683: I Didn’t Want to Melt My Rug
19 Mar 2026MacBook Neo hands-on, Studio Display XDR eyes-on, and how Overcast is transcribing podcasts at scale.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- You’re welcome, world
- Formula 1
- A brief, renewed pitch to watch this season
- Cameras
- Are not a large portion of the coverage (via Matt Rigby)
- Failures don’t [usually] matter (via The Racing Line)
- The other perk of in-car footage (via Eric Fox)
- On getting Sky Sports replays (via Brendan Webb)
- Rosetta
- A deep dive from Colin McKellar
- Instant Final Cut Pro deprecation warning (via Tom Obarski)
- iPhone 17e teardown
- MacBook Neo
- Gruber on the camera & mic on-screen indicators
- Apple Platform Security Guide
- On Apple Exclaves (Medium link)
- CPU benchmark correction (via Philipp Sommer)
- SSD benchmarks (via Vito Traino)
- John’s and Marco’s field trip results
- Teardowns
- Tech Re-Nu
- iFixIt
- Gruber on the camera & mic on-screen indicators
- AirPods Max 2
- Overcast beta now has transcripts!
- Post-show Neutral: BMW i3 Revealed
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple’s 27 OSes and Liquid Glass
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- Leesa: A mattress for every body and budget
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Chapters
- Watch workouts suck less
- F1 Apex
- Rosetta 2 follow-up
- Sponsor: Leesa (code ATP)
- iPhone 17e teardown
- Camera-indicator security
- MacBook Neo benchmarks
- MacBook Neo hands-on
- iPhone 17e hands-on
- Studio Display XDR eyes-on
- Sponsor: Zapier
- MacBook Neo teardowns
- AirPods Max 2
- Sponsor: 1Password
- Overcast transcripts 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Neutral: New BMW i3 🖼️
Watch workouts suck less
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been a busy few weeks. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, we’ll talk about that later. And speaking of, we have a lot to cover, so we’re just going to plow right into follow-up. And I will start,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, Marco, if you choose to dub in, we are the champions. Can we use that outside of the context of the Mac Pro? I think we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can. But you’re welcome, world, because we have apparently caused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, just us, nobody else, has caused Apple to ship a more sane workout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app in watchOS 26.4. I haven’t actually tried this myself, but allegedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the new version of watchOS, you can actually press on a workout type to start that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey workout. You don’t have to wait for the stupid animation for the stupid play button to show up. You can actually just hit the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giant green thing that says, you know, like traditional strength training or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or outdoor run or what have you. Allegedly, that has now fixed your welcome world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s very promising. Also, a couple of quick notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I was last ranting about the workout app, I mentioned that I wish they had some smarter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco settings around reminding you to unpause workouts when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you start moving again. This actually is a built-in feature. They do have reminders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically to remind you to pause a workout if you’ve stopped moving for a while, and to unpause it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in fact, there’s even a feature where it will try to automatically pause and unpause it when you start, you know, if you like stop in a run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you resume again, it will actually try to remind you. What I found though is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are, first of all, very annoying. Like when you, if you’re actually on a run,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have used those and I have found them to be just so aggressive of just like, if you stop for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second, like if you stop like at an intersection, tap, tap, you wanna pause your workout? Like, no, I’m just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna be here for eight seconds. like no! So I don’t like those for that. But then also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found that in walking workouts they tend to be a lot less accurate. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if they’re just looking for bigger changes in speed. So I have not found the current implementation of those to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very good. It also doesn’t address things like the ability to undo a bad GPS point or undo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a missed save. There is however at least a setting that I turned on, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end workout button, there’s an option to have it prompt you before it officially ends with a confirmation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco step. That helps accidental endings become less likely, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still needs a lot of just kind of polish. What we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like about Apple, what got us all to Apple in the first place, was lots of little smart design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lots of little delights throughout much of their user interface and many of their features of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software and hardware. And the Apple Watch seems to have none None of that. Like, it just seems like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch was designed in a very rigid way to have exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these features, nothing else. And again, part of that was, you know, for hardware constraint reasons, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were very good reasons. But so many of those kind of like little nice delights of like, oh, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was smart and I needed that, thank you. Those things seem to be mostly missing on watchOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the Workout app is one example of many where like there’s a lot of room for that and I wish they would add more of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What they have is a nice start, but considering we’re like, what, 11 years into the Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform, something like that, it could be a lot better. So I hope it continues to get better. but this is a good
F1 Apex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s enter Formula One corner for hopefully just a couple of minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Formula One tracks have corners or are they all like
