659: Lose the Ear Lottery
02 Oct 2025Cases and bumpy starts with our new iPhones, our reviews of the AirPods Pro 3, and a baffling USB odyssey.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Eh, that’ll keep…
- 🗣️ St. Jude time is almost done! 🗣️
- 🗣️ New ATP Member’s Special: ATP Dev: Computer Science Curriculum
- Follow-up:
- ATP in the wild (via Mark Christian & Richard Earney)
- iOS 26.0.1 allegedly fixes N1 Wi-Fi/BT issues
- What does iCloud back up? (via Dayton Lovell)
- iCloud for Messages
- A ringing endorsement from Nick
- A potential fix for ∞ GIFs (via Nathan)
- iPhone Transfers
- Why not pre-populate them, Kindle-style? (via Winnie Lewis)
- TestFlight is… better now? (via Daniel Nelson)
- Some thoughts from Nick
- Apple’s onboarding enshittification (via Imthaz)
- Thought to text & AlterEgo
- Firefox (1982)
- Prior MIT project (via Hannes)
- CJ’s thoughts
- More first impressions
- Ask ATP:
- How do we really know if something is encrypted? (via Joshua Wold)
- What is the point of neural engine cores, anyway? (via Tom Cole)
- SIMD
- Evaluating the Apple Silicon M-Series SoCs for HPC Performance & Efficiency
- AMX Units
- Neural Engine
- Does filling a phone SSD slaughter performance? (via Sean Harding)
- Post-show: Marco’s USB odyssey
- Members-only ATP Overtime: NAS Noodling
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Chapters
- M5 iPad Pro leak
- Donate to St. Jude
- Special: CompSci Curriculum
- ATP/Overcast in the wild
- Bugs on new iPhones
- iMessage iCloud backups
- Could Apple preload our iPhones?
- iPhone migrations
- Sponsor: Claude
- AlterEgo follow-up
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
- iPhone 17 Pro cases
- The regular iPhone 17
- Our AirPods Pro 3 review
- Sponsor: Zapier
- #askatp: Trusting encrypted apps
- #askatp: What does Neural Engine do?
- #askatp: Full SSDs on iPhones?
- Ending theme
- A USB odyssey
M5 iPad Pro leak
⏹️ ▶️ John Very often when we record, stuff happens the day that we’re going to record,
⏹️ ▶️ John hours before we record, stuff happens. Drives me nuts. Late breaking stuff and sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it just has to go in the notes because it’s just, we got to talk about this. But other times it’s like, ah, that’ll keep until next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this week I was, today and the past couple of days, I saw a bunch of stuff coming.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, oh, that’ll keep. So I said, oh, that’ll keep. I don’t know. It’s not even that interesting. I don’t even know if it’s going to make it into the show
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like, well, whatever, we’ve already talked about all of this. but it was like an extravaganza
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple leaks of products that we’ve already talked about. So it’s not like, did you know they’re gonna make another iPad? Yeah, we knew that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you know they’re gonna make more MacBook Pros? Yeah, we’re not surprised. Did you know the iPad’s gonna have the M5? Yeah, we’re not surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the leaks are getting so bad that like one YouTube channel
⏹️ ▶️ John had supposedly the iPad Pro M5, like just physically
⏹️ ▶️ John there. They took it out of the box, they booted it, they benchmarked it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think that same channel had like one of the earlier things like
⏹️ ▶️ John an old MacBook Pro or something. In some ways it’s like, wow, this is like an amazing leak. On the other hand, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I mean, it’s the iPad Pro M5. It looks exactly like the
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s got an M5 in it. And the M5 is a little bit faster than the M4. And it’s like the most boring
⏹️ ▶️ John leak ever. And I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. And that’s, you know, in addition to all the FCC
⏹️ ▶️ John leaks, because our government can’t do anything competently anymore. us all of Apple’s secret plans.
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s not doing anything at all. Hey, there you go. Anyway, I just thought it was funny. Like we probably won’t mention it
⏹️ ▶️ John on the show because honestly, like we’ve already talked about all the products that have leaked and there’s no new information
⏹️ ▶️ John in them other than they exist. Like we, we know they exist, so we’re just here waiting for the October
⏹️ ▶️ John event, but it is still funny to see again, assuming it’s real, uh, an M5 iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John pro on a YouTube channel before Apple has announced the product. Yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a remarkable leak or I mean, theft. I mean, however it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens, obviously that’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got it, theft. Theft
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s no way for this to be on the up and up. How this person got this is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John theft. Or, I mean, it could be entirely faked, but it just seems like so much work to fake it, and it’s probably less work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I think, like you said, this person or this channel had something pre-released. I think it was an M4
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they had the physical, like the plain M4 MacBook. Again, one of the most boring leaks ever because
⏹️ ▶️ John it looked the same, like the M3 one, but now it has an M4 inside and the M4 is faster than the M3, but otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same product. It’s the most boring thing ever to leak. But on the other hand, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John legitimately, seemingly a product that has not been announced in the flesh on a YouTube channel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s wild. Like, when you think about the level of leak that is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s kind of funny that this person has now gotten two seemingly legitimate products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this way, but yes, they are the most boring spec bump.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why doesn’t he get the Mac Pro? Come on, no one cares about that. You can just steal that real
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey easy. It’s quite heavy,
Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, it is, as we record this, October 1st, which strictly speaking means it is no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey longer Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, but the Relay for St. Jude campaign does hang out for another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few days. And so we will ask you quickly one last time to go to stjude.org.atp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and throw a little bit of money their way to try to give kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stricken with childhood cancer more tomorrows. This year we’ve had some people write in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and share with us some personal stories. We heard the story of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey young girl at a year and a half who lost her battle with cancer somewhere in Europe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was terrible and awful, but still, the hospital in Europe used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some St. Jude treatments and techniques. Well Patrick writes in, in case you’re interested in specific St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey programs to mention, I wanted to flag one that’s near and dear to my heart, supporting action for emergency response or SAFER.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This program helps kids with cancer in Ukraine both to leave and to get the treatment they need if they can’t leave. This builds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a similar program they ran for displaced children with cancer in Lebanon. And they’re continuing to learn from this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey program in order to make a kind of global crisis response blueprint. Obviously St. Judas countless programs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth mentioning and there’s no wrong answer when deciding which of their initiatives to praise, but one of the five-year-olds at my daughter’s kindergarten is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Ukrainian refugee. And as harrowing as his mother’s tale is of fleeing their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hometown, with just what they could fit in their car as the sounds of explosions and gunfire grew nearer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot imagine the added burden of wondering where your child’s next dose of life saving medicine will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come from on top of that.” This is a quote from Patrick. I think truer words have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never been spoken. Patrick writes and finishes, St. Jude and their local partners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are true miracle workers. Couldn’t say it better myself. Unless one of you has something to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey add, I think we’ll just cap it for this year there, but please, if you have any money to send
⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude’s Way, no amount is too small, no time is too late, although it would be preferable the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week or so, go to stjude.org And we’ll talk to you again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in late August of next year.
Special: CompSci Curriculum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, as we’re doing the show administrivia, we have a new ATP member special.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We do these once a month. We do these member specials that are obviously just for members, where we talk about all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of different things. John, do you want to do a quick nickel tour of what sorts of member specials we do and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps introduce this particular one, if you don’t mind?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, sure. We’ve done all types of ones. If you become a member and you want to go way back to the beginning, you can hear us eating weird food,
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s a thing that you’re into. Sometimes we watch movies and talk about them, which is fun because the other two hosts
⏹️ ▶️ John of of the show are not big movie buffs, so a lot of things are new to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve talked about, let’s see, we do tier lists where we rank things
⏹️ ▶️ John in a typical tier list structure. Usually technology things, computer
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, but sometimes things like storage media and connectors, those can be surprisingly contentious.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve done top four, which is an homage to Marco’s top four podcast, where similar, we just pick our
⏹️ ▶️ John top four of certain things. We also have a subcategory for developer topics. We haven’t done
⏹️ ▶️ John many of those, but the few that we’ve done have been very popular. And that’s what we’ve done this month. We’ve gone
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the ATP DevWell to do an episode for developers. Like we know everyone who listens to the show isn’t a developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know we’re all developers, but we try to keep the content not
⏹️ ▶️ John just to be of only of interest to developers, but every once in a while, developers get a little cookie and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is one of those months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. What kind of cookie is it, John? I don’t know, chocolate chip? I don’t know, computer chip? I see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you did there. Yeah, so we did HP dev computer science curriculum where we discussed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our upbringings in computer science and computer engineering and how that compares and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contrasts to today. And also what did we get and what didn’t we get from our educations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the, what was it, mid 90s for you and early aughts for Marco and I. So yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a lot of fun as always. We had a lot more to say about this than I expected, but hey, it’s us. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoyed it and I think you will too. So if you’re not a member, Marco, what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to atp.fm slash join and give us some money and you’ll become a member.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And obviously you get the entire back catalog of member specials, you get the bootleg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you so desire, where you get the completely unedited version, which is usually me swearing a lot and or screwing things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. You can get an ad-free version of the feed, you get discounts on time limited merchandise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really think it’s a really solid offering, I really truly do. And so atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and if you do join and you wanna see whole back catalog of specials there. They’re in all the regular feeds and everything. This is all in
⏹️ ▶️ John the FAQ on the website. But you can just go also go to ATP that FM slash specials to see just the specials. There’s a dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ John feed with just the specials. So if you just want to catch up on them, it’s, it’s pretty easy. And this one about computer science
⏹️ ▶️ John curriculum, to be clear, the goal was to talk about like college, like you go to college, you major in computer
⏹️ ▶️ John science, what are the courses? What do you learn? What are you supposed to learn? What are they trying to teach you? But the
⏹️ ▶️ John topic is so expansive that even within the realm of that I realized from some feedback we got from people who listened
⏹️ ▶️ John to the episode, There’s more stuff we should have covered. For example, we didn’t even really touch on the thing that I was tooting about
⏹️ ▶️ John a few days ago about my children learning about the file system in college. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, I felt like we should have put that in this member special. Now I’ll just save it for another one. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually a much bigger topic than you might think. If you never studied computer science in college
⏹️ ▶️ John or interested in it or wondering like how that works, this is a good special to
⏹️ ▶️ John listen to. But as I said in the show, you absolutely do not have to go to college at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John let alone major in computer science to be a successful programmer. And that is a whole other topic about being a programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John without any formal education and what that’s like. So we’ll probably go back to the ATP Dev well at some point, but for now,
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP Dev, computer science curriculum, mostly in college.
ATP/Overcast in the wild
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have two unrelated yet kind of spiritually related quick and adorable stories I wanted to share.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Christian writes, I was just walking through Manhattan and wearing an ATP shirt when a stranger tapped me on the shoulder,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey held up his phone, showing Overcast, actively playing ATP, and gave me a thumbs up. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I save button for the record? Yeah. Every time I am around like people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the public, like you know, if I’m in the city right on the subway, every time I see a phone screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I I spy it, I glance at it, because I want to see what they’re doing on their phone. I don’t want to read their messages, I just want to see what kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are they using. I hope every time to see my app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has never happened. I have never seen a random, outside of a tech conference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen anyone using an app I’ve made on their phone. What I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see is everybody playing those candy matching games,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey browsing Instagram,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and texting their friends. That’s it. The entire, I don’t even see that, the entirety of what I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is candy matching, Instagram and messages. I wish someday to see my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app in use by a stranger out in the world. It hasn’t yet happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, apparently it happened for Mark and I think it’s pretty clear that the what a nerd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line was tongue in cheek, but it still made me laugh quite a bit. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco would love it. My kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of nerd. Yeah, right. Exactly. I would love it if you happen to be that person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that flashed Mark your screen and a thumbs up, please write in. I would love to hear about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Richard Ernie writes that he was recognized in an ATP Pixel shirt upon arriving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Edinburgh, Scotland, which I think is quite adorable as well. Apparently, the person that he ran
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into was also an ATP fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John On this topic, I think I might have mentioned this before, but my sister’s family, sister, her husband, and all her
⏹️ ▶️ John kids who are now adults slash college kids, have a contest
⏹️ ▶️ John among the family to see who is going to be the first to wear one of
⏹️ ▶️ John my shirts, like an ATP shirt or an hypocritical shirt or something like that, and have
⏹️ ▶️ John someone recognize the shirt, like understand what it is. They get lots of people saying, is that about tennis?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that about BMW? Like all those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John has actually seen the thing. So every time we get one of these, it says, see, you should just go to Scotland. You can win the game. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you just show
⏹️ ▶️ John with an ATP Pixel shirt and someone will find you. Easy peasy. But just like Marco, like, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people have his app, but he never sees them. So it doesn’t seem like it’s enough. So they’re out there, they’re wearing
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP shirts, I send them ATP shirts, whenever we have a sale and stuff like that. They’re out there wearing the
⏹️ ▶️ John shirts, just hoping somewhere someone’s gonna be like, Hey, where’s that shirt? They’d be like, Oh, my uncle’s podcast, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But it just never happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did sort of have something like this happen. We are members of a community pool. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early this summer, if I’m not mistaken, I saw a gentleman in his family walk into the pool and I was like, wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a second, wait a second. And sure enough, it was an ATP dad hat, as we used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to call it on a dad. Um, and this was delightful for me and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did introduce myself or I think I shouted out like nice hat or something like that it was walking by as he was walking by,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this was made deeply uncomfortable because I am topless in a bathing suit in the swimming pool. And this is not the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wonderful time to meet someone who has listened to presumably at least a couple hours of your voice. So that was a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit awkward. So and I forget the gentleman’s name is very kind But if you’re out there list still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening, you might not be after that experience and I wouldn’t blame you But if you’re out there still listening, I appreciate you. Nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah one time Tiff and I went About six years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We went to on a vacation to Cancun together and We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like in the pool like sitting on the pool deck of this hotel in Cancun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody heard her talking and said, oh my God, are you Tiff Armand?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh wow, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that, and then, you know, we got to talking to both of them and they were end up being fans of both of ours, but like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the closest I’ve ever come to that. And that was amazing. And it wasn’t even me being recognized. It was Tiff, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. That’s the danger of being a podcaster is that people don’t know what you look like, but they do know your voice.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco For the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John can recognize voices, which is only a subset of our listeners as we’ve discussed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in past episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they do know your voice. And so you never know when, going to come up behind you because you’re not they’re not even going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John in your field division. They’re going to be like, excuse me, are you John Syracuse? Like that. I mean, again, to my sister,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone in my sister family wants to win this game. They just need to go to WBC. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco feel like that doesn’t count.
