680: A Lot of Holes in That Cheese
27 Feb 2026Our home screens, desktop audio setups, document-saving models, what we hope to “experience” next week, and where not to aim snow.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco’s Watch and snow
blowswoes - Follow-up:
- Casey got the CableCARD email 😭
- YoLink alternatives (via Joe)
- House batteries & V2H/V2L (via Russel Prouse)
- On the value of M𝑥 Pro processors (via Rick Baumhauer)
- Tahoe window resizing workaround (via Nathan Manceaux-Panot)
defaults write -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize 8defaults delete -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize
- macOS document model
- …was actually introduced in Mac OS X 10.7
- …and noted in the beginning of the Mac OS X 10.8 review
- Final Cut Pro X does auto-save (via Ian Robinson)
- Technical details (via Videoalex)
- Microsoft Office 365 also auto-saves onto OneDrive in Windows (via Éric)
- Saving files in Xcode (via Alex Kent)
- Returning to
Save As…(via Eric deRuiter)System SettingsDesktop & Dock→ disableClose windows when quitting an applicationKeyboard→Keyboard Shortcutscreate an entry underAll ApplicationsforSave As…(using an ellipsis by typing⌥ ;) and assign it to⌘⇧S
- Notepad++ (via Emily Campbell)
- Alternative to Due (via Patrick Dumontel)
- Apple March 4 “experience”
- Apple to manufacture some Mac minis in the US
- Ask ATP:
- What are our current home & lock screens? (via Sagar Patel)
- What’s our current desktop headphone setup? (via ziplyne)
- Overtime on ATP #675
- Casey
- AirPods Pro 3
- Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro 32Ω
- Desktop speakers
- John:
- Marco:
- Podcasting
- Beyerdynamic DT775 Pro 250Ω
- Beyerdynamic EDT1770D Earpads
- Schiit Jotunheim 2 (an older model; current is Jotunheim 3)
- Music
- Speakers
- KEF Q150 / LSX II & KC62
- Amp for Q150: Fosi Audio BT30D
- Podcasting
- Post-show: Casey’s driven more cars
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Skill shortages, Apple Silicon, and AI
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- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp.
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Chapters
- Indoor snowblowing
- Workout in watchOS 26
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- CableCARD doom
- IKEA YoLink alternatives
- EVs and V2L
- M Pro chip enthusiasts
- Tahoe window resizing
- File-saving models
- Reminder app
- Sponsor: Aura Frames (code ATP)
- Apple releases next week 🖼️
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- US Mac Mini factory
- #askatp: Home screens
- #askatp: Home screens (John) 🖼️
- #askatp: Home screens (Casey) 🖼️
- #askatp: Home screens (Marco) 🖼️
- #askatp: Desktop audio setups
- Ending theme
- Neutral: Casey’s EV journey
Indoor snowblowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just got a notification that my Mac Mini’s offline in the garage. That might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be because I might have sprayed some snow on it today.
⏹️ ▶️ John thrower, whatever. Yes. We’ve been complaining that the laptop should be waterproof, but I don’t think anyone has really
⏹️ ▶️ John thought about the Mac Mini being waterproof.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? As it, so I mean, you know, so me using the snow thrower, snowblower, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know snowblowing is a dirty thing somewhere, but that’s what they call them here. So I’m going to keep calling it that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do they not call them that somewhere else? I understand snow thrower being the more technically common term, but I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like nationwide. Snowblower is the common term.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some population is giggling and I just don’t know which one. And I look, I know about it. I just don’t care. Okay. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, you know, I bought this thing, geez, five years ago, at least. I’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used it a handful of times. I’m not good at it because it doesn’t snow that crazily that often. I thought you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meant the Mac mini for a second. I was like, what are you talking about? No, that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use a lot actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey which I’ll get to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John another time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, so, and it has snowed so much in the last few days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Me trying to use this thing has been comical. Everything is a mess and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to clear the driveway and I get about five minutes in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just stops. Now, this is a two-stage snowblower. It’s hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of pounds and it normally-
⏹️ ▶️ John you mean, two cycle engine?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a four cycle engine with two stages of stuff it does to throw snow around. Got it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, it just stops and I’m like, oh my God. And I’m trying to like pull up. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what am I going to do? I’m in the middle of the driveway. This thing is huge and heavy. You don’t like G and then I’m, I realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I’m like, wait a minute. It might just be out of gas. Like I’m so bad at operating. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is my last gas powered thing besides tips, cars, range extender. Um, and so I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, I don’t know how, I don’t know how to deal with this. Like I’ve never even bought. Like regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gas for it. I just use true fuel, like the stabilized gas you’re supposed to keep in it all winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use so little of it. I’ve I’ve paid like 50 bucks total of gas. This is the thing is it has ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used. So like, I’m just, I literally like have never even bought real gas for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So I’m so disconnected from that process, but yeah, it turns out it just was out of gas. I just poured more true fuel in
⏹️ ▶️ John On that topic, by the way, like I remember this came up maybe on this show or in some other, No, it was probably like when we were,
⏹️ ▶️ John when, uh, we, the cultural, we were watching like the first season of the last of us or something
⏹️ ▶️ John and debating how long gasoline.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yes. And cars would
⏹️ ▶️ John last or whatever. Um, and I think I might’ve mentioned this then, but like I continue to think about it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve had really mild winters for the past several years here. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John not mild, but it’s not the worst, but anyway, we had my winters and so I hadn’t used my snowblower in literal years.
⏹️ ▶️ John It had been in the garage and I also have, you know, there’s no gas in it, but I, there was a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a red plastic, you know, I don’t know how big it is, four gallon thing with gas in it
⏹️ ▶️ John that I filled at the gas station. And I was just sitting in my garage for years,
⏹️ ▶️ John for literal years, just in the plastic, sitting there waiting. And then, you know, we finally get a snow after
⏹️ ▶️ John several years that I think I’m going to use the snowblower on. Cause honestly, I think doing it by hand is easier most of the time because our
⏹️ ▶️ John snowblower is so old and so terrible and so tiny. Uh, but anyway, we pulled that out again and every year
⏹️ ▶️ John I pull it out and I’m like, this is it, this is the year it’s not going to work. This is a 20 something year old snowblower, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John has had zero maintenance. And I’m putting into a gas that had been in my garage for four years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, well, the last of us debate tells me that this gas should be dead after six months. So surely this won’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John It always freaking works. It works. Put it in the thing. Fire. It’s a mine is actually too
⏹️ ▶️ John psycho. They don’t sell these anymore because they’re too polluting and terrible. I think it has burned maybe a total
⏹️ ▶️ John of four gallons of gasoline in the 25 years that I’ve used it. But I can tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you leave gas in your garage for multiple years in a plastic container and put it into your two cycle snowblower, the
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid thing will keep running.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m sure you aren’t doing it any favors, but like it sounds like you are trying to kill it so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get a better one. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been trying to kill it by doing zero maintenance on it. It just will not die.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, so I’m so bad at using snowblowers that like, cause like I also, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gave up lawn mowing years ago. I have literally never used a gas powered lawnmower.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Growing up, we had one of those like spinning push manual ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I hated it so much. And so when I finally, like, you know, went through apartments as a young adult and like when we finally got a house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I told Tiff, I’m like, listen, I’m not mowing the lawn because I always hated doing it. I will buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lawn service from day one. And she’s like, no, I want to try one of those push mower things. And I’m like, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m telling you, I will never use that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John She wanted to use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little thing with the blades. Yeah. Like the thing I grew up with hating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I can tell you, you grew up paying that and it is fairly inefficient, but it could have been worse because the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I grew up using was a gas powered lawnmower that was way heavier than the spinny
⏹️ ▶️ John blade thing. And I had to push it myself because it was not, as they said, back in the days, self-propelled,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, how did it move? You moved it and it is so much heavier than this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mini blade thing. Let me tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. I mean, for sure. Anyway, so all this is to say, I have no experience operating like these heavy gas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powered things that at least now they are self-propelled. Um, you know, you hold down the right handle and it turns,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, but as a result, you know, and you have all these different controls in a snowblower. You have, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the forward and back thing, the engaged and disengaged thing, and then also how to aim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the chute that you’re throwing snow out of. And sure enough, I, you know, back into my garage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one of the maneuvers that I’m like clumsily clunkily executing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just throw a huge amount of snow into my garage all over like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the network area, like where all the 3D printing filaments restored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like wonderful. That’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you like my snowblower because it has two controls go and where you aim the chute.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco those are the two controls,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’ll tell you what was all of all of the clumsiness and all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just absolute disaster that was me trying to clear snow out of my driveway a few days ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and today was nothing compared to the clumsiness and disaster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the watchOS 26 workout app.
Workout in watchOS 26
⏹️ ▶️ John What a transition. So smooth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god. Welcome, Marko. I’m so glad you’re here with us now. I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, granted this is a very hot take because this was like I’m just finding all this out today like because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was I was holding out on watchOS 26 because I had it on one of my on like a test watch during the betas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t like the clear you know buttons to enter your passcode and I never used it for workouts I never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really saw the workout app so I was like yeah why upgrade to watchOS 26 it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like it adds nothing I’ll just wait and wait and I guess there was never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am I it bugged me every morning when I put the watch on and it’s all rubbed it’s ready and I would just dismiss it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just never just always wait and with 26.4 betas now it yells at you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty badly if you if you don’t have it like it like refuses to connect to the watch now so I’m like okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine I guess I’ll run the update so I’m just seeing watch OS 26 for the first time as of yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and today and I did my first to work out today. And I’m looking at Garmin’s online now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s how I… Again, this is the hottest of hot takes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think watchOS might be the worst 26 update. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all that, you know, and Tahoe is bad. Believe me, Tahoe is bad. But Tahoe, like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also now… I’m on Tahoe now on all my Macs. I finally gave in on that as well, well, because the latest Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requires it. Tahoe is a mess, UI wise, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does add some things that make my life a little bit faster and easier. So there are productivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and speed boost things, despite the crappy interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, the biggest thing, honestly, is now that I switched to Chrome, it does auto-fill from text messages and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco emails. The way, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a big one. And a couple, there’s a couple of small things that work a little bit better. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, there’s lots of features that it adds, But the reason I ask is because I was under the impression that all of us already use third party
⏹️ ▶️ John applications that filled those roles. And so it’s kind of an academic improvement for us because like, oh, it’s a clipboard history. Well, we
⏹️ ▶️ John were all already using that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, yeah, I’m not using that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Yeah. But you know, Tahoe overall, it’s been, you know, certain things are working a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smoothly because it’s the latest version. So like, okay, fine. But watch OS 26,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’ve been missing nothing for by not using it. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to add nothing of value to me, and it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so brutally murdered the basic usability of the workout app, which is one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most common things I do on an Apple Watch. I’m shocked at how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buggy and unusable, even just like, you boot the watch up after the update and it does what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the 26s do, it wants to take you on a tour. And I’m like, what, on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch? I don’t want to see your stupid liquid glass sh** off tour. Like, yeah, you’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Good job, Alan Dye’s team. Look at how glassy and awesome you are. I, as the user, do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not care to see you. And let me tell you, for reasons that we’ll get to another time, I’ve seen the Tahoe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup screen a lot of times. So I’ve been, I’ve seen like the stupid welcome animation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have to sit through it. And then do you want to take a tour? No, skip. these things a lot now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m so over Apple showing off how cool they are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re so not at this point. And so to see it, to see the tiny version of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the watch, I’m just like, Oh, screw you. And then to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to do the most basic thing and have this thing interrupt me on the way, and then to try to do the most basic thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, fine, just open the freaking workout app so I can start this workout. And then to have the workout app show me like three different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interruption screens before it would even show me the UI trying to promote different things about the new workout app. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a tour. No. And then do you want to try the new guide? No. Like, and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s full of so many promos and upsells before you even get to the UI to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco create a workout. And then when you get to that UI, it’s like, has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody ever used this inside the company before? How to God did this ship? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am so blown away by how utterly hostile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and terrible this app is. It takes the Allen Dye era of UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappiness to a new level that I didn’t even know was possible. So great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job Ghost of Allen Dye inside of Apple. Like I’m shocked at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how bad this is to the point that now I am seriously looking around at an alternative to the Apple Watch because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one of the most common things I do with it. It is so, so bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it makes me question the entire platform and it makes me resent the entire platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and want to just drop it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Now, hold on a second. If you’re going to say that the workout app is bad, you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have to use more words because it’s so freaking bad. It’s so bad. The thing of it is, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in short, the way it works today, it’s been long enough for me that I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly how it worked in previous versions of watchOS, but the way it works is you go to the workout app and it presents you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a vertically scrolling list of workouts, which is fine. And it’s pretty, I think, and you might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco agree. And to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear, that wasn’t great before. Like over the last few OSs, it has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and more like crapped up, but it was at least still like, you know, you could still like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. It was just less ideal than it used to be, but it was still like an 18, it was still usable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so as you’re scrolling this list, all you see is the different workout types, right? And then what’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen if you’re anything like me is you’ll see the workout type you want appear at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the like three different positions that they sort of kind of show on this list. And so what you’ll do is, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say I’m about to do a HIIT workout, you know, an H-I-I-T workout. I’ll see that appear on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottom and I’ll mash the icon. But in the time of stop scrolling on the digital scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or digital crown and go to tap that bottom most icon that to be fair is ever so slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the screen, then magically a play button appears. But Marco, is that the play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button for the high intensity interval training workout? Oh no, my friend. That’s the play button for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one above the hit workout because it’s in, I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the I word, but it is bananas. It is utterly bananas that you have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this animation to appear before you can hit the play button. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why is there a f*****g play button in the first place? Just let me hit the damn workout type in the first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it used to like, oh, and by the way, I just opened up the workout app on my watch to to review this interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could comment more intelligently on it. And I was interrupted on launch. Welcome to workout,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new navigation. I launched this app this morning. And it’s given me the first run welcome screen a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second time now. Like I, this is so bad. Like everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is, okay. In a recent member special, I told a story of when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I left Windows. because it just reached a point one day that I was just so irritated by how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little it respected my time and my direction and I felt like I was being taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a ride by Microsoft as the experience of my computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is a thousand percent there. Using Apple software now feels like you’re being taken for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ride that it’s not your watch it’s Apple’s watch and they want to show you some stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they want to do what they want to do and that it used to be aligned with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, what will be best for users? Like, how can we make this the best product for them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we will benefit from selling good products because we will make the best products for the users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And today’s Apple doesn’t do that. Today’s Apple does, A, what they feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and B, what will be the best product for Apple? And whatever the users want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now a very, very distant third in that list. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, We used to always joke that Apple would do what was best for Apple, what was best for customers and then distant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third what was best for developers. But now, Apple does what it thinks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s best for it and then users are their own very, very distant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing after that. Because the way Apple views us now is either as an audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their wankery of what they’re doing with their design or more commonly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a resource to be extracted for upsells. Yeah, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey mark. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s what today’s Apple is. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just lost so much faith. And meanwhile, I have to say, I am really happy about technology right now because I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing some vibe coding, and we’ll get to that maybe another time. But I’m really happy with tech right now. And as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy as I am with other parts of tech, it is putting my dissatisfaction with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state of Apple in stark contrast because it’s just showing how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are still making things. some really good stuff. But there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holes in that cheese now. There’s a lot of things that are not so good. There’s a lot of things they just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care about, or areas that they used to have priority in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things they cared about that made good products or treated their users well, that they just seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be throwing away or no longer caring about in recent years. And just like the stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work I had this morning, which is like one of the last draws. I’m like, Like I’m like, I think I’m done with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of this stuff. Like, again, I switched to Chrome. I’m much happier using Chrome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m gonna switch away from the Apple watch for a while and see how that goes. Like there are certain things that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a really good job with. And I’m happy to keep using those. I think, you know, obviously the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part’s in a great spot. I still love the Mac as my primary computing platform. And I still have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS as my primary phone platform. And I still love Apple’s development APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and platforms for making my software. But there’s so many other areas now where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just making me mad and disappointed and sad. And I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that in my life anymore. And so if the Apple Watch is gonna now be one of those things where every time I start a workout,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanna throw out the window, maybe it’s time for a change there too. And I’m gonna keep looking for those opportunities for change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t owe Apple loyalty. I don’t owe Apple buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all their products and saying they’re all the best when they’re not. And so, you know, part of what I want to do now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is start really evaluating things that I haven’t been evaluating in a long time. And, you know, is this still the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing? And sometimes the answer is going to be no. And that’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s their problem. That’s not my problem. My problem is I want to use what’s best for me and be able to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on the show for anybody else who might have similar feelings. And Apple has had a long run where they’ve been the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of categories. And I think they are so not the best in a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of categories now Now, I don’t think they’ve realized yet, but I’m realizing it. And look, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their problem to solve.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We need to move on, but very quickly, by pure coincidence, I went to lunch with Tyler from Goose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Monday, not a member of the band, but the one with us, too, Goose. And we went to lunch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I noticed immediately that he had on a watch that was, get this, circular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine that, instead of a round rect, it was a circle. And it was one, I couldn’t tell you which Garmin watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically, but it was a Garmin watch. It was something like 47 millimeter, maybe even bigger than that. So it looked kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ridiculous on my wrist, but I briefly did try it on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them are very big.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I tried it on briefly and it looked really nice. Admittedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I barely messed with it. I don’t think I even really messed with it other than to put it on my wrist, but it looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real nice, leaving aside the fact that my wrist can’t support something that big. But it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tempting for a minute there. I tell you what.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many times people will come to me and say, hey, I want to make a website. Can you help me out? And I don’t have to help them out. I can
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are not computer experts, who are not programmers, doesn’t matter, they do it themselves and they are empowered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they love it and they don’t need me for that. And this scales to so many different kinds of businesses now. So of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-business sites, they’ve had that covered for over a decade very, very well. Business sites though, they
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve got that covered. They’ve had that covered for years. Physical goods, digital goods, all the different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checkout options you might want, payment processing, every payment method that you might want, things like Apple Pay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, and then every credit card around the world support for all these different things. So they have all that covered super well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, they now support things like paid newsletters, paid podcasts. If you’re a consultant, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna book time slots, you can do that. Gated member areas, so much support. Any kind
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CableCARD doom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some follow up. I have had a terrible, terrible thing happen to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve received the Verizon cable card email. Oh no, I got it. I got it last week. There’s still no date
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it as to when the cable cards are expiring. And actually by pure coincidence, it’s been a very busy social calendar for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me today. I went to lunch with John from channels today, and we were talking about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, it has come to me. There’s no date involved. As far as I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even the first people to get it, which I think a lot of them were in the New York and Boston region, none of their cable cards have died.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As far as I know, John, your TiVo is still chugging along.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Is your plan to just ride it out like me and just wait for the day it doesn’t work? Yep, pretty much. Because who knows? That could be a year from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. I mean, it will come at some point or another, but yeah, that’s my plan to ride it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The very, very short version is I was thinking about maybe just cruising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey along with paying Verizon for cable service, even if I don’t use like their new IPTV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app or anything like that, and just using TV Everywhere in order to stream things and suck it into channels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via TV Everywhere. But in the last like week or two, Disney has pulled all of their channels, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey importantly ESPN and the associated properties off of TV Everywhere. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what I’m going to do. I suspect that if anything, what I’ll probably do is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade my Disney Plus package to include ESPN and all that for sports and then maybe pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Peacock for a Bravo and one or two other channels that we watch. And then maybe that’ll be it. No, and I end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Mintana for local stuff, but it’s a bummer, man. It’s a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, Peacock and Tivo related complaint. Uh, we subscribed to Peacock this month for the Olympics because my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife wanted to watch it. She, she was away on a work trip when she came back from the work trip. It’s like, I want to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John X, Y, and Z events that I missed when I was on my work trip. I’m trying to find it in the Peacock app. Can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John find that she’s a search for it. I searched for it. eventually looked it up online. It turns out replays of
⏹️ ▶️ John Olympic events are only available for one day after the event.