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded? They sure do have corners, although I think you can come up with a better name for this instead of calling it Formula One Apex. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I don’t know enough Formula One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terms to come up with something good. We’ll workshop it. But anyways, first of all, I wanted to very briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoil this past Sunday’s China Grand Prix and say that this really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so far is a very interesting season to start watching Formula One. To briefly recap, there’s all new rules, all new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regulations, the cars are totally different. And my favorite team, McLaren, they have two drivers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as every team does, and neither of their drivers made it to the starting line this last race, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stank. But I’m going to claim that that left the space for a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting podium. So the winner of the race is a 19-year-old who races
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Mercedes. His teammate was, I believe, second. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey former Mercedes superstar now at Ferrari, who has not done anything good in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey season or two, Lewis Hamilton, arguably the greatest of all time, potentially, I think by wins,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he is the greatest of all time, was also on the podium. And it made for a really adorable moment where you have these two actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey current Mercedes drivers and a former Mercedes driver, and the race engineer for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the winner, which is basically the dude on the other end of the radio, was formerly Lewis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hamilton’s race engineer. And so, you know, it was a really, really lovely podium even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though my particular team didn’t even make it. And so, again, really good time to pick up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Formula One if you’re at all interested. But I will stop trying to sell it. I’ll stop being a shill at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to follow-up, we have a little bit of information about cameras. John and I got ourselves wrapped around the axle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to cameras when we talked about it last week. Matt Rigby writes, in the TV broadcast, I’d say that onboard cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are perhaps 15% of the coverage at most, and they mostly use the track-mounted cameras like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any other sport. Which is exactly true. I should’ve made that more plain when we were talking about it. But again, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose, if you’d like, to view other cameras. A account that goes by the name The Racing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Line, if an onboard camera fails during a race, then no action is taken. The only time an onboard camera failure has had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a direct impact on a race was the 1995 Italian Grand Prix. Ferrari was leading first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and second when Gene Alessi’s, I hope I have that right, camera detached from the lead car and hit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gerard Berger in the second car, breaking the suspension. Whoopsie-dipsies. Alessi’s leading car broke down a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lap later with an unrelated wheel bearing failure. Ferrari throwing away race wins is a constant in F1 history,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can confirm. Also, the Racing Line pointed us to a really great, about 10 minute YouTube overview of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the cameras in the car, of which I think there’s seven or eight or something like that the video said. It’s very, very interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very cool stuff. Additionally, something I should have talked about when we were discussing cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot, Eric Fox reminded me that one thing you didn’t mention was that the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two might find interesting, as in Marco and John. For follow up is how the driver feeds also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give you access to their radio communications with their respective teams. Of course, the best radio messages, read the whiniest,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get put on the main broadcast, which is true. And I don’t think I mentioned that at all. And that’s a really great point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Eric. And that can be very fascinating. Normally, it’s not that interesting, but it can be fascinating. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally, with regard to F1, Brendan Webb writes, I’m not sure why Apple hides the Sky Sports replays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the main navigation, but you can search for Sky Sports China or whatever race you’re looking for, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they magically appear. So I should have said a little context. I had said in the last episode that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, as far as I could tell, at least in replays, there’s no way to get the Sky Sports feed, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mostly about the commentators. Um, I like the Sky Sports commentators. I find them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be egregiously, uh, UK biased, you know, Lewis Hamilton and George
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Russell, you know, and Lando Norris can never put any foot wrong anywhere for any time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s I mean Hi, I’m American. I know how that goes but It gets to be a little much from time to time Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, a lot of people prefer it because that’s what f1 used to excuse me. That’s what ESPN used to broadcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, apparently instead of just using it as like a different audio track, which I think is all it really is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple treats it as an entirely different broadcast but I think the only way I’ve been able to find it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is exactly what Brendan says. You have to actually search for Sky Sports whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to find it, which again is just bananas to me. I really think that Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a lot of potential here for F1 coverage and being, you know, the American partner for F1 coverage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but golly, it’s been slow out of the gate, But what are you going to do?