⏹️ ▶️ John It absolutely doesn’t count. But that’s that’s the that’s all, perhaps all of the people who know who we are at that conference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disperse. Yeah. And even then, like, it’s not a huge percentage of those people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. Yes. It’s a tiny percentage, but that’s all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, they’re all there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s I’ve told the story before on the show. I’m pretty darn sure. But the first time I ever got recognized in public.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was sitting in Dulles waiting to go to WWDC. This was Marco, Marco, GZ, PZ,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore and I’s tradition every year. We were on Virgin Atlantic or Virgin America,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, flight 96. I think it was, maybe that was a return flight. I don’t remember now, but we were sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Dulles just chit-chatting and I had my back to, you know, there was like one of those situations where the chairs had their backs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to each other and the person like one or two chairs down behind me tapped me on the shoulder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said, I’m sorry, are you Casey? Because I heard your voice.” And I was like, oh my God, what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening? Because that was the very first time I’d been recognized in any capacity, and it blew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my mind. I was incredibly flattering, but blew my mind that my stupid voice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was what got me pegged, which obviously makes perfect logical sense, but it was so astonishing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off-putting, but not in the negative way, in the positive way, it was very unusual and very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, sorry, that was an aggression.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least we’re super relatable to our audience. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Right? Well, hey, like even if you don’t have a podcast, it used to be back when WWDC was in person. If you were
⏹️ ▶️ John in a, lived in a major city and you got on one of the obvious flights for arriving at WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was tons of other WWDC people in that. You could spot them by like how much apple crap they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or whatever. Like if they’re wearing a past
⏹️ ▶️ John year’s WWDC shirt, those were definitely nerd heavy flights.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, they were. I miss those days. So.
Bugs on new iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so what we have in the show notes is as follows. Apple released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 26.0.1, and Apple says, this update provides important bug fixes and security updates for your iPhone, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fixes for the following issues. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth may occasionally disconnect in iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro models. And I saw this and thought, yes, this is my moment. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I lamented, I believe last episode, CarPlay with my beloved CarLink-it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dongle, which I bought something like seven years ago. So it is not new by any stretch of the imagination.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A car wire, wireless CarPlay isn’t working anymore. It’ll stay connected for like 30 ish seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then crap out. And then it’ll reconnect like 10 seconds later than crap out. And it just does this endlessly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wired CarPlay still works great, but wireless with this particular dongle does not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s making me very sad. A lot of people, including Rosemary Orchard have written in and said, they’ve gotten newer versions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of whatever their particular dongle that they favor is, and that’s worked out well for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I figured, oh, this must be software I’ll wait it out. And so 26.0.1 happened. Today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went to one of my favorite local libraries and that’s like a 15, 20 minute drive from us. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the nearest library, but it’s one of my favorites. And like I said, it’s 15, 20 minute drive. And I tried using my 26.0.1 iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my CarLink-it dongle and almost immediately it crapped out and had the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exact problem. So I’m holding out for 26.1, but after that, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna use this as an excuse to just get a new dongle and hopefully fix the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you, so I’m running the 26.1 beta on my 17 Pro. Oh, are you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, honestly, I figured nothing can be more buggy than 26.0. You’re not wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you’re not wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m happy to report 26.1 does fix some of the UI bugs in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system that have been, oh man, it’s being an app developer right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having adopted the 26 design, like it’s kind of like a darned if you do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco darned if you didn’t kind of thing. Of like if you didn’t adopt the 26 design yet, you’re hearing from all your users saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why aren’t you adopting this design? If you did adopt it, you are getting bug reports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your users about bugs in your app that you can’t fix because they’re system bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I have like, I would say a good half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the bug reports that I’m getting in the last month have actually been Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs. They’ve been iOS 26.0 bugs. They, you know, especially, oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, the, when you have reduced transparency in dark mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will frequently get white on white liquid glass toolbar buttons. That’s a 26.0 bug. I think they fixed that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 26.01. I, did they? Cause it seems fixed in 26.1 beta,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s not out to the public yet. So I probably get five to 10 emails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a day about that issue alone. And there’s so many. You know, I’m getting reports of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay, speaking of which, Casey, I’m getting reports that my app is getting garbled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio quality in CarPlay along with other podcast apps when running on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 26. What am I supposed to do about that? As
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far as I can tell, I think it’s an iOS bug. But again, my users don’t know that. They just report
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to me as my bug. And I, oh man, I’m getting, honestly, I’m so worn down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from getting a bunch of reports of bugs that I can’t fix because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s bugs. I hope they iron these out soon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this release cycle is rough. It did exactly what we all feared it would. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were just like, oh, this huge redesign? That’s gonna be a lot of work for Apple too and they’re not gonna hit their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deadline. Well, they didn’t. They shipped a bunch of betas as final versions. They definitely did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not hit their deadline, and no one could have. They just, this is a problem of their own creation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the schedule they made to themselves. Anyway, but going back to your topic about Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connectivity bugs, tethering is totally broken on my 17 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I saw you talking about that on MassDON. I haven’t had a chance to try it myself, but I don’t feel like I’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a problem with it. And a couple of times I’ve tried it very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John briefly. Are
⏹️ ▶️ John running the beta like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is? No, not in 26.1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so to be fair, it could be a 26.1 beta problem. I don’t know that, because I’m running 26.1 beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my 17 Pro, and tethering is incredibly unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get it to work, and it’ll work for between one and 15 minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it’ll just be totally dropped. It’ll be unreachable. You’ll still be connected according to the computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but no data will go through. You can’t ping Google.com or whatever. everything just dies, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose all connectivity, until you reboot the phone. And this happens, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s WiFi, because this happens whether you are running over WiFi or a USB cable, it doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either way. So, it seems like there’s some kind of massive breakage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tethering, at least in the 26.1 beta, or the iPhone Pro, like one of those,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s broken, whatever it is, and like, I’ve been so spoiled all summer long because Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been awesome for tethering, because Tahoe finally auto-reconnects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you go through a train tunnel or whatever and lose connection for a second. Tahoe auto-reconnects,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you open up your Tahoe laptop on a train or whatever, and you have no Wi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after a couple of seconds of looking for Wi-Fi, it automatically connects to tethering, which is a feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has advertised, I believe, for something like three years, but it never worked until Tahoe. So all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer, I’ve had this glorious tethering experience on my laptop with my 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro as it like slowly, you know, melted itself and couldn’t keep itself charged, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly, you know, heating up the world, but it worked every time I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would open up my laptop on the train and a few seconds later, I’d just be connected and it would stay connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire time. It was glorious. It almost made me think like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cellular MacBook after all, but you know, two seconds with this problem on my,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my beta running 17 pro not being able to tether reliably and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh no, this is unusable again. So I don’t know what to do. I hope this is fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly, but all this is to say that not only are the 26.0 releases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously very buggy and now maybe 26.1 as well, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course it will still have bugs. It’s not enough time to have fixed all of them, but it seems to me, maybe introducing new ones, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. It is a beta, but also these phones have Apple’s new wifi chip, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N1, it’s in all the new phones. And I can’t help but think that like, obviously there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be some problems. There’s gonna be some compatibility issues, there’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaws, there’s gonna be bugs, and that’s gonna take a while to iron out too. So in a way, I think we also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have beta hardware this season, and not that I don’t think it can be fixed in software. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in a few months, these exact iPhones with software fixes will be fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all these things. Like I’m sure this is a very short-lived problem until they get these fixes out. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now there are problems and I hope they fix them soon. Because otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are fantastic phones. But you know, everything is not fully baked yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that 26.1 from the rumblings I’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Birdies, and I think I’m not the only one, is really the 26.0 release. It’s obviously not literally, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the release that I think Apple internally wanted to have is 26.0 and just couldn’t make it in time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m hopeful, we’ll see what happens. I will say very briefly, I know we already talked about first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impressions of these phones and we’re gonna talk about first impressions about other things later, but I will briefly say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing does not get hot like the 16 Pro did or at least not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Now I haven’t had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey football game in full sun or anything like that yet. So maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m jumping ahead of myself. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what I can tell so far, this thing does not get anywhere near as hot as the 16 Pro did. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think I really appreciated or understood, cause I don’t appreciate it, how hot the 16 Pro got. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John thought I knew,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but now having a phone that doesn’t turn into a ball of magma, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find that it is quite a bit better now. So that is very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that has been awesome. Like if I’m not tethering, I have no problems with this phone like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m just using the phone itself, which itself maintains its own internet connection just fine. When I’m using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone itself, It is glorious because you’re right, it is a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better thermal design. The phone can actually keep itself charged while outside and being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used, like through a cable to a laptop or a battery or whatever. It can charge itself to 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without massively throttling itself for hours while it cools down. It’s so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just works so much better. It’s a great overall phone. I’m very happy with the 17 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I love the orange. I’m so glad I did the orange. It looks fantastic. I’m so happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey see it every time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we not? Because Aaron got the orange and I don’t dislike my purpley
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blue, bluey purple, but the orange was a better choice. Unquestionably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the orange was a better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choice. It’s not too late.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can still get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Nah, it’s all right. Like, it’s fine. In
⏹️ ▶️ John case he doesn’t want to go through the phone setup experience another time. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco really don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, just get like, you know, three Thunderbolt cables.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. I’ll get to that later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so,
iMessage iCloud backups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had some questions last week, speaking of all this, about, well, it’s a perfect segue. Thank you, gentlemen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had questions with regard to backups. And what does iCloud actually backup or not? And Dayton Lowell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, if you haven’t turned on messages, or I think this is actually a quote from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Apple. This is directly from the Apple page. He gave us a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web page. Thank you. But via Dayton, if you haven’t turned on a message in iCloud, your messages are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey included in iCloud backup. If you use messages in iCloud, your messages automatically sync to iCloud, so they aren’t included
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your daily backup, which makes sense. Additionally, with regard to my iMessage stuff, Nick writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, you should consider enabling Messages in iCloud. Temporary expectations, though, is nobody will ever accuse the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feature of being fast, and it may randomly pause if your devices are not charging or get too warm. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you delete a conversation thread on one device, it cleans it up everywhere, which is very nice. Also, for the sake of your iCloud storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and especially for your Mac, consider going to Settings, Apps, Messages, Message History, Keep Messages, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change this from forever to one year, which, as an aside, I’ve now done. Messages is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a terrible archive for attachments and photos. If you are already in the habit of saving important photos and you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep forever to your iCloud photos as you receive them, then you can probably let go of messages older than a year. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less of an issue on the iPhone where it will offload 100 gigs of messages, but Apple has yet to implement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same offloading feature for messages on the Mac, which is untenable for a lot of folks. Additionally, Nathan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, Casey, if you’re worried about too many GIFs in your messages, go to settings, general, iPhone storage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey messages, GIFs, and stickers. You need to select them one by one, but you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delete them quickly. Additionally, I don’t think we put this in the show notes. I meant to, and I expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John to do it, and I should have done my own homework, so I apologize, John. But a lot of people wrote in and said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you turn, I’m doing this off the top of my head, so I might have this factually incorrect, so please bear with me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco if you turn on- It’s my entire life, man, you’re good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you turn on advanced data protection for iCloud, then the whole thing I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was worried about where Apple has a key to your iMessages so that they could, strictly speaking, unlock them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is not true if you have ADP on. If you don’t have ADP on, then yes, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could, strictly speaking, get in there if they really tried hard enough. But with advanced data protection on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several people wrote in to say they can’t get in there no matter what. And there is a link somewhere that details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, but again, I forgot to put it in the show notes, so I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John I intentionally didn’t put that in the notes because I’m like, well, we’ve covered that when we talked about advanced data protection, but I guess you don’t remember that we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know what advanced data protection is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Do we ever talk about that? I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I’m not that bad. Jesus, I’m not that bad, for goodness sakes.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can troll us forever on that because there’s nothing that you don’t remember that we will not think. But yes, that’s why, who was it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Whoever Dayton wrote in to remind us that like, the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is like that iCloud backups that Apple has the key to them if you don’t use advanced data protection. And they’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use iMessages and iCloud, your messages aren’t in the iCloud backup, so it doesn’t matter whether they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John protected. When we discussed this last time, I think we all said that we had chosen not to turn on advanced data protection
⏹️ ▶️ John because there are downsides to in addition to the additional protection you give. And my
⏹️ ▶️ John rationale was I’m much more likely to accidentally lock myself out of my own data than I am
⏹️ ▶️ John to get hacked by somebody because nobody cares about my crap. And so that’s why I choose not to have advanced data protection
⏹️ ▶️ John on because I’m more worried about data loss than I am about hacks. But everyone has to make their own choices there. And it’s nice that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John gives you that option. If you do enable that, it takes away Apple’s keys even from your iCloud backups.