⏹️ ▶️ John paying for your streaming service if you will not show me a thing that happened more than one
⏹️ ▶️ John day ago? You know what doesn’t have that limitation? If we had T vote it, but we didn’t didn’t. We’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, we’ll pay for Pika who get all the stuff. Just pay for the streaming service. We should get used to this post cable post Tivo
⏹️ ▶️ John world. This was not a problem with Tivo. If we had set up a Tivo to record the Olympic event she was interested in,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it would have been a little bit more work to set up. But when she came back from the work trip, she could watch the events. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John The world we’re living in, and it’s worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is worse. All right.
IKEA YoLink alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YoLink alternatives. Joe writes, you were talking about YoLink sensors, I guess it was last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode, whatever it was, 16 weeks ago when I last spoke to you, too. And Joe continues, and I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share that Ikea has come out with some new matter over thread devices that are mind-bogglingly cheap. They have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leak sensor for about $8, a scene controller for about $6, and a motion sensor for about $8. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think they have a contact sensor as well as some light bulbs, but I haven’t bought any of those, says Joe. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far, I’ve had these for about two months, and they are rock solid. I especially like that these are all integrated with HomeKit, so I just need to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to one place to look at the status or inspect alerts. Which by the way, these three products, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot speak Swedish, are called Klipbock, Bilressa,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Migspray, which I did literal translations of the three of them, and allegedly, as per Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Translate, they are called Scrapbook, Car Trip, and Mosquito Spray. Something may
⏹️ ▶️ John have been lost in translation there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey then maybe not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, yeah, yeah, anyways, but that is good to know. I have heard through some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey acquaintances that these are, at least at first glance, pretty good to corroborate what Joe has said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally haven’t used any of these, But it is very interesting and worth checking out.
EVs and V2L
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to, we talked, I think it was last episode as well, about home batteries and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generators and things like that. And Russell Prowse writes, I enjoyed listening to your conversation about battery backups and solar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One thing you didn’t mention is vehicle to home or V2H. This allows your EV to act as your backup battery as long as it’s connected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a home charger that supports bidirectional charging. A few EVs already support it, including the BMW iX3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the upcoming i3, nudge, nudge, Marco, and more on the way. Also it’s worth noting, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think, John, you’ve put this in the show notes for us to talk about. There’s vehicle to load as well. John, what’s the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between V2H and V2L?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the little part that I put there for you to read. It explains it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I was trying to give you the credit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John. I know it right there. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still stumbling over the JS
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey note. No, no, no, no, no, no. I just wanted to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it clear that Russell wasn’t saying this, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, I know. Genuinely, hand to God, you know I will fess up if I stumble over it. I’ve done it a million times. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time I was trying not to steal your credit for once.
⏹️ ▶️ John for anything. I put all this in the show notes. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey read it. Jesus Christ.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m leaving it all in. Screw it. Marco, if you want to clean it up, that’s up to you. All right. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I happen to know, and it has nothing to do with John Syracuse whatsoever, that there’s also a vehicle to load, or V2L,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where the AC inverter in the EV is used to supply power that is plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the generator inlet or whatever. V2L does not require a bidirectional charger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to operate. And by pure coincidence, I don’t know why I didn’t bring this up last episode, because it’s fresh in mind. My friend Brad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has the F-150 Lightning, he had just installed in the last couple of weeks a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generator inlet for him to plug his F-150 Lightning into because that has 220, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m probably getting the details wrong, but it’s basically got like a NEMA 1450 or whatever outlet on the back of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can plug into a generator inlet. That’s exactly the point. And so as best I know, he has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not yet tried this, but in theory, he can use the battery in his Lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to power at least some subset of the house. Going back to Russell, to me this removes almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downside of a battery backup system and keeps all of the upside. Most EVs have batteries in the 80 kWh range, so you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting with way more capacity than you get with a Powerwall or equivalent battery backup system. If it’s a car you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already own or were planning on buying anyway, that’s an enormous amount of money you can save versus having a car plus the equivalent amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of battery storage. Which is a great point.
M Pro chip enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to fans in the M Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, I meant enthusiasts. Sorry, should have been clearer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to, see, you know, not even you are perfect, John. Who knew?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even think about the whole, like, spinning thing that blows air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. With regard to enthusiasts of the M whatever Pro, Rick Baumhower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, I think Marco was confusing the M3 Pro with the M4 Pro when he said the latter wasn’t a good value.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The M3 Pro is a terrible chip, basically an M3 Plus rather than an M3 Max Minus, as the M1 and M2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro had previously been. I don’t see how M4 Pro with two and a half times the P-Cores and two times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the GPU cores of the base chip can be called poor value at $600 more than the base M4 and $1,000 less than the M4 Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Pro chip, except for the M3 Pro, is for people who want near max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance and core count, but don’t need all those GPU cores. Musicians are one such group.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the problem with all the chip lines is you don’t generally get to pick
⏹️ ▶️ John what comes inside the SoC. How many P-Cores, how many E-Cores, how many GPU-Cores? You get to pick from the
⏹️ ▶️ John three or four sets of stuff that Apple gives you. And if you really just want a whole bunch of CPU-Cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t care about GPU, you end up paying a lot more because you have limited choices. So yeah, the
⏹️ ▶️ John M-whatever Pro chips do apparently have fans, especially in people who do not wanna pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John all that GPU that they don’t need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we did get a lot of feedback kind of defending the M Pro chips, because I was kind of crapping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on them last episode. And I think I did a poor job of explaining my main point, which is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M4 base chip has gotten so good that if you’re looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance per dollar in CPU performance in particular, the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way better than the Pro or the Max. What I was saying was that the Max usually at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least has the benefit of if you need really big RAM or other very large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources, Sometimes you have to go with the Pro or the Max chip to do that, but neither of them, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms of CPU performance per dollar, neither of them are good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco values compared to the base chip. So I think the Max makes its case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you need the biggest of everything, the Max is it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you need the best bang for your buck, the base chip is it. And the Pro is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is between those two. My thinking was not fully considering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pricing aspect because I didn’t realize, because I haven’t bought one in a couple of years, I’m still using an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3 Max for my main Mac here. So I didn’t realize, oh, the price difference is actually pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big between them. So it is a middle step in terms of you can pay some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and get some more, but in terms of sheer computing power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the dollar, neither the Pro nor the Max are good values compared to the base chip, which is a very
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, the biggest of everything is still the Ultra, even though it is still the M3 Ultra. It is definitely the biggest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, yeah, but like almost no one should buy that.
Tahoe window resizing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to Tahoe window resizing, Nathan Manso Pano writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the topic of resizing windows in Tahoe, you can actually enlarge the exterior clickable area. Just run this command
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then log out and back in, and we’ll have it in the show notes, but it’s defaults, right, hyphen G, Apple Edge, resize exterior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size, eight. The default seems to be four. You can revert the change with such and such, which will again be in the
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t tried that, but I’m glad to know that these, you know, little undocumented PLS things are still
⏹️ ▶️ John lurking in there for you to mess with the UI.
File-saving models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk Mac OS document model. First of all, apparently our timeline was a little bit wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The new document model was introduced in Mac OS 10, 10.7 Lion, not 10.8 Mountain Lion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we, I think, stated last episode. And John, you’re eating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crow in our internal show notes, writing, in fact, the first sentence of the section of the Mountain Lion review that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey linked last episode was quote, Apple’s far-reaching changes to the document model in OS 10 Lion.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, it’s my
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. Like I did the Google link because I didn’t remember off the top of my head. I’m searching for my I’m searching through my old reviews to find out when they introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John us and I found the mountain lion section that explain their document model. I’m like, this must be it. But I didn’t read literally the first sentence
⏹️ ▶️ John which linked back to my 10.7 review and said, Here’s what it was introduced. So my
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. I do think the mountain lion section it does a better job of explaining it. But it is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John to look back at the 10.7 review and see what I thought of it then and
⏹️ ▶️ John how my thoughts have changed even just a year. And by the way, it’s also fun to look at the fact that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John could not get its act together marketing wise on 10.7 and couldn’t decide whether it was Mac OS 10 10.7 or whether
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just OS 10 10.7. The 10.7
⏹️ ▶️ John documentation, marketing materials and everything had both of those things in it, which to this day I still remember
⏹️ ▶️ John being like, well, which is it? Are you dropping the Mac or are you not? Eventually I believe they did drop it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget, but in my reviews, I always tried to do whatever Apple said was their official, like, here’s what we call our things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll call it whatever they call it. And in 10.7, they just couldn’t decide or they decided too late and they couldn’t update
⏹️ ▶️ John all their materials. So even in these notes that you can see in my mountain, my review, I call it OS 10 lion,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then in my notes here, I called it Mac OS 10 line. Anyway, Apple and naming has never been great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is not. Ian Robinson writes, and I don’t know why I didn’t say this on the episode. This is one of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that either you two were on a roll and I didn’t want to interrupt or
⏹️ ▶️ John asked you about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, then I don’t know what my deal was. But anyways, Ian Robinson writes Final Cut Pro does auto save on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course it does. Where were you on this, Casey? You have to choose the name for the project when you first add it to a library in the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how long this has been the case. I’ve only been using it for about five years. And that’s pretty much exactly the same for me. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apologies, I don’t know where I was on that. Video Alex writes, ever since Final Cut Pro 10 launched 14 years ago, you do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to save as you work. File format is a database of incremental changes, so you can undo back to the start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your edit. I did not know that, that’s very cool. When you quit, it commits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the changes to the file, which is a bundle. Eric writes, when you’re using Microsoft Office 365
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, on Windows with files in OneDrive, the apps have the default option of auto-saving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all you’re doing without asking anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t actually test this one, but this feedback makes it sound like if you’re using Office 365
⏹️ ▶️ John and your file is in OneDrive, then it default auto-saves. And I’m wondering, so does it not default
⏹️ ▶️ John auto-save if the file isn’t in OneDrive? That would be a weird behavior that
⏹️ ▶️ John users would never guess. But anyway, it’s just another example of an app that we traditionally think of as a file-based
⏹️ ▶️ John app deciding, you know what, auto save is, is the sensible default for this situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alex Kentz writes, does Xcode work on files? How often do you hit a command S every day when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working in Xcode? There’s no number that can measure that that can go that high a billion times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I auto, I hit command S constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John In Xcode you hit command
⏹️ ▶️ John Absolutely. I have never hit command S in Xcode. Yeah. Oh no, Oh, absolutely.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco What are you hitting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John work? To save, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John To save what? The stuff I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just changed. The source
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that you’re editing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, yes. If you didn’t do that, what would happen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, what if the, see, now I’m exposing my Windows priors. But what if the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crashes spontaneously after I’ve just written a block of code that I don’t feel like rewriting or asking
⏹️ ▶️ John So Xcode, the reason, finish this thing, but I’ll tell you what my impression of how Xcode works is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let me, I’m gonna back up to the beginning because I interrupted Alex, if you will. So Alex Kent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, does Xcode work on files? How often do you hit the command S every day when working in Xcode? Autosave feels totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey natural in some apps and totally foreign in others. I have no solid rule for which is correct, but it’s not as simple as shoebox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versus files. I agree with pretty much everything Alex is saying, whether or not it makes any sense whatsoever. I agree with
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because Xcode, I mean, so clearly it works on files. Most IDs are very much file-based. In
⏹️ ▶️ John certain situations where the files are and what their call is actually significantly important. And in Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John and Xcode, it’s not as important as in other languages and other APIs, but it’s still kind of important where the files
⏹️ ▶️ John are and what they’re named, but it’s certainly a file-based app. My impression of the way Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John works, and the reason I don’t ever hit Command S is the only thing that I care about is,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, if it was, let’s pretend it was like old school file-based and you had to hit save. I would be like, okay, I’m type-ity,
⏹️ ▶️ John type-ity, type-ity. All right, now Command R, because I want to run my changes. But wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John you forgot to hit Command S, so when you hit Command R, actually what you’re running is the version of that file
⏹️ ▶️ John that you last saved three minutes ago. And so now you’re running the app, you think you’re running it, but really
⏹️ ▶️ John you have unsaved changes that were not part of your build. That never happens in Xcode. My impression
⏹️ ▶️ John is that when you hit Command R to run, doesn’t matter if you hit Command S in the last hour, when
⏹️ ▶️ John you hit Command R to run, every single one of your buffers is, it’s going to use
⏹️ ▶️ John what is in the file at the time it gets to compiling that thing. In fact, I will continue to
⏹️ ▶️ John type crap while it’s building, confident that it will get, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably already picked up the chain, like whatever point it hit that file, or especially if I’m editing like a comment or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So essentially, I treat Xcode like Apple Notes, where I never have to hit save.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is always saving my thing when it needs to. I’m also under the impression that it’s constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John auto-saving in the background. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s my impression. My sort of the equivalent of Command
⏹️ ▶️ John S is commit and push, because then if the meteor hits my house, you know, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John dead, my source code will be like, I always want to push as in get it out
⏹️ ▶️ John of my house, get it off of my computer, get it somewhere that is not here.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, that’s, I don’t, all I can say is that I’d never have to hit command S and it doesn’t affect my life.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so far I haven’t lost any work because of this, but Marco and Casey, you are hitting command S
⏹️ ▶️ John because you think, is that like, my case is that he’s hitting it because like, well, what if my computer crashes, I’ll lose
⏹️ ▶️ John that code. I just typed. Marco, why are you hitting command s?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I grew up in textmate doing web development and textmate.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know. Well, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so so textmate is basically an IDE for web development sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s like it’s a text editor. Then you can open open a whole bunch of files in and you can, you know, and if you’re working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a web app, you’re dealing with, you know, a directory tree full of files that, you know, And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in TextMate, if you don’t hit Command S, your data is not saved. And so when you go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the browser and hit refresh or rerun the script or whatever, you will not have whatever is unsaved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being run in your test. So I just developed the habit of like whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go to run whatever I’ve written, I hit Command S first.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I grew up in that same environment and have that exact habit, but I did not bring that habit with me to Xcode because it
⏹️ ▶️ John was so clear that it worked differently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I am a little bit more loosey-goosey about it in Xcode. For instance, if I do a find and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replace across multiple files in Xcode, I will do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that find and replace, and then I’ll just hit Run. I won’t think, are all those files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saved? Whereas in TextMate, I actually have to think about that. And you have to do Save All or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John is. If you did think about it, would you go to all the files that have the little M next to them in the sidebar and click
⏹️ ▶️ John on them and hit Command-S? I don’t even know what command as does in Xcode. Does it save every file
⏹️ ▶️ John without standing changes or just the one that’s in the currently active text editing thing? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just the current one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but because- Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not connected to anything like the elevator door close button.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And you two were just hitting command S to make yourselves happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, like, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t, like if you hit command S in notes, it’ll beep at you to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yell at you. Like, don’t save me, what are you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing? I feel like Xcode should do that. I mean, I would probably stop doing it eventually. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do it that often in notes, but yeah, it just, it’s that same carried over habit. Because it does, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the thing with notes, notes, again, notes makes more sense not to do that because there is no explicit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save action that the app is doing, like, on your behalf, like to a file. Whereas Xcode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is still working on individual files. And until you hit Command S or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run, or build and run the app, those files are not saved.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you sure it’s not constantly auto-saving in the background? I haven’t tested this, I’m just asking. Hold on, I’ll tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should check. I should check next time after I spend 10 minutes writing code and then i have not yet hit command