Rosetta 2 follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk Rosetta Colin McKellar writes with regard to processor emulation and how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long it lasts I did some Wikipedia diving and put together this post about how long Apple’s processor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emulation lasts on the Mac. This looks like a three mile long post, but it’s actually a bunch of charts and stuff It’s pretty good stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John, I think you’ve extracted some stuff which we’ll talk about in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s Colin continuing here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah So Colin continues and writes in short 68k emulation was supported on power PC for as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long as classic Mac OS existed including when it lived on as the classic environment in Mac OS X.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PowerPC emulation, the original Rosetta, was around for five and a half years after Mac’s transition to Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey According to Apple’s present plans, Rosetta 2 will last about 18 months longer than Rosetta 1. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I pulled out some more interesting info from this post, which is how long
⏹️ ▶️ John each architecture was the current architecture for the Mac. So 68K was
⏹️ ▶️ John the architecture for the Mac for 10 years and seven months. Power PC for 11 years and eight months and
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel for 14 years and four months. And so far Apple Silicon has just been five years and four months.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Intel, the Mac has been Intel longer than any other processor. And maybe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why I feel like even though they’re according to these stats, it’s gonna be 18 months longer than Rosetta
⏹️ ▶️ John One lasted. It just feels shorter because Intel has been around so long. Maybe it’s just because of the prevalence of Intel software,
⏹️ ▶️ John like going to Intel opened up this whole new world of stuff that became easier to
⏹️ ▶️ John compile for Darwin essentially. Um, but yeah, it’s, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I, my recollection of 68 K to power PC is basically what they said. Like it basically
⏹️ ▶️ John never went away. It didn’t go away until classic Mac iOS went away. Even then it was classic, classic
⏹️ ▶️ John environment inside Mac iOS 10. Uh, but power proceed Intel, power proceed didn’t stick around that long at all. The other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing was Intel was so much faster than power PC. And I guess that’s also true of a Apple Silicon with Intel.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, um, it’s really, it’s just a feel thing. Like it just feels like it’s a little bit too soon because
⏹️ ▶️ John circumstances are different, but it will in fact be 18 months longer than one of their transitions, but shorter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then related, Tom Obarski writes, on Reddit I saw that a user received a pop-up warning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of upcoming deprecation from a fresh install of Final Cut Pro non-subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a brand new MacBook Neo. That’s something else. And so we’ll put a link to the Reddit post, but the little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notification reads, support ending for Intel-based apps. This version of Final Cut Pro will not open in a future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release of macOS. learn how to update to an Apple Silicon version.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a terrible message because I’m assuming Final Cut Pro is not the problem. Anyway, you can keep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so Tom continues, there’s some speculation as to whether this is because the A18 Pro is not seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an M chip and therefore is assumed it must be Intel or whether a component within an FX
⏹️ ▶️ Casey library could still be flagged as Intel and thus would invalidate the whole install. Weird edge case to say the least.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I were to guess, hi, this is Casey. If I were to guess, I would say that it’s probably a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey library or something like that. But I mean, I don’t think that the A18 not being seen as an M chip is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong. It’s plausible for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s very plausible. I mean, there’s a bunch of ways to look up the architecture and the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is, is it ARM or is it not ARM? And the A18 Pro is very clearly ARM. If you were to look it up on a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that ran it, I think the answer would come back as ARM.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta be a library or a plugin or something. And speaking of that, I don’t have the notes, but Apple just bought whatever that, that Final
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder if they’re, you know, the best way to make sure that any Intel only plugins
⏹️ ▶️ John are no longer Intel only, just buy the company and then make sure they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Apple Silicon before the
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iPhone 17e teardown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some teardowns have been released recently. The iPhone 17E has an iFixit teardown. We’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. And it appears that a lot of the parts are the same as we saw in the 16. Yeah. And
