catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

653: Warning Stories

Marco thought the bunnies were real.

Episode Description:

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Falling for AI videos
  2. Going 26
  3. “myriad of” is OK
  4. Hinting at future hardware
  5. State of 26
  6. Sponsor: Squarespace
  7. HomePod repair
  8. John vs. AppleCare One
  9. Watch blood-oxygen workaround
  10. Cellular MBP rumor
  11. A19 Pro Studio Display?
  12. Blurry Mac games
  13. Sponsor: HelloFresh (code atp10fm)
  14. #askatp: Renaming Siri
  15. #askatp: Vehicle Motion Cues
  16. #askatp: Trackpad methods
  17. Ending theme
  18. ATP Insider: Vacations

Falling for AI videos

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you see that thing about the anacondas spawning?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I did not. I’m sorry, what? My anaconda

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want. Unless you got, never mind.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s hard to know these days, you know, when you see something breeze by on Instagrams, was that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI generated? Like I fell for the bunnies bouncing on the trampoline, like I’m one of those.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, Marco. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I mean, well, I when I first saw the bunnies, I was like, oh my God, it’s amazing. And then like, you know, a few posts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco later, I saw the same thing with like raccoons. I’m like, oh, oh.

⏹️ ▶️ John But one of the bunnies did a flip and winked at you, you’re like, wait a second.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It wasn’t that ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was pretty ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I guess, and like, okay, you can kind of argue, okay, that is, we’re in this kind of hellscape

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, all this AI generated stuff being fed to us on social apps to keep us engaged.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also like, is it that different from them algorithmically feeding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco us stuff that humans made that, you know, we’re going to breeze through and never see again. And it just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tickling our fancy for a split second as we waste time, like.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little bit different.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is it? If you,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, because, because if you believe that it’s real, you know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I suppose, but

⏹️ ▶️ John like. Because, because then like you get the sort of the, the excuse me, if everyone holds your ears, because I know it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John be upset people. It’s the Fox news effect where if you’re fed a constant diet of things that are not true and accept them as

⏹️ ▶️ John true, even if each one individually is harmless, you essentially acclimate to the idea that, uh, you know, you’re, You’re

⏹️ ▶️ John filling your brains with untruths, but filing them under truths. And so your whole world view gets really distorted,

⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re like, look at all these things. These are all things that happened. And you’re like, actually, no, all 8,000 of those were BS.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re like, that can’t be true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I wonder, what are we comparing it to? How accurate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the pool of slop that was being fed to us before AI? Once

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you finish the handful of posts from your friends on Instagram, and between all of the 1,000 ads that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re seeing, you’re mostly just seeing like, you know, memes and screenshots of funny

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things from Twitter or, you know, copies of Tik TOK videos, you know, whatever, like you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just seeing mostly low trust loaf, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco low nutritional value content anyway. So now that if a bunch of that’s going to be AI generated,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. I don’t actually think it’s that much worse than it already was.

⏹️ ▶️ John The tip of the specific kind of video you’re talking about is the kind of like, look at this amazing thing that happened. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the entertainment value comes from believing that it happened, because as soon as you believe, as soon as you realize that

⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t happen, it loses a lot of its value. You’re like, oh, now I’m not interested in seeing it. You know what I mean? So the value comes

⏹️ ▶️ John from, can you believe that this thing happened? It’s the closest analogy I think are

⏹️ ▶️ John the videos, and this is kind of limited by the, how hard it is to be a good actor, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the videos with it are clearly staged, where they stage some kind of thing to try to make it like,

⏹️ ▶️ John can you believe this thing happened? But like, but the good thing about those is, again, people aren’t very good actors. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s usually very obvious that it’s staged because it seems staged because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John bad actors. But obviously, the stuff sort of fixes that problem because, you know, the bunnies don’t have to be good

⏹️ ▶️ John actors. They just, you know, got to be convincing on the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey camera. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John the bunnies are probably mostly harmless. But like, again, being being fed a steady diet of stuff like that

⏹️ ▶️ John and not being interested, like in not not being interested, but like accepting the truth

⏹️ ▶️ John of those because the value of them comes from them being true sort of primes

⏹️ ▶️ John you to accept anything from that feed as true if the value of it comes

⏹️ ▶️ John from you thinking it’s true. So it’s not great, but we will, as you just noted, everyone knows about that

⏹️ ▶️ John stupid bunny video, because it’s a good example of people essentially building antibodies, because now they’ve been burned. Now they feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like they’ve been had. They feel betrayed. And that feeling hopefully will stick with people to say,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to be a little bit more skeptical. Again, not everybody, but hopefully Marco, And the next

⏹️ ▶️ John time he sees one of those, like the Anaconda one that you’re about to describe to us before we got derailed, you’re thinking, is this real?

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you wouldn’t have been thinking that before the bunny video.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, and in a way, like, you know, like what you were saying about so many videos in the past have been just staged,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, can you believe this thing that happened? And then, yeah, it’s like that, you’re all just

⏹️ ▶️ John acting. Or like a man and a woman having a fake conflict over a thing that they think will be humorous,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re terrible actors. It’s clear it was a setup.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like, you know, like you’ll see like, you know, the screenshot of the message conversation that’s outrageous, and like, that didn’t, wasn’t a real

⏹️ ▶️ Marco conversation. You know, like, but that, you know, back before AI, you would believe,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, maybe that happened. That might be real. But maybe, you know, now that we’re in this AI world now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if everybody just believes that by default, if you believe the thing you’re seeing is probably fake,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably both better and more accurate of how it has been than,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, than believing most of it was real.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the, uh, Am I the A-hole Reddit? I just assume everything there is fiction. But

⏹️ ▶️ John in that context, it is a forum where people practice fiction writing and entertain each other with their fiction,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m mostly okay with. But like, but that’s, you know, that’s, that’s sort of how you

⏹️ ▶️ John get you end that you enter this sort of like, trust no one X files type environment. And I’m sure lots of

⏹️ ▶️ John people read mi the a hole and are entertained by it because they believe they’re all true. But I read it and I’m entertained because

⏹️ ▶️ John I believe these are all this is a big set of skilled fiction writers trying to, you know, Entertain

⏹️ ▶️ John the world with their fiction,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I bet when it’s I mean, I don’t know anything about read it really But I bet when it started out I bet that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco subreddit might was probably mostly true stories But then they probably quickly ran out and realized oh, this is fun. Let’s just keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they run out like I’m sure there’s true story sprinkled in there It’s just my the way I take it is

⏹️ ▶️ John this is all fiction and then I’m able to be entertained by it without having to Worry about it one way or the other but I think most

⏹️ ▶️ John people read in and assume it’s all true Except for the one that they really can’t believe. These are all true, but this one I can’t believe.

Going 26

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, do you want to start the show, do some follow-up? That’s what we do. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we do. So I did the unthinkable. I put iOS 26 on my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey carry phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, welcome. And then promptly dropped it and the replacement had, uh, taken on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco How did you know? No, not really. No, but then you can’t restore your backup onto it anymore. You have to upgrade your new, whatever, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone you replace this phone with when you drop it, you have to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John first-

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t, doesn’t it say more than one backup? Like don’t, can’t you just use your older backup?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but then you’re going to have like a gap in time. I mean, who knows, whatever new game

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you installed or whatever in the meantime, you’re going to lose stuff. You can’t do that. You can never go backwards, John. Only forwards.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The only way out is through. So, yeah, I did this yesterday late morning, I believe it was.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s only been a little over 24 hours that I’ve had iOS 26 on my phone. And I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey downgraded—no, I’m just kidding. It’s so weird. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fairly visceral love-hate relationship with it so far. I really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that there is some modicum of whimsy to it. So like in messages,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you, when you tap in the text field that you type into,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it kind of like flashes and like dances a little bit, and I could see how somebody else would find that very frustrating, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s kind of cute and neat and generally speaking.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it looks pretty good. And I think that again, the animations are fun. I do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think they’ve done an incredibly good job of modeling what glass looks like. And so like when you pull down,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, control center, notification center, rather, notification center, and you’re watching the, the edge of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notification center come down, like that looks really cool. I really dig it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I, I really think at the surface level,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of this is very cool and I enjoy it and I like it. With that said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey holy God. sometimes the legibility is zero. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know this is old news, but now I’m experiencing it like on my carry device. Notification

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Center in particular is so bad. It is so bad on Beta 7.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s, if I turn off, or if I do reduce transparency,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it basically looks like the iOS 18, which on the one side is good, because it’s readable. On the other side, I don’t like it, because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it feels old and boring and whatever. But man, is that bad. Additionally,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Safari with the compact toolbar at the bottom, absolutely not. I only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I have like maybe eight tabs on eight to ten tabs on a general basis.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meanwhile, Erin has like 450. It drives me nuts. But that’s her phone, her, that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes her happy. But I only have like right now I have eight tabs as it turns out. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s probably too many by my own admission. But you know, my point is it’s not a ton. But I do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey flip between them somewhat often and the compact tab bar where I turned it off already,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think it’s like something the button on the left this search

⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash URL field in the middle and then basically a everything bucket on the right and I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hated it. I tried to stick with it for the better part of a day and then realized no I can’t I can’t I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it it. But those are the only initial

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that jump out at me that really, really struck me one way or the other.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overall, I actually, despite my complaining just a moment ago, I actually do like it for the most part.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, I think it’s whimsical. I think it’s fun. I think it looks good as long as we’re in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey relatively decent legibility zone, which is a zone that we dive in and out of with regularity. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far, tentative thumbs up from me and we’ll see how it goes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the next few weeks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m honestly like I think that’s going to be a pretty common take. Like I think you know those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us who care about things like user interface design are going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of complaints about some of the things about it that just don’t work well as an interface

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like legibility challenges, contrast, like there’s a lot about it that just doesn’t work well. You know additional taps,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things buried in as you call it the everything bucket menus which I think is a great term because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s kind of how Allen Dye designs things is junk drawer design. You know so there is a lot of that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also it does look clean, fresh, and cool. Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yeah yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think you know as I said in previous episodes I think most people are gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be fine with this like I do think people are gonna complain about slower performance but especially people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on older phones but otherwise I think for the most part people are gonna think it looks cool and new and fresh.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And those of us who are on the grumpier side of a lot of these little detailed problems,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re gonna have to suck it up and realize that we care a lot more about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain factors here than anyone else is going to care, including Apple’s own designers. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does not feel great to be on that side of things, but that is the reality of where we are.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people are going to think this is cool, and Apple’s not going to change their minds on almost any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. What you see now in beta seven is almost certainly what’s going to ship with pretty much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no changes or no meaningful changes. And this is the new design. This is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So we can bury our heads in the sand and move to the woods or we can just go with it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll keep critiquing as we need to, but this is it. This is the design.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And only we will care about these things. Everyone else will not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, I should bring up, I have been talking specifically about my phone for the last few minutes, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put the beta on my iPad and Vision Pro pretty much immediately. I’ve used my Vision

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro like thrice since then, but I did put it on my iPad pretty much immediately. There

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are definitely times that the new windowing system gets in the way, and as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an example, if I do something on the title bar, like pull down to get to notification center from the top of the screen, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it takes that as, oh, I wanna take this window from full screen to a window, if that makes any sense,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than, Oh, I’m trying to reach notification center. There are things like that where it gets in the way that I find

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very frustrating, but overall, I cannot say enough good things about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS or excuse me, iPadOS 26, obviously on the iPad, it’s incredibly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredibly good, you know, is, is saying iOS or iPadOS 26 on the iPad. Is that like saying 4 30 AM in the morning? I hate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that so much. And I just hit, but I hate like 4 30 AM in the morning. Oh, really? You don’t say.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, the point is that it’s incredible on the iPad and I think overall I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do like it on the phone. John, remind me, what is your beta situation for non-Mac?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still avoiding iOS and iPadOS. I’m avoiding iOS just because, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know, like my phone, I don’t want it to be janked up with all of the betas. And I’m avoiding iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m not ready to say goodbye to SlideOver.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m sure I’ll find a

⏹️ ▶️ John better alternative, but it is part of my television, iPad television watching workflow

⏹️ ▶️ John to have a bunch of stuff and slide over. And I know there are other ways to get around it, like

⏹️ ▶️ John to do similar things. So I guess I’ll just figure that out. But I’m figuring I’m just going to because no, I would have upgraded

⏹️ ▶️ John my iPad by now. Usually that’s usually my sacrificial machine. But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m in Tahoe all day doing dev. So I’m getting a full dose of Tahoe. And I’m sure I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John have more to say about both these things when they’re actually released, because I will I will upgrade when they’re all released. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll still hold off my iPad. I don’t know, but anyway, we’ll see. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, good deal.