Could Apple preload our iPhones?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to iPhone transfers, Winnie Lewis writes, I feel like Apple pre-populating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new iPhone purchased directly from them with the iCloud backup of your current iPhone could be an incredible value add for customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see a technical reason why this wouldn’t be entirely possible. Do you? This reminds me very much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Kindles that come pre-linked to your account, which is really freaking nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m honest with you. That being said, I don’t know how much, as much as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree 100% that this would be amazing, in principle, when in execution, I’m not so sure it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so great. And that’s no small part because the iCloud backup that’s being taken and put onto your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone, aside from that being a little bit creepy, that also is going to be what, several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days a week, two weeks old by the time you get your phone in hand. So leaving aside technical challenges,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t think that would be as good as we think it would be because these devices are always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in flux constantly. But I don’t know, convince me I’m wrong, gentlemen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if you use advanced data protection, they can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it. They can’t put your data on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use advanced data protection, because how are they gonna get your data to put on the phone? They can’t get your data. They can’t put it, only
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do that. That’s the point of it. Now, even without advanced data protection, even though they may be able to have
⏹️ ▶️ John access to your iCloud backups, I still imagine there’s some things that they couldn’t put on there without you like authenticating,
⏹️ ▶️ John because even though they may have the key to your iCloud backups, that’s just data, there may be other stuff. Like for example, they can’t get your iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John keychain stuff no matter what kind of backup thing you use. So tech, there are technical
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons why they literally can’t do this. But the most important reason is even if they could do this
⏹️ ▶️ John from a technical perspective, it’s just like the Presto pizza box thing of putting the thing out like the scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John We all know how long it takes to do transfers. The best case scenario, it’s taking maybe 30 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John or an hour depending on how much data you have. Multiply that by how many iPhones are sold. Like who,
⏹️ ▶️ John when is this gonna happen? Are you gonna pay fleets of people and giant machines to constantly be running and putting these
⏹️ ▶️ John things through and keeping track, like it’s a huge added expense and we have huge amounts of time and it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John feasible at the scale that they do things due to how long it takes to put
⏹️ ▶️ John data on a phone. So yes, there are technical reasons why it can’t be done and then there are also practical and economical
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons why it can’t be done or at least couldn’t be done without charging you 200 extra dollars and making you wait an extra week for your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, also worth pointing out, like for Amazon to do it for Kindles, like what’s the maximum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surface area of like a bad outcome for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worst case scenario is somebody fraudulently, I guess buys a bunch of stuff on your Kindle account,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s Amazon, they can refund that, like it’s not that horrible of a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re probably writing like two bytes to the device too, by the way. That’s why they can do it so fast. This is your Kindle customer
⏹️ ▶️ John ID, and then when you turn it on, it says, oh, this is your customer ID, and it probably makes you log in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, whereas like, think about like the, you know, not only the technical side, but just like the security risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple doing that, and somebody intercepts that phone, Or even just the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple themselves could just kind of instantiate your phone whenever they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to. Like there’s a reason why we have protections and checks and everything like that. You know there’s lots of security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco implications of that and privacy implications that that would be very dangerous. Like the way Amazon does it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not super safe but like the again like the attack the possible attack surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a Kindle being registered to your account like it’s not that terrible compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your entire iPhone.
iPhone migrations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My buddy Daniel Nelson writes, I forgot to do anything about my test flight apps when moving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my new phone. And I was happily surprised to find this year it replaced them with the App Store versions. So although
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still had to redownload them to get the test flight version, I at least didn’t have my home screen positions get messed up. Daniel’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very smart and a very good guy. And I don’t think he’s wrong. My recollection, as we’ve discussed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my memory sucks, but I thought that there were gaps in the home screens, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were the couple of home screens where I had test flight apps, but I don’t remember them having been populated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by full App Store apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one thing that is not populated by a transfer is developer mode apps. Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just build and run an Xcode and deploy that onto your phone, that won’t transfer to a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m thinking of like, you know, Overcast, Day One.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, any app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a dot next to it. Exactly. And I, again, I’m not trying to say that Daniel’s wrong. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m probably the one that’s wrong. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, supposedly, watches transfer to new phones too, but we already
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know that’s not a thing happens
⏹️ ▶️ John consistently for customers. So Daniel got lucky.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, but my experience was that at least there were holes in my home screen, which I vastly preferred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the like reshuffling of my home screens. I think we talked about this on the member special at some point, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m down to only a couple of screens now, and it’s only like 20 apps total across the two screens because widgets and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatnot, but it was still frustrating having to figure out what was the thing there and what was my muscle memory? Oh, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s where overcast goes. And this time, at least there was a gap. So it was easier to figure that out, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least that’s why I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John the gaps used to collapse. That was worse back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, exactly. But yeah, maybe your experiences were better. You, Daniel, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, the royal you. The same Nick from above writes, I’ve been doing all manner of iPhone migrations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and restores many hundreds, if not thousands of times, at AppleCare over the last 13 years. And I have strong opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about which backup and transfer methods work best for whom. Finder or iTunes backups still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offer the most unique benefits over other methods, including you can have an unlimited number of full local backups, hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive space permitting, and they stay in your computer forever until you choose to delete them. Not so for iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You typically get two, sometimes three iCloud backup dates to choose from, and then you wait too long to restore. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you wait too long to restore, excuse me, those dates will change. Combine this worry with your trade-in deadline,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it can feel very stressful. Local backups are included in your Time Machine backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Restoring from Finder or iTunes backup allows you to front load the most time-consuming process and walk away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, Finder and iTunes errors give you far more information about what went wrong compared to the other methods, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are more troubleshooting remedies when a backup or restore fails. For pro iPhones on a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the second fastest migration, assuming you make the Finder iTunes backup before you get the new phone. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey summary, iCloud is the choice Apple clearly wants most people to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the practical choice for almost everyone, the best choice for the impatient and or phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the least complete restore method. I feel attacked. The least complete restore method. Encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finder backups and iCloud backup and sync is the best choice for nervous or reluctant upgraders, the best choice for anyone doing a trade-in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the most complete backups tied with device to device. And finally, speaking of device to device,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the best choice for rural customers with slow internet, no computer, or apparently if you’re in a car, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possibly, the most complete backups, which is tied with encrypted Finder backups, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the worst choice for transferring from very old phones, my experience is that these devices are not performant or stable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to go through a multi-hour device to device transfer without failing over and over.”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to Apple’s onboarding, Imphas writes, “‘I loved the conversation about how many questions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hoops one had to go through to set up new iPhones. Even the AirPods Pros have this problem. Back in 2017, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I first got AirPods, it was magical. Just open the case next to your phone, I was good to go. Even when I set up the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro 2 a few years ago, it was relatively easy, but now it was, “‘Do you want conversational awareness? Do you want personalized audio?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you wanna test your fit? Do you wanna take a hearing test? Et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it is getting worse on all products, but I think in the case of AirPods, part of it that is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the original AirPods didn’t have a lot of features, and now they do. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the time when you would expect someone to show you those features. They didn’t have noise canceling.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you want it to be on, off, or whatever? They didn’t have it. And again, having a sort of a wizard type
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where it walks you through these steps, instead of just saying, just let me use the AirPods, there probably should be
⏹️ ▶️ John a button for that. The phone should probably know if you’ve had this kind of AirPods before, or if you use this feature before,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said last week, don’t show me about noise canceling. This is my fourth pair of noise canceling AirPods, I don’t need to see
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But I do think that you’re never gonna go back to, you just
⏹️ ▶️ John open it up and immediately start going because there’s just so many more features on AirPods than there used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be. And the number of features on AirPods is going up and not down. Now it does get ridiculous when it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, okay, well, you gotta pick which things you wanna show in there. What are the most important features to show the new user
⏹️ ▶️ John of AirPods, assuming they’ve never owned AirPods before? Because eventually it’s like, do you wanna test your heart rate monitor?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you wanna test the live translation? You know, it’s like, okay, all right. It does a lot of things. Let’s just maybe pick three.
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AlterEgo follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thought, text, and alter ego. This is, was this overtime?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Overtime. I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. This was the thing where you can strap some device to your cheek and it will read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the muscle movements in your mouth in order to figure out what you’re trying to say. Doesn’t go on your cheek.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was on your cheek.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. No. All right. Shockingly, your memory is not accurate. Well, all right. Side of your head somewhere. It doesn’t really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember like the guy had it, he was sitting in a little lounge chair, he got the like on his temples, kind of by his ears.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, okay. Well, I’m also, in my defense, being thrown off by this older image, which I know is an older image of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much larger thing. That’s from April 2018. It says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there in the notes. You know, I’m doing the best I can here, John. Not all of us are perfect like you. All right, tell me what Firefox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the movie from the year of my birth is about.
⏹️ ▶️ John I threw that out there during the overtime segment, knowing full well none of you would get it. I meant to clarify what it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John just people don’t think I was having a stroke or or something, but I said, think Russian. When we were discussing
⏹️ ▶️ John thought, controlling things with thought. The 1982 movie, Firefox, starring Clint Eastwood,
⏹️ ▶️ John is a movie that was on TV a lot that I watched when I was a kid about
⏹️ ▶️ John a Russian spy plane that actually looked pretty cool. Like that big, you know, it’s kind of like a cross between the, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the Valkyrie, if you know what that is from US military and the kind of like SR-71. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a black spy plane made by the Russians and Clint Eastwood goes to steal it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when he steals it, the plane is controlled by thought, but to steal the plane, he’s gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh my God. It’s just- Oh my.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was thinking that like, we’re really catching up to these 1982 sci-fi movies because if
⏹️ ▶️ John you had like a thought to text type interface for doing something or whatever, and it was in
⏹️ ▶️ John Russian, you’d have to think, you’d have to think words in Russian. Anyway, that’s what the reference was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel better knowing that piece of information.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t. I watched that
⏹️ ▶️ John movie. You know, if we keep doing member specials, eventually I’ll make you watch terrible 80s movies with me at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But my recollection is
⏹️ ▶️ John that it was not a good movie. But when you’re a little kid and they have Clint Eastwood flying a spy plane
⏹️ ▶️ John controlled by thought, it was cool. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, conceptually that makes sense, but that does not sound fun to me. This is a point of contention with a dear local
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend of mine who is in love with like all 80s movies. What was, there was some military one you brought up like two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or three months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Iron Eagle. gets to fly an F-16. Again, these are really appealing movies when you’re seven or eight years old.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Well, and I brought this up with my local friend, Brad, and he was like, oh yeah, I love that movie. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told him, he actually listens to the show, so now he’s potentially embarrassed or delighted, who knows. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I talked to him about this and he was like, oh yeah, it was great. And I was like, man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it does not look good to me. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great, but great for kids. Well, in his defense, I think that was roughly what he said, but nevertheless. That was
⏹️ ▶️ John back when I was young and wanted to be a fighter pilot before I realized I was never going to be a fighter pilot because my eyes are terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also I get terrible emotions. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey going to say, before I knew all of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Many disqualifying factors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure the eyes are a problem, but I’m not sure they’re the problem, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Then we have some information from Hans, who writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alter ego seems to have been an MIT project first. And very suspiciously, the man in the alter ego
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video doesn’t show the left side of his head. It might look more like this. And this was the image that I was talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was distracting me about the cheek thing. And we will put a link to the show notes to a post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the MIT, I guess, like Media Lab, Media Center, something along those lines, where they talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this. And again, to John’s point from April of 2018. Yeah. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you couldn’t see the side of the person’s face, but you could see enough of their face to know that. I think that their sensors
⏹️ ▶️ John were only like sort of over your ears, again, kind of like a bone induction headphone. This thing had a sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John that was touching your chin, like underneath your lower lip. I think that would have been visible if that was in
⏹️ ▶️ John the video. but I think they’re just using, they’re not using sensors in that location for the alter ego demo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. CJ writes, I’m a doctor slash neurologist and neuroscience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey researcher. I was listening to your overtime discussion of the alter ego device and agree that it would be very unlikely to be able to reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read brain signals or EEG. My group is trying to analyze walking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Parkinson’s disease patients with electrodes deep in the brain or with 64 carefully placed contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the scalp. And that is hard enough in lab conditions. There’s always way too much noise. And so a consumer device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with very limited contact area to the scalp is unlikely to get enough usable EEG signal to work even with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI noise suppression. So it makes sense when I looked into it, that it appears to be that the device is only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey measuring muscle signals, EMG in the, here we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go, in the temporomandibular joint. Ooh, I think I got it. All right. Look at me go. Uh, older
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions of the device had more contacts targeting the mouth and tongues, they appear to have refined it since then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the video, which we we’ll link in the show notes. Electromyography, or EMG, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a technique for evaluating and recording the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles. We’ll put a link to the Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey page in the show notes. And additionally, electroencephalography,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey EEG, is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity in the brain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Holy jamoles, I can’t believe I’m mostly keeping this together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yes. So many
⏹️ ▶️ John syllables, yeah, but that’s the distinction I was trying to make, but I didn’t know these terms when we talked about it, EMG versus EEG.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from CJ, reading EMG signals is much easier as the muscles are only millimeters away and have much less noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe there are some accelerometers as well. Therefore, there’s no potential for reading thoughts as noted in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the video. It’s unclear to me whether or not the tiny movements associated with silent speech they are reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are unintentional or need to be developed as a technique to use the device. Given the sensors and location
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the demonstrated device, I see no reason the sensors could not be placed in glasses, arms, or indeed in the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John See, he doesn’t know the technical term for the glasses arms, but now we do. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey who’s the neuroscientist?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Sticks. Uh, they’re called temples.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, the basic signal processing is much less complicated than the audio processing the AirPods already do. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the AI could presumably run on the iPhone. If it is working on EMG signals, I would not expect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the interpretation would be much more complicated than audio to speech in regards to John’s question of being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to measure intention to act or speak, which these devices are not doing. This is a well-established
⏹️ ▶️ Casey research methodology in neuroscience, particularly in functional MRI. We’re able to see the main motor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey areas light up in a functional MRI scan when a patient imagines walking, and we see how it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is different with different diseases, such as Parkinson’s. But yes, it has more recently been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shown that further networks are engaged when a movement actually occurs compared to when only imagined.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So, I’m still interested in these things, the EMG muscle thing, especially since, well, There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of angles that this person is saying that he thinks that the thing that the alter ego was doing could be done
⏹️ ▶️ John in an air pod or glasses. Of course, the Meta Ray-Ban
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses have the wrist strap that is also an EMG measuring thing that gets measuring the
⏹️ ▶️ John electrical signals to the muscles in your fingers to tell what fingers you’re moving. That product is out now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we’ll probably have a story next week about the late breaking thing that happened today about Apple’s plans to
⏹️ ▶️ John compete with Meta’s glasses and whether or not they’ll have some kind of EMG
⏹️ ▶️ John reading aspect to it or whether it will just be AirPods on long sticks with cameras in the ends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Five years from now. Yeah.
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iPhone 17 Pro cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s continue with our first impressions. And I have nothing to say about this because I have only barely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interacted with them, but I presume Tina has gotten a tech woven case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was her first. She’s always willing to try whatever the new cases from Apple. She actually got the fine woven case and used
⏹️ ▶️ John it for the entire two years that she had the phone. It’s pretty rough looking, but you know, she
⏹️ ▶️ John thought it was fine. It came in a color that she liked. She didn’t mind how it felt. She didn’t mind that the edges got nicked
⏹️ ▶️ John up or whatever. So when the tech woven case is out, I said, all right, well, we’ll try that one too.