⏹️ ▶️ John interestingly, one of the things they pointed out is that, um, say you’ve got a 16E and you wish it had MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just put the 17E back on there with MagSafe. And it mostly works. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John so there’s a few points, like it doesn’t, so MagSafe will attach to it and charge it, but you don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John the little like animation, you know, the little circle filling thing or whatever it is, because like there’s a little it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little bit of a frankenphone, right? It’s not not a francophone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to be clear, so the 16 e did support chi charging, just not
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But that means but the animation that you get for MagSafe is the like the green ring that appears or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it will charge it. So anyway, parts are I think basically every part is the
⏹️ ▶️ John same except for the like the the logic board or whatever and they they they made
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone out of a mixture of a whole bunch of parts they were very excited about the part interchangeability and the fact that they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get hassled by the software for like parts pairing and stuff like that but uh yeah 17e is just
⏹️ ▶️ John a 16e with a different logic board and a different SoC and a magnet on the back.
Camera-indicator security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about MacBook Neo. First of all, Gruber had a post with regard to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on-camera and also mic on-screen indicators and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gruber linked to Apple’s platform security guide which states the MacBook Neo combines system software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and dedicated silicon elements within the A18 Pro to provide additional security for the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feed. The architecture is designed to prevent any untrusted software even with root or kernel privileges in Mac OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from engaging the camera without also visibly lighting the on-screen camera indicator light.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the context here is that the MacBook Neo doesn’t have a little green LED next to its front-facing
⏹️ ▶️ John camera like all the other MacBooks do. Instead, they have an icon
⏹️ ▶️ John in the menu bar, like the green little FaceTime icon, and also like a green dot
⏹️ ▶️ John in the corner of the screen. And that dot is basically a stand-in for the light. And last time
⏹️ ▶️ John you mentioned it, I’m like, I’m sure Apple has done something to try to make that more secure, but it’s obviously more difficult when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re trying to secure software versus trying to secure it in hardware, where in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John the LED if the camera is on, the LEDs on business like electrically hardwired
⏹️ ▶️ John connected to it, and you’d have to stop that from happening. You’d have to get physical access to
⏹️ ▶️ John the laptop and cut a, you know, trace somewhere to prevent, you know, that from working.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even that might be difficult, although there was a bug with that. I couldn’t find this link, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the first time Apple did this, they tried to say, and the light will always be on as long as the camera’s on and they
⏹️ ▶️ John messed up the implementation, but that was a while ago. The current implementation is pretty solid, but that’s all in hardware. So what do they
⏹️ ▶️ John do to try to make the software more secure? So this first bit from Gruber is there from Apple security document
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, even if someone like, you know, puts a root kit on your machine, they have super
⏹️ ▶️ John user privileges. They have root kernel level access to your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t stop that green dot from appearing in the corner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So Gruber got talking with friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, and Guy wrote to Gruber, the software-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera indicator light in the MacBook Neo runs in the secure exclave part of the chip. So it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost as secure as the hardware indicator light. It runs in a privileged environment separate from the kernel and blitz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the light directly into the screen hardware. All of that applies to the mic indicator as well, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a bonus compared to the camera only hardware indicator. And then Guy also provided a little footnote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run on a completely isolated real-time operating system that communicates with the kernel in user space using a very limited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey API surface. Not to be confused with the secure enclave, which is a totally different thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so to actually stop the light from working, they need more than just access, kernel-level
⏹️ ▶️ John access, they need to hack the X-Clave, which is a lot harder to do because it is very limited. It is a whole separate thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John running a whole separate operating system. And it talks to the main operating system, but it doesn’t go
⏹️ ▶️ John through the main operating system, it seems like, to get those dots onto the screen. It just does writes them directly into
⏹️ ▶️ John the video hardware old-school style. So that’s pretty cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and then also Gruber linked to random Augustine’s post about the Apple exclaves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which you can read over on medium if you can hold your nose too long enough to read something on medium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco All right. Hey, do you want to log into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Medium? Oh god, it’s the worst.