“myriad of” is OK

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to, I’m really torn because on the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one side I want to take a victory lap, but on the other side, and I will be taking that victory lap, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other side is I would like to concede and congratulate you for admitting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your own wrongdoing and doing so publicly by putting this in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John show notes. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no victory for you to lap here.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is. Are you kidding? Nope,

⏹️ ▶️ John nope, I don’t know why you have the wrong view of this entirely, but go ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, OK. Well, this is going to be an adventure for all of us, especially me. So I found in the show notes, which I did not put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, quote, myriad of, quote, is OK. So this was Ask ATP last week.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Daniel Liu had talked about liquid glass and touch interfaces, which included

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phrase that Daniel wrote, quote, the myriad problems with legibility, quote.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I read that verbally as, quote, the myriad of problems with legibility.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and John jumped down my throat for it. So Jason Eccles-

⏹️ ▶️ John I issued a mild

⏹️ ▶️ Casey correction,

⏹️ ▶️ John but okay, jumped down my throat. Go ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Agree to disagree, maybe? No, anyway, so one way or another, then Jason Eccles writes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Myriad of is perfectly fine. And then someone, I presume John, found Miriam Webster’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey grammar and usage blog, which reads pretty aggressively that Myriad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of is just fine. And reading the quote that I presume John pulled, somewhere along the way,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone made the ruling that myriad is most properly an adjective, but we are all here to tell you that that is simply

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not true. One will occasionally find usage guides, professional and otherwise special specifying that myriad should not be followed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by an of, which is another way of saying it’s just an adjective. Myriad is a noun. And if anyone tells you otherwise, feel free

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to print this article and shove it in their very wrong hands. Maybe I misunderstood, but I’m reading that as myriad of is just fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. So here’s, here’s, here’s how you’re misreading this. First of all, um,

⏹️ ▶️ John my correction of you is that you didn’t read what Daniel wrote. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey reason I was very true,

⏹️ ▶️ John which that’s so that’s you need to be corrected there. But why should you be writing because there are lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of people like me out there

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco who will say, Hey, you shouldn’t say myriad of

⏹️ ▶️ John you should say myriad. And I want to spare Daniel from the corrections of other people saying, Hey, when

⏹️ ▶️ John Daniel wrote into the ask a TV question, he shouldn’t have written myriad of it, but he didn’t. He wrote

⏹️ ▶️ John the myriad problems. I wanted to give Daniel full credit and it’ll help him to avoid

⏹️ ▶️ John that correction.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’re particular, it’s just that you’re altruistic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Got it.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then, yes, I did

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey correct you and I listened

⏹️ ▶️ John back to it. As usual, I have qualifiers that say, I believe you’re not supposed to say myriad of, myriad

⏹️ ▶️ John is correct or whatever. So yes, that correction does apply to me. It’s one of many of those things.

⏹️ ▶️ John As the Merriam-Webster’s Usage Blog says, some style guides say that you shouldn’t do it. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s one of those grammar rules that you learn if you’re of a certain age, but the language changes.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, just like people would be correcting, you know, you have to use whom here, you can never use who, and it’s like, too late,

⏹️ ▶️ John man, like, that stuff has changed. So I stand corrected that myriad of is perfectly fine

⏹️ ▶️ John in modern usage, even if some style guides say that you shouldn’t do it. But most importantly,

⏹️ ▶️ John Daniel did not do it. So he was avoiding the issue entirely by doing the one that pedants

⏹️ ▶️ John think is correct.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s pedants, isn’t it, John? It’s pedants. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m kidding.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey admitting your wrongdoing publicly by way of my

⏹️ ▶️ John mouth. Well, this is the reason I put this in here is because this will hopefully save us from being corrected if any

⏹️ ▶️ John of us say Miriam in the future, because now it’s fine. And I’m one of those people who

⏹️ ▶️ John had always heard that you shouldn’t do the of, so I learned something too. So I’m sharing it with everybody. This is the nature of follow up. This is

⏹️ ▶️ John the value of follow

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. This is TIL personified.

Hinting at future hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, then related to the above, Brian Guffey writes, with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey regard to Daniel’s question about Liquid Glass’s decreased information density in touch interfaces, Brian writes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and John keep saying that all the design changes that folks read as, quote, setting things up for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey touch max are just accidental good luck. How then would they read the size classes era,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where developers were encouraged to adopt a flexible design, which most folks credit as, quote, looking forward

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to when iPads were introduced?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So actually, size classes were introduced with iPads for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the distinction between iPad apps and iPhone apps. What Brian is most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely referring to here is Auto Layout, which was introduced, I believe for the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac a year prior, but it was introduced for iOS 6 in 2012.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was announced in June 2012, and in the fall of 2012 was the release of the iPhone 5.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was the first iPhone that had a new screen size besides all the iPhones that preceded it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was the same width, but it was like one extra table row basically in height.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So auto layout is the reference here. And the idea was that June,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we knew about the iPhone 5, they were like, hey, you should really use this auto layout system,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not assuming anything about anything but use Autolayout and you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco define how your layout should respond to whatever size it gets. And they were very,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were not subtle that you should really probably have a dynamic layout

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and here’s a new system to make that easier. And then four or three months later, then there was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 5.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So the difference between these two things here is that with them saying, we have a new system

⏹️ ▶️ John that allows your content to adapt to containers and you should really adopt that it’s strongly hinting that

⏹️ ▶️ John like this, adopting different sizes, I was like, why would we do that? All the screens are the same size. Like we kind of get the hint. But

⏹️ ▶️ John with the less information density in Liquid Glass, first of all, I don’t think Apple has even ever said

⏹️ ▶️ John that Liquid Glass has lower information density or larger targets or anything. And second, they certainly haven’t said, and by

⏹️ ▶️ John the way, when you’re designing your UIs, make sure you make your targets on macOS a little

⏹️ ▶️ John bit bigger. Maybe you maybe make them a little bit taller, maybe make them a little bit wider, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Dropping those kinds of hints of saying like, we suggest you do this, not giving a reason. You know, you should have auto

⏹️ ▶️ John layout. It will allow your UI to adapt to different sizes

⏹️ ▶️ John where it might find itself, right? But they didn’t say any of that. Like they’re not pitching it, right? And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just two different situations, right? One is where they knew that they were creating a UI that they wanted developers

⏹️ ▶️ John to adopt because they knew they were about to release a phone that was a different size. I know that sounds like a big deal because it’s like, so what? It was a centimeter

⏹️ ▶️ John taller, big deal. But every iPhone out before that had been like pixel perfect exact grid

⏹️ ▶️ John to the size of the iPhone screen. So it was a thing that developers needed to get on board with, but I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ John seen anything from Apple saying, yeah, on Mac OS, you should make things bigger. You just should, it’s a good

⏹️ ▶️ John idea. And here’s a system for making things bigger. It’s true that Apple’s interface takes up more space in various places

⏹️ ▶️ John as lower information density. But in some cases, as Marco pointed out, the actual touch target, quote unquote, touch targets,

⏹️ ▶️ John may be smaller because they wasted the extra space on margins.

State of 26

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really… I even found like… I think this is going to be an interesting problem as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we see as apps adopt iOS 26. When you make an iOS 26

⏹️ ▶️ Marco toolbar button, just you know those round glassy buttons with the icon in the middle,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you in SwiftUI, if you put anything in that button that is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a label element, if you try to make your own button with say an image, you just put an image in there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the touch target for the button is not the whole button anymore. Like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco round shape of the button, if you touch the edge of the round shape it will expand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in response to your touch and then you let go and it just decreases right back down. It does not like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fire the button. So it looks like you’re tapping the button. It responds that you’re tapping the button but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual touch target of the item in the button is smaller than the circle.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you use the SwiftUI label component, it does some magic where it takes up the entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco circle. But anything else, even if you give it like a rectangle or whatever, it doesn’t take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole circle. There’s so many problems with… there’s gonna be so many little subtle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco frustrations like this and we’re gonna see in apps over the next few years until they fix that if they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John will. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no button shape modifier or something that you can stick on to?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is but it will not take up the bounds of the circle

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah cool there are a lot of problems with liquid glass in from the software stack hopefully they sort some of the stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s also fun is that if you put some if you define say if you put like you know the dot frame

⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifier on the contents of around button and you give it a square the button becomes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a perfect circle anymore it becomes oblong that’s it’s super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun like oh god it’s that I feel like we are designing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iOS 1.0 again, but iOS, well I guess iOS 2.0, but as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was called then iPhone OS 2.0, the SDK was actually a little bit more firm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than, like, there’s so much about designing with liquid glass.

⏹️ ▶️ John You saw my, the controls moving when you mouse over them? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Most

⏹️ ▶️ John of my Tahoe battles have been with the settings screen in hyperspace, which is just a bunch. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John a form with a bunch of toggles all using the modern interfaces. And that I can’t get the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John to not have scroll bars because the size of it keeps changing. I have condition. Obviously, I have

⏹️ ▶️ John conditionals for Mac OS 26 or later, like runtime checks. Is this Mac OS 26 or later? Or is it before? So

⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, I have that. I also have is this Intel or is this arm?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Why would the layout change in

⏹️ ▶️ John Intel and arm? I don’t know. I’m just telling you it does. So I have think, think of the conditionals in the

⏹️ ▶️ John code. It It’s just, it’s, and I keep hoping they’re going to fix it and every new beta is just weirder in a different way.

⏹️ ▶️ John I still need to file a bunch of stuff, but yeah, like controls moving on mouse over and that movement changing the height

⏹️ ▶️ John of your thing, causing a scroll bar to appear or disappear. It’s madness.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds super fun. Yeah, I have been very, very busy and I’ve been kicking the can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my call sheet, you know, update, rewrite, whatever you want to call it, re-skin for iOS 26.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And man, it’s definitely a roller coaster so far. I’m only a couple of days in, but I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey start something and realize, oh, this looks like trash, I hate every bit of it, then I’ll try a different direction. Oh, this looks good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m cruising, this looks great. Oh no, I hate this again. Like, it’s very one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey step forward, 10 steps back, two steps forward, 13 steps back. And that’s a lot me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not exclusively Apple, but it’s gonna be a rough ride. I would say that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would not expect that many apps will be 100% ready to rock on liquid

⏹️ ▶️ Casey glass when iOS 26 drops. I would expect it’s gonna be much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more of a trickle out. And I certainly hope so for selfish reasons, but that’s what I expect will be the case.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, definitely like, you know, those of you out there, we have a lot of opinionated app users

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our audience. And I would urge you, please give the developers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iOS apps a lot of leeway and a lot of forgiveness and a lot of time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we adopt Liquid Glass, because it’s not a small job. Even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just, like, what I decided to do with Overcast is I’m not radically changing the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface, I’m just updating it to use the native toolbars and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco New design for the mini player, like, you know, it’s just stuff to make it fit in a little bit better, but it’s still gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look effectively the same, like, basically, in broad strokes, it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a complete redesign. But even just that, even just adopting little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, Like for instance, when you have a menu that has like say a delete item in the menu

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you tap that and before it deletes it confirms. Are you sure you want to delete?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those confirmations used to be on the iPhone, the sheet that comes up from the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know maybe like an alert dialog in the middle. Now it’s like an iPad. Now those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pop out of a source view. So ideally they pop out of maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the button or the menu that spawned this whole process in the first place.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you have an iPhone app, you’ve never had to deal with that. So now you have to go and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco move these around and make sure they’re popping out of the correct view. You have to go through every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco confirmation and every alert in your entire app and every way you could possibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reach a confirmation or an alert. You have to go through all of them to make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure it’s popping out from the right place now. There’s so many of those types

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things where you think it’s as simple as, oh, I’ll just replace my custom button with the system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco button. It’s like, okay, yes, but then you have all these behaviors you have to consider. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to maintain compatibility with iOS 18 and earlier, you probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to do everything twice. not only do you are you like you know okay now I’m going to use this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system X instead of my custom X well you’re going to probably have to keep your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom X for iOS 18 or figure out how to make the system one work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco acceptably on iOS 18 when it doesn’t have the 26 behaviors so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s a lot of work even just even doing a even doing what seems to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the user like a pretty light adoption of the new design it’s still a ton

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of work and a ton of QA, a ton of testing, a ton of little subtle bugs. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, be gentle with your App Store star reviews this fall to everybody’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. You know, we’re all doing the best we can. It’s gonna be a lot. It’s not gonna be great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on day one. You’re gonna have apps that are not ready on day one and maybe aren’t even ready this calendar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. You’re gonna have apps that are ready but are limited interpretations of the design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that have weird edge case bugs because Apple is shipping

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a beta as a final version. What they are going to achieve quality wise for iOS 26

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is beta quality at best. 26.0 is gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little rough. It’s gonna have animation bugs, it’s gonna have little behavioral things. This entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco design is a beta and all of our apps using it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will basically also be betas. And that’s kind of, you know, Apple has kind of,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, brought us here to this point that we don’t really have much of a choice in the matter. So please,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, be gentle and be tolerant of your friendly neighborhood app developers and,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, give them some slack this fall. It’s kind of a rough time for us.