⏹️ ▶️ John She is a wallet person, like a MagSafe wallet person.
⏹️ ▶️ John So where she puts it on the back of her phone, she keeps her cards and her driver’s license stuff in there. And so she got
⏹️ ▶️ John the, whatever, it’s I guess it’s still the fine woven wallet, right? It’s the tech woven
⏹️ ▶️ John case, but the fine woven wallet, it’s a very confusing line, but she got both of those. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the tech woven case, I checked it out. She put her phone in it and I’m, It’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of scratchy and like the bumps on it are very regular. I don’t know if you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John seen it in person, you felt how it’s, what it’s like. It’s kind of plasticky. It’s not fine woven.
⏹️ ▶️ John The weaving is very coarse. It’s not fine. But whatever it is, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John lumpy plastic. So it’s like lots and lots of little lumps. And the problem with that
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it provides the MagSafe wallet with less surface area where it is contacting
⏹️ ▶️ John the case. And that results in less friction. And so she rejected and returned
⏹️ ▶️ John the Tekwoven case based entirely on the fact that the wallet slid
⏹️ ▶️ John off sideways too easily because it didn’t have the friction. It wasn’t like the surface area,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s touching the Tekwoven case, but it’s only touching the tips of all the tiny little mountains in the Tekwoven case.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that doesn’t provide, now we did an experiment of all the different surface materials. So that got rejected.
⏹️ ▶️ John She got an Apple silicone case cause she wanted to try the body strap, lanyard, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing, cross body strap. And Apple’s cases have the little attachment points for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was interesting because I was wondering about this from seeing the pictures. Do either of you have the cross body strap?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I touched one extremely briefly at the Apple store and it seemed nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I didn’t like put it on or anything like that. So you now know everything I know about them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so she was willing to try that as well. She’s like, oh, maybe that’ll be fun. And of course, Apple’s cases have the little corner things it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’ve seen it in the store or the pictures of it, you know that the things attached to the corner of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cases by these very, very thin, I forget what they’re made of, someone sent us the name of what they
⏹️ ▶️ John think it is, but very thin, strong, like thread type material.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was wondering like, you know, how, how easy is it to take that
⏹️ ▶️ John on or off? Like, do you have to like, you know, tie it onto the case and then it’s there permanently or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John The answer is that the the attachment things on the crossbody strap
⏹️ ▶️ John have a little like metal bar and then the crossbody strap wraps around that bar and snaps
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other side of it to itself so it holds the bar and the bar has the string coming out of it
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can pretty easily unstrap unsnap the crossbody strap on both
⏹️ ▶️ John ends and then remove your phone but now your phone has two little metal
⏹️ ▶️ John crossbars dangling from it by about an inch of very thin string so I I don’t think anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John would want to use their phone like that. So you basically have to take the case off and unthread
⏹️ ▶️ John the threads. The other thing is to get those threads, it’s a loop of threads. It’s just, you know, it’s like a metal bar
⏹️ ▶️ John with a loop of thread. And that loop does not come out of the metal bar. It is in the metal bar. There’s no way to remove it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John to get it through the little thing, you have to, if you have big cameras, Marco knows about
⏹️ ▶️ John this, maybe also Casey, the way the camera straps attached to most cameras with the little loop that you loop through
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you put the strap through the loop, you know? I don’t know how to describe it, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to, it’s a continuous loop and you just loop it over on itself. But she had to use a needle threader
⏹️ ▶️ John to get through the case. Cause she couldn’t get, like, you’re trying to like, it’s just like a loop of thread and you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to shove it through. She can get through the first hole, but then get it to make a U-turn and go through the second hole
⏹️ ▶️ John to come back out. She couldn’t do it and had to use a needle threader. So that was a little bit unuser-friendly. And it really, you really are committing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the cross-body strap. Because like I said, the only way to get it off is to take your phone out
⏹️ ▶️ John of the case and then carefully unthread those things and pass the bar through the little thing. And it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a simple maneuver. So I think there’s room for improvement on the crossbody strap in terms of ease of connecting
⏹️ ▶️ John and disconnecting from the case. I’m not sure what the solution is, but the first try it seems, eh.
⏹️ ▶️ John The strap itself is fine. It’s magnetic to itself. Anyway, so she replaced her tech woven case with the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John silicone case, which she’s used many times before. She’s destroyed many of those, came in a fun color. The
⏹️ ▶️ John wallet, the new fine woven wallet sticks to it way, way better. And also I suggested to her,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you don’t like the tech woven and you’re just so-so about the silicone, what about a leather case? So she got the
⏹️ ▶️ John Bullstrap leather case. And also she was won over by the marketing of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Bullstrap leather wallet, which is a find to my device. So it’s thicker than a
⏹️ ▶️ John regular wallet, but it has an actual kind of like air tag type thing in the wallet itself, as opposed to just the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where when it comes off, the phone knows where it fell off and will tell you about it. This actually has an air tag
⏹️ ▶️ John in the wallet. So leather bull strap case with leather wallet on it. Very good friction
⏹️ ▶️ John between the two of them. Harder to slide off sideways. I think the best friction is probably her old sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of broken in leather. She had a leather wallet back when, an Apple leather wallet. She has one of those, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very well broken in. That on the back of a leather case or that on the back of a silicone case is probably the strongest
⏹️ ▶️ John attachment. But that’s her review slash my conveying of her thoughts
⏹️ ▶️ John on all of the cases. I thought the bull strap case was nice. She got it in a weird like pinkish leather color,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not to my taste, but she likes it. But I thought it was kind of bulky. We should put a link in the show notes to Steven
⏹️ ▶️ John Roble’s leather iPhone case review.
⏹️ ▶️ John He also mentioned that some cases are thicker or thinner than others, even though they’re all just leather cases. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not like, it’s like, you know, whatever that plastic shell or something with leather wrapped around it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They vary in thickness significantly, but she likes the leather one. That’s the one she’s using, but she also has a silicone one
⏹️ ▶️ John for the crossbody strap, which I’m not sure how often she’ll use that because currently the silicone case is sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John on the desk behind me and it does not have those little dangly strap things on it. And if she wants to put them on, she needs to use a needle
⏹️ ▶️ John threader. So I don’t see that happening that often. But for this year, I would say Tekwoven is
⏹️ ▶️ John more successful than FineWoven with the caveat that if you’re gonna put a wallet on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna get less friction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. I will say also, My iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro case situation is not resolved yet. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoyed last year, I really enjoyed the Nomad magnetic leather back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was just the back made of leather that would go over the whole back of the phone and you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel the leather on the sides, just like, you know, kind of because it goes to the edge of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, but it wasn’t wrapped around the side, so it gave a lot of grip and made it, you know, more stable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a surface, and it wouldn’t slide off of slanted things. And it really improved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ergonomics of the phone, but you were still using the naked sides of the phone, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really nice for having the nice buttons and being able to see the side finish and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ordered one of these for the 17 Pro, and unfortunately, because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the shape of the mesa, which now goes, or the plateaux, which now goes all the way across,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Nomad, it has a magnet in the middle, on the magsafe area, and it has those like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco micro suction tape patches on the corners. Well, it used to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one on the upper corner, like adjacent to the camera plateau. But now that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no room for that, because the, you know, the Mesa, the plateau goes all the way across, it only has those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sticky pad corners, like on the flat part of the phone area, which,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I posted a quick little video to master it on. The problem is then there’s nothing holding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case back against the phone along the top edge above the Mesa.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it kind of just like flaps in the breeze. Like it creates a gap, it doesn’t sit flush.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, stuff will get stuck in there. So it’s basically, in my opinion, the Nomad Magnet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back is unusable on the 17 Pro. So I actually returned it. Like I’m like this, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot, I can’t believe they shipped it honestly and they shouldn’t have unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because, And it’s a shame because I loved it on the 16 pro and what I’m doing right now, I believe I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last episode that until my 17 cases come in, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut the top off of my 16 pro leather back from Nomad and just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it rests under the camera bump and I’ve just been using that. It’s not, this is not a good solution. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line up correctly in the bottom edge. It looks ridiculous, but it does provide a lot of grip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is what I’m still doing. I’ve ordered a couple other things to try,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not here yet, so more to come in the future. But the iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro case story remains unsolved for me. I will say I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handle a tech woven case in the Apple store and I thought it was very nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in fact, they seem to be selling very well because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stores that I keep walking by like I’ll breeze in and see like I was in Grand Central
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier today I looked at theirs and they’re sold out of most of the good tech woven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors for most phone models. The tech woven cases seem to be doing very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well with iPhone buyers. So there’s something there. I do think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will probably end up preferring something else, but time will tell.
The regular iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, who has an iPhone 17 in the family that apparently has some thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, I mean, they’re sitting on the desk right next to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John still in their boxes. Like I haven’t had much experience with them. So I guess I don’t have much to say about that. I wonder what
⏹️ ▶️ John the timing was with when my kids would be getting these. But apparently they’re going to wait until their
⏹️ ▶️ John fall break in October. So these, I did take the phones out of the box
⏹️ ▶️ John and put their cases on them just because I like to get the phone into the case before the phone is covered
⏹️ ▶️ John with fingerprints, whereas no one else in my family cares about that at all. So they will take the phone out and handle it for 15
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes and then take the food encrusted fingerprint front covered thing and stick it inside a clear
⏹️ ▶️ John case. So I got them directly out of the box, immediately into the clear case, barely even
⏹️ ▶️ John touching it. And my son’s got a silicone case. So they’re all ready to go, waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ John their phones to come to do a data transfer. But no, they’re nice. They look nice. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John normal. have nothing exciting to say about them. They are extremely unsurprising,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they haven’t yet been set up.
Our AirPods Pro 3 review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods Pro 3. Marco, remind me, you did get a pair, I assume? I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Would you like to start or shall I? I really don’t care either way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey returned them. Oh, interesting. Why is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So, this, I did not expect this. I’ll tell you that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by all accounts, they they are much better on paper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do have significantly better noise cancellation which is impressive because it was already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like for any earbuds it would even the twos were already pretty good but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the threes were even better. The sound quality is indeed better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say it’s like you know world changing better it’s still not to the level of full-size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones but it does come a lot closer. And they are certainly good enough that by noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cancellation and sound quality metrics alone, barring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other factors, I would not recommend anybody ever get the AirPods Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance. I think the AirPods Pro 3, if they fit you, and if they’re comfortable, and if they fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your, for other, if they work physically for you, I think they’re the better product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in every possible way. They sound great, they have the best everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like feature-wise, they’re way ahead. My problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AirPods Pro 3 fit very differently than the 2s. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not like a little tweak. Like, you know, from AirPods Pro 1 to 2, as far as I can tell, there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no fit difference. From 2 to 3, this might as well be a different product. Like, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a very different fit. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lottery? I did. So now, so here’s, so I guess I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can count myself lucky that I have had a pretty good ear situation with the AirPods Pro 2s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But not with the original AirPods, right? So you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been on and off with the ear lottery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so the 3s fit very differently. Mainly, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3s have the ear tip seems to go further into your ear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seems to, you know, push harder against your inner ear. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does come with different size tips. I tried, it starts out with medium and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has like small and extra small. I kept going down in size whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would try, try it for a couple hours on one size, and it’s a little uncomfortable. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the next day, I’d reset my ears, next day, put new tips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, try it again. And there was no ear tip combination that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found that made these not just hurt after a couple hours of wearing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is a problem for me. And every time I put them in, I’d be like, mm,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kinda hurts, kinda uncomfortable, but let’s see, let me give it a shot. I would try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adjusting, I’d try wiggling them, different angles, every adjustment I could make,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was no combination that didn’t result in pain after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally about an hour or two. And the twos don’t hurt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, ever. They have never, never in a thousand years have the twos hurt. The threes just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hurt my ears. And I think they aren’t as secure in my ears either. And again, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried different ear tips, tried different angles. I couldn’t get them to fall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, but they seemed, they felt less secure. So it could just be psychological,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they do not work for me. And then every time, like when I would go back to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my AirPods Pros 2s, you know, after my ears would hurt, I’d give them a break and then go back to the 2s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could continue operating in my life. And the 2s, it’s like going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home to like a well-worn couch, you know? It’s like the 2s fit so comfortably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me. It’s a night and day difference. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really know what to do. Like, I think the 3s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there were no other products like this, If I didn’t have the twos, if the twos never existed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might buy the threes and just use them for short times because the feature set is that compelling. But as long as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my twos continue to work, I’m gonna continue to use them. It’s kind of like our discussion about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the natural scrolling direction on Apple’s mice and trackpads. I can still use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old ones, so I’m gonna keep using them because I like them way better. They work way better for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t sell the twos anymore, do they?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t, but Amazon does, and they’re on sale, so I got myself a backup pair of twos.