MacBook Neo benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CPU benchmarks. Apparently we got something a little bit wrong. John, can you tell us about that, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the iPhone 16 Pro Max with the A18 Pro, which is what I was using for CPU benchmarks because the Neo had
⏹️ ▶️ John not been released to anybody yet, has 46% higher single core in Geekbench,
⏹️ ▶️ John not 30%. I just plain did the math wrong. So it was 3428 versus 2347. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think those are the numbers from the earlier episode, but I just didn’t do the math right. So 46% faster in single core,
⏹️ ▶️ John not 30. Thanks to Philip Sommer for the correction.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then with regard to SSD benchmarks, Vito Treno writes, your MacBook Neo SSD benchmark figures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last episode came from the Verges benchmarks, which only measured sequential speeds. While those are important for large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file transfers, random speeds are a better reflection of using the computer, you know, OS boot, logging in, launching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, et cetera. Sequential speeds may be more visible to the user in Finder progress bars, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey random speeds are arguably more important to the user experience, contributing to the feeling of snappiness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and ultimately the longevity of the machine. This seems to me to be a far more important metric for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey target market of the Neo. I would agree with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so before we go on, so obviously the Neo has an SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John and not a spinning disk. Back when spinning disks existed, random access versus
⏹️ ▶️ John sequential access was a key way to measure performance because
⏹️ ▶️ John as Vito noted, you’re doing random access when you’re doing most stuff. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly not just copying one giant file from location A to location B, Even that could be random depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on fragmentation on a spinning disc or whatever. But spinning discs had to move actual disc heads
⏹️ ▶️ John on an arm to get to the track where the data was, wait for the arm to settle, wait for the
⏹️ ▶️ John sector that you want to spin underneath the heads of the track, and then do that all over again, back and
⏹️ ▶️ John forth and back and forth, making all those lovely noises that we remember from the spinning disc days. And so random seeks on a spinning
⏹️ ▶️ John disc were murder because you spend most of your time waiting for physical items
⏹️ ▶️ John to travel to be aligned and settled and then a brief reading of some magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ John information and then you start the whole process over again most of your time was burned on overhead. SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other hand do not have any moving parts in that way they don’t have arms that move they don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John discs that spin they never have to wait for an arm to move to a different section of a disc and they
⏹️ ▶️ John never have to wait for a disc to rotate several more degrees and they never have to wait for the things to settle
⏹️ ▶️ John and so you would think well Well, isn’t random access on an SSD basically a constant time
⏹️ ▶️ John operation? Like it doesn’t vary. It doesn’t care if you’re reading address zero or address 4 million.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all just chips. Well, there are things that can affect random access because the chips have to be read
⏹️ ▶️ John in certain size chunks from certain regions at a time and so on and so forth. But so that’s why you still do random tests
⏹️ ▶️ John on SSDs. But the difference between random and sequential is not nearly as pronounced as it used to
⏹️ ▶️ John be. And what most people feel like they’re waiting around. do you feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re waiting around for a disc? It’s when you’re copying a big file and you see a big progress bar. Like you’re copying some
⏹️ ▶️ John huge movie from one disc to another or whatever. If you’re not limited by your internet download speed or you’re not limited by the other
⏹️ ▶️ John disc, especially now that with APFS that you get the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the clones, like when you duplicate a gigantic file on APFS, it’s like instant, right? Because it doesn’t actually copy the
⏹️ ▶️ John data. So that is entirely eliminated, but copying to and from multiple volumes
⏹️ ▶️ John or to and from multiple, you know, physical disc mechanisms, That’s when people say, oh, shouldn’t this
⏹️ ▶️ John be going faster? It’s two SSDs. And that’s where you’ll see the difference. So I agree