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HomePod repair

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you apparently have your own victory lap to take. What’s going on with your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey HomePod?

⏹️ ▶️ John My HomePod is back. I had one original HomePod from back in the day, and then Marco gave me two of

⏹️ ▶️ John his also original HomePods, the very first generation. They were all in various states

⏹️ ▶️ John of disrepair and dying, some of them totally dead. I was like, okay, now that none of them work, because they got to the point

⏹️ ▶️ John where none of them, I couldn’t use any of of them for any purpose. Some of them turned on, but I couldn’t use them to do things.

⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t get signed in. I couldn’t connect to my iCloud thing. I couldn’t do my whole automations. I could ask what time it was

⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe the weather, but that’s about it. But one of them just totally didn’t turn on. So I was looking for someone who I know people repair home

⏹️ ▶️ John pods. I found somebody online, nixfix.com, N-I-C-S-F-I-X.com,

⏹️ ▶️ John that he repairs home pods. And I figured I’ll send him the dead one,

⏹️ ▶️ John the one that you plug into the wall and nothing happens. It doesn’t light up, doesn’t make any noise. It’s just dead, dead, dead, which thing that happens

⏹️ ▶️ John to first gen home pods for a fairly explicable reason because some component burns out or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, and it’s really easy. You go to the website, you know, sign up to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John He’ll send you a box, a packing box for the thing, and then a return like a

⏹️ ▶️ John shipping label. So I got the box, wrapped up the home pod and the packing material, shoved on

⏹️ ▶️ John the prepaid shipping label that he had sent, and arrives at Nick. He streams

⏹️ ▶️ John his repairs live on YouTube, and we will put a timestamp link in the show notes to his stream

⏹️ ▶️ John where he fixed my HomePod. My repair starts at one hour and 54 minutes and 11

⏹️ ▶️ John seconds in this video. He spends a long time repairing a lot of HomePods. He’s so fast, like he repairs

⏹️ ▶️ John them very quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me let me jump in right there. So I will concede that I was watching this at 2x, but I watch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of things at 2x and you get a pretty solid vibe as to how quick or how slowly something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is happening quickly or how slowly something’s happening. Holy freaking crap this dude

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was flying doing this repair. Like it is clear he has, you know, disassembled

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and reassembled thousands of HomePods. It is incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ John He does like he does dozens in this video. Just in this that’s just a per day. Like it’s the backlog

⏹️ ▶️ John of HomePods is incredible. Like and and the other fun thing if you watch it at one X is to see

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly how painful it is to open a first gen

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco home because

⏹️ ▶️ John he’s he He knows how to do it. He’s like, this is the best case scenario. An expert doing it has done this so

⏹️ ▶️ John many times that it still looks incredibly painful. Like, are you breaking it? Is that how you’re supposed to do it? Is that really

⏹️ ▶️ John the only way? And it’s like, yep. Anyway, so his

⏹️ ▶️ John workstation is extremely dingy and scary looking, considering that dozens of homepots are going through it per day.

⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s like burn marks and solder drips everywhere. But he gets the job done. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the care with which he desolders and replaces the surface mount components is

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not up to the sort of micro electronic precision that you see from like some of the other

⏹️ ▶️ John YouTubers, but it’s all about turnaround. You know, you just gotta go, go, go. Bottom line is he

⏹️ ▶️ John replaced a bunch of components that he knew would be, he doesn’t even need to diagnose this. He knows, okay, I know what the problem with this

⏹️ ▶️ John one is. Take these out, take these out. He also replaced some other stuff of like the woofer cone that always fails. He replaced

⏹️ ▶️ John that with a better one. He just, and the other thing he has like in a checkbox in the form of like, do you want me to update your OS? I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John like, yes, please do that. Because one of the problems with my other home pods I can’t get them to do an OS update. So he did

⏹️ ▶️ John everything. He replaced a bunch of parts, including ones that weren’t. They probably still worked, but they were probably

⏹️ ▶️ John going to eventually fail. He just replaced those two and sent it back to me. And it works now. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it was like 80 something dollars. And I basically paid like the maximum amount, which is I’ll pay for you to send me a shipping box,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because you could pay less if you want to ship it yourself and yada yada. I don’t want to deal with any of that. The whole point is I

⏹️ ▶️ John will give you 80 something dollars. You take care of this for me. And he did. So my home pod is back. I’m debating

⏹️ ▶️ John sending the other two or just waiting to see if this one ever dies because I only really need one of them. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John the repair economy is real. Even if Apple doesn’t want it to be 80 something bucks to get a first

⏹️ ▶️ John gen home pod back to working order.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is really incredible. And about how long did it take from the time that you said I would like it done to the time you unboxed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the repaired home pod?

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t time it all that well, because first of all, we had a little bit of backlog. And second, when

⏹️ ▶️ John he was ready to repair it, I was about to leave on vacation. So I said, don’t even bother like you can just

⏹️ ▶️ John push mine to the back of the queue because I don’t want him because he repairs as You saw he repairs one home pod in

⏹️ ▶️ John like Three and a half minutes, right? So he’s not like he’s gonna take all day to do whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like if you repair it and ship it back to me No one is home to get it So you can just wait until X date when I

⏹️ ▶️ John come home from my vacation and then send it back then and so There was some artificial delay

⏹️ ▶️ John for me being away But yeah, it was basically like how long did it take me to get to the front of his extremely

⏹️ ▶️ John long repair queue? But once I got there, it’s like done, shipped back the same day. Like it’s, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s very straightforward. So I, I would, I would recommend this or any other service that’s like this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, because look, I sent him a dead piece of electronics that would otherwise just go to like the re the electronics recycling center.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I got by work, a working home pod. Yeah. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And like John said, you know, you can watch the repair of John’s actual home pod

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whether or not you’re interested in general in these sorts of things. I think there’s something fun

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and fascinating to watch when you see someone that has done this so many times and knows exactly what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do. I will concur with you that I was not in love with the haphazard nature by which he dropped

⏹️ ▶️ Casey those, like, I think it was either three or six little rectangle bits. I don’t know what specifically they were,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but he basically put a bunch of wet solder down, threw them on, and then walked away. And I was like, what, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to wait, make sure it hardens, and nope, no, none of that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like he knows what he’s doing. And also,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey by the

⏹️ ▶️ John way, I think this was actually actually Margo’s home pod, not mine.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, it’s Mark. I

⏹️ ▶️ John talked about before that I couldn’t tell I couldn’t tell which one was mine anymore. So they got mixed up. But the easy way to tell

⏹️ ▶️ John is Margo had chucked his two in a box haphazardly and sent them to me. So his are more scuffed up than mine. Mine

⏹️ ▶️ John is pristine. Most of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my course, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it was

⏹️ ▶️ John taken it was carefully taken out of its original box and placed in one place in my house and never moved until right. So I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty sure he actually prepared one of Margo’s home pods. But anyway, Most likely. My home pod

⏹️ ▶️ John now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very cool. Now, again, not required viewing by any stretch, but I do strongly recommend you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch starting at 1 hour 54 minutes and 11 seconds. It’s very, very cool.

John vs. AppleCare One

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so you had your victory lap now, unfortunately, we’re gonna have to turn that smile upside down Tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me about your latest Apple care one Woes,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know when I put this item in here It’s just gonna be a little bit of follow-up on something that I said last week But it just escalated since

⏹️ ▶️ John then so the little bit of fault from last week is I was I was saying that they had Pulled off my wife’s phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John I said, you know because people would asking questions like why is your wife’s phone on there? That’s clearly not your device. You’re not signed into

⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever I’m like Apple recommended that I add it but then they threatened to remove it and I said, well I tried one thing

⏹️ ▶️ John which is I’ll sign into the App Store on her phone with my Apple ID, which I did and that seemed to solve the

⏹️ ▶️ John problem, but not for long because eventually they just yanked her phone off the plan. And I’m like, fair enough, like

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it should ever have been on the plan. And yes, it is a problem that they promoted the plan to me by saying, here,

⏹️ ▶️ John you should use these devices. And I just took their word for it, silly me. But clearly

⏹️ ▶️ John my wife’s phone shouldn’t be on the plan because the whole deal with the plan is it has to be devices that are all on a single

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID or Apple account, and her phone’s not on mine. So and the store login thing maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John warned it off for a little bit, but not for long So I’m like, all right, I’m resigned to that her phone should never have been

⏹️ ▶️ John on that’s fine But of course after I was resigned to it and they removed the phone Immediately,

⏹️ ▶️ John I got a red dot on my phone under the AppleCare and warranty thing in settings like a little red badge saying hey

⏹️ ▶️ John You should add this phone to AppleCare one Of course like

⏹️ ▶️ John get your stuff together Apple Like you, like I can tell you that you should not be recommending that I

⏹️ ▶️ John am. Like it’s, I’ve never been signed into that anyway. So that was my, that would have been my fault.

⏹️ ▶️ John But when her phone was removed from Apple care one, I had to, hers was one of the original three devices. You see, you

⏹️ ▶️ John have three devices for 1999 a month or whatever. So fine. Her’s gets kicked out because it never should have been on there, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I needed to replace it, otherwise I’m paying the full three device costs per month for two devices and that

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t save me any money. So I replaced it with the Mac studio. So it’s my phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John my iPad, and the Mac Studio, which yes, the Mac Studio is technically my wife’s computer, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I bought it on my Apple ID. I have an account on it, so does everyone in my family, and as I

⏹️ ▶️ John said in the past when I complained about this, I’m logged into that computer with my Apple ID on my account 24-7.

⏹️ ▶️ John That computer is set not even to go to sleep. It is on 24-7,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m logged into it 24-7, and recently, I’m actively using it every single

⏹️ ▶️ John day by sitting in front of it and using the mouse, That’s essentially my Sequoia test machine while my Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John is in Tahoe when I’m doing like dev work on my stuff Which is happening, you know every single day. Anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John after recording a podcast at like 1046 p.m. The other day I get an email

⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple that says hey we’re about to yank your Mac studio off Apple care one which I had gotten before

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m just like I was just at the end of my rope like Stop threatening me with removing my Mac from the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John because the stupid email is like a new account is signed into your Mac Studio to avoid losing AppleCare, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what are you talking about? Did I receive this email when I was logged into that Mac Studio

⏹️ ▶️ John with my account? Yes, I absolutely did, like all the other times that this email has come, and I was so angry about

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And I threw a big tantrum about it, I messed it on. You did, it was incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was just, it was like late at night, like I feel like it’s like, like that’s the type of email that could like get lost in the shuffle,

⏹️ ▶️ John because like if it comes in late at night, and the next day’s email, when I wake up in the morning, there’s a new batch of the next day’s email,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see that one or whatever. Like, like, here’s the thing. warranty

⏹️ ▶️ John plans are the type of thing you don’t have to be vigilant about like at any at any time

⏹️ ▶️ John a 24 hour timer should start could start without your knowledge. And you have to do some

⏹️ ▶️ John nonsensical BS within that 24 win our window. Otherwise, they’ll take away your

⏹️ ▶️ John warranty. And many people said, sounds like AppleCare one sucks. Why don’t you just cancel the whole plan? Well, the problem

⏹️ ▶️ John with AppleCare care one is when you sign up for it, they cancel all the warranties of the devices you put on it. And Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John care one can be applied to any device that’s four years older or less. But regular

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple care plans, I believe you still can’t take like a three year old device and say, Oh, by the way, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have Apple care on this. But now I want to add it now there may be a grace period like I may actually figure this out

⏹️ ▶️ John and try it and say, fine, cancel Apple care one. Can I get? Can I go back to

⏹️ ▶️ John getting plain old Apple care for devices that are you know, two or three years old, or can I only

⏹️ ▶️ John re add AppleCare one to them? Right. But you know, by by complaint about this is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John this, this Mac studio is compliant with all of their rules. I actually went to their