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t think about getting a third party ear tips for the three, because maybe you just don’t like the ones with the foam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the way that they are achieving the better isolation and the better base response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is with better physical blockage of the ear canal from the outside world. That’s how,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, the noise cancellation, they’re doing some electronic things with feedback and everything, like that’s part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of noise cancellation, but a huge part of why it got better is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are much more aggressively sealing out the outside world with the fit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s going deeper in the ear. It certainly is like sealing against the walls of the ear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder, it’s like pushing harder against the walls of the ear. Whatever it is, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have significantly changed the weighties fit to be further into my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ears. And it just, it doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t work. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I hope the two continue to work for a while. And to answer your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question, John, I don’t think third-party ear tips would actually fix my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it isn’t that the ear tips aren’t soft enough, it’s that they move them. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sit differently in my ear in a place that is far more intrusive and invasive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and far less comfortable and causes pain after a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John What if you got third-party ear tips that were half the depth?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if they would fit or if they would keep them in my ears if they put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them further out, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Were you afraid of staying within the return window? Because I’m kind of shocked that you returned these without the
⏹️ ▶️ John opportunity to buy more stuff, which is I bought these 17 third-party eartips to see if I can even fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, at this point, I wouldn’t trust third-party eartips for the AirPods Pro 3s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really exist yet, that were at all reasonably considered. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I’ll try in a few months to look around, But again, like right now, like, well, my twos work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. So I kinda, I think I’m just gonna sit this generation out and see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m really, honestly, I’m really disappointed to have to do that. Because again, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of it, I do like the increased noise cancellation, although that’s obviously, if that comes at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost of blowing up my ears, maybe I don’t like that. I do like the better sound quality. That’s nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like the fact that the new ones are water resistant. Like there’s a lot that I wish I could enjoy about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new ones, but they just don’t fit me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I am ecstatic to report that I have yet to lose the ear lottery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I knock on wood because my time will come. In terms of fitment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think these fit me just fine. There’s definitely a tighter seal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against my ear canal. I wouldn’t say it’s uncomfortable, but for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say it’s uncomfortable, it is noticeably tighter and the tips give less.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds like an indictment and I actually don’t mean it as such. It’s fine for me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is noticeably different. That being said, the ANC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, let me back up a half step. The reviews that I initially read or watched was that, oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, these things are perfect. I cannot believe how great they are. I will, I would buy a million of them if I could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, from, I forget who, like MKBHD had a really good review. I feel like there were a couple others, I forget who,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that all said, these are absolute win top to bottom. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opinion is more tempered than that. These are an improvement for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there are a couple of ways that I think they’re a vast improvement, but I would temper one’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expectations if you have not yet bought these and are looking to buy them. They are better. And for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I’m getting into a USB-C case, which is chef’s kiss. Even though I almost never charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case with a cable, It is still so nice to have one less lightning thing in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you’re the kind of person like me that uses AirPods on and off all day long, pretty much every day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, I guess, to some degree, it is an absolute win, unless you lose the year lottery. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ANC, I would say it’s better. I wouldn’t say it’s dramatically better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now it is possible that maybe I need to use different tips. I did do an ear. What is an ear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fit test, whatever they call it. and it said they were fine, but I haven’t actually tried any of the other tips yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So perhaps going up a size or something like that would increase the isolation and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would make it worlds better. But I’ve only used the stock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tips, the standard ones that were attached to them when they came out of the case. And the ANC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is good. When I was on the plane back from Memphis, I went back and forth with my twos and my threes, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the threes were better. but you know I heard some people talk about how like the plane just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disappeared and I feel like maybe I heard Jason talk about that I might have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that yeah just like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I wouldn’t say that was my experience which it I’m not trying to say he’s wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just talking about what I have experienced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco here that Jason keeps saying you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John you have currently or have you had a pair of over-ear noise-canceling headphones to compare with on plane flights
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably 15 years when the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John technology was still. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of like the extra bit of foam blocking sound and wedging itself in your ear, another
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that can block a lot of sound is a gigantic piece of plastic over your ear. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t tried, and again, I don’t like things in my ear hole, so I don’t use the little earbuds, but I always do wonder about
⏹️ ▶️ John the trade-offs, on a plane in particular, because you’re there for a long time, there’s like an obvious drone noise
⏹️ ▶️ John that you would want to cancel out. I use the over-ear ones, but over-ear ones can make your head sweaty, and
⏹️ ▶️ John even they can press on your face and like be uncomfortable after hours, but I also don’t like things in my ear holes. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I know lots of people who swear by the pros on the plane as great noise canceling or whatever. I’m like, but how could something
⏹️ ▶️ John that tiny cancel it? But I guess if they just wedge themselves in your ear holes well enough, they can get the job done.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s why I was wondering if you were comparing the twos and the threes, if you had a pair of over-ear canceling headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John to compare to both of those, how they compared. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess- I mean, over-ears can usually do significantly better on planes for the actual noise cancellation. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why I don’t carry over-ears on planes anymore is that they’re huge. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they take up your entire carry-on bag.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like the AirPods. Sony’s come in a really small case. They fold up real small, it’s nice. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s nothing. I have the Sony’s, I know what you’re talking about. I mean, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously the AirPods are smaller, but I will, you know, we did note that the AirPod 3 case actually got a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger. So if we just graph this
⏹️ ▶️ John In the year 2162, the AirPods case bigger than the Sony headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s nothing, it is nothing like what you think. Like, it is so com- like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is so comically small. Like, the AirPods Pro case versus the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John headphones. My wife has AirPods Pro. I know how big it
⏹️ ▶️ John is. I’m making a joke. It’s making, it’s like an infinite timeline joke. Extrapolating. Look at the graph. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, it’s worth noting, and I think I’ve said this before, but my AirPods, when I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it’s jeans season, which we are quickly angling into jeans season here in Richmond, My air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pods live in my little change pocket on my right side. You know what I’m talking about? Like the little baby pocket on your right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hand side that at least for boys anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the ipod nano
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pocket. Yeah, the ipod nano pocket. Exactly. That’s where my air pods live and and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re always on me. They’re basically always on me and I would not have the and I know you’re kidding, but I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have those sonys always on me and honestly, I’d rather not even have them in my carry on if I could avoid it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I half the time I have my stupid vision pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and I talk about something that takes a lot of room in from your car. But anyway. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony headphones and the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Vision Pro case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re not wrong. The ANC, it was better. It was not to me, night and day better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in general, like I mowed the yard today and you know, definitely dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reduced or I guess attenuated, I think is the technical word I’m looking for the volume of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lawnmower but I would not say it disappeared by any stretch of the imagination. Which again, makes me wonder if I should try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the larger sizes and see if they fit if they work better, et cetera. But it’s not a regression,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think, but the fact that I’m saying I don’t think is probably not a good sign. Also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the case, which by the way is indeed bigger, but is so barely bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I mean, I can only notice when I’m holding both of them at the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. Like otherwise I can’t really tell the difference. But what’s interesting about them is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the AirPods Pro 2, the tips are angled fairly steeply.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say at a glance it’s at like a, I don’t know, I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say like a 45 degree angle. I think that’s a bit dramatic, but they’re angled. If as they’re sitting in the case, they’re angled down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pointing toward the center of the case. Whereas these point almost laterally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like they’re almost at a 90 degree angle. It’s hard to do this. I’m trying to paint a word picture and I’m probably not doing the greatest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job, but they sit very differently in the case, which also means they wiggle quite a bit more in the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not a big deal and I am 100% nitpicking, but I see, I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it enough that I find it lightly off-putting. That being said, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are two things that, oh, I’m sorry, there’s one other complaint I have and then two absolute compliments. Connected,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe it was mentioned this, but the light for the like charging and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already charged and pairing and all that, it used to have like a cutout in the front of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case where the light would shine through. Now it just shines through the case, which makes for a better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look, generally speaking, But mother of God, this light is so bright.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, it is a lot brighter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ridiculously bright, which 99.9% of the time does not matter. But I opened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case once when Aaron was asleep, and I happened to have the case pointed in her general direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was like, Oh, Jesus Christ. I didn’t want to wake her up. And I’m being a little bit hyperbolic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But truly, the light is ridiculously bright. And I’m pretty sure they talked about that unconnected. A couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of of really good things though. Number one, the bass response to my ears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is night and day better. I never thought the bass was bad in the AirPod Pro, AirPods Pro 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods Pro 2, whatever, you know what I’m saying? Um, I think it is worlds better in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one where the, the twos, it sounded good, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it almost sounded, I don’t know how to verbalize it, but it almost sounded like an interpretation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of where the bass was and what the bass should sound like. Whereas the threes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is what bass actually sounds like. And for some, like perhaps Marco, and I don’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that to be snarky, I’m being genuine, perhaps for you, you would find that off putting because I know, or at least my recollection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that you generally don’t care for bass heavy mixes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Fair enough. I don’t like, you know, beat style mixes where it’s just, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t, I don’t dislike a more bass heavy mix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the bass in these seems much more airy in a good way. Seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the soundstage seems much wider is particularly with regard to bass. I think the bass sounds incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a vast improvement over, over the old ones. And I, again did not I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have said oh yes the base needs to get considerably better in the twos I never would have thought that but now having had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the threes it got significantly better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I’ll say on that so you know base response in headphones especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in tiny headphones like this base response really needs a good seal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you will see you will have different people have very different reactions to it that’s that might explain why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know you you were saying like to you, it’s a big difference. And then some people have reported it’s a small difference or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t notice the difference. Base, like good base, you need a good seal. And again, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of what they did with their design choices here with three is like, they went for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much stronger seal to get better base response and to get better noise cancellation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the possible expense of comfort for a lot of people and fit challenges. So, you know, whether that was the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea for them, it depends on whether it fits you or not, but that is the trade-off there. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say also on the treble response, like, so I’ve heard, I’ve seen and heard a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complaining that the Pro 3’s sound too harsh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I’ve heard like too digital or like too crisp. Oh, I wouldn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are all different ways of saying the same thing. Those are all different ways of saying they have too much treble for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. And I did notice that the treble response is very noticeably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stronger than the 2’s. And treble response is a very personal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing and like what you want out of your headphones. And if you look at high-end headphone reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re all over the place because each reviewer wants a different amount of treble response.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what you hear is, you’ll hear people who think that they’re listening to too much treble,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll describe it as like fatiguing or again, sharp or harsh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And people who are listening to something with bad treble response or low treble response, They’ll describe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as like warm. This sounds warm. What that means is it’s kind of muffled, there’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of treble, but it’s very relaxing. A low treble,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of warmer tone is less fatiguing to your ears over a long time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s nice, but you hear a little bit less detail and high Christmas in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco energy. So anyway, what they’ve done with the threes is they’ve pushed that treble,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say, and I like a lot of treble. I think they’ve pushed it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as high as they can and still be within the realm of what I like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost too much for me and I love treble so I I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they should probably do is give some kind of control over this
⏹️ ▶️ John possible Marco we don’t have the technology how could you change the amount of different frequencies coming out of a speaker they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have to invent something I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and that’s the thing, when AirPods were not able to produce a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treble response, because they just weren’t good enough yet, this wasn’t a problem. They were able to have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound adjustment whatsoever, because no sound that their AirPods could produce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was potentially offensive or objectionable to anybody. It was not good enough to be offensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But now, as they are getting higher fidelity, higher response, stronger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bass response, stronger treble response, less drop-off at those extremes in their frequency response.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of their competitors in the nice Bluetooth headphone to the nice noise-canceling headphone space,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all offer audio tone controls through their apps. Every single one of them. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can customize the amount of treble, mid-range, bass. Some of them are pretty simplistic. Some of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have a whole parametric EQ. But they all offer customization.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why? because people want different things out of their sound profile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that Apple has outgrown now. Now that their headphones have gotten really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good at general sound response across the whole spectrum, they’ve outgrown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea that they can just have like one tone that they just let everyone have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think they’ve outgrown the idea of having one shape that these products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be to fit in one type of ear. But hey, well, I’ll keep arguing that over the next three years until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they maybe consider that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they did add more tips. They used to have three tips, now they add five. So they are trying to, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure what the alternative is. Is it kind of like the visor things or whatever? You can get AirPods 3
⏹️ ▶️ John with the A shape or the B shape or the C shape?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I mean, I honestly, when I tried the different tip sizes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t seem to make any difference in comfort at all to me. I figured like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe if I go smaller, maybe there’ll be more of a risk of falling out of my ear or I’ll lose the seal, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll be more comfortable. They weren’t. I did eventually lose the seal and they did eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk falling out of my ear if I went too small, but going smaller and smaller didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually improve the comfort for me at all. I think it’s a different issue than just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very minute diameter differences of those pads. But anyway, all that is to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s time Apple adds a little bit more control over this. Now there are like, there’s different system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level like ways you can kind of tweak an EQ or have a hearing profile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like so there’s ways you can kind of hack some customization here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although be careful with the hearing profile because if you’re old, you probably can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hear high frequencies that well. And what the hearing profile is gonna do is gonna crank them up. And so if it’s already
⏹️ ▶️ John too shrill for you in the high end, don’t apply your hearing profile to it if you’re old.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, and also like whatever you apply would then apply to I think any headphones that you would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio, yeah. Which is not, that’s also not super desirable. So, I think it’s time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope Apple revisits the comfort and fit here and tries to get something more universal.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve measured a million ears, Marco, that’s what they’ll say next year, or two years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John from now. But not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine. They do. It’s a shame, the 2s were great. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon is still selling the 2s if anybody else has the same problem. You can also buy a spare pair, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would suggest doing it soon, Because once these are really out of all the channels, you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a hard time finding new ones with new batteries. So good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They saw a million ears and they measured them all. That’s a reference, John. One final note