⏹️ ▶️ John or i will go look in the file system and see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i’m not a hundred percent sure, but i am like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can i just tested it because you can tell like whether it shows up in your get diff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah if you just type some code if you just type something and alt tab away sorry command tab away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know look at like it won’t oh wait a minute. Oh my god now it’s there
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m gonna tell you this autosaves every two seconds, doesn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gracious. Oh my God. Maybe did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John This is the year of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You can stop. I think it might just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco auto saving like whenever you switch away or do
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s auto saving like every 10. I think it’s constantly doing it. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, that’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John moving on, we
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey learned something new.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? All right. Eric DeRoyter writes, you can get back to the old save as model in Mac OS, I use a hybrid of auto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey save and save as so I have the benefits of auto saving with the mental model of using save as and system settings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, in desktop and dock, you disable closed windows when quitting an application. This will be in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to add, by the way, that setting is a thing that nobody would guess that I tried to find. I think what Glenn Fleischman had an article about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, what, why would you ever go to desktop and dock and look for
⏹️ ▶️ John a setting that says closed windows when quitting an application and think in any way that’s going to mess with the document model,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is an essential part of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And then secondarily, in keyboard, then keyboard shortcuts, you should create
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an entry under all applications for save as and assign it to command shift s and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you might want to get a true form ellipsis by hitting option semicolon again that will be in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to because the the uh the keyboard shortcut things that works in the menu system on the mac you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the menu item exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it appears in the
⏹️ ▶️ John menu so if you don’t know how to type in ellipsis and you just type three dots you’re not going to figure out why it’s not working because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just like a a text-based matching thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right i I forgot about that. Thank you. Then finally, for this portion, Emily Campbell writes, Nopad++
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Windows presents a pretty basic text editor. You open existing text files or make new files and they don’t save unless you save
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. The tabs for each document show very clearly which files are unsaved so you’re never confused. But here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best bit. You don’t need to save the files. It will remember forever the edits you’ve made to the unsaved files.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s obviously storing a copy somewhere under the hood. If you close the file, it asks you if you want to save your changes with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the options save, don’t save, or cancel, which is the close action. They’ll cancel the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey action of trying to close the file. If you close the application, it doesn’t ask you anything. It just remembers all your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey state without touching any of your original files. In my ideal world, every application would work this way. It’s literally the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best possible combination of both models. It never loses any of my data, but everything feels 100% intentional. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is how BBEdit works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like Marco was saying, you have to hit Command S because if you go refresh in the browser, you won’t see your changes if you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hit Command S, But I never worry about losing anything because for years and years and years, I forget when BB Edit
⏹️ ▶️ John started doing this, but it’s been many years. I have so many, as we’ve discussed in past episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have so many BB Edit windows open. Half of them have the little dot on them that they have unsaved changes
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. When I quit BB Edit, it never asked me anything. It just, it quits. And when I launch
⏹️ ▶️ John it, every window comes back to exactly where it was. It doesn’t retain undo history across launches, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe TechSmartt did at one point. And is that a feature or a bug? I’m just kind of used
⏹️ ▶️ John to it at this point. But this, I don’t know if it’s the best of both worlds, but it is a system I prefer.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t want auto-save, but you also want sort of the quote unquote protection of auto-save, BBEdit
⏹️ ▶️ John is effectively auto-saving your documents off to the side everywhere, but still presenting the model
⏹️ ▶️ John of, oh, you didn’t save these changes, so they’re not going to appear in the actual file, they’re just in my file off to the
⏹️ ▶️ John side that I’m using. And it works for untitled windows too. Like you can have like an untitled window open for months
⏹️ ▶️ John and just use it as a scratch pad. And every time you quit, restart, whatever, the untitled window is always exactly where you put it,
⏹️ ▶️ John size the way you made it. It’s just there, it’s called untitled 1572 or whatever huge number is on there.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a great system, especially if you love having lots of windows open. So I’m glad to hear that Notepad++
⏹️ ▶️ John does that on Windows. I’m telling you that BbEd does that on Mac and there’s probably other Mac apps that do it as well.
Reminder app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, finally for today, with regard to repeating reminders for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, Patrick de Montel writes, yes, DUE app is fine, due is fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but good task is what you want. It uses the reminders data, but keeps reminding every five or otherwise configured minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am an avowed due super fan, so I personally like having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different section for all this stuff. But if you really like the reminders app and want to just kind of supercharge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, apparently a good task is what you need to look at. And we’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually downloaded GoodTask years ago. It was in my App Store history because I believe, I’ve been ranting about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need occasionally for years. It is a very involved app. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does a lot and it kind of does like its own version of a lot of things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a full blown, full featured app. And that’s not really what I was looking for. I was looking for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much, much simpler that basically still like left reminders to be reminders to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a large degree, or like left, like I didn’t want something that added that much on top of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s what I’ve been vibe coding for the last day or two. I decided,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what? I need to learn these AI tools beyond just very quick little dumb tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me actually, you know, set up, I’m using Codex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this, but I first try the Xcode integration. It’s fine, but I like the full Codex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app better. So I’ve been using the full codex app and it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has been a remarkable experience. Um, I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impressed by it. Um, we can talk a little bit more about it now, if you want. Um, I have, I have some thoughts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, but suffice to say I’ve made my own app to do this and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do plan to release it. Um, I, I don’t expect there to be a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John necessarily cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m making like what’s best for me. Sometimes that works out and sometimes other people want it too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not a guarantee with things I make. So it might not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other users except me. But I am making it, I am gonna release it. It’s very, very simple. It’s almost done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I basically need to make screenshots and fix one screen of kind of a bad UI. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me excited about AI coding. It’s exactly, like what Jarm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is making. It’s the kind of thing that if I had to do all this from scratch, I just never would have made it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like this app just wouldn’t exist. But now by lowering the bar to how much work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is to make it. I was able to make it in like a day and a half while also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing many other things in my life. Like it’s been, you know, coming back from the vacation and catching up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on everything, like, you know, it’s been a lot and the stupid weather, like there’s been a lot going on in life. They’re just like stuff to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s not like this has taken me a day and a half of constant work. It, this has taken me like a day and a half of occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Oh, do this, do this to this and then, you know, Oh, I have to do something else now and come back to it later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and it’s been kind of amazing. I guess, do we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a minute to talk about it now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, yeah, I mean, I think we have a lot to get through, but if we can contain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco ourselves, you and I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you and I did not contain ourselves about Apple watch. So if we can contain ourselves about this, please, let’s do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe I’ll save it for when I actually release it. I will say that’s a good idea. The reason why I want to release it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, why not? I mean, if it can help somebody else. Great. I think it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty specific to the way I like things to be done, which is a banana system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that no one else should use. Everyone else should use more discipline and be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco organized than I am. But this ridiculous pile helps me with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my life such as it is. But also, a while back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the apps that I made to learn the basic Swift UI was called Coffee Ratio. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like, whenever I go upstate to my in-laws, they have, you know, pour over cone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big air pot that I brew coffee in for everybody up there. And it’s always a different number of people, depending on like who’s around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that day and who still wants coffee. And I never remembered like, how much water to beans do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use for this number of people or whatever? So I just made a really simple one screen app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called Coffee Ratio. And I actually made a really good icon if I can say so myself. I don’t know if it stands up today, but I liked it at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This was probably four or five years ago, at least. The problem is, if you make an app for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself on your iPhone, even if you have a paid developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account, the way that works is you open it up in Xcode, you build and run, you deploy it to the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if you change phones, that app is gone. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only way to get it back is to go to a Mac, download the app, figure out, register it with provisioning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and turn on developer mode for, and make sure, add that certificate to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the privacy permissions thing, so it trusts that developer account. And so it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big pain that isn’t always possible. And so when you’re making little personal utility apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for yourself for iOS, it’s actually easier to just release them to the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it is to try to manage that. So in many ways, even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one else ever installs it, as long as it’s something Apple will approve, it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way easier to just have it in the App Store than to try to manage that developer thing over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time for an app that you only occasionally use. So that’s why I actually am going to release this app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s not gonna become a big part of my business, I don’t think, because again, I don’t think it’s gonna fit what most people want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is so far fitting very well what I want. And I’ve been very impressed with the AI coding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ll get to that another time.
Sponsor: Aura Frames (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Aura Frames. So if you’re anything like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, you’ve got a gazillion photos on your phone. Photos that in a lot of cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are actually really good. And even if they aren’t really good from a photographic point of view, there are people that you really truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love. And they should live somewhere other than that phone. They should be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out in the world. And you can think to yourself, well, you know what I’ll do is I’ll get one of those god awful crappy photo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frames that I used to buy 20 years ago to give as gifts that I hated because they were ugly and the screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were worse. Well, I have a better idea. How about you check out Aura Frames? So imagine
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey an SD card or anything like that. It’s via a really genuinely well done and well designed iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, or Android too. and you can load up the photo frame remotely because it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via the app. And you might be thinking, oh Casey, but I surely only get like 10 megs of storage, right? Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, you get free unlimited storage. What’s more, if you’re giving this as a gift,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can personalize the frame before it arrives at the recipient’s house. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can preload it with photos, you can have a little welcome message like, you know, congratulations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I love you mom or whatever the case may be, all done without really opening up the box.
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Apple releases next week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we record this, it is Wednesday, the 25th of February.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in a week on March 4th, Apple is going to have an experience, an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple experience. And so, uh, just weatherbed at the verge, Apple is hosting a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey special Apple experience in New York city on Wednesday, March 4th at 9am Eastern, instead of at the Apple park location
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it typically uses for events. It’s also hosting press in the cities of London and Shanghai at the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time The invitation includes the words you’re invited in an Apple logo Depicted in segmented discs of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yellow green and blue the rumored colors of the new low-cost MacBook Otherwise, it provides no hints about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the purpose of the so-called experience However, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has previously said that he’s expecting Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to launch a low-cost 18 pro chip powered MacBook and new MacBook Airs MacBook Pros and Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey displays over the course of the next several weeks alongside the iPhone 17 E,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new base model iPad and an M4 iPad air. And maybe we’ll even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see a preview of Apple’s new AI infused Siri, which we’ll find out later is probably not so likely after all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, but yeah, this is happening a week from today. Uh, I know I was not invited as far as I know, neither of you two were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Unless I didn’t hear John, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John was not invited. Um, so they didn’t mention in this story, but like a
⏹️ ▶️ John theory that I saw Gruber speculated about and then German either echo Gruber’s
⏹️ ▶️ John speculation or confirm it with sources. I couldn’t really tell which was that it would be like
⏹️ ▶️ John a week of press releases like a Monday. They press release some stuff on Tuesday. They press release some stuff on
⏹️ ▶️ John Wednesday. The press release of stuff and then have the experience which is why it’s not an event on the Wednesday
⏹️ ▶️ John because the idea is and they’ve done this before where they do a press release each day announcing some products
⏹️ ▶️ John culminating in an in-person thing where presumably they’ll get to have people who are there will get to have hands-on experiences with
⏹️ ▶️ John some hardware. But just look at this list in the Verge thing. That’s a lot of stuff. I mean, there is a backlog because
⏹️ ▶️ John the M4 Pro and Max MacBook Pros essentially got delayed. They were supposed to be the end of last year and the chips weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ready, according to the rumors. So they kind of get shoved out into spring. But even if you ignore
⏹️ ▶️ John those, having new low-cost MacBook, new MacBook Air, new displays,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is in itself is a momentous event for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes, it happens once
⏹️ ▶️ John every decade. iPhone 17, a new base iPad, new
⏹️ ▶️ John new iPad Air. That’s a lot of products even for three days worth of press releases. And then you add on top of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John which what I have to assume was going to be the headlining feature, which is our new most powerful laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John which are most popular. Our laptops are the most popular Mac line. I don’t know if the most
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful laptops are the most popular, surely the MacBook Air is but anyway, the the highest profile that the
⏹️ ▶️ John glow, the highest glory level of laptops are the ones with the biggest laptop chips
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, and this would be them. And so it seems like it’s going to be a really busy week next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we’ll see. I mean, I’m very excited to see whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the low cost MacBook is interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I’m sure it’ll be interesting. It just will be interesting in a good or a bad way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, right. But like, you know, like, like there’s been some rumors of like, you know, what it will cut out. And we, I really did enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our, our theoretical thought experiment months ago about like, you know, what, how would would we cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down or what would we expect to be cut down to make this significantly cheaper?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember what we said? Someone was asking about that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco before the show. I’m like, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John already forgotten what we said. Because there was a Mac rumor story that we don’t have the notes for this episode saying, like, oh, here’s what we think will be
⏹️ ▶️ John this point, I’m like, we’ll just wait until next week. We’ll find out. There’s no reason speculating further. But we did long
⏹️ ▶️ John ago talk a lot about things we thought they could cut. And so we’ll see next week what they actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I believe my big thing was obviously like I was pretty sure they were going to cut Thunderbolt. I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll have to go back and listen to the episode to see. And to be clear, I don’t think, it wasn’t a predictions episode. It was a
⏹️ ▶️ John brainstorming episode where we were like, what do we think they could cut? Like, if you had to do this, what would you cut
⏹️ ▶️ John out or what could they cut out? It wasn’t a like, we’re now predicting, like we didn’t have any inside sources and we weren’t saying
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what Apple will do. I think we were more exploring the space of things that could be done to make a cheap laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John What can you remove to remove cost?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, cause I remember like one of the things that I was kind of theorizing a lot about was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t want to cannibalize sales of the MacBook Air. And so they actually might restrict it more than they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, just so that more people don’t choose it who would have bought the Air otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but just like the colors or the size better. So one of my theories was like, maybe they would make it app store only apps or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t think they would do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that really, but like that, like I was trying to figure out like what would they do to make sure, like for instance, that businesses don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy this. You know, having no video output would be a big one. Like, so you can’t connect it to projectors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know we weren’t gonna talk about this, but I guess now we’ll have to link it. One of the rumors was like, you can’t get an SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t get a one terabyte or larger SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Which has been rumored today.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not true today of the MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I was saying that was rumored today. Like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John was- Yeah, I know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m saying. This is the story of the
⏹️ ▶️ John that just came out that I guess we’ll now have to link. Sorry, Casey. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it has a whole bunch of rumored things. Again, I don’t wanna speculate, but that aligns with what you’re saying, Markov, like artificial
⏹️ ▶️ John segmentation. There’s no reason you can’t put a one terabyte SSD in this low cost one. Apple would charge through the nose for
⏹️ ▶️ John it and it would make the price go up. But like to your point, OK, well, once you if you if you spec this
⏹️ ▶️ John out so that it costs way more than a MacBook Air, wouldn’t you rather have these people buying a MacBook Air?