⏹️ ▶️ John website and looked up their terms and conditions PDF, like not the little like footnote on the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey web. Let’s

⏹️ ▶️ John see. Let’s see the legalese on this, right? It’s not that much different than the footnote. So here’s what it says.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll link to the the AppleCare one terms and conditions, you have to pick your state if you’re in the United States, so I picked Massachusetts

⏹️ ▶️ John because I guess it varies by state, but directly from the Massachusetts PDF for the terms and conditions, it says,

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s some of the relevant passages. All your covered equipment must be remain signed in and associated

⏹️ ▶️ John with that Apple account during the plan term. I’m doing that. It’s signed in

⏹️ ▶️ John with my account with the one that purchased the plan. Like that’s and then later it says,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you sign out of your Apple account connected with this plan on a covered device, except for AirPods, beats and studio

⏹️ ▶️ John display, and sign in with a different Apple account on that covered device, you will have 24 hours to sign back into your Apple account

⏹️ ▶️ John on that covered device to avoid looting coverage, blah, blah, blah. So here’s my new theory. My new theory is

⏹️ ▶️ John whoever made this plan doesn’t know that you can be signed into a Mac in multiple accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ John Definitely, which boggles my mind because that’s not a new feature of MacOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a thing that, right? And like the feature is so broken because yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John all four members of my family are currently signed and signed into the Mac studio, all four of us, right? We’re always all

⏹️ ▶️ John signed in. It’s kind of like the communal computer for like doing stuff because we do things on behalf of our children. And my wife

⏹️ ▶️ John is always signed into I’m always signed into it, right. But you know, so

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how they couldn’t understand this. But that’s my new theory. I will eventually call Apple support and

⏹️ ▶️ John dedicate an entire day to essentially saying I don’t I do have a problem. I don’t expect you to

⏹️ ▶️ John solve it. I just want you to convey like pass up the chain, Max can have more than one person signed in.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so that was yesterday. That was like last night when I ranted about this. I’m like at the end of my rope, a warranty is exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John the type of thing that should be like secure and you don’t have to worry about you should just pay and it should be ready to go. It shouldn’t be something you

⏹️ ▶️ John have to be ever vigilant about, right? And their thing is just broken. It just doesn’t work right.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then today, just before the show, I got the same freaking email again. And people are asking like, will they yank it off

⏹️ ▶️ John your plan? Yes, they absolutely will. I’ve tested this. If you don’t do anything, they will yank it off and give you a little refund and then tell

⏹️ ▶️ John you to put it back on, which I have done, right? So they will yank it off. And how do I fix it? So they don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John What I do is I just go to my account that’s already like I unlock the computer and see before

⏹️ ▶️ John me my account that has logged into my Apple ID and is always there and always on

⏹️ ▶️ John and I log out and back in.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s how I fix

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s how I

⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m already logged in. I log out and I like back in and then it fixes it and then like the the little orange text

⏹️ ▶️ John that says this is about it disappears from my phone Like at least they don’t they never tell you this by the way. There’s never some email.

⏹️ ▶️ John It says yes, you’ve satisfied it Don’t worry Your 24-hour timer has stopped the only way I can tell is if I go to the

⏹️ ▶️ John Warranty section on my phone and look for the little orange text underneath it. So Yeah, like and

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think the thing that triggered the email tonight was the

⏹️ ▶️ John what is it the Let me look it up the sequoia

⏹️ ▶️ John 15.6.1 update, which had security fixes. I updated the Mac Studio from 15.6 to 15.6.1.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when I updated it, everybody logged out because the machine had to restart. And when it booted back up, I signed

⏹️ ▶️ John into my account first intentionally. Did that help? No. A couple hours

⏹️ ▶️ John later, email that says, a new Apple account is signed into your Mac Studio. To avoid losing AppleCare

⏹️ ▶️ John One coverage, you must sign into the Mac Studio, which I was already signed into. It’s just, it’s killing

⏹️ ▶️ John me. So this thing is so badly implemented. All right, so it’s badly conceived,

⏹️ ▶️ John because as I said, confining AppleCare One to a single Apple account is dumb, but whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t even do that correctly. And I guess, I mean, I’ve been warning people off saying

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do this, because it’s more headache than it’s worth. Maybe if you don’t have a Mac, or you don’t sign into your Mac with more

⏹️ ▶️ John than one account, or anything like that, but like, boy, how terribly botched is this? So I’m, I gotta figure

⏹️ ▶️ John out what to do. I should probably cancel the thing, and then just like complain on support until they restore my old support

⏹️ ▶️ John things or whatever, but it’s a mess. I’m very upset about it. And AppleCare

⏹️ ▶️ John One is the worst Apple thing that I have paid for in a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you’ve owned Mac Pros.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re great. They’re great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m kidding, I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I shouldn’t poke the bear. I’m sorry, John.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m kind of glad my Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been spared from this drama because it’s too old. That’s very true. Now, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey take joy in your frustration. However, seeing you lose your sheep

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mastodon was incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I don’t know what push me was just. It’s just the fact that it’s a warranty. It’s supposed to be like so boring. It’s like insurance.

⏹️ ▶️ John And why? Why is insurance constantly threatening to take away your insurance unless you do something dumb

⏹️ ▶️ John that you shouldn’t have to do? And this is the worst idea ever. Who came up with this? Like

⏹️ ▶️ John like what? Only time insurance companies are constantly trying to boot you off is if you’re like a

⏹️ ▶️ John higher risk, like Casey’s keep shattering his phone or something

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like that. Right. You

⏹️ ▶️ John get into an accident, your car insurance drops you. But this is like you get car insurance. You

⏹️ ▶️ John never drive your car like you don’t get any accidents. You make never make any claims. And at any point,

⏹️ ▶️ John like on a daily basis, they send you a threatening letter that says, hey, if you don’t, you know, switch your windswipers

⏹️ ▶️ John once, you’ll lose insurance on your car in 24 hours. Like, why? Why don’t you want my money? I’m trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to pay you monthly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel your pain. However, it was really something to see you go this this ballistic on something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Exactly. I’m so mad. But I

⏹️ ▶️ John think it was because it was at the end of a podcast. It’s like, oh, it’s night. I finished a podcast. It’s late at night. I’m ready to go to bed.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, but before you go to bed, here’s a threat from Apple that you’ve got to deal with. And again, I got the same

⏹️ ▶️ John threat the next night. So I think this is just going to be every day, maybe every day. Oh, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s fast user switching that does it. Because if I’m logged in and my wife sits down and the computer is locked, she just

⏹️ ▶️ John hits Escape and then clicks on her account and logs in. She’s already logged in, but she’s basically just switching to

⏹️ ▶️ John her account. We’re all logged in all the time. When she switches to her account, does that trigger it?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I’m just going to get this threat every day. And I guess I can’t leave the Mac studio. I have to stay here every day and

⏹️ ▶️ John log out of my account and back in to satisfy this stupid thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think anybody is at Apple who knows that Mac multi-user support exists anymore. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s one of those problems, like the people who, you know, work on Apple features,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, and this is the kind of thing, like, this is not, you know, you’re talking about adding, you know, a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a brand new kind of obscure, kind of fancy warranty plan to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac. So this is already kind of like off the beaten path a little bit. This is not like the next version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iOS, which itself has problems.

⏹️ ▶️ John AppleCare for Macs is off the beaten path, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go on. This isn’t gonna get like the maximum amount of QA in the company. They’re too busy with the redesign

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they shouldn’t have shipped this year. What you’re talking about is a problem that none of those people who actually work on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this would really face because Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmers and like Apple managers and stuff don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scarcity as a factor in their Macs. They don’t know a world where people might share

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac. The same way that Apple’s software tends not to deal very well with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco small amounts of disk space. Because Apple people can afford or have access to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger disks than what many people buy. So that’s not a problem they run into very much.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it doesn’t get as much testing, it doesn’t get as much attention. Multi-user support on the Mac is something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple could really make a lot better if they wanted to. When you do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco multi-user Macs, you run into a lot of problems. A lot of little bugs in both Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and in other people’s apps. Because no one who makes apps for the Mac really does a good job of

⏹️ ▶️ John testing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this is the case. We’ve been running multi-users on all of our Macs for the entire existence of Mac OS

⏹️ ▶️ John X and it’s been fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This sounds really fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John The two things that I’ve had was the, when you have hundreds of windows open, it gets slow, and Apple fixed that bug as I reported it,

⏹️ ▶️ John and AppleCare won. Those are the two things that we had.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it sounds like it’s pretty much not super fine right now, but.

⏹️ ▶️ John All I said was one of the two things. It was the slow windows and AppleCare won. But otherwise, there

⏹️ ▶️ John is no app that I’ve seen that misbehaves because we have multiple, like the multi-user system on macOS is real

⏹️ ▶️ John multi-user system based on the real Unix multi-user system and it works fine. It always has.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, sounds great. Anyway, so when you are off the beaten path, you are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more at risk for things like this, like more at risk for bugs and problems and everything. Multi-user support on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has now reached that point where you are now out of the mainstream, you are off

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beaten path, you’re going to have periodic problems like this. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a good answer, but I think this is the answer, which is Apple launched a system like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this that did not consider multi-user Macs at all because they don’t think that much about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ll try to give the feedback when I talk to them on support. Like, I don’t think there’ll be anything that they can do to help me. I’ll just have to endure

⏹️ ▶️ John this or cancel the plan or whatever. But I wanna say, like, is there some way we can convey to the people who created this plan

⏹️ ▶️ John that, the two things, one, that the plan is dumb as conceived, but two, that the plan as conceived

⏹️ ▶️ John is implemented incorrectly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think they will probably be able to fix this with updates, but I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna be top priority, like, especially heading into a fall season.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this is one of those things that’s ever going to get fixed. You know what I mean? Like, for the reasons that you stated, like

⏹️ ▶️ John it just seems like one of those things that’ll be like, this, the problem you are describing affects so few people,

⏹️ ▶️ John nobody cares. So, I don’t, and I’m just, and again, I’m just guessing at the, at the, what the problem is

⏹️ ▶️ John based on like, what I know of people talking to me on Mastodon who are and aren’t having the problem

⏹️ ▶️ John and my experimental evidence. I’m still just guessing, but like, all I can tell them is like, here,

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what the plan says it’s supposed to do and it’s not doing it. I’m not entirely sure why I have some ideas, but like, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, just go fix it. I will work with

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyone in Apple who wants to

⏹️ ▶️ John debug this with me and figure out what the problem is. Like, whatever. Well, we can work through it together. But it’s I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not expecting this to be fixed in the next five years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing it gets fixed in one year. I’m guessing like with next fall’s OS is it’ll be fixed. But I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you will have a year to wait.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Well, we’ll see. Anyway, I will I will look into, hey, if I cancel these plans, can I get warranty stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John back on on on these devices? Because they’re all so old. Right. And maybe there’s a grace period as soon as you cancel

⏹️ ▶️ John AppleCare, you can start a new one or something like that. So I’ll figure it out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s definitely going to be a phone call with support for a while

⏹️ ▶️ John for that one, I bet. I know. Like, just imagine trying to explain this. It’s just, I’m tired even thinking about

⏹️ ▶️ John it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, Godspeed, John, because that is not going to be fun. Not at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, and I do think it’s, you know, for to kind of generalize the lessons here, I think this is one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the situations where like this is kind of a warning sign of like or warning. What are those warning stories

⏹️ ▶️ Marco called? My brain is melted cautionary tale. There you go.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know where you were going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco with that. That’s exactly what I was thinking. We have a melted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brain. Yeah, okay. So it’s a warning story that like, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you are off the beaten path again, problems like this can arise and over time, you know, things that maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have worked at one time or worked okay, start to work worse as they get, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco further into the, you know, the the lesser used options or configuration. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one example is like if you relocate your home directory on the Mac, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do that. You can even I think you can even put on an external drive. This is not a good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea and a lot of things break if you do, but you can you know like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you can start playing sim link tricks and stuff like that or like you know hey if you want Dropbox to sync some other folder like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can play a sim link trick and kind of like it kind of works or it might work briefly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know you’re kind of signing up for bugs and problems. Now, multi-user

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac configurations are now that class of risk.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t think so. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to push back pretty hard against using multiple user support in MacOS versus

⏹️ ▶️ John changing where your home directory is with symlinks. Those are two very… One is 100%

⏹️ ▶️ John supported, used by millions of people every day. And the other one is a thing that might work if you figure

⏹️ ▶️ John out how to hack it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I take your point, Marco, but I think John’s right that this is a false equivalence. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s certainly, as we’ve said many times in this program, I think there’s something to the theory that if this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is something Apple people do, then it will work. See for the, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the classic example of, oh, Maps has always been great in Silicon Valley. What are you talking about? It’s always

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been great. Whereas Maps, you know, on the East coast was not great for a long time. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is another example in, or I think this variable could be another example where who at Apple doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a Mac per person in their lives, much less their households, and one of you said this earlier, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, it’s not a concern that they have and thus it’s not something that they tested. I mean, this is still

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a piss poor experience for you, John, and I feel awful for you, but ultimately I think this is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this very well could be a lack of dogfooding.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it is a less commonly used feature than the other case, which is not

⏹️ ▶️ John to do this, It’s just so supportive and has been for so long. And as like, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John really no excuse for this. And really the other pushback I have on this whole feature is what I want to tell the people, like talking about

⏹️ ▶️ John product sense and product design, don’t design a warranty system called, you know, AppleCare

⏹️ ▶️ John One that is confined to a single Apple account. Like it doesn’t make any sense, except for as like they’ve decided

⏹️ ▶️ John they

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco could afford. It’s right there in the name, John. It only supports Macs with one user account on them.