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on this. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John one final note. I’ve got one on sound quality here. So on the subject of sound quality of these headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ John there has been much consternation among the reviewers about the sound quality. Some people like it, some people don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John My relationship with sound quality reviews is mostly through
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube channels that I watch. I love it when YouTube channels try to play the speakers in their video
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to let you know how they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sound. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s about a thousand things wrong. Sorry, but anyway, cause like just
⏹️ ▶️ John the chain of stuff from that speaker making noise to it going into my ear holes when I watch it on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, it’s like, okay, we’re just, anyway, one of the channels that I like, one of the channels that has found
⏹️ ▶️ John clever attempts to, to be a YouTube channel that reviews speakers in some constructive
⏹️ ▶️ John ways, always has an objective measurement section and a subjective
⏹️ ▶️ John part. And objective measurements are great because you can put them on graphs and stuff. And he always does this, it’s called
⏹️ ▶️ John Aaron’s Audio Corner. He always does his subjective review and then he tries to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out, based on the objective results, why his subjective review was like that. Does it make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense that his subjective review is way off or it’s like, ah, this thing that I heard in my subjective listening,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see it here on the graph. And that is a good way to at least give people an idea of how
⏹️ ▶️ John a sound thing, a speaker or whatever, might perform and then you can decide how much travel do you like? What kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John response do you like? And eventually you’ll learn your tastes and you’ll know if you would like this speaker or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never heard of this channel that someone sent me. It’s called the Headphone Show. I’d never seen it before, but they also
⏹️ ▶️ John had essentially a subjective part and an objective part. I think they have like a little ear shaped machine where they shove
⏹️ ▶️ John the AirPod in and then they do like frequency response measurements with it shoved into the ear canal. so they get like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, who knows what shape the little fake rubber ear is, but anyway, they’re trying to get good
⏹️ ▶️ John frequency response. And you can see their graphs where they show that AirPods 2 versus the AirPods 3. And sure
⏹️ ▶️ John enough, just like Marco said, and much like Casey said, the AirPods 3 have more bass
⏹️ ▶️ John than the 2, and they have more treble than the 2. Not by much, but it doesn’t take much changes in these graphs if
⏹️ ▶️ John you watch a lot of these videos, you learn that like, the lines being just separated by a little bit, it’s audible,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s usually a logarithmic scale and stuff like that. But I will say that both the AirPods 2 and the AirPods 3 do not
⏹️ ▶️ John have linear frequency response. They are boosted in the bass and they are boosted in the treble. The mid-range is nice and linear
⏹️ ▶️ John on, you know, it doesn’t wiggle around too much. And then the bass, I’ve heard a lot of people complain that it’s kind of flabby
⏹️ ▶️ John and not tight, but like you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can’t really see that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I disagree. Can’t really see that in the frequency response graph. But a lot of people thought like there is more
⏹️ ▶️ John bass, but they don’t like the quality of it. But that’s, again, that’s subjective listening. And then the treble is,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, it’s boosted on both of these. just boosted more slightly more on the threes
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not flat and the thing with one of the things you learn from looking at all these graphs and speakers
⏹️ ▶️ John is that you can tell based on there’s another measure they didn’t do but Aaron’s Audio Conner always does
⏹️ ▶️ John which is basically if this line doesn’t have any wiggles in it this speaker will take well to
⏹️ ▶️ John equalization which is deciding changing the frequency response you know like a you know like I said 12
⏹️ ▶️ John band 10 band equalizer or whatever. If you see
⏹️ ▶️ John a response curve that you don’t like, you can say, oh, this has too much treble. So I’ll just turn the equalizer down on those high frequency
⏹️ ▶️ John bands and I can adjust it to sound how I like. Not all speakers take to equalization
⏹️ ▶️ John that well based on this thing, that whatever this parameter is that I, again, I wish I remember what it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, from watching the channel, you just learned, oh, that line is nice and flat. That means this, this speaker will EQ well
⏹️ ▶️ John and sure enough, you can put it through an equalizer and say, no, look, I put it the way I wanted and I can make the Curve how I want it and
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s too much trouble for me I can turn it down but other speakers if you try to turn Down the the treble with the equalizer it
⏹️ ▶️ John will screw up other parts of the line and it won’t be as linear anyway All this is to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John Airpods 2 and 3 are not linear speakers they are Very much
⏹️ ▶️ John like tunes to be appealing to mass audiences, which makes sense for what they are They’re trying to be a single
⏹️ ▶️ John product sold to millions of people They’re not going to be like an audiophile in your speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple brand is different than the Beats brand. Beats brand, their curve is even heavier on the bass and lower
⏹️ ▶️ John on the treble. And this is true of all speaker brands. Like what is the one that starts with a B, not
⏹️ ▶️ John Bang & Olufsen. What’s the other
⏹️ ▶️ John Dynamic, the headphones? No, there’s some, it might be Bang & Olufsen, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John forgetting, anyway, there’s certain speaker brands. B&W is another one. Yeah, I know, but it’s not that one either. There’s certain
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker brands, and it’s not Bose, that cost a bazillion dollars and have
⏹️ ▶️ John a reputation of having really, tons of treble, like tons of high end. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like Marco said, some people like, oh, I hate that brand, I find it fatiguing and shrill and it kills me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And other people like, oh, that brand sounds the best, I can hear every nuance of those violin strings or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s personal taste. So it’s good to see, I haven’t seen this for most of, you’re right Marco, also that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the AirPods Pro are good enough that they deserve this kind of treatment now, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John before it’s like, oh, they’re nice, they go in my ears like regular AirPods. Now they’re getting out the graphs. Now the audio
⏹️ ▶️ John people are looking at them and saying, this is what AirPods are. They are this U-shaped graph where it’s lots of bass and lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of treble, and the threes put more bass and more treble in. And for the people on this show, for the people on the headphone
⏹️ ▶️ John show, it was over their limit. They said, this is too much treble, and they both hated the bass. But for other people, your mileage
⏹️ ▶️ John may vary, but just be aware that that’s the product you’re buying. And it is interesting that they made that adjustment,
⏹️ ▶️ John or either didn’t make that adjustment, but just, you know, the seal is providing that extra thing. and also didn’t provide,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was sarcasm before when I said there’s no technology for this, it’s called an equalizer. Like let people
⏹️ ▶️ John have some kind of adjustment. We’ve had equalizers, we’ve had analog equalizers, like this is not a new
⏹️ ▶️ John technology. If there’s too much treble, it should be possible to turn it down. But it should be possible to
⏹️ ▶️ John adjust that frequency response curve so there’s less bass or more bass, less treble or more, but you can even adjust
⏹️ ▶️ John the mid band. It’s all these bands go across the entire thing. Equalization, if the speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John takes well to equalization, you can adjust it to sound better. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, it’s not gonna help you with fitting in your ear, but the fact that Apple continues to provide
⏹️ ▶️ John so little adjustability for AirPods Pro really limits them because I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John they are capable of more than this. And especially if you like everything about them, but you just don’t like the sound
⏹️ ▶️ John for listening to music, which was true of lots of reviewers. I saw a lot of YouTube videos where they’re like, these are amazing, love the transparency,
⏹️ ▶️ John love the noise cancellation, but they sound worse than the AirPods Pro 2, and I don’t like how they sound. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a shame. That I feel like is perhaps fixable for some subset of these people
⏹️ ▶️ John if they just provided basic equalization. But I guess that’s just too fiddly for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, like, and you know, I usually professional headphone or speaker reviewers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually like a little bit less trouble than I do. Like there’s this thing called the Harman curve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and forever ago, like the Harman Audio Corporation developed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or came up with this like kind of target frequency response curve. Like what people, what is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most pleasing to the most people? Because it is not a flat response. It is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even response across the entire spectrum. Most people have a certain balance, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit of extra bass, you know, a little bit of boost here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of- It’s a shape of a line. I know what shape it is because I put the Harman Curve into SoundSource,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Roga Miva thing, as my preferred EQ for my external speakers. I like it. Harman Curve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appealing. Yes, most people do. So the problem is, as everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has gotten better at designing speakers and headphones over the last 20 years, like we’ve made huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advances in the engineering behind developing these products, what has happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, in order to optimize for the most market, almost everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now making their headphones and speakers try to match the Harman curve as close as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have a whole bunch of things that all sound the same. The AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro don’t match it. Yeah, AirPods Pro don’t match it though, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But they- No, they don’t. They definitely don’t, Kirk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I like the way the AirPods sound. Because what I know is, again, what I know about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself, and when I look at other reviews, and when I look at frequency response graphs, I know that I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bit more in certain parts of the mid-range, like between like one and 3k, I like a little boost there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get like a little bit more vocals and guitar presence. And then I like a decent treble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco response, not a like rolled off response where it plummets after a certain amount.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I also know that other reviewers don’t like that. So I tend to go for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choices that have a little bit more treble than most reviewers think is ideal. So for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, the AirPods Pro 3s sound great where they already are. But if Apple wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to only have one tone that everyone gets, what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna have to do is issue a software update that changes their default tuning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be worse for me. And that just, that illustrates why this should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be some kind of control. And why, again, all of their other competitors in the headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space, they all have apps to offer basic tone controls at least. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people like different things. And again, now that they are capable, like now that these drivers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and these headphones have gotten so good, so advanced, that they’re able to be, So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re able to be good enough to cause these kind of opinion differences to be a problem. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you offer control. So maybe they will, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, the speaker brand, I’m pretty sure, was Bowers and Wilkins. Thank you to Hairline1 in the chat room
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for going- So when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said BNW and you
⏹️ ▶️ John said no. Yeah, going, you said BNW, I didn’t know it stood for Bowers and Wilkins. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, one final thought on the AirPods Pro 3. I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk. This may all be in my head, this may be a placebo. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I will use transparency mode and I will use noise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cancellation. I mostly have abandoned adaptive, although I think I need to try it again, to be honest with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, I typically flip-flop between transparency and noise cancellation. And with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the AirPods Pro 2, transparency sounded really good, but you could tell you were listening to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reproduction of what was happening around you, in the same way that when you’re wearing the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s really good, but you can tell, you’re looking through some, you know, humongous goggles at screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are reproducing what you’re seeing around you. With the AirPods Pro 3, transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is freaking transparent. It is unreal how real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sounds. I should have thought that sentence out a little more, but it is just difficult to believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how absolutely real transparency mode sounds for my ears anyway. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as though I don’t have anything in my ears, which is absolutely bananas to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, you know, it’s what it is and I love it for that. All in all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these do get my recommendation. I do think that they are worth it. But if you’re coming from AirPods Pro 2 that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re happy with, unless you’re desperately seeking more bass, my personal experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, or a USB-C case if you don’t already have one, my personal experience is that these are good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t call them requisite. know, these are not must buys, but they are definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. Again, you know, caveats about ear shapes and so on and so forth. But, um, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the initial reviews and certainly the way they were presented that everything is better in every measurable way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, but I wouldn’t say that everything is dramatically better. The bass to my ears,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dramatically better. The soundstage better. Transparency mode, quite a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. Everything else it’s a notch better but I wouldn’t say it’s night and
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#askatp: Trusting encrypted apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s do some Ask ATP and let’s start with Joshua Wald who writes, on past episodes you’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the UK demand for encryption backdoors, which by the way, breaking news is back baby.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This brings up something I never fully understood. How do we know if anything is encrypted? Couldn’t everything have backdoors? What if Signal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a backdoor? I don’t know John, what’s up with that?
⏹️ ▶️ John So in some respects, as just a consumer who doesn’t know about the technical details, are
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially trusting the products that you buy that claim
⏹️ ▶️ John to have encryption, the companies that make them that they are telling you
⏹️ ▶️ John the truth about the fact that it’s encrypted, and that they haven’t made any mistakes when they implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John that encryption. Most of the time they are telling you the truth. It’s impossible
⏹️ ▶️ John not to make mistakes, and so that’s why there are security flaws, and that’s why they have patches, and yada yada. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John But practically speaking, okay, but what if you are technical? Is there a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that people can tell whether Apple is telling the truth about encrypting things?
⏹️ ▶️ John Unlike the world of like Linux or whatever where there’s you know that you have the source code and even then you what you would
⏹️ ▶️ John say is okay we have the source code to Linux but how do I know that this is the source code that you’re using when you build
⏹️ ▶️ John your Linux that’s in your product right there’s always that problem so Apple has tackled that in a couple different ways
⏹️ ▶️ John their private compute thing is one of the ways they try to tackle this where they’re like we use these signed
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system images that we give to security researchers to say here is
⏹️ ▶️ John that here is the binary that we’re running and it’s signed in a certain way and you can we can prove that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John signed because only a signed thing would be able to answer this challenge of this way but you know it’s this
⏹️ ▶️ John whole sort of like math based cryptography thing to say we’re gonna give you the binary that we’re using and we’re gonna try to give
⏹️ ▶️ John you a way to prove to yourself that that really is the binary that we’re using but in the end, as I
⏹️ ▶️ John forget the details of this, but very secure researchers had looked at it when private cloud compute came out and said, in the
⏹️ ▶️ John end, there is still at the very bottom of this trust chain, a place where you have to say, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is telling the truth about something or other. It’s very difficult to do sort of a zero trust
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and no, please blockchain people, please don’t. Very difficult to do a
⏹️ ▶️ John zero trust thing that doesn’t waste all of our time burning down the entire planet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has also provided for iOS, I believe they provide like to security researchers like
⏹️ ▶️ John versions of their hardware and software for security researchers to try to crack because compiled
⏹️ ▶️ John software and even encrypted compiled software running like there you can do things to look into
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware and software to see if it really is encrypting things
⏹️ ▶️ John because if it’s not it’d be trivial for you to get all the data right. The iPhone is a very popular,
⏹️ ▶️ John just to give one example, very popular target for security researchers because people want to crack the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if there was a back door, somebody probably would have found it by now because that would be a very
⏹️ ▶️ John desirable thing to have. They’re finding amazing exploits that are just mind boggling,
⏹️ ▶️ John like this chains of 15 different exploits, each of which is just, you know, you can’t even believe
⏹️ ▶️ John each one of them and you need all of them to get through. And now Apple just added that memory integrity protection that we talked about. gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make it even harder for everybody. But yeah, so practically speaking, even though you as a consumer
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t really know this stuff, you can have some faith that the entire world is trying to break
⏹️ ▶️ John into Apple’s software and they’re gonna find all the flaws. And if there was a
⏹️ ▶️ John backdoor, they definitely would have found that I feel like by now because it’s very hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to hide that given the access that people have to Apple’s hardware and software to hide
⏹️ ▶️ John a backdoor like that, oh, you know, everyone’s, you know, You can get into anyone’s phone by typing this
⏹️ ▶️ John special password. It’s a typical sort of silly backdoor. But any kind of sort of thing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John even the most sophisticated backdoors, like there was, I forget the details
⏹️ ▶️ John connected to this, but there was some speculation by the various people who tend to be paranoid
⏹️ ▶️ John that some government encryption algorithm, maybe it was DES, I forget. But some sort of like
⏹️ ▶️ John government standardized encryption algorithm had some kind of flaw. And the idea was that the NSA
⏹️ ▶️ John knew about the flaw and they made it a standard. But since only the NSA knew about the flaw, they enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John some number of years where the entire world thought this was unbreakable, but the NSA knew the mathematical weakness.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s also kind of a backdoor. It’s not like, oh, if you use this one password, you can get into everything. The backdoor was
⏹️ ▶️ John like the NSA, according to this conspiracy theory, knew the weakness, knew the mathematical
⏹️ ▶️ John weakness in this algorithm, and so they could crack it in much less time than everyone else. That would also qualify as a backdoor
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like secret information that they know that you don’t. But if other people did know that, than they could break in. So
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, it’s very difficult to know for certain that
⏹️ ▶️ John your trust is founded, but on Apple’s platforms and in the iPhone in particular, I think you can have
⏹️ ▶️ John some faith just because so many smart people are trying all the time to break into
#askatp: What does Neural Engine do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tom Cole writes, what do the neural engine cores and Apple’s chips actually do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They spent years boasting about how the neural engines made them leaders in AI or ML. Then LLMs came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out and it turned out they needed to boost RAM and were massively behind. Were whatever the neural engines for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a technological dead end? And so what do we do about this, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do they work? What are they about?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we talked about this a while before. It’s actually difficult to look up technical details on this. What do the neural
⏹️ ▶️ John engines do? They do math. That’s what all CPUs do, but like they do math. Um, and
⏹️ ▶️ John why, why is there a separate thing called the neural engine does math. The whole, the whole CPU does math.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, why do you need this separate thing? Uh, the thing, the math that is
⏹️ ▶️ John useful to do that is required to do for machine learning and AI type stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John involves lots of numbers. So for example, the math and the CPU, you have an instruction to add
⏹️ ▶️ John two numbers together and puts the results someplace, right? But what if I told you that you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John have to add 10 million numbers? Not just two. You
⏹️ ▶️ John could take the first two and add them, and then take the second two and add them, take the third two and add them, and you’re like, oh geez, how many of these numbers are there?