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, well, we’ll see. We’ll see what they do. There’s also rumors, as you would imagine, about like how
⏹️ ▶️ John low cost will it really be now with the RAM prices going? That’s because of the whole, you know, AI server
⏹️ ▶️ John farms and everything using all this thing. So we’ll find out next week. Presumably they will announce pricing as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m actually most excited about the color rumors. I mean, this this story mentions that there’s there’s a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors of of it coming in colors and what those colors might be. And yeah, as we always do, we look at the invitation
⏹️ ▶️ John like this. Tell us anything. Well, it does. I mean, it’s a bunch of like it’s got a it’s got a spectrum
⏹️ ▶️ John of colors from yellow to green to blue. Those are the only three colors of this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yellow, green and blue. It seems weird, but you know, I’m I’m open to any kind of colors
⏹️ ▶️ John and laptops that are visible to the human eye, unlike the sky blue on MacBook Air, which is, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John visible to the human eye, but it’s tough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like at least these won’t just look like weird white balance differences.
⏹️ ▶️ John see, and maybe they will. Maybe they’ll look like pea colored white, but it’s green. Is that green or is that yellow? And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll find out, but you know, there’s some signs of hope with the orange iPhone 17 Pro and also the
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors of the deep red iPhone 18, which maybe we’ll talk about in a future show. So fingers crossed. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John of all these things that they’re talking about announcing, I am actually the most interested in the low cost MacBook Pro, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s such a good idea. Like I think it’s a product they should make. It’s just all about, kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the 16E. It’s all about execution. What do they lay out? What do they put in? I still think
⏹️ ▶️ John leaving MagSafe on the 16E was a terrible mistake. Will they make a similar terrible mistake with this thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or will they get the balance just right for a thing that is cheaper than the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air and less powerful than the MacBook Air, but like this is the time for that because the MacBook Air is so massively overpowered
⏹️ ▶️ John for the things that most people do with it there’s room for this to exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have, this is by far the product that I’m most interested in like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in seeing what it is. Because it has all these unknowns. And what I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always hoped for this product was that it would be like, you know, kind of like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 12 inch came out. Obviously it had a lot of problems, limitations, as we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talked about at length, especially that damn keyboard. But, you know, it had a lot of other problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a lot of people bought it despite that because it was so much smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lighter than everything else that everybody was like, oh my God, I would love a smaller Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fit some role in my life or just to be delightful when you pick it up. If this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t have too many significant trade-offs, I could see a lot of people, maybe myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like wanting it for its fun color and its small size. That could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough. Like if it is a delightful looking and feeling product, many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will want it. And so, you know, one thing that we heard a long time ago, I don’t know if this was true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We heard a long time ago that Phil Schiller was responsible for pushing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up market some of the details about the 12 inch MacBook. I believe things like memory capacities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. And he apparently was like the champion of that in the company of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making the small computer not just a bad low spec computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but giving it like some premium options or premium capacities. It
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a bad high spec computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like, because the idea is like, yes, some people will buy something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s the smallest cheapest one. But also some people would buy a small one because it’s nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them in some way. And they want it, but they would also either need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or want a little bit higher spec in some way. So you know if the rumor is true that came out today that the thing maxes out of 512
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs like you know that’s gonna limit some things you know if it I’m sure there’s only gonna be one RAM option maybe 16
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know we’ll see how that goes but there if it’s a good enough product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s really interesting if it’s really a visually or tactically or what what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the tactile yes if it’s visually or tactily appealing to people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people will buy who don’t necessarily need to be the cheapest Mac. They just want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that they can use and the better it is possible to spec it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more people that will fit in its range. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very curious to see this from that point of view. Also I have been saying for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like one thing I was hoping for with the Apple Silicon era was for them to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a successor or or spiritual successor at least to the 12-inch MacBook with the Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they really, they haven’t quite done that. Like the MacBook Air has been made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closer to that, but it’s still not close. They still have not really flexed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and shown like, what is the most amazing, very small computer we can make with our new technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we have now. Again, the MacBook Air is very good and it has very, it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no compromises. It’s a great computer overall, but it’s not nearly as small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and light as the 12-inch was. It’s not even close. So if they give themselves permission
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make more trade-offs, to say, we’re gonna make a computer that’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compromised in the MacBook Air, which is almost not at all compromised. We’re gonna make a computer that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit compromised in some ways, but that will allow us to make something really awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some other form. You know, typically the form factor, the size, the weight. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like there would be so many fewer trade-offs required to do that now with Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all their modern components and stuff now. I was hoping this computer would be that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know that it will be. It sounds like it’s mainly there to fill the cheap spot and they’re gonna market it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot next week and then we’ll never hear about it again. That’s probably the more likely outcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Similar to when they release a new base model iPad. You know, the new base model iPad, They sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of them. No one ever talks about them. They’re not interesting. They do sell a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, mostly like to schools and stuff like they sell a bunch, but no one cares after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day it’s announced, like if we get one day press and we’re like, Oh cool. They’ve updated the new, the base iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now it’s $5 cheaper and comes with the a whatever chip. Okay. And then no one talks about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it again. I hope that’s not what this Mac will do. I, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fear that it is, but I hope this is actually a more interesting Mac model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And hopefully we’ll know in a week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it actually might have more staying power than the base iPad or even the base iMac or
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac period, which is a great comparison because the iMacs became colorful, and they all love them, but we don’t talk about them. But we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about them because nobody buys desktop Macs. That’s why we don’t talk about them. But with laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Why would you john? Yeah, but but with
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops, everybody buys laptops. And most people I see in the world do not have a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, they have a MacBook Air because it’s cheaper. It’s the people buy the cheapest Mac laptop because
⏹️ ▶️ John they need a laptop. They don’t understand why they should pay thousands of dollars for a bunch of crap they don’t understand. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they say, well, what’s the cheapest Mac laptop? And then maybe they get, you know, option crawled by a salesperson
⏹️ ▶️ John into getting a bigger SSD, which they should probably do anyway, let’s be honest. Or, you know, whatever, but mostly like base
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Airs are everywhere, but that’s because that’s their cheapest laptop. What happens when there is
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially the equivalent of an iMac, a colorful, interesting computer that is also cheaper?
⏹️ ▶️ John Assuming it is not compromised in a terrible way that everybody hates, I can see it being very popular
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the fact that it is colored and unlike the iMacs, it’s not a situation where it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was never gonna buy a desktop anyway. So yeah, they’re cute and everything, but who cares? Cause this is very relevant to people’s lives. But it all depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on like, what are the balance of features and price that this thing comes out with? And in terms of the size, the rumor is
⏹️ ▶️ John that the screen will be a little bit smaller, like diagonally a little bit smaller, but I haven’t seen any rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John saying one way or the other about like, will it be thinner? because I feel like they could make it thinner because
⏹️ ▶️ John an A18 Pro is gonna be even less hot than an M anything. So you have the space to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it thinner, but to the point of the Phil Schiller thing before, but is that, can you make it thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and cheaper? Like, I’m not sure that they’re gonna go for the old 12 inch MacBook.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like this is the thing that fits inside underscore David Smith inside jacket pocket. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if they can do that and also make it cheaply, and that’s one of the rumors, by the way, they’ve come up with some new process for making
⏹️ ▶️ John the unibody aluminum case that is also cheaper, a way to pull cost out of the thing. But I just like
⏹️ ▶️ John the thinnest you can possibly make it tends not to be a cost saving maneuver. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see. Like they have some inherent thinness savings by using an A level chip, I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like, because, you know, you’re producing less heat, right? So that is in there. But I don’t know if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to really push it, because again, you do need room for the battery and everything. I don’t want them to use scalp batteries again
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, because that’s also expensive. So we’ll see. It’ll be very, very interesting computer and multiple fronts.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I guess the 17 is in there as well. Like, because, you know, again, 16, I think should absolutely have had MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Will the 17 have MagSafe? Will they fix that one mistake? We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, can you can you imagine if the new low cost MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also offered a cellular chip?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I will say out. No, I don’t think that’ll happen. I don’t think that’ll happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John That doesn’t seem like a low cost option, but I you know, I can see where you’re out there hoping for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, like if this rumor is true, that like they’re only using one NAND chip, they’re not even using their own wifi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John There’s no way. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not even using the, the rumor. They’re not even using the end one. It makes me say no C anything in there either.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Agree. Agree.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I, again, I’m not trying to say I expect this, but holy cow, that would be so hilarious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to watch Marco and I have a crisis of whatever, as we look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this, we would have a crisis,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco would buy one instantly. We’re talking about no crisis.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you know, it’s, here’s something that’s like pretty underpowered and arguably not very good in a lot of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And yeah, how
⏹️ ▶️ John underpowered it is. We’ll see. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t anticipate them making like a cellular nanotexture version of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John with a 1 terabyte SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs of RAM for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they would be amazing though. No, just very briefly to kind of build on what Marco was saying earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a 12 inch MacBook. I think Underscore and I were the two biggest 12 inch MacBook fans and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the only 12 inch MacBook fans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guys are Matt Alexander.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. But I love that thing. Like it was a piece of trash. It was one one of those things like when it was brand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new, it was awful, but I loved it because especially compared to the contemporary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey machines at the time, it was impossibly thin and impossibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light. And the fact that it was woefully underpowered and the fact that to my recollection, the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life was not great. And more than anything else, it had only one USB-C port, not Thunderbolt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind you, USB-C port, which made everything difficult. I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love that computer. I absolutely adored that computer because it felt portable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a way that no other computer I’ve ever owned has ever felt that portable. Aaron has an M1 MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also really liked that computer, but it feels like a boat compared to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, uh, the 12 inch MacBook. It was just unbelievably light and cool and fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would love for them to go that route, but I think this is just going to be something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smaller and cheaper and mostly unremarkable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, just to give some to give some perspective. So the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 14-inch MacBook Pro is 3.5 pounds. The 13-inch MacBook Air is 2.7. The 12-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was 2.0. Yeah, that’s a big difference. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like it’s about the same difference between the 14-inch and the 13-inch Air. So like it’s it’s about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that same difference, but like in at in relative of terms compared to the Air, it’s even bigger. Like 2.7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 2.0, that’s a huge difference. And nothing else has come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close. The 11 inch, the old 11 inch MacBook Air, I think was a 2.3 or 2.4 or something like that. So that was kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the two, but yeah, 2.0 pounds. Nothing has been like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, now, I mean, if you have, I think, if you have an 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inch iPad with a magic keyboard, I think you’re somewhere above that. I think part of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey marketing’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argument in the meantime has basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been that the 11 inch iPad covers that role. And it sort of does, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cover it well. It doesn’t cover it nearly as well as the 12 inch did for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who wanted that kind of form factor. It’s not the same. The magic keyboard and iPad is a brick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love the magic keyboard and iPad combination, but you’re right, it is not light by any stretch of the imagination.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m excited to see how next week turns out. I’m very curious to see what they do launch, what they do announce.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m starting to get a little bit of the itch to replace my M3 Max MacBook Pro, only a teeny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit because it’s really an incredible computer and I have nothing to complain about. See also my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’m starting to get a little bit of the itch, so I’m starting to kind of think to myself, well maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t think this is happening next week, but when the OLED touch screen allegedly launches. I think German has most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently said at the end of the year, maybe I’ll do something then so I can try the touch screen, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think there’s anything about that, that like I don’t want to touch screen MacBook pro, but I feel like for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show, if nothing else, I need to get one and try it. So we’ll see what happens. But I’m very excited for next weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see, even if it’s, you know, kind of silly stuff that is just press releases or whatever. I’m still excited to see what Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say. So we’ll see.
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US Mac Mini factory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, moving on. Apple apparently has been planning to, and continues to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan to, make some Mac Minis in the United States. They put up a newsroom post about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we record this, I think yesterday, the day before yesterday, yeah, yesterday. So Apple on February
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 24th announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston. Sorry, I’m reading from the newsroom post. Bringing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey future production of Mac Mini to the US for the first time. The company will also expand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new advanced manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey center beginning later this year.” This newsroom post was mostly unremarkable. Basically, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the Mac minis we’re going to build here. Which ones? Who knows? But it’s going to happen. But John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you had found, and maybe somebody pointed it to you, I don’t know, but you had found a Wall Street Journal video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I think was like eight to 10 minutes, somewhere in that neck of the woods. There’s also an article, we’ll put a link to the article in the video in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, but the video was fascinating. Can you tell me about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this is clearly like Apple invited Wall Street Journal to come, you know, to pair with their press
⏹️ ▶️ John release. And again, the press releases we’re going to be making some Mac minis in the U S eventually. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John just before we get to the video, just to talk about that, uh, obviously you look at that through the lens of like, you know, a piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of into the Trump administration or whatever, but setting all that aside, uh, it’s a good idea
⏹️ ▶️ John in general for Apple to try to make some stuff in places other than China. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John increasing their manufacturing in India a lot, and there’s some tension on that with China trying to do things that stops
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple from increasing their manufacturing in India. And yes, manufacturing in the US is
⏹️ ▶️ John much more difficult for a variety of reasons, but it is a good idea for Apple to try. And
⏹️ ▶️ John historically, it has always been paired with this distasteful appeasement of the Trump administration, but
⏹️ ▶️ John setting that aside, no matter who is president, I think it’s a good idea for Apple to try this.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can only do it for really low volume simple to manufacture products yada yada
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’re never going to get anywhere if you don’t start somewhere so yes
⏹️ ▶️ John do make trash can Mac pros in Texas or the Bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac pros, which was also in Texas. I guess they do everything in Texas probably for tax reasons Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John do try to make some Mac amenities here. Not all the Mac amenities, but just some of them I think it’s the thing they should do and
⏹️ ▶️ John And this video is part of their PR push for this. And so like I don’t poo poo this just because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a it’s a also a bonus appeasement of the Trump administration. I think it’s a good idea. Please
⏹️ ▶️ John do try to do this. Figure out. It’s not a good position for us
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in where all the manufacturing is concentrated in one place. And it’s not a good position to remove all the manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John from our own country. These are some skills we should have. Presumably these can, you know, anyway, that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my position on the manufacturing angle, which is what Apple’s promoting. But the video is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very quickly before we get to the video, I’m sorry. A friend of mine pointed out to me an Apple Insider article from,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, yesterday as well, which says, I didn’t prep this for the show, and I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But my recollection is that it said basically, this was planned during the Biden administration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, obviously, they’re really ramping all the rhetoric up because of the idiot in charge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this has been in the works for a fair bit of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John things don’t happen over. In general, it’s a good idea to start moving down this
⏹️ ▶️ John path to try to do more manufacturing here. And the fact that they’re taking their PR wins for it or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John as a political advantage is the least of the bad things they’re doing. But I think this is a good idea. Please do
⏹️ ▶️ John try to make stuff in the US. Figure out where the gaps are, and we’ll talk about that in overtime. And
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s shore up our ability to do things that we think, you know, manufacture things that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we think we should be able to manufacture here. Um, the video is, you know, it’s, it’s a companion
⏹️ ▶️ John to the, to the press release. Let’s invite the wall street journal. And let’s just take them on a little tour of a bunch of stuff. And it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just cover what Apple is doing. It covers a bunch of stuff, um, in the region
⏹️ ▶️ John of like tech, high tech manufacturing stuff. And as some people put it in the chat room, this is mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John like final assembly and stuff, but there, but not entirely. Like, so, um, one of the things they talk about is,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, a silicon wafer factory in Texas that makes the, if you’ve ever seen this process,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as cool as the ASML machines that we talked about before, but still when they get these big disks that they print
⏹️ ▶️ John the chips onto, those silicon wafers, how do they get the wafer? And the process is delightfully analog
⏹️ ▶️ John in that they melt down a bunch of silicon and then goop it out into a big cylinder. And it ends with
⏹️ ▶️ John like a little like soft serve tip on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s molten. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get soft serve and they turn off the machine and it makes that little tip? does that, but with but with silicon,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fascinating to look at. Is this lumpy? It’s like the most imprecise, wavy, lumpy thing you’ve ever seen
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the most precise things that human beings make on top of it. So that’s fun. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple angle there. So there’s this company. What is it called? Global Wafers, No Space Capital G, Capital