⏹️ ▶️ John They couldn’t afford to do it because like if families were allowed to, they would lose too much money. But again, that’s one of

⏹️ ▶️ John the reasons, even though I’m sometimes an early adopter, sometimes not, one of the reasons I jumped on board with this is

⏹️ ▶️ John that the come on was very compelling, which is like, hey, save $18 a month. I’m like, yes, please. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it was going to save me money. And technically it still is saving me some amount of money or

⏹️ ▶️ John no longer $18. Although it might be close because the Mac Studio is a pretty expensive computer. Putting expensive

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware on AppleCare One saves you more money than putting cheap hardware on. And putting really cheap hardware loses you money.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, it’s just an ill conceived thing. It’s a poorly conceived product.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is the wrong product offering that by the way also doesn’t work. But even if it did work,

⏹️ ▶️ John it would still be the wrong design choice for this. They should adjust it so they still make money,

⏹️ ▶️ John but allow it to be used across families. Like that’s the no brainer thing. And it should never, like

⏹️ ▶️ John save yourself from Mark Apple, don’t have any mechanism whatsoever to try to figure out if a device should be

⏹️ ▶️ John yanked off. Just don’t do it. You don’t have that for regular AppleCare. It’s tied to the serial number. So long as someone pays the bills,

⏹️ ▶️ John that serial number is covered. That’s all you should care about, Apple.

Watch blood-oxygen workaround

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some topics and there’s some breaking news from I think it was last

⏹️ ▶️ Casey week that The blood oxygen sent sensor for Apple watches

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sold in the US recently is sort of back So reading from Apple’s newsroom post

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple will introduce a redesigned blood oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9 Series 10 and Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultra 2 users through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update coming what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was later today, which was August 14th This update was enabled

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by a recent US Customs ruling. So jumping to Gruber’s reaction,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what this workaround does is process and display the blood oxygen sensor data on your watch’s paired iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than on the watch itself. That apparently is what the new US Customs ruling holds does not violate Massimo’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey patent. No processing of the sensor data on the watch and no display of the results on the watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then reading from Victoria’s Song of the Verge, this redesign only covers Apple watches sold after January 17,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2024 once the ITC import ban took full effect. A dozen impact models sold before that date are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watches sold outside the US all of which still have the original blood oxygen feature you can tell if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a covered model by checking if the serial number ends with a LW slash A To get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the redesigned feature people with the series 9, 10 and ultra 2 watches will have to update their devices to watchOS 11.6.1 and their iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to iOS 18.6.1 Coming back to Gruber, after the iOS 18.6.1 and WatchOS 11.6.1 software

⏹️ ▶️ Casey updates, the iPhone and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch need to download an over-the-air asset to enable the redesigned blood oxygen feature. This apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey may take up to 24 hours. Until the asset download happens, the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey blood oxygen app on your Apple Watch will say, the blood oxygen app is no longer available. To jumpstart the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey download, users can open the Health app on their phone and the ECG app on their Apple Watch. Just opening the ECG

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app is enough to trigger the asset download needed by the blood oxygen app.

⏹️ ▶️ John So what a weird way this is gone. Like we’ve been talking about this patent fight and then we say, like, well, it looks like they can’t get around it. Apple should just

⏹️ ▶️ John settle. But somehow quote,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been giving this out of like, well, if you do this thing in this way, technically it won’t violate

⏹️ ▶️ John the patents. And I think the patents expire in like twenty twenty eight or something. So now it just seems like Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going to wait it out because the way of doing it, like, OK, well, you can do stuff on your watch, but you can’t look

⏹️ ▶️ John at the results except on your phone. And the phone is technically the thing doing the analyzing. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the reason number a million why patents are dumb. Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John all an unfortunate situation, but it’s an unfortunate situation that Apple has been very

⏹️ ▶️ John typically, very typical of them, stubborn about by saying, we’ll just gonna not

⏹️ ▶️ John remove the feature. Like, you think we won’t remove a feature from the Apple Watch for people in the US? We’ll do

⏹️ ▶️ John it, but we’re not paying you any money, Moss, Moe’s, we hate you so much. And so now they found a way around it, possibly

⏹️ ▶️ John because of their bribery of our terrible government,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, either way, this is, I guess it’s better for people who bought the watch and hadn’t had the feature. Now they

⏹️ ▶️ John have the feature in a not so great version. And by 2028, this will all be behind us, but this is a

⏹️ ▶️ John strange ending to, uh, uh, a long running saga with Apple and their

⏹️ ▶️ John watches.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Apple is very cheap and very patient. So I am

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not surprised to see this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John kind of thing. I’m very stubborn.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God, yes. Yeah, so yeah, I mean it’s an interesting fix

⏹️ ▶️ John or workaround I guess. Yeah, I mean honestly, if Apple had never gotten this fix and just had not been able

⏹️ ▶️ John to do the feature, I think they still would have waited it out. Like it seems like, just at this point they were resigned, like we’re just,

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna wait till 2028 and the fact that they got this out however they got it, is like, oh bonus, actually

⏹️ ▶️ John we can give it back to our customers. Even if they didn’t, they had shown that, like, we’re just never going to pay you. We’re

⏹️ ▶️ John never going to settle. Like we’re just going to wait.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s weird, but I mean, I guess, I guess at least Apple got what they wanted. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel bad for the Massimo people, assuming that there’s more to this, like it was like Gruber’s post at one point

⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically all but said that he thinks they’re patent trolls and I don’t know one way or the other, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel bad for them if they’re more than patent trolls, but if they are patent trolls and screw

⏹️ ▶️ John them. Well, I mean, like, here’s the thing. Like I, I disagree with the entire concept of patents as we’ve discussed in in the past, but

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has to operate within the system, which has patents. And so that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the choice before them. Masumo is not entitled to the money from Apple to license this patent if Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t want to license it. They sued, they won. Masumo’s reward is, Apple’s not allowed to do this in the US,

⏹️ ▶️ John you won. And what did Masumo do with that? Did they take advantage of it by deploying their

⏹️ ▶️ John own products that they made money from? Like that’s not Apple’s problem to do, right? So like, I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John terrible, but it is the system that we have. And so this is one way that can turn out, where

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no licensing. There’s no, like, it’s just one party waits out the other. And yeah, sometimes people, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John companies just don’t get along. And I don’t think, like, whether or not Massimo’s a patent troll, they certainly didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John reap any massive reward from winning this case against Apple. I think I saw some report about how much money Massimo

⏹️ ▶️ John has spent on this lawsuit, and it’s like hundreds of millions of dollars. I do wonder

⏹️ ▶️ John if that was the correct choice for them. There’s another terrible thing about our system, that even if you have a patent in our stupid system

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s valid and you successfully deploy it against a big company like Apple, doing so will cost

⏹️ ▶️ John you hundreds of million dollars and you may get nothing out of it anyway except for the satisfaction of defeating Apple in court.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, too, I don’t think they’re a patent troll at all. The idea of a patent troll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a company that sues over patent infringement. Patent trolls do that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not all companies that do that are patent trolls. A patent troll is a company that doesn’t actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really make anything that basically buys up patents for the sole purpose of suing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And usually it’s like historically the way that term has been used, it’s like really obvious,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually software patents. Because software patents are even more dysfunctional

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than other kinds of patents, which is really impressive because I think, like John, I think the entire patent system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is incredibly dysfunctional. And it is my opinion that no patent should exist. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also even including prescription drug patents. I don’t think any patent should exist, because I think the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco net harm they do to the world is much greater than the net benefit they bring to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world. And the entire patent system is based upon a fallacy that ignores things like principles

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of simultaneous invention. Or it’s kind of based on this fantasy that we have these individual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inventors in a garage somewhere. And that’s not really the truth at all for almost any patents. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Massimo is a product company. they’re really big in healthcare. Like they have a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco presence in healthcare stuff. And so this was not a patent troll. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a legitimate patent lawsuit. And I think if the patent system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is deemed to need to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John exist,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was probably a valid case to bring. Apple was bullying them around and saying, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re just not gonna pay you. And Apple is ultimately going to come out ahead because it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, you know, Apple had more leverage. You know, they, they didn’t need this feature on the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch. And now they found a workaround that will probably hold until the patent expires. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a victory of Apple over, you know, a patent troll. This is Apple bullying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco another company because they didn’t want to pay like this, this actually, if you look at like Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco behavior here, it’s awful. Like Apple is definitely the bad guy in this story. No question.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All it took was one gold trinket and a little bit of glass.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if the the details of the case because as you noted Margot a lot of these things Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John may feel that like that they didn’t even know Massimo existed and they just happen to come up with a

⏹️ ▶️ John similar idea because it’s obvious like so Many patents are and the fact they lost the case may

⏹️ ▶️ John like they may feel essentially justified in saying We didn’t take an idea that

⏹️ ▶️ John Should have been licensed You know, they just beat us to the punch with patenting it because Apple patents everything

⏹️ ▶️ John as well But I don’t know enough of the details to know that. But yeah, I think people call it, think it’s a patent troll, because even though Massimo

⏹️ ▶️ John does make things, they don’t make like a direct Apple Watch competitor. And sort of the simplified view is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, if Apple Watch can’t have this feature, then where’s your Apple Watch equivalent with this feature? And that’s just not

⏹️ ▶️ John Massimo’s business and their business is lower volume. And again, the amount of money they’ve spent on this case is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t seem like they, like the victory for them is basically

⏹️ ▶️ John a legal concept, legal concept, but like it hasn’t been a boon to their business

⏹️ ▶️ John because they spent all this money on the case. It hasn’t increased the sales of the things that they have. They just have this

⏹️ ▶️ John feeling of righteousness, I guess, that they want a case. But, you know, in the end, like so much things in our legal

⏹️ ▶️ John system, if you’re if the person you’re suing has more money than you and is never going to do the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing you want, which is to license your patent with a bunch of that money, then what did you what did you gain? Right. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John you stop this feature from shipping on Apple Watches, you won the case for a time anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you didn’t get any additional revenue from licensing the patent, and you spent a huge amount of of money for

⏹️ ▶️ John a company that size to win the case.