⏹️ ▶️ John What if you could add a thousand of them at the same time? Give me the first thousand numbers and
⏹️ ▶️ John the second thousand numbers, and I will add the first thousand to the second thousand in the same amount of time
⏹️ ▶️ John that it takes me to add one number to another number. That’s what these
⏹️ ▶️ John SIMD engines do. Single instruction, multiple data. Don’t just give me two numbers to add.
⏹️ ▶️ John Give me 100, 200, 500 of these huge numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John and give me all the memory, give them all together and I’ll just take this huge bunch of numbers and these are, and then I’ll, same thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John multiply, you know, I’m going to multiply these numbers together. I’m going to put the result in here and add it there. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the job that you have to do to run most of these machine learning algorithms. These specialized
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces of hardware are engines that instead of taking two numbers and doing something with them
⏹️ ▶️ John two numbers to multiply two numbers to divide They take hundreds and they it’s just you know It’s like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John massively parallel right and they can do this because they only do a certain small number of operations
⏹️ ▶️ John that are commonly done For like matrix multiplication and stuff like that which if you take a
⏹️ ▶️ John course in school to learn about all the big square brackets and the numbers and how you do these things a certain number of operations that you’re gonna have to end up doing a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of and And if you have huge amounts of numbers, you can do it faster. Now, what I was trying to look
⏹️ ▶️ John up is, okay, that’s the neural engine. How does that differ from the sort of the existing
⏹️ ▶️ John SIMD units? Because if you remember back in the Pentium days, they had MMX and the PowerPC had Altevec. Those were the first sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John popular SIMD engines. Again, single instruction, multiple data. The single instruction is add. Multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John data is two sets of 100 numbers or whatever. They were smaller back then. There were groups
⏹️ ▶️ John of five or six or whatever. Anyway, the Apple SOCs have things in them called AMX
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix Advanced Matrix Extensions. Those I believe are like MMX
⏹️ ▶️ John and Altevec, they’re like CPU instructions that you feed to the A19 or whatever. And instead of going to the
⏹️ ▶️ John adder or like the multiply units or whatever, it goes to the AMX
⏹️ ▶️ John unit, but it’s part of the CPU. And it’s so hard to find details about this. I’m sure people know, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John silicon know it well, but I didn’t know where to search on the web. So I did find a scientific paper called Evaluating
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Silicon M-Series SoCs for HPC performance and efficiency. HPC is high performance computing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they talked about the AMX units. And then this is, here’s what they had to say about the neural engine. The neural engine supports int8
⏹️ ▶️ John and FP16 precision. That’s integer, eight bit integers and 16 bit floating point precision. As a hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John accelerator, the neural engine operates independently of the CPU and GPU, not as a co-processor such as
⏹️ ▶️ John AMX. The neural engine delivers higher throughput for matrix operations than AMX, but at a lower precision
⏹️ ▶️ John in FP16. While this makes it highly efficient for AI related tasks, Low numerical precision is not
⏹️ ▶️ John beneficial for traditional high-performance computing workloads. HPC applications requiring FP32, F364 precision
⏹️ ▶️ John may not be fully benefit from the neural engine. So the neural engine is separate. It’s not part of the CPU, it’s a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John unit. So it can operate independently while the CPU is doing other things. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tailored for the kinds of data that are used in machine learning, which is like 16-bit floating
⏹️ ▶️ John point, not for a 32-bit or 64-bit floating point, which you’d have to use the AMX or the SOCs
⏹️ ▶️ John regular units for. And that’s what it’s there for. And it’s not a dead end. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is still very useful. In fact, it’s so useful, they recently add those whatever neural cores to the GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m assuming is the types of matrix math that is done inside the neural engine. Now there’s a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John thing inside each GPU core that also can do that. So if you’re doing some kind of GPU or graphics related
⏹️ ▶️ John operation, or if you’re using the GPU as a compute engine, now you have some really wide matrix
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff going on in there that wasn’t there before. A lot of it’s probably branding, neural engine versus AMX
⏹️ ▶️ John versus whatever everyone else calls their thing, but that’s the answer. They do math on a lot of numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time because the things you need to do in machine learning and AI require you
⏹️ ▶️ John to do math on a lot of numbers at the same time.
#askatp: Full SSDs on iPhones?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally for tonight, Sean Harding writes, I always try to keep my SSDs from getting too close to max capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I know that filling it up kills performance. But why don’t we hear about this for phones? Is the storage in the phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different enough that it doesn’t suffer from this problem?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you the only you ever filled a phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I’ve gotten close. And I feel like when you get really properly toward the end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your available storage, it does get ugly fast. But I feel my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vibe check here is that Sean’s right, that you can be pretty close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a phone and it’ll be alright, whereas if you get pretty close on a computer, things are not alright. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, do we know how much this is still a problem with modern SSD controllers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When SSDs were new, this was a pretty substantial effect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s been a lot of advances in how smart their controllers are, how advanced they’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they operate and everything. How much is this still the case?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still a case. Obviously, SSDs are better than they used to be. But there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a measurement. I forget what they call it in the enterprise world, like over-provisioning or something, essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John how much extra hardware is there in the SSD. It’s kind of like when you have an
⏹️ ▶️ John extra car battery that they tell you the capacity, but really that’s 90% of the capacity. They never
⏹️ ▶️ John let you fill it to 100%. And then even within the 90%, the car software will also
⏹️ ▶️ John not let you fill the full 90%. So they call the 90%, 100, like there’s how much is advertised to hold and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how much is actually in there. Enterprise SSDs have, are over provisioned in the amount of memory they
⏹️ ▶️ John have because the cells wear out over time. And
⏹️ ▶️ John before those cells have worn out over time, I can imagine that will alleviate some of the problem. But yes, in all these
⏹️ ▶️ John cases, there is still kind of the problem of, even with spinning disks, like
⏹️ ▶️ John when you start to fill the thing up, the number of choices of places you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to store new data become more limited. When it’s empty, you can store it wherever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John most convenient, across these three chips and these strips or whatever. But as things, you know, in the old days, get
⏹️ ▶️ John fragmented or whatever, or as like cells wear out and you can’t use the ones in this chip anymore or whatever, and as the thing fills up,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get fewer choices of where you wanna put stuff. And having only one or two or three choices of where to put data,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s the not most efficient place to put it, will slow things down. So, and phone
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs are no different than any other SSDs in that respect, in that if you do fill them up, you reduce the
⏹️ ▶️ John number of choices and I can slow things down. But that’s not your problem. The real problem is
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS, macOS, the underlying Darwin operating system, gets very
⏹️ ▶️ John upset when it runs out of disk space. Even if the SSD was like
⏹️ ▶️ John a quarter full, say you partitioned your SSD and three quarters of it is totally empty, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John quarter of it that you’re using is about to fill, Mac OS is gonna flip out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if there are so many things in the operating system that expect to be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to have disk space. On the Mac, for example, the swap files. If it’s time to make a new swap file
⏹️ ▶️ John and it can’t make one because there’s not enough disk space, things are gonna go bad real fast. If certain things try
⏹️ ▶️ John to write to the disk and they get no space left on device back from the operating system, and that part of the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system expected that never to happen and doesn’t handle that failure well, bad things happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s the real danger for, you should worry about for filling your SSD,
⏹️ ▶️ John your spinning disk or anything is that most operating systems and especially Apple’s operating systems do not behave
⏹️ ▶️ John well when they run out, when they start to run out of disk space. When anything that expects like, surely
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll always be able to write this one little file here with this like process ID in it or something and it can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. How good is the error handling? Is there this cascade of like, well, I couldn’t do this, therefore this thing, how
⏹️ ▶️ John could this, or does it just fall on the floor and things start to fail? bad things happen. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing about phones is, and like Max, as we discussed in the past, how
⏹️ ▶️ John much space is left on your phone’s SSD. You’re going to go into settings, general iPhone storage
⏹️ ▶️ John and look at that graph and think you get information out of that. That graph is a lot of hand waving, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s, and as we’ve discussed with the APFS stuff and the Mac stuff, there’s not actually a good solid
⏹️ ▶️ John answer to that question of how much space is left, especially on iOS where the OS has such control about things that
⏹️ ▶️ John that it can purge and stuff like that. And there is the race of like, well, the operating system needs to write
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, but this thing is purging like old iCloud stuff at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time and who’s gonna win that race. So yeah, I think the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John for why you don’t hear about it in phones too much is because iOS is such a more sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John controlled environment and it is so much more aggressive than Apple, than the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS and Apple’s other operating systems about doing stuff behind the scenes to like purge things to make
⏹️ ▶️ John room. But if you fill a phone all the way and then try to do
⏹️ ▶️ John your normal work in it, your phone is going to be worse and slower and probably the OS is gonna flip
⏹️ ▶️ John out at some point. So don’t fill your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to our sponsors this week, Claude, Factor and Zapier. And thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides the special we talked about earlier and a whole bunch of other exclusive member specials is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. So if you have not heard enough from us, you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear more from us, you can do that every single episode with Overtime. This week on Overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re talking about Synology, third-party hard drives, and the new Ubiquiti NAS
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco much, everybody, for listening. And we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long
A USB odyssey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have a USB Odyssey that I went down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not just a story, not a journey, a full-on Odyssey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has been an Odyssey. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you, I have figured it out, and I still can’t figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so… About maybe two weeks ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe a week ago, my Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started to flake out and slowly, you know, lose keystrokes or double keystrokes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, I’ve been using the Sculpt ergonomic keyboard for a while, this happens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is how they die. There’s two tragedies to the Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is that they never updated it, and in fact, it’s gone through this whole now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterlife of like Microsoft sold their whole keyboard business, they sold part of it to Incase, Incase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now remaking this particular keyboard among a bunch of others. Other people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have tried to make clones of the Sculptor Economic because it has such a strong following, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matthias and Kinesis, both of which I have tried and neither
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of which I can recommend. And this keyboard, the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people love this keyboard, myself included, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it dies after maybe, It depends, you know, it’s a roll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the dice. It dies after usually between two and three years of use in my experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I have like, you know, five or six just new in box, like ready to go, waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around in reserve. So I’ve seen this problem before. I’ve gone through, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably killed maybe four or five of them over time. Because I’ve been using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard for a long time. So anyway, this one starts flaking out, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keys start doubling and missing. I’m like, well, I guess this one’s at the end. Just in case I’ll change the batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Change the batteries, no difference, you know, it’s still doubling. I’m like, okay, I guess this is about to die.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then one morning I go to my computer and it’s, it had, like the keyboard is totally dead. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, no keys work. I’m like, well, that’s a new one. All right. I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess this one’s done. Get the next one out of the box. Go to the garage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take one off the top of the stack of boxes. Gracious. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go to plug the new one in, and it just, it also doesn’t work. That’s weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I guess maybe something else is wrong. Maybe like I’ll try a different port on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hub or something, I don’t know. Because it has its own custom USB receiver. That’s important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not Bluetooth. You have your keyboard connected to a hub? Of course. because I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one Thunderbolt cable going into my laptop. So I can take my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and bring it
⏹️ ▶️ John home. Laptops? If your laptop has more than one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port though, come on. Of course, but it’s the one cable dream, John. Plus, it’s a USB-A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this stupid dongle hanging on my laptop all the
⏹️ ▶️ John know, then you gotta deal with hubs. There’s a reason my USB microphone connects directly to the back of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, anyway, for a while, for years now, I have had the same setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and at the beach. I have a Pro Display XDR and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of USB devices put in. I have a USB sound headphone amp thing. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my USB pre-audio device. I have the keyboard dongle and a couple, like an external drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there. A few things. And a Thunderbolt ethernet adapter hanging off of a hub.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have all those things in both places and they’ve worked great for years, many, many years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But when this dongle died, when this sculpt keyboard died,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new one didn’t work in the same place, first time ever. And then, so I’m like, all right, well I keep one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Apple, the narrower of the two Apple keyboard styles without the big numpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the side, I keep one of those around for touch ID. Usually it’s stuck to the bottom of the desk. So I’m like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll just switch to that temporarily until I figure this out. So I switch to that, and that works fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I go through and I realize, oh, also, why can’t I play music? My sound isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working. My sound devices also plugged in, neither my headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amp, nor the USB pre-microphone interface, both of which are USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound devices, both of which plugged into the same hub, they’re not working either. Huh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I eventually conclude is that USB 2.0 devices, devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which sound devices they all are I think but certainly both of mine are USB 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices are not working when plugged into the ports on my Thunderbolt hub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the USB 3 external SSD is working
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s bananas I mean you you hope the SSD is working or maybe slowly corrupting all this data
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco well right I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so I’m trying to figure out why do those work and then I’m like wait a minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I plug in, like, I was moving stuff around, different ports, if I would connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it through the ports on the Pro Display XDR,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worked. But if a USB 2 device was connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through any other way through the Thunderbolt hub, it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t be recognized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the computer at all. What is your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hub? Yeah, I was about to ask the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was using this OWC1, I forget the name of it, these hubs all have such similar names
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they change like every two years, but it’s one of the OWC ones, the one that has a built-in power supply and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has like, you know, ethernet and everything. So I was using that. So I’m like, all right, well, I have, I have a couple of CalDigits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around from previous buys. I’ll just swap one of those in. Maybe the ports on my hub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went bad when somehow maybe this keyboard dongle killed the USB ports on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hub. I don’t know how, but you know, these keyboard dongles are crap. Like the Sculpt Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works great, It feels great, amazingly comfortable, but electronically it’s a piece of garbage. This is why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they keep dying. And so I’m like, all right, maybe somehow my sculpt keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco killed the USB 2.0 bus, because USB 2 uses different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pins. We talked about this recently. USB 2 uses entirely different pins on the connector than USB 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So theoretically it is possible for a hub to basically, for USB 2 not to work, but USB 3 to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. But I figured like, but like, you know, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get power and everything, and I’m like, well, and it should be like, you know, multiplexed over Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the computer. That shouldn’t, like, that shouldn’t matter anyway. So I’m like, let me try a different hub.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Try a different Thunderbolt hub. One of the CalDigit, the Thunderbolt Element 4.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No difference, same problem. And I’m like, that’s really weird. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take out, I’m like, maybe it’s, maybe my laptop somehow, Maybe it’s a software thing? Who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows? So I take out the other laptop and I connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Element Hub to that and I got it to work once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, well that’s weird. And so I moved some stuff around like rewired and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged it into my other laptop but it doesn’t work. I’m like, what? What is going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, here’s what worked. USB 2 devices would not work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any configuration except when connected directly to the MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or when connected via a USB-C hub that was not Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or connected to the Pro Display XDR’s built-in ports whether or not there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Thunderbolt hub between the XDR and the laptop. Here’s a bunch of things that didn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Two identical CalDigit Thunderbolt Element 4 hubs. Two different models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of OWC Thunderbolt hubs. If I connected the USB 2 devices via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C or USB-A through dongles and ports, didn’t make a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether I connected the USB 2 devices through a USB 2 hub connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to one of the Thunderbolt hubs upstream ports, no difference. Whether the Thunderbolt cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was connected to different ports on the MacBook Pro, no difference and a completely different MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly no difference but if I connected Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices to the Thunderbolt hub like the Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that worked just fine and the USB 3 devices work fine so it’s only USB 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices even if I connected that as the USB 3 SSD if I use a USB 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only cable to force it to to work over USB 2, didn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re not describing the whole world of devices here, but I’m assuming you were going