⏹️ ▶️ John W. It’s a Taiwan based company, but they have manufacturing facilities in Texas.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple, I forget. I didn’t get the details. I put I put scare quotes. Apple encourages
⏹️ ▶️ John its suppliers to buy wafers from the global wafer manufacturing facility
⏹️ ▶️ John in Texas. Again, this is not a U.S. company. This is a Taiwan based company, but they do manufacture the wafers
⏹️ ▶️ John in Texas. So Apple gets TSMC to buy their wafers
⏹️ ▶️ John from global wafers in Texas. So they ship the wafers from Texas to Taiwan and then TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ John with its machines from ASML and wherever they were, was the Netherlands, I think like anyway, It’s it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John global operation, but like Apple is doing this because they’re trying to build up more of a manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John base in the US and they really are global wafers really is Manufacturing these wafers in Texas like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not just final assembly or anything Same thing with the TSMC Arizona plants, which I’ve had stuff in the show notes for
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s probably over a year now Maybe we’ll get to it eventually but suffice it to say TSMC another Taiwanese
⏹️ ▶️ John company is Building huge plants in Arizona to make stuff that it’s just not cutting-edge like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re building the a16 there and a bunch of other stuff on older processes. But anyway, this is what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s there. They’re throwing the weight around to try to do things that like TSMC would otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ John not be motivated to buy wafers from Texas. It’s far away from Taiwan. Why would we buy wafers from you
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s someplace closer where we can get them probably for cheaper? Why wouldn’t we do that? But Apple through its deals
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently is using its weight to make that happen. So that’s interesting. Another thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that is in this video thrown out as a fact with no sourcing, but it’s a Wall Street Journal video,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just saying like, they didn’t even say like Apple told us or whatever, they just said flat out,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sells fewer than 1 million Mac minis per year. Like does Apple know you’re saying that Apple never
⏹️ ▶️ John tells you how much they sell of anything anymore. They used to years and years ago and earnings calls tell you like break down their product
⏹️ ▶️ John lines. And they said, Why are we doing that? We’re not gonna tell you. We’re not gonna tell you anything about how we can try to back solve Good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we’re never gonna tell you how many MacBook Airs how many MacBook Pros how many you know, they do not break down their stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. But I found it fascinating, like because that’s a small number of Macs. Obviously, Macs don’t sell as
⏹️ ▶️ John many as iPhones, but less than a million. First of all, that could be 10, that could be 900,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John Less than a million, but like, were you both, any of you shocked by this number? I
⏹️ ▶️ John put the number of Mac minis way higher than that. Yeah, I was surprised by that. I mean, I don’t know if this includes
⏹️ ▶️ John the current open claw, like surge in Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, that’s not a lot of Mac minis. Another thing that I found exciting in this video when
⏹️ ▶️ John they, so like there’s this press release, oh, we’re gonna be making Mac minis or whatever. And they do on these tours, they did a tour of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Global Wafers Factory and they show video of the Arizona TSMC stuff. And then they
⏹️ ▶️ John also go into the place where they’ll be manufacturing the Mac minis. And it’s a giant empty warehouse because
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing is there. And it really undercuts the press release. It’s like, we’re gonna be making some Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John minis in the US and here’s where we’re gonna do it. Like, oh, in this big empty room? It’s like, well, it won’t be empty
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually. but suffice it to say, it’s not like tomorrow they’re gonna put the
⏹️ ▶️ John lever and Mac minis will start coming out. It’s a giant empty building. So still they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John put the stuff in that building and hire the people who work in the building to make some of the 1
⏹️ ▶️ John million Mac minis that they sell per year, less than 1 million Mac minis that they sell per year. So I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John that part of their press tour was ill-considered. Don’t show me the empty factory for the thing you just announced.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the most exciting part for me, and the part that of course they talked about the least, was, and they mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John in this press release of like, where did it say in the press release? Like they were also increasing their AI
⏹️ ▶️ John server manufacturing at the factory. They’re already doing this. Like this is rumored in Apple’s, we
⏹️ ▶️ John build AI servers that run, you know, private cloud compute presumably or whatever, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re calling them AI servers, not just servers, right? So they’re built, why would Apple ever build his own servers? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumor was they were putting M2 Ultras in them to run AI workloads and that was their private cloud compute
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or whatever. And everyone was like, what are these Apple servers? Like what, what, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know nothing about them other than they supposedly exist. Even Apple wouldn’t tell us what they’re running. I don’t think they
⏹️ ▶️ John ever mentioned anything. It was just rumors about what’s in them. This video shows you Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John servers being assembled at this factory. And so I’m going through the video and freeze framing
⏹️ ▶️ John and like the whole journal articles and the press things. I’m like, what are these things? What is in an Apple server?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do they look like Apple hardware? And I have a bunch of images in the show notes, but just go watch the video.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just going to link the video because these are all essentially screen captures from the video, all the or the Wall Street Journal article.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John went full Zapruder or however you pronounce it on this. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, it looks like the answer is they have eight ultra chips in each one in about what looks like about a three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or four U tall case to you. Maybe that may be
⏹️ ▶️ John And also the answer, the question of whether this looks like an X serve. No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not a beautiful Apple piece of machinery. Like I mean, maybe it’s. But you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what? What’s funny about it, though, is like it. Like, have you seen other servers? Like if you compare this to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a super micro or whatever, this is way prettier than those. Everything is symmetrical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything lines up. Everything is like centered and a lot. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, it’s not outside the realm, but there are some, so I’ve seen servers that look equivalently good, but the point is it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the X serve. The X serve was styled by Apple’s industrial design group to look
⏹️ ▶️ John nicer than any other server you’ve ever seen. This looks like basically slightly better
⏹️ ▶️ John than average rack mount system. So to give you an example, this is way better than the ones I’ve seen. It has
⏹️ ▶️ John holes for ventilation on the front and the back as servers do, because they bring in the cold air from one side and they shoot
⏹️ ▶️ John out hot air on the other side. You got the hot aisles and the cold aisles and the holes are just it’s a flat piece of metal with
⏹️ ▶️ John holes in it. Apple doesn’t do that anymore. Every hole that Apple makes has to be. They’re completely
⏹️ ▶️ John hidden like it is on like the studios or whatever, or like carefully machined and made aesthetically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope. These are just the normal holes you would see. like there’s no real branding
⏹️ ▶️ John or styling of it at all. It’s just like bent pieces of metal, as it should, because it’s a serve. I’m not saying it should be fancy looking,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s fascinating to see that when Apple makes stuff for their own internal use, they don’t necessarily deploy the full
⏹️ ▶️ John force of their hardware design group to make them beautiful for such a utilitarian thing. But then, yeah, as Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out, you get to see what’s inside them. And there’s very clearly eight little
⏹️ ▶️ John things in there that look like presumably each one of those eight things is like a computer unit
⏹️ ▶️ John of some kind, maybe each one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re eight giant heatsinks, and it looks like heatsinks for ultra-class chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they look, they’re big. Like, the heatsinks are large. Like, if you look at the guts of a Mac Pro with the ultra chip in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, like, it kind of looks like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder if it’s not two chips under each one of them, because they’re kind of split in the middle. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s weird that they allowed video crews to, because you can see them assembling, you can see them sticking things into it, you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John like the presumably redundant power supplies and all like, you know, how large the things
⏹️ ▶️ John are and them sliding into the racks and all this other stuff. And, you know, of course, the Wall Street Journal people have no
⏹️ ▶️ John interest in this. This is totally only of interest to like, you know, hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John nerds who are interested like, what kind of things is Apple making for itself? Especially if you were like an XServe fan
⏹️ ▶️ John when Apple stopped making for people who don’t remember this long ago. Apple used to sell rack mount server hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John that they made themselves and advertised on their website. And they stopped. They got out of that business.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now they’re back into making hardware just for their own because you can’t buy these no one is buying
⏹️ ▶️ John these I mean They’re just Apple manufactures them for itself to put in its own data
⏹️ ▶️ John centers and as Marco talked about in an earlier episode we’ll see how long that lasts with
⏹️ ▶️ John With the Google deal and them running on the Google’s TPUs and everything like that But here they are in the flesh
⏹️ ▶️ John running off the assembly line and Apple says it’s expanding this manufacturing So for right now, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re building more and more of these things And I think they’re fascinating, especially since like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you got one of these, if it really has eight ultras inside it, first of all, it’s an expensive computer, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John And second of all, how do you address those eight ultras? Does it present as
⏹️ ▶️ John eight individual addressable, like, is it running eight copies of the OS or is there one copy
⏹️ ▶️ John of some of OS that’s running, that’s powering all, like, I just would love to know everything
⏹️ ▶️ John about these. Are they running Linux against the ultras?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Or are they running like-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So my best guess is that each one of these eight units is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a Mac studio with an ultra like re reengineered to fit into this enclosure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re just eight individual computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re just addressable. Like, like, how are they addressed? Like, what is the KVM like interface into situation?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, are they are they completely controlled from the command line? Is there a virtual display thing running on them? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, because, you know, as Marco will talk about in some future episode, I’m sure, like, even though Apple makes lots of things that people
⏹️ ▶️ John like put in racks like the little Mac minis and everything. They’re not really designed to be headless
⏹️ ▶️ John computers. There’s lots of affordances to make you be able to use them that way. But when you have like a rack mount Linux server, like
⏹️ ▶️ John at no point are you bringing up like a virtual screen on the thing to do anything like you. You don’t even bring up the console these days
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you’re like really in deep doo doo trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John something in the data center. So I just loved how I know how they manage fleets
⏹️ ▶️ John of these things when every like what is this like a two or three you a
⏹️ ▶️ John rack mount thing with eight individual virtual Mac studios. Like how do they present
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves? Like what are their, you know, what OS do they run? Do they running a custom variant? Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to stare at the frames in the video and see if you can discern anything, check out the Wall Street Journal video. Fascinating
⏹️ ▶️ John brief glimpse into the inside world of Apple hardware that no one can ever buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, OS, I’m sure it’s probably just running the private cloud compute, you know, server, OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I know they gave that to security researchers, but I don’t know how security researchers
⏹️ ▶️ John run it. Like, is that entirely headless? Do they run it in, I don’t understand that whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, if you have insider information, please feel free to reach out. We’re good for it, I promise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the seven people who know how Apple’s RackMAT AI servers work, please tell us. You never know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Normally our beat is we get rumors about USB ports and stuff. This is a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside of that, but I’m still curious.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we don’t even know the right questions to ask about these. That’s the problem.
#askatp: Home screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of questions, let’s do some Ask ATP. And Sagar Patel writes, can you talk about your current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone setups on iOS 26? I’m curious to see your home screens, lock screens, and widgets, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We did a member special about this way back in the olden days of July 2024. ATP Insider roast my home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have put my home screen and lock screen in the show notes. John has put his home screen and lock screen in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t believe in homework. Marco Arment has yet to do so, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John okay. He doesn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John reminded about about it five times because he’s not done with his app yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I uploaded it though. It’s in the CMS. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John can show you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to give us the link to it. Alright.
#askatp: Home screens (John)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s start with John and let’s start with your lock screen. So we will take a look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that first. I’m seeing what appears to be a very, very cute picture of your dog, Daisy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have the flashlight in the bottom left as you should. The camera, the bottom right, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also concur with and no widgets whatsoever. I’m a little surprised by that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So my my lock screen is a picture rotation thing. I have this same.
⏹️ ▶️ John a collection of photos that I have made for myself to be nice vertical
⏹️ ▶️ John lock screen images.
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple tries so hard every time they update the OS to destroy, and it’s successful
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the time to destroy. I make these images, I carefully align and crop them, and
⏹️ ▶️ John every new version of iOS is like, I know you carefully align and crop these, but I don’t care what you did.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m screwing up all the crops. Good luck getting them back with this interface where you have to like touch and drag with
⏹️ ▶️ John two fingers, but not zoom, but just drag with two. It’s the worst interface in the world when you’re trying to like nudge
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s talk about workouts
⏹️ ▶️ John watch. Well, anyway, trying to align these, the crops of these images with pixel precise,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, being pixel precise on a phone, the way they make you do it on this thing is maddening.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just noticed recently they screwed up a crop on another one of mine. So they do not respect the work I do
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to make well composed lock screens, but I do. There’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, seven or 10 pictures. It’s mostly my wife, my kids, my dog. That’s what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s that’s what I have pictures of. So I didn’t want to put any of my kids in my way up here. This is one of the many pictures of my dog. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John my lock screen. I do no customization lock screen other than I think I’ve changed
⏹️ ▶️ John the like the the numerals and the clock to be a little bit bolder than default. And
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not the liquid glassy like I turned off the you know, that you notice they’re just like white things.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re opaque, they’re not glassy, but no, no widgets, no changes to any of the other default stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s my lock screen. It’s very boring. And my home screen will also be boring. Again, not everyone has heard or can
⏹️ ▶️ John hear the member special because not everyone’s a member. But we go over the lock screen in detail on that. And I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you it has essentially not changed since twenty twenty four, which honestly, some things about it probably should change.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think in that twenty twenty four special, you guys both asked about Google Authenticator being
⏹️ ▶️ John on the home screen. I’m like, well, I’m transitioning away from it and the transition is not done. The transition is done.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still on my home screen. It’s in a place that is very difficult for me to reach the way I hold my phone, kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John calendar, which as I discussed in the member special, I never use Apple calendar. It is purely there so I can
⏹️ ▶️ John see the words Tuesday and 24 on my home screen. That’s it. It is a graphic
⏹️ ▶️ John display that it shows the date, but I never tap it. Uh, and authenticator is right next to
⏹️ ▶️ John it and it’s really hard for me to reach. I basically never tap it. I should evict that and put something
⏹️ ▶️ John else there, but if I’m going to put something there, it has to be something that I don’t ever want to tap. And so I’m not sure what would go there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Authenticator is still there. All my other apps are basically the same. If you wanna understand the logic of them, picture
⏹️ ▶️ John me holding my phone with my right hand, with my thumb sweeping across from,
⏹️ ▶️ John my thumb sort of coming from the lower right corner and sweeping in a radius across, and you’ll see that it is easy
⏹️ ▶️ John for my thumb to find messages, Overcast, Ivory, YouTube, Slack, Instagram,
⏹️ ▶️ John Find My, Calendar, Reminders. Those are the hot items. Those are the items,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I guess Gmail I can reach a little bit too. Those are the hot items that I am reaching all the time. Instapaper probably
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t be there. I do use Instapaper a lot, but I don’t access it. I mostly add things to it. I don’t access it that
⏹️ ▶️ John much, but again, it’s been in that spot on the home screen for ages, so I tend not to move it, and I’m not sure what I would
⏹️ ▶️ John replace it with. And also part of it is aesthetic. I know there’s no, like, I don’t have widgets, and
⏹️ ▶️ John my background is 100% pure black, as it has always been. So I’m not doing anything styling-wise there,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the way the icons sort of form a complete thing, Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I put it this way, I wouldn’t want an icon on this home screen that like stands out and doesn’t fit in with
⏹️ ▶️ John the other ones in a way that I find ugly. And so it’s the paper with, it’s just, you know, a black
⏹️ ▶️ John eye and a white background is inoffensive and doesn’t really upset the balance. So it continues to stay there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I do still have Twitter in the dock. I find the dock incredibly difficult to reach the way I
⏹️ ▶️ John hold my phone. So I never hit, those are items there that I essentially never tap.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Twitter if when you launch it now just says whatever is gone. Sorry about that. Try this app.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m leaving it there as essentially a tombstone, a memorial, a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco place of honor. I love this so much. I forgot
⏹️ ▶️ John used iPhone. I mean, it’s going to be it’s going to be another decade before some other app replaces this as
⏹️ ▶️ John my most used iOS app. But Twitter if it was before it was discontinued before
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter was destroyed, was by far my most used iOS app. days it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John Ivory which is essentially replaced Twitter for me. So it’s down there and it’s a little place of honor. Everything else is nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting. There’s maps in Google Maps because I tend to use both. There’s camera in the camera spot.
⏹️ ▶️ John FaceTime, App Store, the Kindle app when I read stuff. Like, you know, it’s not exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Home I guess replaced Nest. I think I might have had Nest there at some point before Nest. Yeah, Nest app went away and got replaced by Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Home, But yeah, it’s my home screen.
#askatp: Home screens (Casey)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So, for me, I have a very similar story with regard to my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lock screen. This is a rotation and it just so happened that a picture of Penny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came up in the rotation. To be clear, I don’t have any particular album or anything like that. I have faces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I say, whatever you want, Apple, just pick photos that are either Aaron or the kids or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Penny. Not carefully composed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John individually framed. No, goodness, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ain’t nobody got time for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have time for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So anyway, so I do have a couple of widgets. On the bottom left, I have caret weather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey showing me the next several hours of weather. And then on the bottom right is my calendar. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see here that there’s a notification that the price is right would be recording from 10 59 a.m. to 12 p.m. That’s adorable.
⏹️ ▶️ John that on your calendar?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because one of the many calendars I have is that channels emits an iCal set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of calendar entries for the things it’s recording. And it just so happened when I I took this picture that that was the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing on my calendar because I work for myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should actually put a weather widget down there. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John not opposed to having wages. I just don’t, I don’t know. I like the fact that the current weather thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is very fairly unobtrusive and like lightweight and doesn’t take up a lot of room, although
⏹️ ▶️ John it probably would mess up some of my composition. So I’ll think about that, but I would definitely never put a calendar thing that would show me what my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, it’s, this is me. I like to be informed about these sorts of things. Do I need to be? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope, but I don’t know. I like having I like knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you like the glassy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey digits. Yeah, I don’t mind them I mean, I never really thought about it until you said said something a minute ago
⏹️ ▶️ John found them physically hard to see like contrast wise like that’s why I changed it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the look I have to be clear. I think these the the numerals this glassy sort of smoke glass look I think it does look
⏹️ ▶️ John very attractive. I just found it hard to read. Yeah. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, then my home screen I don’t think this has changed in a couple of years with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the exception of of maybe Home Assistant. I think Home Assistant was already there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have adopted a two-screen approach for my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey launcher. It used to be I had four or five pages. I curated where everything was, particularly in the first two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the third and fourth, I still curated where things were, but to a lesser degree. Now I have just two pages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you’re only seeing the first one here. And there’s a giant caret forecast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey widget at the top. That’s a two-row tall widget. so it shoves my icons down.