Cellular MBP rumor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there is a rumor first posted at Macworld that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently there might be a m5 MacBook Pro with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cellular being tested. So Felipe Esposito and Macworld writes internal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple code seen by Macworld now reveals that the company has indeed been testing an unreleased MacBook Pro model with an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey m5 Pro chip and Apple’s first 5g modem the code

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which also revealed the existence of a new Mac Pro with them for ultra chip which nobody cares about, right, John? Now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey confirms that the company is at least experimenting with the idea of a MacBook with cellular connectivity. This Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop found in the code is powered by the M5 Pro chip, code named T6050,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which indicates the upcoming generation of MacBook Pro. The same code suggests that this could be the first Mac ever to include a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Centauri chip, which is the code name for Apple’s 5G modem, also known as the C1, which was introduced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier this year with the iPhone 16e. Oh, my gracious, please make this so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can give you all of my money.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so let’s just set expectations accordingly. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this kind of indication is a sign that Apple is preparing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this as a launchable product

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this is just like something that they had to build in software support so that they could start engineering

⏹️ ▶️ Marco testing to have cellular support in a MacBook at all. Earlier rumors from,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe about six months ago, had suggested that they weren’t going to consider cellular until

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the second generation cellular modem and the I believe the OLED redesign of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro which I don’t think is slated for another like year and a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John half or two.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the M6 is the OLED one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Correct. So I don’t think this necessarily contradicts that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this could just be like they made this this configuration supportable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the software so that they could test it internally. So that’s kind of like I’m trying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get my hopes up too much because I’ve wanted this for so long. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is either way. It is very promising that like this seems to be something they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they are starting to work on. Like there is a lot more smoke

⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind this fire than I think we originally seen. So that’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I cannot wait for this. And even though I just bought this M4 14 inch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro, So I would gladly replace it with another one if it had cellular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is just such a difference in terms of practicality,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usefulness. Although that being said, the timing of this is fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ever since I updated to the Tahoe betas on that laptop, it’s a lot better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at automatically connecting to tethering than it ever has been.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like for the last like few weeks I have noticed I don’t need to go to the menu

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and select my phone anymore and it doesn’t prompt me anymore it just connects

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to my phone when I can’t find Wi-Fi which is pretty awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now my phone is still draining its battery the whole time and heating up like crazy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know like it’s I would still rather it be built into the MacBook. But they made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tethering, at least it’s working now. Somebody pointed out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco months ago when we last talked about this, that there was that setting somewhere in network settings of automatically connect to tethering.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I remember I tried it and it just didn’t work. It just kept prompting me anyway and it just never actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked and I talked about it on the show. But in Tahoe, it seems to be working. And so maybe this is like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a HDMI CEC unicorn kind of thing. Maybe I’m just lucky and knock on all the wood

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can find. this stays this way, because it is a lot nicer. And again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not the same as having a built-in, but it gives you a glimpse of what it is like to have it built in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is closer to that than than it not auto connecting. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s glorious. So I really, I hope I hope that it continues to work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well on my existing laptop until they make one with it built in. But when they do make one with a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco built in, it will be better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s what I was about to ask. If you could guarantee, you know, if I could wave

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a magic wand and I could guarantee that tethering would connect every single

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time without fail, do you think you would still want a MacBook Pro with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a cellular chip in it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes it a lot less urgent. So for like another thing I’ve noticed, back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again six months ago, whenever it was, we talked about this last, one thing I complained about on the show was that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if say you were on a train and it went through a tunnel, you lose your signal. If the tethered phone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost its cell connection and was offline, previously it would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cancel the tethering session on the Mac and it would never reconnect automatically. So you would,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, go through your tunnel, phone would drop the connection, the Mac would drop the connection to the phone, and then it would never,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t tell you this, and it wouldn’t reconnect. So, you know, five minutes later you’d be back out in the world,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone would have a connection, but your Mac would still be disconnected from the phone. That seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have also been fixed. When the phone loses the cell connection to the network,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it no longer drops the tethering session with the Mac. So they’ve done something, they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco changed something, and they’ve made it a lot less crappy. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been in there doing a lot of code related to cellular on macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. I will say tethering in the Tahoe beta

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has worked better for me than it ever has. So it does actually remove

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of that urgent, oh, gotta have it, you know, nature of my desire for MacBooks with tethering,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco however, or with cellular rather, however, again, once I can buy one with it built in, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to. That’s not a question. It’s just a matter of, you know, between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now and then, which is probably at least six months to a year away, at least, possibly longer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s less painful now. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s awesome, I’m happy to hear that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Some meta commentary on this, Felipe Esposito or Felipe Esposito at Macworld,

⏹️ ▶️ John he’s had a bunch of stories that are, they read kind of like Mac rumor stories where there’s like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple code seen by Macworld, like Macworld didn’t used to sort of be on the rumors beat. Occasionally

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they would report on something that someone else did, but this is a sort of direct reporting from Macworld about rumor stuff. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I keep seeing that name with a lot of this stuff. I don’t know if Macworld is branching out into the rumors world because that stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John gets a lot of traffic, but just keep an eye on that. And on the Mac Pro thing, like these are all

⏹️ ▶️ John existing rumors, like this is not any new news. Like, look, you gotta introduce the machine, Apple. Like, we could just sit here,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m waiting all year to see what they’re gonna do with the Mac Pro. The rumor is essentially like there’s no Ultra Fusion on the

⏹️ ▶️ John M4. So if there’s an M4 Ultra, it’s not two of any other M4 sticks chips stuck together. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John its own chip. Yeah, yeah, like, what, like there’s rumors have been around for ages and ages, but they need

⏹️ ▶️ John to ship a thing. So I’m like, I’m not really, I’m just waiting, like I need to see what they will actually

⏹️ ▶️ John release, not more rumors and part numbers about this is the exact right part number that

⏹️ ▶️ John should be for an M4 Ultra, but of course Apple has directly said that the M4 is never meant to have Ultra Fusion and yada

⏹️ ▶️ John yada, like, so I’m just waiting, I’m here waiting. Put out a new Mac Pro and we’ll see what

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like. So I’m not getting too worked up about it, but I’m glad it looks like we’re getting closer to cellular Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ John I would definitely choose that over tethering, even if tethering worked perfectly every time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Oh

A19 Pro Studio Display?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the A19 Pro chip could be coming to a studio display too, reading now from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Rumors. Yesterday, signs of the second generation studio display with the code name J427 were spotted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Apple code. Now it has emerged that the device will contain the as yet unreleased A19 Pro chip. Rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggest that the next generation studio display will come out in early 2026, when we’re also expecting new Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Little is known about the new studio display, but it could feature mini LED backlighting for improved brightness, contrast, and color.

⏹️ ▶️ John If it didn’t, I would be disappointed because it would just be the same as the current one. But this is a hilarious rumor because the rumor

⏹️ ▶️ John for the low cost Apple laptop that we talked about all those shows ago is that it would have an A18 Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So the

⏹️ ▶️ John monitor would have a more powerful SoC than the low cost laptop that you connect

⏹️ ▶️ John to. Now granted, the monitor presumably wouldn’t have like a 512 gig SSD in it and it doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John all the ports or whatever. Like I get it, it’s not quite the same thing, but like the current studio display has what, an A13 in it

⏹️ ▶️ John or something? And we always thought that was weird, It’s like, well, Apple’s got a bunch of those chips laying around, might as well use it. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then that thing was buggy and had all sorts of problems. So maybe they work that out. But

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what a world we live in where the monitor, which I hope that I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John the rumors like, oh, it might be mini LED. Like if it’s not, why even bother? Like if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like you don’t improve, like they’re always so cautious, it might actually be better than the current one. Oh, you think

⏹️ ▶️ John after six years or whatever, it’s been there, would it would be better than the one every place? I would hope so. There’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John a million things they could do to make it better. But anyway, having an A19 Pro, like

⏹️ ▶️ John can you offload stuff? That like, maybe that’ll mean it’ll be like a smart monitor where like

⏹️ ▶️ John the Samsung ones, like with no Mac attached to it, it can still do stuff. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John with the addition of an SSD, how is that not like an iMac? Like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got an A19 Pro in it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re just like, can I just, can I just stick some storage here with a Thunderbolt? I know it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s quite the same because again, of all the security and the boot up process. Like I get it, but it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John what a world that we live in. And obviously this would probably be way more expensive than a low cost laptop. So it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John although the screen would be substantially larger as well, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this is just

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the most absurd situations I’ve ever heard. And it’s, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John because we talk so much about the Apple Silicon chips, but as we occasionally note when we talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about these things, they are pretty much never the most expensive component in any of these systems

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro possibly accepted, depending on what Apple does. Like the screen is the most expensive

⏹️ ▶️ John component, I imagine, in the studio display. The screen is often one of the most expensive components. And

⏹️ ▶️ John these SoCs, as amazing as they are, they’re fairly small and they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John that expensive in the grand scheme of things, like retail price, if they were selling like the Mac Pro chip, maybe it would be thousands

⏹️ ▶️ John and thousands of dollars. But like to manufacture it, you can kind of know like how much does this cost? It’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what TSMC’s cost for its highest, you know, for their highest process, whatever process

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is using, here’s how much it costs per like, you know, area of the die. And here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John how much their weird assembly thing is where they fuse the parts together and put the RAM on it or whatever. Like you can calculate it, like

⏹️ ▶️ John what the cost is plus TSMC’s margin. And it doesn’t come out to be more expensive than the screen

⏹️ ▶️ John in many cases. But it’s so central to the device. Like it makes it what it is. It’s how

⏹️ ▶️ John fast it can do the stuff you want it to do. It determines the capabilities. And yeah, we’ll get this monitor

⏹️ ▶️ John with a more powerful SOC than Apple’s low cost laptop. Again, both rumored, but I’m watching

⏹️ ▶️ John for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s bananas. I don’t know, I’m curious to see what they do with monitor story, because obviously y’all’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey XDRs are positively ancient. I mean, what was that like 2020 or something like that? 2019. Was it 2019?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a 2019 Mac Pro that I

⏹️ ▶️ John bought with the XDR when it was new. That’s why I can’t put AppleCare One on them, because they’re all too old.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I’ll tell you what, the XDR, it is incredibly solid.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I know. Everyone’s problems they have the studio displays up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco front. I haven’t heard about them recently. I assume they may

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John be fixed

⏹️ ▶️ John They got most of the stuff worked out to it But it is still weird that you have to do basically a software update on your monitor I mean, I guess there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John firmware updates for the XDR too, but it’s just like yeah It’s it’s a different world where you’re running a full Apple OS versus

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever weird firmware that the XDR is running

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the XDR is great I mean it is a little long in the tooth and like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are certain parts of it that I would love to see Updated obviously like number one screen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, yeah, like number one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be like, you know, maybe get rid of those dim edges on the outside and maybe more dimming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco zones and maybe 120 Hertz. Like I think those would be like my top three.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John are the ones you got them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But like the end, of course, you know, can it not be $5,000 plus a Sanford and a thousand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Nope, sorry. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Now you’re asking too

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. Yeah. Like it’s, it is a great monitor in all other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco respects and for it being six years old and still being amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and still having almost no peer. Like we talked a little bit about like there’s some recent ones just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming out now from other companies that match the resolution and some of the specs. But

⏹️ ▶️ John not Apple’s design sense, obviously, because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they just, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ John And certainly not matching Apple’s hardware, but yeah, it is unique in that way and you pay for it. But like being

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that has a pretty okay screen in it, even all things considered, and with an exquisitely

⏹️ ▶️ John designed, horrendously expensive Apple matching case.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a very good product. Like there’s, it doesn’t leave me wanting much.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in fact, selfishly, I kind of, I’m kind of waiting, you know, I’m like, well, I kind of want to get my, my $6,000 worth out of this. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it to be replaced too soon.

⏹️ ▶️ John To be clear, if and when I buy a new computer, I’m not buying a monitor. I’m using this computer until, using

⏹️ ▶️ John this monitor until it dies. Cause I’m, I’m perfectly satisfied with it. It does everything I need it to do. its flaws

⏹️ ▶️ John accepted. I’m, I would love, uh, you know, to not have the vignetting around the edge to have 120 Hertz

⏹️ ▶️ John and to have more dimming zones and yada, yada. But like, I don’t need any of that to do what I’m doing. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m, I’m using this computer until it dies from the vertical red line that has been haunting underscore.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yup. Uh, no, I, I, I don’t know if there was, if there were to be a studio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey display too, because I have no self-control, I’d probably get one. But if you recall, my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup right now is a LG 5K on my left, LG 5K on my right, and a studio display dead center. And the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey difference between the two, or the three, I guess I should say, you would think that it would be minor, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh no. Even on VESA mounts, where that awful stand from the studio display is irrelevant,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the display quality is very, very, very different. It’s quite a bit different. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love a studio display too, I think, but depending on how hilariously expensive it is, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey may or may not end up getting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John one. I mean, I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like they should be able to match the close to the current price of the studio display because that A19 is not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John add that much to the price. I mean, maybe it would like be inflation adjusted similar to what it is. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John you can get a mini LED back lid, 120 Hertz screen for enough

⏹️ ▶️ John money to fit comfortably within the ridiculous margins of the studio display.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So I hope the price doesn’t get

⏹️ ▶️ John inflated by too much. Maybe let’s just say, just the Apple standard, oh, it costs a hundred dollars more than it used to.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think you would still end up buying one and I think you’d be happy with it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Why aren’t they going OLED yet? Is it, is it not ready at those sizes? I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John while,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? There are rumors of that sometimes, but OLED, the OLED burn

⏹️ ▶️ John in issue is still a thing. There are, I mean, I’m looking at them from my PlayStation five that you can get a 27 inch 4k QD

⏹️ ▶️ John OLED or tandem OLED gaming monitor that has high refresh that, you know, that they’re great.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But burn in is still a thing. And especially for like desktop things

⏹️ ▶️ John with lots of windows on it like what is it a monitors on box has been doing like a Year long

⏹️ ▶️ John test on like a I think it’s an alien where QD OLED 27 inch 4k thing using windows

⏹️ ▶️ John on it just like a regular computer. It’s got a little bit of burn and you can detect it It’s not a problem with

⏹️ ▶️ John many LED. So I wonder if Apple is a Little shy about that. I mean, I mean they’re gonna go ahead

⏹️ ▶️ John with it with the MacBook Pros and the m6 generation so maybe that’ll be the test bed, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there are any 32 inch 6k OLEDs from anybody anywhere ever

⏹️ ▶️ John But for 4k and maybe I’m not sure about 5k, but right now you can get 4k and 1440 OLEDs that

⏹️ ▶️ John are amazing Apple tends not to

⏹️ ▶️ John be an early adopter in display tech So I think we really have to wait for the current refresh

⏹️ ▶️ John and then wait another seven years or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the normal Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John time is and by then hopefully the issues will have been worked out because is, you know, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John like our phones are all that it’s like, well, why is burning not a problem on our phones? I think we’ve talked about this before. It’s just like the screens aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ John on as much. The power is lower. The brightness is lower for less time. But for like for desktops

⏹️ ▶️ John that are, you know, just showing static stuff for a long period of time and are on a lot, it’s an issue.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like one of the one of the clever features that Asus recently added is essentially a proximity sensor to their monitor. So when you get

⏹️ ▶️ John up and walk away, it turns the monitor off. And it’s just a hardware thing that has nothing to do with the OS. It’s just a monitor hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John feature. save that’s to save Vernon it’s a smart feature and yeah Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John would probably have to look into to something like that if they ever went OLED on their big monitors with current tech.