⏹️ ▶️ John one device at a time or were you trying all these configurations with all your devices?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was trying everything I could try. Like I was, I mean, I’m sure I didn’t do it perfectly scientifically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like I spent like three hours
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause I would have gone down all the way just to the keyboard, keyboard directly connected, keyboard being the
⏹️ ▶️ John only device on the thing because you mentioned like you’re a device killing the hub and I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like hubs will die all on their own. I always suspect the hub as being bad, but you’ve eliminated that by trying like four different hubs, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably not all four of your hubs are bad. So then my next suspicion is some USB 2
⏹️ ▶️ John connected devices like just spraying garbage data because it’s flipping out. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought too. And any device connected to USB 2 is now failing because the entire USB 2 environment
⏹️ ▶️ John is just inside any of the hubs is totally destroyed by that one device that’s just spewing garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John So then I would have said, okay, does just the keyboard work? You know, in all the configurations,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing but the keyboard, just the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And go, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And then add a second device and add a third
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device. Yeah, so I did that, because I had the same thought, I’m like, maybe one of these is like, you know, broken and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like polluting the whole USB 2.0 bus somehow. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, all the same thing, which like, if I connected them directly to the MacBook Pro’s ports, they would work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they would not work through any Thunderbolt hub. And only USB 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices. And I’m like that, but except if they were plugged into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the XDR’s hub. For some reason the XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine that the XDR situation would be that the XDR is like, you know, again, like tunneling it over
⏹️ ▶️ John the Thunderbolt, the one Thunderbolt cable that connects it back to your Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even, so yes, you’re right. But so I have a USB 3 hub that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a couple little ports on it. So I tried, all right, maybe, what if I connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB 3 hub to a Thunderbolt hub and then connect a USB 2 device into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the USB 3 hub so that it was like, maybe it’s translating the USB 2 back and it may be able, it will upstream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the hub over 3. And I was trying all that, no matter what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if USB 2 devices were in that Thunderbolt hub, they would not be recognized by the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. And I was like, am I going crazy? and I would try different things, and I’m like, didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it work that one time on the other laptop, but then I couldn’t get it to work again when I tried it again? I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happened? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is this? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS’s are these laptops running? My main one is running the non-26 one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my travel one is running 26. And so I’m like, what is this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, that’s all the information I had. What are your guesses? Because I did eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out something about it, but what are your guesses at this point? Power supply.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t think it’s a power supply. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s a power supply.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I feel like there’s something about, I mean, obviously, there’s something about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fact that it’s USB 2. And I’m thinking about how on the TS5, which I know you’re not using,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but on the CalDigit TS5 Plus particularly, which is what I’m now using,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a different like USB controller for different pieces of the hub and I think it’s running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two different USB controllers and I feel I the vague notion that it’s something in that direction,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I Got freaking nothing other than that
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean really it’s a power supply because that’s something you haven’t mentioned yet, but really like that if I was
⏹️ ▶️ John Narrowing us down which I have done with like my mouse and stuff Oh I would always strip it down to zero devices
⏹️ ▶️ John than one device like I would want to know which one of the things is causing the problem rather than it sounded like you
⏹️ ▶️ John were very often hooking up all your devices through various things and be like no get everything off of this it’s just a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a keyboard it’s just a single cable and then build up from there until it breaks and then then you’d figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ John the what the thing that’s causing the problem is but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and I was doing that but what would happen is like as soon as I would plug anything any USB to device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would have to be routed through a Thunderbolt hub it would not work anymore unless that hub was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John when it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one even it was just one device? Yes. Even if I ran the XDR through a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different Thunderbolt hub and then into the laptop. So daisy-chained it worked too. Like if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XDR was hosting the USB 2 device on one of its ports, this all worked just
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Which single USB device did you use to determine this? Did you use Apple’s keyboard? Did you use the in-case keyboard?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was using one of the sound devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I always say power supply because in these devices, especially hubs, but even like external
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drives and stuff, the weakest part of it is the thing that converts alternating
⏹️ ▶️ John current to direct current. Those things, if they get wonky and start providing too low voltage
⏹️ ▶️ John briefly and do or just get bad, it’s not the fault of the hub technically, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just not getting enough power. And so things can be disconnecting or freaking out or whatever. But as you’ve tried so many
⏹️ ▶️ John hubs, that’s probably not it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, at one point I like unwired the whole setup and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco re like pull again pull everything from scratch right and I like move something around
⏹️ ▶️ John oh we’re using the same wires when you were swapping in the hubs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them was the
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t even have cats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the thunderbolt cable that ran between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the laptop and the hub which is Apple it’s the one that comes with the XDR the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like you know the the braided two meter long because that’s like it’s kind of a long run it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco runs along the whole side of the desk so and it’s the only cable I had that was that link you’re standing desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that moves well that part is fixed that part doesn’t go up and down all right but anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the only Thunderbolt cable I had that’s longer than like a foot and a half so it’s the only one that can make the run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I was using that one cable for all these tests except the one time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I plugged in the laptop when it worked for a second I couldn’t I couldn’t reproduce a year Your
⏹️ ▶️ John experiment design is a little shoddy here. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable, again, this is like the Apple Pro XDR cable, it works for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything else. Except, suddenly, when the Sculpt keyboard died,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it then stopped working for USB 2 devices being sent over Thunderbolt that are not plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the XDR. Now, I… I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no idea why. And, I even, I have a cable tester.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey This is what I was about to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco say because now that you say that… Yeah, didn’t you recommend this to me? The… Yeah, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BLE Caber Q. The Caber Q. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Because as you’re talking just now, I wish I had come up with this a while ago, but just now I’m thinking to myself, wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a second, I’m pretty sure USB 2 rolls on different pins… It does. …on a Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you said that. It’s maybe the only thing that’s using those wires.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But… Yep. But see here… But here’s the thing, like, I mean, maybe I’m missing something about how this works. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you plug in something into a Thunderbolt hub, the Thunderbolt hub is like a… It’s like a big PCI device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And like, isn’t the Thunderbolt, isn’t the USB controller on that hub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco translating the USB pins to the devices into PCI? I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John it was more of a tunneling thing where it reserves lanes for plain old USB2 somewhere in there. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I don’t know the technical details. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that you’re sending the USB2 data pins over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thunderbolt cable once, like coming from a hub. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I would say that if you have determined you have a bad cable, no amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of tunneling is going to save you probably unless it actually entirely avoids those conductors. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so here’s the thing. So I tested with my caber queue this great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little cable tester. I tested the cable that seemed to be the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sure enough it says like it does cable health 0% like whatever that means charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powers here and it says like is that I don’t think so. But then under the specs, like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only lists USB 4 and alternate mode. It does not list any of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backwards compatible USB modes. I’m like, okay, but it’s a Thunderbolt cable. Like, and this is, you know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the age of the XDR. This is like a Thunderbolt 3 cable, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is before USB and Thunderbolt were united. So you could have like USB 4, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all united. A USB 4 cable should also do Thunderbolt 4 and 3, you know over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it but a Thunderbolt 3 cable might not have the pins to also do USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this tester was that was verifying okay it has Thunderbolt basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not old USB modes but like but again that’s been fine for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years it has worked for years it was only when that keyboard died
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it stopped working so like maybe it fried something so anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I test one of the CalDigit cables like one of the true USB 4 Thunderbolt 4 cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and of course every light on the tester lights up it passes every possible test and I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and it works I’m like what changed I’m like well I go online and like well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon can deliver me tomorrow morning a brand new one of these cables I’m like okay I still need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long thermal cable so I don’t like run cables in a weird way across my desk so I still need a long cable I still need to buy a new one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so all right let me get the same Apple cable again like now it’s officially I I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like labeled USB 4 or whatever, but like, let me get the same cable again. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got the replacement cable the next morning. Sure enough, replacing the cable in the exact same run,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works perfectly. So I’m like, oh cool, let me get out my cable tester and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what’s different. Is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an active cable? No, I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hard to tell these days because the chips are really small. But I think it’ll be, it has tiny microchips in the ends of the connectors to help
⏹️ ▶️ John with the transfer. Very long cables usually
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have that. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think all Thunderbolt cables have that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m not sure all but anyway, but there’s a thermal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable says I believe thermal thermo cables can also I think have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like optics and like fiber optics for certain lengths. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway But even the electronic ones there they have tiny chips in there and the chips are very small So it’s hard to tell whether
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re in there and obviously those chips go wrong Your cables can have problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but so I got the replacement cable the tester tests it exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same same it so I cannot figure out what has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changed about the bad cable it whatever it is this tester does not distinguish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from the new cable
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine that tester absolutely can’t handle active cables but who knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know but like it’s well it handles all the other one anyway so all this is to say I have I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still have no idea what happened I still have no idea what about the cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went bad such that USB 2 devices would only work if plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in through a Pro Display XDR’s hub and no other hubs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I… this was the hardest to figure out problem I have ever had on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home computer and I… I still don’t know the answer. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least just worked around it by just replacing this cable but like this is the most bizarre thing ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so anyway that that’s where That’s where we are now. I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I’m still using that Apple keyboard. I did not go back to the sculpt I’m gonna I’m kind of testing to see
⏹️ ▶️ John go back to the the keyboard that you thought went bad and try that first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already threw it away
⏹️ ▶️ John Could have been just the cable that was bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My theory is like because it was like dying in Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the with like the key misses and stuff because it was dying in the way those always die. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was just dying. I’ve killed like five of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years. Like I’ve seen exactly this pattern happen. So it’s very likely the keyboard was dying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was about time for this one. But I think when it died, I think it is something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really weird to the stuff it was connected to. And I think something got fried or something along
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way. God knows what happened. But things got very messed up and it all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came down to this one cable. Like the upstream cable between Thunderbolt hub and the laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have no idea why.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, not even knowing whether the cable is an active cable doesn’t let you know whether you could potentially blame
⏹️ ▶️ John the tiny microchips that are in the ends of the connector, if they exist or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. Well, again, I think on Thunderbolt cables, I believe there are always microchips in the end. It’s just a question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of maybe of like what kind, but there’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John But if those start to do weird things, like that’s the type of thing you’re not gonna be able to debug from the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John very easily, because how can you tell whether the chip is working right? and you’d have probably have to know more about the protocols
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff to understand how the chain of stuff is configuring itself and yada yada. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end, it doesn’t really matter why it’s going wrong. You want to get it down to the problem. I think you would narrow
⏹️ ▶️ John it down eventually to that cable because replacing it, although buying the exact same cable again, I would have maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John bought a different one, but you know, it worked for years with that cable. So I suppose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and you know, it’s also, you know, it’s still, it worked for all these years. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the Apple cable, it was the only cable I could find it was anywhere near this length. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s like 1.8 meters or something. Like, it’s not, most of them are like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either two meters or, you know, like.6 or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s a weird length and it happens to fit, like the run that I have for it, it fits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so perfectly. So, like, I don’t want to get anything else, but anyway. And it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, and you know, this is like, it’s one of the only cables that’s visible behind my monitor so I want it to look nice. So it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, it’s finally done. Well, next
⏹️ ▶️ John time, yeah, next time come up with a more regimented experiment design
⏹️ ▶️ John that will get you to this answer sooner and strip it down to nothing and then slowly add things back
⏹️ ▶️ John and change all variables. Different, you did a different laptop, you did different keyboard, you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think to do a different cable till the end.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was expecting this to be some sort of interference related thing, like you and I were fighting with my XLR cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other day. But no, turns out it’s just.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or it could have been
⏹️ ▶️ John like the cable gets caught in one of the hinges of your standing desk and gets shredded or a cat chews through
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Or there’s all sorts of cable related things that can go wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, allergic to cats and that. So when I wire a standing desk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put all the wires that are important and that are actually useful, like I put all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wiring that I can somehow attached in, on or under the desk so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the wires all move with the desk. The only wires that go downward from the desk to the floor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are power and network, that’s it. And everything, like I have, like there’s a whole surge strip like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mounted in the desk or under the desk, like whenever I do a desk, that’s what I do. So that way the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup moves up and down and you only need a little bit of slack in the power cable and the network cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the plan, but you know, cable gets loose, flops down, gets caught between two pieces when the thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John going up and down. You know, it happens. Beep, beep, beep.