⏹️ ▶️ John wait, so let’s pause here. So you have, on your lock screen, you’ve got the carrot weather widget, and then on your home screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John fully a third of the icons is taken up by another weather widget. For someone who never leaves their
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey much do you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John know about the weather?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Partially, the problem is, is I never look at it on the lock screen, even though it’s there. And I know it’s there, I just never look at it there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I more often look at it on the home screen. I mean, nothing you’re saying is unreasonable whatsoever. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely right. But I don’t know, it’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John it. You’re just a weather
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey enthusiast. Cause like, like you watching it to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how should I dress when I go out to pick up the kids or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. What, what, what is it going to be like if I leave the house? But to your point, do I leave the house every day? No, I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no logical explanation for this whatsoever. So if you’re seeking one, you will not find
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I’m just saying it’s a lot of real estate for that. Like in my life, what I found is that I actually use like,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, either my, my thermostat has the outdoor weather on it or like my like
⏹️ ▶️ John ink display thing I I have hanging on the wall because that’s near the door. And so then I’m deciding what coat should I
⏹️ ▶️ John wear. And so I’ll just glance at that and see like, what is the temperature this morning or whatever? But yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of those things. A lot of it is an area that I imagine you would find hard to reach. It’s at the top. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like you’re sacrificing things. But anyway, it’s a lot of it’s a lot of space for the weather.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, you are not saying anything I disagree with. Nothing you’re saying is unreasonable. It’s just the way I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John a smart widget? Like, can you swipe that up and there’s more stuff besides?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re looking for the word you’re looking for a stack. And no, it is deliberately not, because I always want the weather there. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, if I want to see the weather, I want it to be right there. And yes, I, again, I know it’s on the lock screen, but I very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rarely look at it there. The other thing I will note is that this is, I think it’s called the forecast widget on Carat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Weather. And what that does is, depending on what’s about to happen, it will be, it can look
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very different than what you see there. So it’ll show like rainfall expectations, if it’s about to rain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or snow or whatever, sorry, trigger warning YouTube. But anyway, it’ll show vastly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different things depending on time of day. So for example, now that it’s late, and I took this this morning, but now that it’s late
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the day, it shows me the current temperature on the left half of that same widget, the current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey temperature, what today’s high and low were, and then the right half of it, it shows the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five days worth of weather, right? Because it’s late in the day, so today’s weather has basically already happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s very, very cool if you’re a care weather person, which you should be. Like I said, I think it’s called the forecast widget. it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rejigger itself in order to do what it thinks is best to show you. But anyways, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home screen, Home Assistant may or may not have been there when we last did the discussion in 2024.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s in my same spot as Google Home was for you. The only other highlight that I think might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have changed is a couple of friends of ours, Ben and Aaron,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are working on a app called Indigo, which they kind of sort of talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit. And what that basically is, is a Mastodon and Blue Sky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like joint app. And I don’t think I should probably say too much more than that. They knew I was gonna talk about it a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna say like, why doesn’t it have a dot next to it, but you have the titles hidden on your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud. Correct, correct. So it is very good. I don’t know when it’s gonna be out, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soonish. And it has replaced Ivory for me on my home screens and on my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not 100% the same as Ivory. There are definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some places that there needs to be a little bit of work, but it’s a beta. But it’s really good. I think they have, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see if I can remember to put a link in the show notes, but I think they have a place where you can sign up for a little mailing list about release. But you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely check it out once it is out. It’s really good. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same folks that did- Maybe I’ll finally remember to use Blue Sky that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. Right, exactly. They’re the same folks that did Croissant, which is the app that lets you cross post. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Croissant doesn’t let you read anything. It just lets you cross post. And so that’s what that is there. But otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s all basically the same for at least a couple of years now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Then can you say, uh, in your home screen, Casey, which icon I would find on harmonious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably the Sonos one, right? Cause it’s all black.
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Big black hole punched right now. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re going to use
⏹️ ▶️ John it cause you frequently use that,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I mean about like, if I was in that situation, it would be tough decision for me. Because like, look, it’s a frequently used app. I want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be my home screen, but it doesn’t fit in aesthetically. Uh, and the other, my other question for you is what is your, what is your
⏹️ ▶️ John background? Is that one of the Apple supplied ones? Like a gradient?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it is a gradient and I think I just tweaked it. Like it’s not an image, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, it’s just like I messed with sliders. I did it so long ago I don’t even remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s a built in Apple thing where you just pick it and then can mess with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least to the best I can recall, I set that up forever ago, like years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. But yeah, I mean, there’s nothing too remarkable here. I should go to your point. I should go and see if there’s a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sonos icon available. I really truly have no idea if they offer an alternative icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I couldn’t believe I got a Sonos Roam 2 a while back, and I could not believe they de-emphasized
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the only cool hardware things they have going for them, which is that their logo is the same right side up or upside down.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so on the Sonos Roam, I would get it in black and it would come with the white Sonos embossed on it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like the little letters that stood out from it, and you can look, it works both ways, no matter which way you put it, it works. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John on the current black Sonos Roam 2, they made the Sonos logo also black, so you can’t see it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the same thing with the Arc Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John you doing? But it’s the one cool thing you have aesthetically. Anyway, the icon is, it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John bad icon because the logo is cool, but it does not fit with the rest of the icons in your home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. No, no argument there, but I mean, this is my home screen. There are many like it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one is mine. All right.
#askatp: Home screens (Marco)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, let’s start with your lock screen, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. I use the built-in weather lock screen from Apple. So it’s a constantly changing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like animation of my current weather conditions. As you can see, when I took this screenshot this morning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or last night, it was gray and cloudy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey because it’s New York in the winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We get a lot of that. It’s, oh, and you can also see, I was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I took this on a train and as a result then I had one bar of 5G plus whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Turbo. Turbo, yeah. What is that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AT&T has all these different modes that they advertise their service to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be. And there was the 5G-E that still exists in some places. There’s 5G
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual, there’s 5G plus, I think there’s a 5G ultra, like who knows? They have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco branding of their various service levels. But on this train corridor, I was in a spot where no matter what it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, why do you, I just realized this. Nevermind, all right, it’s fine. I was like, why
⏹️ ▶️ John well, like Casey has Verizon spelled out on his lock screen. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have VZW space Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s because I wasn’t at home at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the time. Because I
⏹️ ▶️ John was home, right, okay. And then you’ve got AT&T Turbo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, whatever that is. So yeah, so it’s a fairly boring lock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. I use the top widget, so to speak, to be the calendar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. So it normally shows the date and then the next reminder or calendar entry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have the non-glass, plain old white flat digits clock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Below that I have the three overcast lock screen widgets, like the medium sized one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the small playlist specific one, and then just a second one for my two different main playlists.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is that overcast widget trying to tell me? Resume comma 54M ellipsis? What is that trying to tell me?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s 54 minutes left. Of what?
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the ellipsis telling me? Is there’s more text off after the 54 minutes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was cut off. I don’t know, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably, yeah, I should probably like redesign that so it doesn’t get cut off.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you see that, like when you parse it, you’re saying there’s 54 minutes left of what I was listening to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is what you were listening to what now with something or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Trevor Noah. And then Prime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the title of the episode. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s like, it’s, you know, it’s new versus resume, time left podcast title episode title.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean it’s difficult to put it, you know arbitrary length podcast information
⏹️ ▶️ John to a widget of that size. I was just asking if you could parse it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s it like when it’s when it’s a show that you have been listening to you know what that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, you know, so like if the second line said accidental attack pop, you know, you would have figured it out, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, and the other two are just playlist selectors and then for the bottom to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what used to be like flashlight and camera. I don’t need either of those anymore to be those things because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flashlight I assigned to the lock button or the sorry the action button.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So did I but yet my that my flashlight still remains on the bottom left for no reason I never use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it but I don’t know what else to put there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so I have flashlight as the action button and now that we have the camera control as a camera launcher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t use either of those anymore. So for the left I put the magnifier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Such an old man thing to do and I might do the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep forgetting that I have that there. I’ll tell you what, like, so we went on vacation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week and at one point, you know, we were going to like sit by the pool at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hotel and so it’s out in the sun, I’m like, I wanna wear sunglasses. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not yet gotten myself a pair of progressive sunglasses. I don’t have any kind of reading glasses ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my regular sunglasses, so I can’t see anything up close with my regular sunglasses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I either have sun on my face wear my regular progressive reading glasses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or wear sunglasses and not see anything. So I thought, as I’m sitting out by this pool on vacation, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really need to bring my reading glasses, I’m just gonna hang out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And well, that was short-lived. And I very quickly needed, so I’m like, now I wanna use my phone, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna go all the way back to the room, it’s a substantial walk away. So I’m just gonna increase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the font size on my phone. And I tried different ways to do this. What I found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best was actually to turn on display zoom, which still exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And display zoom, that was the feature when I believe, was it when the iPhone 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out? When they first made the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John substantially bigger? Display zoom. I think it was when it got wider, not just taller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, display zoom was a feature where you could basically make your phone have the display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layout of the next size phone down from it. So when the 6 came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would, like you could simulate the look of the iPhone 5 screen or something like that. Like whichever one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco introduced it. You know, you can increase the font size regularly in accessibility, but that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increase the size of everything. It increases the size of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many, but not all places. But I was having trouble like seeing the keyboard very well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff. So I’m like, let me just, and like, I was trying to like type emoji in certain text fields and I’m like, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was hard to do even with the bigger text size. So display zoom was actually better. And this, by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, I still, go back to the Apple Watch, I still wish they would add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco display zoom to the larger sizes of the Apple Watch because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the font size accessibility on the Apple Watch is terrible compared to the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has the same dynamic type APIs, but way fewer things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it on the watch compared to the phone. So if you need a bigger than usual text size on the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re mostly out of luck. It doesn’t do a very good job of it. Again, you can see it in some places, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nearly as many as you would want. Especially like the watch faces themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no luck. And so what I really think would be a very good accessibility option for the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch is if you have either of the two large screen models, the Ultra or the 40,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, 47 now, whatever that is, if you have either of those, Display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zoom could render the interface of the smaller, smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 42 or 41, whatever, it could render that interface size and blow it up to the bigger screen size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be a great accessibility feature on the Apple Watch larger sizes. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they haven’t done it yet, honestly, is baffling. Because again, Apple usually is very good with accessibility options, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visual and text size options are usually very good at that. And the Apple Watch is just a giant black hole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of text accessibility where it’s just terrible. Anyway, all this is to say, I need magnification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes when I’m not wearing glasses. And so that’s why I have the magnifier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that left thing, which I keep forgetting is there. And then on the right, I recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put the Google Gemini shortcut. I also tend to forget that’s there. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only used it a couple of times so far, but that is a quick way to like launch into Gemini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ask an AI question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before we move on, a real-time follow-up from Dr. Cahoon in the chat. AT&T has a new optional feature for some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its plans. It’s called Turbo, and for $7 per month, that provides quote, better speed and stability quote for a line
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of service by upgrading your data plan to quote performance data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m paying $7 a month for whatever that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s what I’m hearing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just for the word, displaying that word. It’s like when you get one of those badges on your car that doesn’t change any
⏹️ ▶️ John feature of the car, just adds a badge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And I’m sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure performance data, I’m sure they must’ve added something new. I’m sure it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them just downgrading everybody else’s data. No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John of course not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your ones and zeros go faster. Yeah, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, your home screen, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, my home screen, it’s, as home screens go, it’s like a boomer home screen. It’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boring. There’s a lot of stock Apple apps in their default places. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the regular ones that are the top two rows. I have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touched that camera icon in years. And so I should probably replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera icon with anything else. Maybe I’ll do that soon. Otherwise, you know, compared to what we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did a couple of years back or a year back in the member special. Waze, the navigation app, has been replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Google Maps. Apple Maps is nowhere. As I mentioned a couple episodes ago, I’m all in on Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maps for the time being. And that’s been going fine, by the way. Otherwise, I have my car app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a folder full of some games that I occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John will. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John new? I don’t remember the games thing being there last time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that might have been on page two last time. I think I probably promoted
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you lose the page? Are you playing more iOS games lately?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a spot that I wanted to fill.
⏹️ ▶️ John I see what I see in there. I see threes, watermelon. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Suica game is the watermelon. Hold Down is the little blue one. Threes and then like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the eight ball is like that. Zach Gage’s billiards game. I haven’t launched most of these games in a pretty long
⏹️ ▶️ John Golf on Mars or Desert Golf, one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Desert Golfing, Flip-Flop Solitaire. A lot of Zach Gage being represented there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, yeah, so Unread is my RSS reader. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kinda- Unread is this entire f***ing home screen because you’ve got 37 unanswered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone issues, two Slack messages, 15 text messages. Unread is the summary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this entire home screen. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s because he’s not showing the unread count on mail anymore. I think he was last time and it was like thousands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s currently 221 on my desktop, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, good God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, yeah, so yeah. Slack, WhatsApp, train time is the Long Island Railroad thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Audible, Amazon, Gemini, basically quick access stuff. So I have, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also use the caret weather widget. I use a different one than you Casey, but the way you were describing yours sounds interesting. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might switch to that one with the, with like the dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey change. I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has to be full width though. It’s the same height as what you’ve got there. I think it has to be full width, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey double check my math on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll see. One thing I, so yeah, so I do the smallest widget size, which is in icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grid measurements, two by two. I wish there would be a two by one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco widget size. Like, cause I would like to use more widgets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just are so big, I don’t have room for them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re saying two wide, one tall?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, exactly. Like that way you could stack two on top of each other, but that would still give you a wide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco canvas to display information on. Like I think a lot of apps could do a lot of good with that size, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, that’s about the same size as what you get on the lock screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you go to the lock screen, you have like those two wide, those double wide lock screen slots. It’s about that size. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you could do a lot with it. Well, you can see people do a lot with it. I would love to have that available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone home screen as well, because I would love, again, I’d love to use more widgets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re just too big. So yeah, please, Apple, two by one size, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Otherwise I have Flighty there because I had just taken a flight and I haven’t moved it off yet. And Reminder, which is my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vibe code of Reminders app. And that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you reading that much using Audible? What is Audible there for?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s mostly like if I’m going through an audio book, I don’t wanna forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that about it. Like I want it to be kind of in my face so I remember to go play it basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m not using Audible frequently, but when I am using it, I want it to be very visible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. I don’t know, John, any complaints about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m glad to hear that Flighty was just there for the flight, because I was like, really, you’re taking flights that much? You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have Flighty
⏹️ ▶️ John up there? But apparently you’re a swap certain things onto the home screen when traveling and swap them back out when you’re.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially like in those bottom slots, like Reminder has just been there for a day. So, you know, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knows where that’s gonna end up. But like usually those bottom two slots rotate a lot. So like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like I was flying on a certain airline, I might put the airlines app there during the trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or, you know, if I’m on any kind of trip, if there’s like a specific app that is very relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that trip, usually I have one or two open spots at the bottom of that home screen that I’ll put that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey but it’s not that interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume neither of you mess with the custom home screens for a focus mode thing. Do you know what I’m talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, honestly, that whole system I find very convoluted and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s a, it’s a whole system designed for like CGP gray to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey optimize his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every moment of everything. And I, I respect that kind of desire and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system building, but I don’t do that myself. Like I don’t build that complex of a system for myself. Generally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use a lot of things in their basically default ways. I use a lot of things very unstructured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or very loosey goosey, much to my detriment sometimes. But I don’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level of structure and discipline to my process most of the time. So I don’t use almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of that stuff. Like I use the sleep mode at night just because I don’t want my screens turning on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being bright in my face, like next to my bed as they charge. But that’s about it. Like I don’t, I don’t really do any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The reason I ask is because I have embraced it for when I’m working out, because, uh, I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have like just a couple of apps there that I use in various different reasons, but most, especially for travel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when I engage the travel focus mode, I have a bespoke travel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home screen that has like Lyft and Uber in the last airline I took was Delta. So the Delta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app is there. The flighty widget is there. My Apple wallet app is there. So it’s even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easier access than double clicking the lock button, you know, stuff like that that I have just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for travel. I overall, I agree with your approach that it’s just one home screen to rule them all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for travel and for working out, for whatever reason, I find that I really enjoy having a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home screen set up for those two.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is clock there for? Is that for alarms?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, alarms, timers, you know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And is that reminders icon also AI generated?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, one thing I have found is that AI sucks at making app icons. It’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried. It is so bad. But I actually, I’ll tell you, I spent more time designing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that icon than I spent writing code for the app. Because I went through a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of different, like I kept basically recreating the reminders icon. Like I was like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want it to represent reminders. I mean, it is kind of the obvious icon. Well, but it, and so yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically every iteration I came to, it was like, oh, those circles are too big. Oh, those lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are too bold. And then I just kept reverting just to be closer and closer to the reminders icon. And I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not gonna work. So also I’m trying to call the app reminder. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the icon is that similar to Apple’s icon, it’s gonna increase the odds they’re gonna reject it. I think you
⏹️ ▶️ John mean reminder colon Marco’s app for his thing. Right, right, right. Reminds you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, it’s, you know, reminder colon, something like, you know, never forget a note or whatever. It’s, there’s already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a colon in App Store Connect because I couldn’t create it without it. But so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icon represents the look of a list of somebody who manages their tasks like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do with a bunch of overdue tasks. That’s what the red lines are. Because when you have an overdue deadline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in reminders, that’s what it looks like. So it’s my like abstract representation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a list of a bunch of overdue tasks. So yeah, I tried a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different concepts. I tried like using a check mark and I tried like creating the shape of a notification the corner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the but like that was on the wrong side for the checkmark. I tried a bunch of different concepts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is what I was doing on the plane on the on the way home from from the trip. It’s like like the Wi-Fi died so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t use the coding agent anymore. So I’m like, all right, let me do some icon design and paint code. So this is what I was iterating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. And I must have spent a cumulative total of maybe three hours building the app and probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four hours making the icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. A couple of complaints about this, which I mean, honestly, if this works for you, that’s all that really matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I really hate my BMW icon. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco just make it the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey roundel. What are you doing with this cursive my in front of the BMW roundel?