Blurry Mac games

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then we need to talk about gaming on the Mac, which believe it or not,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a thing. And apparently, if you’re gaming on your MacBook Pro, your game is probably rendering

⏹️ ▶️ Casey blurry. John, do you want me to read this? Do you want to talk about this? How do you want to proceed?

⏹️ ▶️ John You can go through it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So from Colin Cornaby, they write, if you game on a MacBook Pro display, your game is probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rendering wrong unless you’ve adjusted your settings. If you’re a developer building a full screen game in AppKit or Catalyst,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s APIs have some issues you need to aware of. When most games start, they ask the system what resolutions are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey available for the current display and pick the best one. A Mac app can get a list of suggested output resolutions through

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the CGDisplayCopyAllDisplayModes function. This worked well for decades on Macs with regular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey displays, but modern Apple laptops have a notch at the top of the display. The full-screen area your game

⏹️ ▶️ Casey runs in is not the same resolution as the screen. Most games do not account for this problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They output frames sized for the entire screen instead of the region they can draw to. This output is height compressed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and blurry. The problem is that the resolutions returned from the CGDisplayCopyAllDisplayModes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey function are mixed in a single list with no built-in way to filter. Worse yet, most games default to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first resolution on the list. That happens to be the resolution of the entire display instead of the area under the notch. Out of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey box, most games draw using this squished down output. I’ve submitted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the issue described in this post as a blah-blah-blah feedback number, which will be in the show notes. The issue has been open since

⏹️ ▶️ Casey September of 2023, which means it’s a wee little baby feedback. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey barely alive at this point.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so just to clarify what they’re talking about here is like the game thinks it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going to draw on the whole screen, like basically drawing behind the notch, like the whole resolution of the screen. But then

⏹️ ▶️ John when it actually does display, it displays in the region below the notch because

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want your notch interfering with things. So they’re taking the full screen’s worth of pixels and just squishing

⏹️ ▶️ John it down a tiny little bit to get under the notch, which is terrible. Like it’s not like non-native

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but you would hope that the game spends the time rendering the pixels

⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain resolution that it would display it at that resolution. Instead, like squishing it, making things look,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’ll make things look wrong and blurry and just, it’s bad. This reminds me of when, I

⏹️ ▶️ John think I had a rant about this on one of my old Ars Technica blogs or something, like Mac games would,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’d launch a Mac game, a Mac OS X game back in the day, and it would go full screen,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it wouldn’t use the Mac OS APIs for essentially locking the screen. Like if there’s an API that

⏹️ ▶️ John said, hey, I’m a game, I’m about to go full screen, give me exclusive control over the

⏹️ ▶️ John screen, and then change to whatever res the game is gonna be running at, and then play the game.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then when you quit, unlock it. And the reason you’d wanna do that, the reason it was important to me, you’ll be shocked to learn, is that if

⏹️ ▶️ John a game didn’t do that, it would say, I’m going full screen, and my settings are set to 1024 by 768,

⏹️ ▶️ John so please go full screen 1024 by 768, and every other Mac app that you had running

⏹️ ▶️ John when you launched that game would get a notification that says, hey, FYI, the screen resolution just changed to 1024 by 768.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Mac OS itself would say, oh, all you other apps, you just changed to 1024 by 768,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it would gather all the windows so they fit on screen in 1024 by 768.

⏹️ ▶️ John So when you quit the game and it turned back to like whatever your Apple Cinema Display resolution was,

⏹️ ▶️ John all your windows have been moved and squished into a 1024 and it drove me

⏹️ ▶️ John bonkers because Apple had an API, said, hey, game developers, before you go full screen, call

⏹️ ▶️ John this API so we won’t tell the whole rest of the system that the resolution has changed because we trust that you’re gonna change

⏹️ ▶️ John it back before you quit. Like there’ll be none the wiser, right? You’re going full screen, you’ve blacked out the whole screen, you’ve locked

⏹️ ▶️ John the screen. Don’t tell all the other apps that you’ve squished, You know what I mean? And

⏹️ ▶️ John they made a specific API for this. And this is one of the frustrations with Mac gaming is that

⏹️ ▶️ John to properly port a game to the Mac or write a game on the Mac, you

⏹️ ▶️ John have to actually understand the platform enough to get basic stuff right. Like how

⏹️ ▶️ John do I display full screen in a game on Mac OS? And the right way to do it was back then to

⏹️ ▶️ John lock the screen so you don’t destroy the placement of everybody’s windows. Right, even if you’re not like a picky window person

⏹️ ▶️ John like me, people notice when suddenly all their windows that used to be arrayed across their screen are squished into a little

⏹️ ▶️ John central, like imagine if you went to 640 by 480 in the game to get higher frame rates and all your windows are now squished into 640 by 480.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is just like that, where it’s like Apple’s doing all the stuff, the game porting toolkit, and look at all these AAA

⏹️ ▶️ John games that are coming to the Mac and we’re getting all these game developers and these games can’t be bothered even with Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John presumably direct support to make sure they’re correctly drawing, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John correctly sizing and drawing their display to account for the notch. again, they’re not just not a new thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John All these games are basically come out on the Mac in the post notch era. And so does

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple not care enough to say, hey, we looked at your game and it looks like it looks like you’re squishing your output to fit

⏹️ ▶️ John under the notch because you’re picking the wrong resolution from this thing. And in this case, it seems like Apple doesn’t even have an API that says,

⏹️ ▶️ John or I guess they do, you can still find essentially the safe area instead or whatever. But it’s just so disappointing. With

⏹️ ▶️ John all this press and all this technology about gaming on the Mac, they can’t be bothered No

⏹️ ▶️ John one in this situation can be bothered to make sure something basic about the games is correct, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John that they are drawing into the size and area that they think they should be drawing into on Apple’s most popular Macs.

⏹️ ▶️ John Very disappointing. I like this post from Colin because this is an issue I had never heard of because again, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have a laptop with a notch that I game on or a laptop with a notch at all, and I don’t like laptops, so this doesn’t affect

⏹️ ▶️ John me, but like every time they show gaming on the Mac, It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John look at it and you can run on your laptop if you don’t mind Shoddily constructed

⏹️ ▶️ John games that don’t correctly render by default. Oh And there was a list of affected games

⏹️ ▶️ John FYI, so the shadow of the tomb raider was used as an example, which is a game that was ported to the Mac ages ago maybe this predates

⏹️ ▶️ John it but Colin says Riven defaults to a squash resolution stray the game where

⏹️ ▶️ John you cool game where you play a cat defaults to 1728 by 11 17 which is not 16 by 10 in a squash control ultimate edition

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, Collins has control gets around the issue by just making up its own resolutions.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are a few 16 by 10 resolutions on the list, but none of them are the actual native resolution of the Mac of

⏹️ ▶️ John Collins Mac book pro. Uh, no man’s sky defaults to squash non 16, 10 resolution. The resolution pickers

⏹️ ▶️ John lists both safe area and non safe area resolution. So, you know, a lot of these cases, it’s just like what it defaults to and you

⏹️ ▶️ John can, you know, change the settings to make it not squish. So it’s not like a permanent thing, but it’s embarrassing

⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s the default. And then honorable mention of for a world of warcraft, which actually been a pretty good Mac OS citizen

⏹️ ▶️ John for its entire life. World of Warcraft at first looks wrong, but World of Warcraft is an older game

⏹️ ▶️ John using the legacy Core Graphics Display Services full screen API. That API actually allows World of Warcraft

⏹️ ▶️ John to draw into the notch, so in this case the 34 or 56 by 2234 resolution is

⏹️ ▶️ John correct. So if your game is super old, it has no idea the of the notches there uses the old things, but at least it doesn’t draw

⏹️ ▶️ John squished.

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#askatp: Renaming Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP and let’s start

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Aaron Bushnell who writes, with Apple working on new LLM AI and voice technologies,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you think the name Siri will continue to be used or do you think it will be retired and they’ll use a new name after years of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri disappointment? This is a really great question because as soon as I read it, I was like, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, they should get rid of Siri if it’s actually good now. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what they would do, but I think it would be a very wise choice to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with Marco. What do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they won’t, you know, but if they did, I think they would call it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just ask Apple because that’s, that’s kind of their, their direction. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate that, but you’re probably right. And we

⏹️ ▶️ John would sue them, right? Yeah. Because we invented the entire concept of ask something and didn’t steal it from another

⏹️ ▶️ John podcast. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I think if they did, if today’s Apple, you know, like with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco moderate with, you know, this group of, you know, marketing and decision making people, I think they would just say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask like, hey, Apple, what’s the answer to this question? Like, I think that would be their answer, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of hate, but that that is probably what they would do. But that being said, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think they’re going to change it. Because to change it away from Siri, like, Like number one,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple would have to think Siri is unrecoverable. And I don’t think anyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high up at Apple actually realizes how bad Siri is and how bad the Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reputation is. Certainly many of the non-high up people know very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, but I think the people at and near the very top have convinced themselves that Siri

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is awesome. I don’t think they have the self-reflection

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really see how bad it is. Also, Apple, we said earlier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re a very patient company. Apple loves recycling names

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and using them for a long time. We have MagSafe, that’s one. We have a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, once Apple comes up with a term and they market it, they tend to return

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it whenever possible. So even if Siri is damaged now, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see them possibly even, oh, hold on, my phone just woke up. Thanks, thanks for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even if it is considered damaged now, I can see them just kind of downplaying it for like a year or two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then going right back to it again, or never leaving it in the first place. Because Apple loves

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the names they invest in, and they continue to use them as much as they possibly can.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So again, I don’t think they’re leaving the name Siri, but if they did leave

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the name Siri, they would just say Apple, because they would want it to stand for Apple Intelligence.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it would just be, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey hey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, what’s the weather tomorrow? That’s what it would be.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you in both in that that’s what they would do and I hate it, but do you think they would do hey

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple even considering that hey Google has long been a thing?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it used to be okay Google, which- No, that’s true,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you’re right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when all of these wake phrases started, they needed to have certain audio characteristics

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make them more easily distinguished from other words and other sounds. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hardware and the software, back with Alexa and the first Google Home things, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware and software were much simpler and much more primitive. So certain words

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and rhythms and sounds and frequencies would work better than others and would be more easily distinguishable from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco background, from false wakeups basically, from like other sounds and other words.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco As technology has gotten better and more advanced, now I think they have a lot more flexibility

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in what those words can be. You wouldn’t know it from how my phone just woke up, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do, like over time, we do have better options available to us.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why they dropped the hey requirement recently. Although

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you, if you turn the hey requirement back on, it reduces the frequency

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of miss wakeups.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s why I never turned it off.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But anyway, I don’t think they care that Google was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OK Google. And then I believe now they’re Hey Google. I don’t think they care. You can do both.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think Apple would avoid using the word, you know, Hey Apple, or just Apple. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they would avoid that for that reason.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think they will because of the earlier discussion about Apple’s stubbornness. Like, just because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just, damn it, we’re gonna make Siri good at some point, surely, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought we had this in fall for next week, but apparently we don’t, but there is actually a story about, maybe I

⏹️ ▶️ John just didn’t pull out of my stuff, so maybe I’ll spoil it here, but there was a story this week about

⏹️ ▶️ John rumors of a visual redesign for the new Siri, because they burned their pretty cool

⏹️ ▶️ John current visual redesign for the Siri that wasn’t any better, right? And so they’re thinking of having

⏹️ ▶️ John to do a new one, and that’s, I feel like, how they’re going to, Like there may be like a rebrand,

⏹️ ▶️ John even if they say like Siri 2 or Siri, now it’s good, or like new Siri or next gen Siri or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like Siri is going to be in there. I think they should do like, you know, the whole, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, like a Bell Atlantic, Verizon, AT&T, like the airlines that changed

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco their name. Xfinity. Like Comcast

⏹️ ▶️ John Xfinity, right? The reputational associations of Siri are so

⏹️ ▶️ John bad with just regular people, justifiably bad, that

⏹️ ▶️ John they should get rid of Siri and pick a new one. If and only if they have an actual

⏹️ ▶️ John good voice

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey system. Well, that’s the thing, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so clear. They did the visual design, which I think the new one is cool, and they wasted it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. If that is true, if they come out with a new visual design,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the people who designed the current cool one, they’re like, oh man. We

⏹️ ▶️ John made this cool thing, You just didn’t give us a thing to associate it with. So yeah, I don’t think they will change it, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I think they totally should. and I secretly hope that they do.

#askatp: Vehicle Motion Cues

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roli C. writes, does John have an update on the accessibility feature vehicle motion cues?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you tried it? So to recap, I think this was iOS 18, maybe even 17,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but recently, there was a thing you could opt into where, and I think it would try to do it automatically,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you could also put in Control Center where there would be a series of dots, predominantly along the side

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the screen if I recall correctly, and as the car that you’re in or the boat or what have you moves around,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey those dots would move in a commensurate way, which allegedly will help keep your inner ear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and eyes in sync. I presume that this didn’t work for you, John, because you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have more severe motion sickness than pretty much anyone I know, but tell me, what has happened?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never tried it. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco come on! Well, okay, in John’s defense, it was announced, you know, like Apple does those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big accessibility feature previews in the spring, but those features often are like months

⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from shipping. And so when it was announced, we talked about it, but I don’t think it shipped for like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least three or four months after that. And so I think we all just forgot about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t forget about it. That’s not why I didn’t try it. Like, look, I’ve been this motion. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John known that I’ve been this motion sick since fifth grade. There’s a lot of things. Early

⏹️ ▶️ John on, I tried all the various things that you can try. Granted, they were different back then.

⏹️ ▶️ John But like what I’ve learned is I’ve learned what works for me and what doesn’t work for me. And

⏹️ ▶️ John those dots, like my motion sickness is just laugh at those dots because they are insufficient

⏹️ ▶️ John to properly sync up my inner ear and my eyes. Here’s the thing, I would never attempt

⏹️ ▶️ John it because the punishment for finding out that they don’t work is so terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ John When I have a known solution, which is do the things I currently do, like make sure you’re looking out the front of

⏹️ ▶️ John the car or stare at the horizon or whatever. I have known things that I know will work for me. I would never

⏹️ ▶️ John risk, like, let me see if I can ruin my entire day and puke my brains out to see if

⏹️ ▶️ John these dots work. So I don’t have anything against the dots. I’m sure they work for a lot of people. I just don’t expect them

⏹️ ▶️ John to work for me. And I don’t need them to work for me. Currently don’t need them to work for me because I have

⏹️ ▶️ John other things that I can do to accommodate this. The most important being like, don’t put yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John in situations where you’re getting emotional. Like if someone said, you have to be on a boat, I’m gonna puke my brands out anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John So of course I’d try the dots then cause hell I’ll try anything. You know what I mean? But like, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John just not gonna go on a boat that rocks like that. Right, you know what I mean? Like it’s, so

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. I haven’t tried them. I know it’s disappointing to some people. What I have done is heavily

⏹️ ▶️ John promoted these dots to my children because my children insist on being on their

⏹️ ▶️ John phones or iPads in the back of the car and then complain that they get motion sick. I’m like, I know you’re on your

⏹️ ▶️ John phone. Of course, you have some of my genes. This is not a surprise to me. And I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ John they won’t get off their phones, right? So I’m like, try the dots. And they’re like, ah, the dots, whatever. I’m like, at least,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like me on the boat. Like, you’re gonna, like, apparently you can’t stop looking at your phone while we’re sitting in the car and you always complain

⏹️ ▶️ John that you get motion sick. The same thing with reading, they’ll read a book. I’m like, don’t try to read, you’re my kids. Don’t try to read a book in the

⏹️ ▶️ John back of the car. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gonna work out well for you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, oh, I feel so sick. Yeah, I know, I know you’ve, they’re not as bad as me. Like they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not as bad. They don’t have the problems that I have. But like all child things, like I’ve been trying to tell them to

⏹️ ▶️ John use the dots because I think they’re at the level maybe the dots would help them. The dots are a good idea. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John sound, there’s a rationale that makes sense. And I’m sure they do work for some people, but I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ John probably never gonna try them unless, if you see me trying them, you know everything else has fallen apart. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey completely

⏹️ ▶️ John desperate.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, a homework assignment. Have Tina drive you around, cause I wanna know if this works. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been meaning to ask you

⏹️ ▶️ John myself. No thanks. I know. Come on. All right, so I’ll do that if you drink some Ipecac.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I think that’s not exactly apples to apples. It is,

⏹️ ▶️ John cause the failure scenario is the same.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where’s your sense of adventure?

#askatp: Trackpad methods

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ellie writes, when you use a trackpad, what method do you use to actually register a click tapping, clicking with your pointer finger

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the old style clicking with the thumb? I’ve realized at some point since the introduction of click anywhere trackpads, I’ve switched

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from old style to clicking with my index finger, but I don’t know when that happened. Uh, I’m an old and I’m the only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one who regularly, or well, pretty much always uses a trackpad of the three of us. And while I will occasionally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like click anywhere 99% of the time I am doing a, uh, doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my thumb on the bottom of the trackpad click. and that will probably never stop happening because I’m an old.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you occasionally use laptops. So what do you do?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes I will do the old style, like, you know, what you were just saying, like where the button used to be. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes I’ll do that. Usually I’ll just click the finger I’m using to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco move around, which is almost always my index finger.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. John, I know you hate trackpads and avoid them at all costs. Do you have any thoughts on this

⏹️ ▶️ John though? I avoid them, but they still exist and I have to use them, especially when I’m fixing my kids’ laptops and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or, you know, my laptop is another one of my Tahoe test machines. So I have an Intel Tahoe machine, an ARM

⏹️ ▶️ John Tahoe machine, and anyway, so I do have to use trackpads. I hate trackpads.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not my friend. But when I read this question, like, I thought about it for a little bit, I’m like, oh, we’ll put that in next, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then the next time I was using the laptop, I started to pay attention to what I do, because I was like, what do

⏹️ ▶️ John I do? How do, because, you know, I started using trackpads when they have the physical button at the bottom part of the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, right? So I’m like, that must be what I do, right? But no, it seems like most

⏹️ ▶️ John of the time I do the clicking anywhere with my pointer finger. And once

⏹️ ▶️ John I realized that that’s what I was doing, I don’t know when that transition happened, but like, at some point

⏹️ ▶️ John after they introduced the trackpads where you can click anywhere, I started doing it, because it is convenient. But once I

⏹️ ▶️ John realized that I was doing that a lot, I said, I shouldn’t be doing that, because one of the things I hate most is when I’m doing

⏹️ ▶️ John that and I’m like doing a drag and I like get to the limits of the trackpad because the tracking isn’t quite

⏹️ ▶️ John what I expected it to be or whatever. And then it’s like I got to like do this little maneuver to like continue

⏹️ ▶️ John the drag without releasing it but give myself more room. You don’t have to do that if you do it the old way and the thumb is holding

⏹️ ▶️ John down the quote unquote button while the other finger goes swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe to move over. So I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John consciously been trying to change how I use the trackpad to not run

⏹️ ▶️ John into these more problematic scenarios. Obviously, again, I’m not a great, obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not a very good trackpad user. Like, it’s one of the reasons I don’t like it. It doesn’t fit with my, it doesn’t fit

⏹️ ▶️ John with the way I use computers and I’ve never really gotten particularly good at it. But paying more attention

⏹️ ▶️ John to how I’m using it and using different techniques. I’ve even gone so far as occasionally to do the old person thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John where I use my other hand to be the holding down the quote unquote button and then use that

⏹️ ▶️ John hand to do like dragging things or whatever. I still feel so constrained by trackpads and I hate it and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John a mouser for life, right? But, uh, but yeah, um, apparently I

⏹️ ▶️ John use the click anywhere thing and I shouldn’t. All right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and hello fresh. And thanks to our members

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join us at ATP dot FM slash join. One of the many perks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of membership is exclusive content in many forms. You do specials here and there. And we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do after every episode, ATP over time, this is a special exclusive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weekly bonus topic for our members. You can listen to everything we’ve ever done. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exclusive by joining 18bit.fm.com. This week on Overtime, we’re going to be talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s research into using LLMs to make UIs with SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What could possibly go wrong with using LLMs and AI tech to design user interfaces?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We will find out in Overtime. You can hear us again, 18bit.fm.com. Thank you so much everybody for listening. We’ll talk to you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Mastodon, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ John C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they did it mean to

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental Tech Podcasts, so long.

ATP Insider: Vacations

⏹️ ▶️ John Did we ever promote the vacation special?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We did not. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey occurred to me like an hour ago and it was way too late.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was about to jump in but I’m like, maybe we did. Maybe we did. Sure didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re still on the regular show. We can still save this. No, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the after show. This is the

⏹️ ▶️ John after show. What I’m saying, but it’s not overtime yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So we can save this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we’ll just save it. Let’s just save it for next week.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, we’re committed now. At this point, we got to do it. We

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey can’t. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re, we, this is, you got to get better in increments. We’re getting incrementally better. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should have done this in the pre-show, but we didn’t, but we have a new member special ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey insider vacations where we talk about, you know, our vacations. What,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we want out of them, what kind of vacations we like, how do we handle them, what are our roles when going on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey vacations, what’s a trip, what’s a vacation, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know, John, anything to add.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I use it. How we think about vacations, the role they have in our lives. because there is

⏹️ ▶️ John surprising variance from the sort of stereotypical view, especially the stereotypical American

⏹️ ▶️ John as promoted in the media view of what a vacation is supposed to be versus how

⏹️ ▶️ John people actually engage with vacations in their lives. So that’s that’s the topic we tackle tackled in

⏹️ ▶️ John our typical fashion. If you want to hear about us and our vacations and our weird

⏹️ ▶️ John ideas and attitudes about vacations, there’s a member special for you that we forgot to promote at the top of the show.

⏹️ ▶️ John Us?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Weird? We don’t do anything weird. Us? Forgot to promote a member special? That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John never happens.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why this has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco become a sickness with us. It never used to. And then the last three, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I don’t know what’s happened. Maybe they just become so routine. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John members. You get member specials every month, like clockwork, but we just can’t remember to promote them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s bad. But hey, you know what? You should check it out. And I mean, whether or not the vacations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey member special is interesting to you, I would like to, uh, plus one, if you will,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, Marco’s typical outro where, you know, even if this one isn’t interesting at this point, we have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey amassed a pretty solid library of specials and whatnot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And so, yeah, there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go. So if you are interested at all, join at least for a month, preferably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for longer and check them out and you can listen to them and enjoy them. The tier lists seem to be the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey crowd favorites, but we have heard many pieces of extremely lovely and good feedback about pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey much everyone we’ve done. So definitely do check that out. And if you’re not a member, atp.fm.com. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re all different. Like there are ones about tech topics. There are ones about like this one’s mostly about like kind of family things. There are funny

⏹️ ▶️ John ones. There are goofy ones. There’s there’s ones where we watch movies like it’s it’s all over the map. But like each one

⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know different. So if you say like I don’t want to hear you talk about your lives or your vacations. I want to hear you about talk about

⏹️ ▶️ John software development. There’s a member special for that and there’ll probably be more so yeah check them out