⏹️ ▶️ John 05.01 The worst part is like compositionally, it’s just, they just like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John take this and put it in the square somewhere, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. And you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like BMW, as discussed, has a great logo. Why couldn’t they just do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that? It’s really, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 05.02 And then having the folder on there kind of irks me because everything else is so nice and flat and then you have this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folder of games like that’s I don’t love that but again if it works for you that’s all that matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean I’m not that aesthetic although I’ll tell you what though what I was just marveling the other day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the New York Long Island Railroad MTA train time app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a pretty good icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a great icon like I hate that icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no it’s pretty good. I hate it so much I think that’s my least favorite icon on this home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Honestly I was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying like what what a great job they did with that icon and I’ll tell you the MTA train time app is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excellent. It is one of the best apps on my phone and I’m like you would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a transit app for your for like the commuter rail. You would not expect that to be a good app. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic app. The design of it is excellent. It’s highly functional. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so impressed by the MTA train time app. It is way better than both. It needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be and that that you would expect it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Agreed. Real-time follow-up, the forecast care weather widget,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is available in the two-by-two size, after all. I was incorrect about that. OK. Yeah, maybe I’ll try that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I think we’re good on home screens then, right? And lock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John screens. Yeah, if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John hear an even longer discussion, even though it was two years ago, not that much has changed. But it’s in the member
#askatp: Desktop audio setups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Zipline writes, listening to the conversation about Fender Mix modular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey headphones in the overtime for ATP 675, it brought a question to mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s your current desktop headphone setup and how recently has it changed? I’ll start.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I’m following the question literally, what is my headphone setup when sitting at my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this computer? It’s one of two things. either AirPods Pro 3 or Beyerdynamics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DT77, 770 Pro 32 ohm, which is what I’m using as I speak to you right now. But in the spirit of the question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what are you using to listen to things at your computer?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we’ve talked about this a few times, but I was able to get score a really good deal on some Sonos stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have two Aero 100s, which are not the ginormous things that Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has somewhere in his house, but the more reasonably sized, like kind of vertical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cones, if you will, or tubes that are sitting on the corners of the desk in a sub mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which made a world of difference to make everything sound excellent. And then one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two Aero 100s is plugged in via the Sonos combo adapter. So that gives it ethernet and a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line in. And that line in is then attached to my Calgigit TS5+.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is a little bit of audio delay when music first starts. But other than that, like I’ve watched videos a million times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t notice any latency. it works out really well for me. More discerning individuals,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that both of you, probably would hate this setup. And I think Marco, you’ve talked about having a similar setup in the past and didn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it. But for me, it works pretty well. John, I think you’ll have fewer opinions about this. Let’s go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you and then have Marco finish this off.
⏹️ ▶️ John First, I’m gonna say that I think describing your speaker setup is not in the spirit of a question about your desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey setup. Yes, it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John It says headphones specifically. It’s in the context of the Fender Mix Modular headphones. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John a headphone question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I almost never use headphones at my desk. It’s boring. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Well, you can say that, but I just feel like your speaker setup is not relevant.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fine. Anyway. Um, when I worked at my jobby job, I had, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, various headphones that I would bring with me to work so I could listen to music while
⏹️ ▶️ John doing coding stuff, or sometimes just use them as if I was on a plane, because that’s what you have to do in the office sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John where there’s nothing actually playing and they just have the noise canceling turned on. So I can actually get stuff done in the harsh
⏹️ ▶️ John cubicle environment of jobby jobs. And that was, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even remember what I used to use there, but that was probably a more interesting setup as things rotated through the years. My home setup
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the only time I ever use headphones when sitting in front of my computer is when I’m podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I am using the Sony headphones, whose name I can’t remember, and I didn’t want to take them off to look at it. Marco, they
⏹️ ▶️ John are? The MDR-7506. Sony MDR-7506. I use them when
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m podcasting. I bought them ages ago. I have replaced the ear
⏹️ ▶️ John cups several times, but that’s basically it. I don’t even know how they sound for music because I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John played music through them. Presumably they don’t sound good. That is my desktop headphone setup.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use them except when I’m podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, let us have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is actually probably going to disappoint you. I also, for podcasting, what I’m wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now is for what I’ve used for a very long time, the Beyerdynamic DT770.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use the 250 ohm version because it comes with a coiled cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I find coiled cables for desk use are far superior to straight cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you don’t have a whole bunch of excess dangling everywhere. That’s the whole point of the coil is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you can be like close to the thing and it just rests on the desk but if you want to like, you need to like lean back or turn around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get something behind you, the coil will just stretch a little bit and then go back. That’s why phone cords back in the day were all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coiled because it’s, it, it allows you movement flexibility without having a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excess dangling all the time. So at a desk, I find that very valuable.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, the Sonys also have a coiled one. And speaking of the 770s, I also have a pair of those
⏹️ ▶️ John same 770s that I got at one point where I was like, you know, I should upgrade my desk headphones to be something
⏹️ ▶️ John better. So I bought a pair of those and I tried them and I bought alternate ear cups for them. And I just went
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the Sonys. They just didn’t fit my head. Like they have circular ear cups, like literally circles,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they just don’t sit on my head right. which is weird because the reason I was interested in buying them
⏹️ ▶️ John is because these stupid Sony ones, they’re so old, like the design is very old and
⏹️ ▶️ John the ear things are smaller than modern things and they’re too small for my ear. So I’m like, let me get
⏹️ ▶️ John one with bigger, you know, everyone recommended the 770s and I think I got the one with the cold
⏹️ ▶️ John cord and I don’t, you know, but I just did not find them comfortable on my head. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a fact of life with like with AirPods or even with over your headphones. If they don’t feel comfortable sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John on your head for a long time, you’re just not gonna like them. So they’re currently sitting in my attic. I’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ John have given them to one of my kids or something when they want them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John 770s, I just don’t use them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they, you know, with desktop headphones, everything is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comfort dependent and it varies by person, like, you know, different shaped heads, different preferences, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, whether you wear glasses or not. And this gets me to my other point in a minute, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to be clear, I love the general, like the old Beyerdynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shape, which was the 770s, the 880s, the 990s, they all used like the same yoke, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same kind of driver ear cup shape. Like they all use, and it fits me very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. And I find it very comfortable for long spans. That being said, these are not headphones that I enjoy a lot of music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, because frankly, they were great for the time that they came out, which was a very long time ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we’ve gotten a lot better since this. Like headphone design has gotten way more sophisticated. Headphone drivers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have gotten way more detailed, way nicer. So these, like for the time they came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for their relatively inexpensive, like 150-ish dollar cost most of the time, they sound
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great for that, but we can do a lot better now than we have. So they don’t sound good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough for music for me, so I don’t listen to music on these. I also, for my podcasting use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I much prefer a different pair of ear pads that actually, they come with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DT1770, which is a newer model that I really did not like, but I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their ear pads and you can buy them separately. So you can order from Germany, the Beyerdynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EDT1770D ear pads, which are like a memory foam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pleather kind of thing. And I find they are a substantial upgrade to the 770s in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both comfort and a little bit in sound quality. So I use these.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I got these ear pads as well on Marco’s recommendation. They did not help my comfort level, but yeah, This
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the good things about headphones that you can mix and match pieces of to try different stuff out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because especially, you know, this was like Beyerdynamics, like standard round ear pad. They’ve made a lot of different headphone models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years that have that exact ear cup shape. So there’s a lot of like aftermarket and different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ear pads you can put on and everything. So that’s what I do for podcasting. For music, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main music headphone, when I’m at my desk is still the HiFiMan HE6,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is positively ancient by today’s standards. I think it came out in like, I don’t know, 2011 or something. It’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old headphone at this point. I’ve not found anything that I like more. There are a lot of high-end headphones these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that cost way more. Like I think it was about $1,100 or $1,000 when it was new. Modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flagship headphones are well above $3,000 now. I have never found anything in that range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I liked better than these. That being said, I haven’t looked in a long time. So that’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end music headphone. However, I really hardly ever wear them anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I usually am using speakers to listen to music at my desk these days. When we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved, I no longer shared an office with TIFF. I had my own office. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can play music out loud without bothering anybody else with my terrible jam bands. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that a lot more often now. And also I have recently crossed the threshold of needing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reading glasses at my computer desk. So I’m still, I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pair of 0.5 magnification glasses for my computer desk, but I do need those for clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vision of the screen. So now that I’m wearing glasses at my desk full-time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a little less comfortable to wear headphones full-time. And I have very thin-framed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thin metal-templed glasses. I’ve optimized them as much as I can, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as nice as not wearing headphones. So I now greatly prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers, and my speaker setup at my desk is a pair of KEF
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Kef, I still don’t know how I’m supposed to pronounce that brand, but a pair of KEF at the beach, Q150s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and here in the Long Island house, the LSX2s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which are very expensive. They used to be less expensive before all the tariff BS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the recent inflation and stuff. They were never cheap, but now they’re more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have the KC62 subwoofer, which is again, very expensive. It’s like $1,700 now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was, I think, $1,200 when I got it, which I thought was obscene then. But this is not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap setup. I think, frankly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the Q150s sound better than the LSX2s, but they are just much larger. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a desk, they are kind of an imposing size for a desk. I would say, if you don’t mind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the size, the Q150s which are actually not made anymore but you can probably still find them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are by far my favorite desktop speakers I’ve ever had. They’re just massive but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound amazing. They really could use a subwoofer though and the KC62 does work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really well. It’s really good. It’s a shame it’s so expensive. It does work really well but really any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop subwoofer would be fine for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there a KC62 in both houses or just one? In both houses. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good for you. I bet that sounds incredible, but woof, I feel bad for your wallet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, and I did for, you know, I did the Sonos thing you were saying. I tried it with, you know, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned I had bought a pair of Aera 300s for a different role in the house, and I just hadn’t installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for a few months, and I just kind of borrowed them from my office for a few months. And a pair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Aera 300s with the Sonos sub is also an incredible sounding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup and costs less than this. The main problem I had with it was, you mentioned briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like brief turn on delay and the latency. The latency is bad enough that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really don’t want to use Sonos speakers as desktop speakers for anything where real time sound alignment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matters. Things like watching videos or playing games. I find it really annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You see, I don’t have that problem. I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m not saying you’re wrong. But for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve never had that issue, but I cannot sit here and in good conscience say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, it’s perfect because there is like the one actually has the physical line in connected to it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will turn on. And then there’s like a beat probably between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second and a second before the other channel turns on. I’ve gotten used to it. It doesn’t really bother me generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking, but for more discerning individuals, and I’m not going to be snarky about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it this time, that may not work for you. But let me tell you, even the Aero 100s, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are like half the size of 300s, even those with a subwoofer sound freaking incredible. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 300s, which are freaking massive. I’m sure those sounded just astonishing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, they were amazing. I was so happy with those. But yeah, ultimately like that weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco startup delay, like I hate when things, I hate when speakers auto sleep after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I try to play sound, it doesn’t play because they’re still asleep and they’re still waking up for the first second or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, so I miss sound effects or I miss the first part of music, or I miss the first few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco words of a video. I find that very annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I do, at the beach where I have the KEF-Q150s, those are passive speakers, like regular old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers that you plug into a powered amp. And the amp I have, I forget, maybe I’ll dig it up in the show. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the many 60-ish dollar Amazon Class D digital switching amps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then I think it’s from Topping or one of those brands. There’s a handful of brands on Amazon or SMSL.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a handful of brands that make a whole bunch of these like 60-ish dollar power amps that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very small, like, you know, the size of a few decks of cards and produce certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough power for desktop speakers. And usually you have to get one with a subwoofer output if you’re gonna have a subwoofer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like these, it’s a whole class of very good products that don’t cost a lot of money and it’s just on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So my computer, when it plays sound, it just plays. There’s no latency, it works 100% of the time, it just plays.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I love that about that setup. It’s one of those things where as technology has gotten more sophisticated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain things have gotten worse. You get more features, more flexibility, whatever it is, but certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are worse. One of the common things that I hear our friends talk about, like John Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talked about this a lot, is when you turn on a TV now and switch channels, there’s so much delay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything is laggy and you have to wait for things to boot or wait for things to sync up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco digitally. And it’s so much less responsive than it used to be, even though we have all these new features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and capabilities these days, to me, speakers largely have not benefited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from becoming more digital. If you want things like to be able to connect AirPlay or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth to them, you can do that with these little, you know, amps or desktop input kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of products and still just feed regular passive speakers through a regular passive amp, and that’s usually better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in all these little tiny ways, like I don’t like all these paper cuts with the new products when they go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sleep or, you know, have latency or whatever. Like to me, that just makes it work worse. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a constant irritation to me. And as much as I loved how the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speakers sounded on my desk, like a pair of Aera 300s on a desk, I’ve never found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that sounded that good in most ways. But it was just too annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there was no, like I even got the little adapter for both of them. So they both had ethernet in. They like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, I had it on the lowest latency settings. It just, it was still too much latency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and still too irritating with the stupid auto-sleep and auto-wake-up thing. All right, and then as for the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone amp, going back to the question that we were actually asked, sorry, Zipline, for being this far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use the brand, Sh**. I’m a big fan of their products, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the, well, the way it’s said by Americans is the Jotunheim 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe they’re now up to the Jotunheim 3. What Americans say that? No one says Jotunheim? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not no one, but certainly no one in New York probably. But-
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, I’m just going to say that the YouTube channels that I watch always say Kef and not K-E-F.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, there you go. So it’s probably Kef, but I love Kef speakers. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so I use the Jotunheim headphone amp. And the reason I use that one, not only does it have enough power to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power the HE6, which the vast majority of headphone amps do not, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a really nice little switch input thing and volume knob on it. So as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing things like switching between podcasting input and computer input, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switching between speakers and headphones. The front panel controls on the Jotunheim
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very nice for that. And it has a nice big analog metal volume knob that I like a lot. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great little amp. I have, over time, I’ve owned a lot of gear from sh**. It is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit buggy sometimes. Like the USB sometimes will flake out and I have to like turn it off and turn it on again to get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB to work again. Or sometimes like, you’ll get like a little bit of noise being picked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, like if your phone’s too close to it. It’s not something I can recommend without conditions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is still what I choose to use because I like it the most.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wanna spell the name of that brand?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-C-H-I-T-T or I-I-T?
⏹️ ▶️ John I-I-T. I love how you always bleep out Casey’s Curses, but every time you talk about your amplifier, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s spelled differently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how they, look, they’re a California company run by a bunch of nerdy guys. They know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re doing. It wasn’t an accident. It’s fun. have fun with their name and I like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they make good products. And I’ve, I’ve had many of them over the years, um, and they’re, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall still my favorite product for this guy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve had some good. Good deal. Since you two insisted on talking about your speakers, I will just point out that, uh, I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ John the Canto aura fours, uh, which I talked about on ATP episode 630 a year ago. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to hear more about them, listen to that episode. Uh, my update is that I still like them. So everything I said there, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John is they’ve worked out great. I’m, I’m. As you’ll hear in the episode, I They don’t really use speakers at my desk, but for the purposes that I want,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re great. And kind of what Marco was saying, like you turn them on, they play sound, there’s no latency, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John directly connected to USB audio. They’re just very simple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I would say like for most people, that is probably a better setup for most people. That being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, I’ve heard those speakers. They sound okay. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing compared to the Q150.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure, I mean, they’re an eighth of the size, but like I keep them powered off most of the time, which tells you how important
⏹️ ▶️ John speakers are on my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the LSX2, the reason I have the LSX2 here is because as I described, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years ago when I bought them, I don’t need or use any of the wireless features. It was more of an aesthetic choice that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way this desk is set up in the room, it’s kind of floating in the middle of the room. Having the full-size Q150s on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desk would look ridiculous. And so I got the LSXs to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller and they do sound close to the Q150s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are way smaller and way nicer looking. So it did solve that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need for me. But you don’t need these if you can tolerate larger speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your desk and you want the amazing sound quality of these amazing drivers that KEF makes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t need the LSXs if you can get something bigger. All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace, Aura Frames, and Delete.me. And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us at atv.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our weekly bonus topic. Every time I say this, I make like jazz hands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John with each word, weekly bonus topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that three word phrase is actually very good that you eventually came up with. The weekly bonus topic does accurately describe it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t think you need to characterize the length at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well anyway, it is usually a length of additional content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we put at the end of the show for our members. You get an entire additional topic that we talk about every week. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week on Overtime we’re going to be talking about skill shortages, Apple Silicon, and AI. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how those things are relating to each other right now. So join ap.fm slash join to hear it this week. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear all of our other wonderful exclusive content as well, member specials, everything like that. Thank you very much for listening everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-E-R It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long
Neutral: Casey’s EV journey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I have what I think is the conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my scratching of an automotive itch. Oh. I went,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per your recommendation actually, Marco, I went to a dealership that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half an hour away from me that has what I consider to be an astonishing collection of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used electric cars. There was Lucid, I didn’t even see it, I’m sorry, John, I ran out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. There were a couple of Audi e-tron GTs, which is basically a Taycan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by another name. I think there was a Taycan or two. I don’t recall if I saw them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not now that I think about it, but I believe there’s a couple of those there. But more importantly than anything else,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, ask me what was there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was there a BMW i4?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not only was there an i4, but there was an i4 M50. Two of them, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact. Oh, the fast one. The really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the faster one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So I went down there and I was very clear about my intentions. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the gentleman I was working with was very, very nice and very patient with me. And we took, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 15, 20-minute test drive. And let me tell you, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so desperately wanted to get rid of my beloved 335 when I got rid of it in 2018. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 2011 335i xDrive M Sport 6-speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I loved that car for the 10 minutes it was working, but it was constantly broken. Go back to like six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years of ATP to hear my sob stories about this car. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loved that car though when it did work. And even though BMW has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changed quite a bit since 2011, and particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the front of modern BMWs is generally speaking pretty homely. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kidneys are just obscenely, or just too big,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s too much. This is not a good era of most car designs, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but nevertheless, I sat in that car and a little part of me was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re home. This is where you were supposed to be. And then I drove the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it got worse because, oh my God, that thing is so nice. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. I told you, I’ve never even been in one, but I’m like, obviously, this is the right car for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so nice and so fast. It’s ridiculous. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my word. Like I’ve been in fast electric cars. I’ve driven fast electric cars. One of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that I personally love about Rivians, particularly the launch edition ones or whatever it was that had the three motor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup, is that they’re stunningly fast in things that are as big as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a house. Like you’re breaking physics. Physics is bending to your will at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I absolutely loved it. I thought it was incredible. So, there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that BEV drivers that, you know, people who’ve been driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full electric cars for a while find deeply distasteful about this car. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric car snobs, which is basically everyone who drives an electric car, would tell you that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey garbage that this was originally a chassis and drivetrain and platform designed for a gasoline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car, and then it was retrofit for a battery situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you believe there’s still a transmission tunnel? Exactly. That is exactly what I was going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to say. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of a big deal if you care about the backseat space. Obviously, from the driver’s seat, you don’t care. But the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a giant hump in the backseat that serves no purpose is annoying if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is true. But when are you really ever putting three adults in the back of a sedan? It’s not often that
⏹️ ▶️ John Even for a kid, it’s a big transmission tunnel. And also, the other one is that, obviously, no frunk. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not much, the worst part is that there’s not actually that much stuff in the front of this car. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s arranged in such a way that it precludes having a front. Like if you take off the plastic- There’s more than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you take off the plastic cover, you’ll see that there’s lots of cooling lines running here and there, but it’s like, if you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John taken the same amount of stuff and just shoved it to the sides, you could have had a frunk, but they were like, nah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be clear, like my iX, which was designed from the start to be electric, doesn’t have a frunk
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, lots of car companies are sort of anti-frunk these days, mostly because I think people just don’t use it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But because the backseat is so small on the i4, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco understand what you’re saying. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that small. The purists are like, no. Those are compromises in this car. The compromises are that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an internal combustion chassis, and they didn’t bother trying to give you a frunk. But if you’re in the driver’s
⏹️ ▶️ John seat, none of those things really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter. Exactly. And the other thing is, you have to consider what my priors are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My priors are gasoline cars or plug-in hybrid gasoline cars. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so not having a frunk, OK. And that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offend me. It offends people who are all in on BEVs. A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of people wrote in, and some of them were former Tesla people or current Tesla people. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply offended. Sometimes they’re Tesla people who went to M50s or, excuse me, I4s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they’re offended that the garage door doesn’t automatically open based on geographic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proximity to your house. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, fine. I think only Tesla has that feature. I don’t think I’ve seen that with anybody else. You could probably do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something with home assistant there. I mean, mine just has a button. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey well this is my point, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had that feature on Tesla’s for a while. It was kind of fun, but also now I have a button in it. That’s also fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John My garage door raises when I pick it up with my hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course, John, of course. But no, this is what I’m saying, right? is that my priors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are regular old cars. And so for me, it’s like, I don’t have a Frunk?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK. What have I lost? Nothing. Who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not to say that these people are wrong, but again, given my priors, I know I’ve said it like four times. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say that they’re wrong, but they’re a little wrong. I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess it depends on what you use. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John the trend is anti-Frunk. The trend in all, especially fancy EVs, is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not going to bother. but like it is, you know, it does seem like it’s kind of a shame, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John when they make the back trunk things. I don’t know if you looked at this when you were there, but like, did you open up the back
⏹️ ▶️ John and feel like that was gonna fit all your stuff in it? Cause it’s gonna be nothing compared to your Volvo, but
⏹️ ▶️ John probably also smaller than your Golf maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s probably roughly equivalent because it’s certainly squatter vertically, but I think there’s more depth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Actually probably a fair bit more depth now that I think about it. And it did have like a gully where you can put the charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable and all that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, that’s really what you need. Like that’s why people get away with not doing the front because the little like lift the false
⏹️ ▶️ John floor in your trunk and there’s some little thing there because they take away the spare tire for you to put
⏹️ ▶️ John your charging cables in. Yeah, yeah, I just, I guess also
⏹️ ▶️ John on the i4, like it’s a long hood. Like it fits an
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey internal combustion engine. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s such a long hood. Like I understand, the test people are coming from, they’re saying, well, this is what I’m used to. And so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna go somewhere where I don’t have this because I’ve become used to it. But to your point, you have never become used to it. So you’re not missing out on anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. I don’t think there’s that much more to say about it. Truth be told,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was an astonishing car. I loved it. I threw up a couple trial balloons with Erin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about what she thought about me going back to a BMW. And the answer in summary was basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if this is what you want, then so be it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the end of a conversation where it’s basically like angry resignation more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey more than an endorsement. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I left that test drive. Oh, well, I skipped a step. So I pretty much immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fell in love with the M50. It is, I think, the perfect electric car for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. Not to say it’s a perfect car, but it’s the perfect electric car for
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot to mention the other downside that everyone complains about that you haven’t mentioned yet. Crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yes. But I mean, again, so I had mentioned earlier that I had lunch with John from channels and he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives an R1S. And we were discussing this whole experience. And you know, what I was saying to him is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the almost eight years that I’ve owned my Volkswagen, I think I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey count on, I know I can count on one hand. And I think I can count on one finger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The amount of times that car has been more than an hour away from my house, because it never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has the need to, it has 30 some thousand miles on it in eight year, almost eight years. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one time I took it to my alma mater, which is like three and a half hours away from home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Other than that, I don’t think it’s ever left Virginia, period. And I don’t think I’ve ever been more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than Charlottesville away, which is an hour away since I’ve owned the car. So for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I need, what is that, like 60 miles range? You know what I mean? Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need a 400 mile range car. So I think this is like, and the range on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M50, I think depending on which wheels you get is somewhere between 200 and 230-ish miles. No, it’s like 300
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, the reason people complain, it doesn’t matter for Casey’s purposes, because if he’s never leaving, he’s never going far
⏹️ ▶️ John away, who cares? But the thing is, for the size of battery that it has, like its range is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have a lot of range. And also, I believe it is still 400-volt architecture, so it charges more slowly as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so again, for the, I wouldn’t say EV purists, but for the EV enthusiasts, this is not a state-of-the-art
⏹️ ▶️ John EV, but for Casey’s purposes, I never go far away, I don’t care what the range is, I just want something that’s fun to drive. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it fits for your needs, but these are the complaints about the car. That it is not like, as compared to, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Lucid, which has a fantastical range and it has more EV friendly features than a huge frunk
⏹️ ▶️ John and all this other stuff. But that’s not obviously not a, that’s a no-go for Casey because he doesn’t live anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John near a Lucid dealer. And they’ll probably be out of business soon anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Allegedly the mobile repair people are a couple of towns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John over from me. I would not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that. Agreed, agreed. So anyway, so I drove the i4 M50, freaking loved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And then I very quickly, I said to the gentleman I was working with, look, I’ve already driven a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Taycan. I’d love it if you wouldn’t mind if we could go, we took like a 20 minute test drive in the i4 M50.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I do like five minutes in an e-tron GT just to really verify that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t like it? And I got in, it’s unquestionably a nice car, unquestionably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not for me. I just cannot get past the fact that the view from behind is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a slit. I just, I can’t abide it. And so-
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to get you a Ferrari, but now I guess I’ll just cancel that order. And you don’t like the view
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey out the back. It’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously in a Ferrari, I would make exceptions. I’ll get you the Ferrari SUV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. In a Ferrari, or get me the, what is it? The Luce or whatever’s coming out.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Pura Sangue is their existing SUV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, either way. But I mean, in a Ferrari, I would make do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think you would. I think you’re like, cause the Taycan is, I mean, the e-tron I don’t like either, but the Taycan
⏹️ ▶️ John is a really nice car, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John get over the view out the back. And that’s going to be true of every low slung, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and I did briefly put it from, what did the Audi call it? I think from like regular to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dynamic, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I know. I would say that like the, the settings in the Audi are probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not the same as the settings in the Porsche. Let’s just keep that in mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Moving from normal or comfort or whatever the default is to dynamic definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did exactly what I expected and what I thought I remembered from the Taycan when I put it in Sport Plus, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it made the transmission situation way better, but I still just freaking hate the fact that it’s there. I get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying it’s wrong. It’s just not for me. So the Taycan, the e-tron, both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the table. And I’m back and thinking about the M50 and I’m driving away from that test drive and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m thinking to myself, This is a phenomenal car that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not cheap, but it’s like half off MSRP. And for like a two or three year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old car, I could afford it. But rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dropping something like 15 or 20 grand on a car that I don’t need, what if I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took the family on a vacation or two or three or four instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that money? And that’s where I’m currently leaning. And I’m pretty sure that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my final answer, but with me, you never know. I’ll concede, but I don’t need a new car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now. New to me car right now. My car is in great shape as far as I’m aware, as I knock on wood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I can’t get around. I’m solving a problem that I don’t have just because I’m being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. And I think my final answer play this back to me in like a week when I ended up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But I think my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey final answer is it’s just not something I need and it’s just not worth it. like I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do other stuff with that money rather than, or, well, I mean, you know, whether I finance or whatever, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I think of it as having that money. Right. And so I, I don’t think of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that as a useful use of money. And I think I’d be much better off doing things with the family than getting a car. I don’t need.
⏹️ ▶️ John Experiences versus possessions. Obviously there are also experiences in having a possession.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get the experience of driving it, but still, I think a family vacation is probably a better choice. And also I will
⏹️ ▶️ John add that, you know, the 2030 i4 that you used in 2032 when your golf finally dies is gonna be way better than this car.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is, you’re right. Maybe also uglier, but just, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Also true. Also true. Yeah, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, cause what’s coming also, like, you know, the Neue Klasse, however you pronounce that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new class of BMW electric vehicles coming online, like, you know, over the next couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years and you know, the i3, like not, The i3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is TIFF’s car and that’s a very weird little thing that they haven’t made in a few years. The new thing that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be apparently using the name i3 for is like the 3-series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the new platform. And whether, and you know, presumably there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be an i4 updated to that, you know, that platform probably, you know, a year or two in or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that. That is going to have some pretty substantial upgrades to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the electric powertrain. You know, it’s going to be, first of all, designed for electric from the start, so maybe you get rid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the transmission tunnel. There would probably also be, you know, there’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a higher, it’s an 800 volt battery system. It’s higher battery capacities, higher ranges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that that platform is going to be a pretty substantial upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the cars. So you can get one now, you know, get, you know, get one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used I4s or get a new one now, like you could do that. But if you don’t need it now, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re willing to wait, you know, three more years, maybe there would, there would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably be more options on the market and either you will want those options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they will depress the price of these options. And so, you know, if you don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it right this second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t, it’s, you can make a pretty clear argument. Like you are better off probably waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can. Um, but I, you know, I still stand by and this is not going to going to help you at all. I still stand by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, you are a working professional and this is a thing you’re very passionate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. And so I don’t think you should feel guilty about wanting to indulge this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a degree. But I also think it’s very wise of you to consider like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco total enjoyment for the dollar. You know, bringing, bringing your family on some nice vacations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably higher, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mean, obviously, you know, you can spend thousands of dollars on a vacation or on a vacation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or many vacations. It’s all depending on where you’re going and what you’re doing and so on. But it just, I’m not even saying that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s like a one for one trade between a car and vacation, but it just feels that way. You know what I mean? And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I, I really feel like it’s, it’s a silly waste of money that I probably shouldn’t do. So when I drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one home in a week, you know, you can, you can just help me forget that I ever had this conversation, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, let me tell you incredible car though, I really think of all the things that I’ve been interested in and driven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far, far and away my favorite, not even close. And I would have one tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if John was buying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. Oh, no, I think you were right. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, relax. Oh, wait, simmer down.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is a way for Marko to drive one and find out he hates it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? Actually, it could be. Very well could be. That would be funny. You should drive one just for grins and gigs, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for our vacation, we rented a car. We were driving it around for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a week. And it It was a Hyundai Sonata. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always go to the rental and I’m like, give me a full-size sedan. I love a full-size sedan. Those don’t exist anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry. Well, they do. It’s the Hyundai Sonata, unfortunately. And it was, I mean, in every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible way, really mediocre, but it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I’ve been driving SUVs for the last few years, I wasn’t sure, am I still gonna be comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a regular car-shaped car? Because my plan has been, whatever I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy next after this lease is over in a year and a half, my plan was to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go back to cars again, not SUVs anymore. But I was worried,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am I still able to sit in a car comfortably without irritating my weird leg and knee problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been developing slowly over the years? Or am I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to see at night without too much distraction from headlights and stuff like that, like you know stuff that happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you get older. And so I was worried like you know can I still get a car basically and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did a lot of driving in the Sonata and it’s not a great fit for me in terms of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its seats were not really super comfortable I couldn’t really adjust it the way I wanted and it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was totally fine. I loved being in a car-shaped car again and there I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had no problems with my knee or anything like that so it was fine so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am still car compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and I look forward to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know in you know a year and a half when I get to figure out what to do next and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking hard at possibly the new BMW i3 if it’s any good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even maybe the i3x because like I was comparing like you know it is still an SUV but it’s like it’s their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller one I don’t think we’re gonna get the there’s like a there’s like a one series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of their sedan or of their SUVs like the the ix1 i think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not available in the US i don’t think will be available in the US but all the Europeans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who have it say it’s amazing i think if i remember correctly anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ix3 is a very possible thing because it is smaller than the ix but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still has like big cargo capacity which i do enjoy But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I look forward to being able to look at these options in a year and a half and see what they are.