⏹️ ▶️ John that random and sequential are not, are two separate things, but I really think that sequent,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason people show sequential is, well, first of all, it’s the number that’s going up. So it’s fun to show in benchmarks, look how
⏹️ ▶️ John much faster it is. Uh, and then also I think that these days with SSDs, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John main time people feel like they’re waiting. Like I wish my SSD was faster because I’m copying this
⏹️ ▶️ John giant video file from this external SSD to my internal one, and I’m looking at a progress bar and I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Vito continues, I’ve only found random seek benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one review, which is Andrew Mark David’s review at 11 minutes, 17 seconds, we’ll put a timestamp link in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the random speeds seem to be on par with what we’ve seen from the M1 MacBook Air. They also, from what I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t seem to be to differ much across the entire Apple Silicon lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I looked at that and I think they do differ across the Apple Silicon lineup. So we’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes to the benchmark app, which I had never heard of, but you can download and try it if you want. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ John graphed the numbers for the RND 4K QD64 read and
⏹️ ▶️ John write and RND 4K QD1 read. I don’t know what that means. I’m assuming random 4K,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know what the QD means, but anyway, two different read and write benchmarks for three
⏹️ ▶️ John machines, the MacBook Neo 256, the M1 MacBook Air 256, and the M5
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro 512. and especially on the RND 4K QD64
⏹️ ▶️ John read and write tests, the MacBook Pro is way faster. It’s like twice as fast in these random scenes
⏹️ ▶️ John as the Neo. So I wouldn’t say that, at random they’re all about the same. I mean, granted, when you get down to
⏹️ ▶️ John the, whatever the RND 4K QD1 write one, maybe they’re a little bit closer, but look at those graphs. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say there’s still a appreciable measured difference between
⏹️ ▶️ John the fastest and the slowest. So for example, I don’t know what these numbers are, they come from the disc benchmarks, but the the neo is 582 and
⏹️ ▶️ John the m5 macbook pro is 1180 that’s close to double
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and similarly on the on the other like the closest benchmark is 31 to 45
⏹️ ▶️ John still a somewhat substantial difference. So Yeah, um, I I agree that people should be
⏹️ ▶️ John still testing random not just testing sequential, but I think just people Especially in this youtube. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John complained about this all the time because my entire where your childhood was spent arguing about benchmarks. Nobody argues about benchmarks anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just, YouTubers just used Geekbench and are like, well, the number says what the number says and nobody,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I applaud Vito to be out there saying, these benchmarks are BS, you’re just measuring sequential. There’s much more to the
⏹️ ▶️ John story. I agree, and there’s much more to the story than random. It’s like, well, random, I don’t care about your benchmark. Your benchmark
⏹️ ▶️ John has this problem. We need to test the launching of Photoshop, but not that version of Photoshop. And yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the culture I come from. So I applaud Vito for calling it out here, but I will say that I think random access
⏹️ ▶️ John still differs between the less expensive and more expensive SSD MacBook Pros
MacBook Neo hands-on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you went on a field trip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was happened to be in the mall. Well, I actually I took
⏹️ ▶️ John the trip to the mall. I was driving my son there to get his haircut. And the reason I drove him is
⏹️ ▶️ John so I go to the Apple store. I went to the Apple store to look at all the new stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I went right to the MacBook Nios. And I don’t know what I was expecting. Like I had this image in my head
⏹️ ▶️ John of the product. Obviously, I’d seen it on Apple’s website and we talked about it on the show. And I knew all these things about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just I didn’t I didn’t go in with any expectations. Like I’m just going to
⏹️ ▶️ John go in and look at them and they’re going to be exactly like how I thought they would be. And they weren’t. I picked it up and played with
⏹️ ▶️ John it and touch it. And I’m like, they have pulled off something
⏹️ ▶️ John with this product that is tricky to do, which is I think think about the
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops. What are they? They’re they’re like flat rectangles made of metal, especially when
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re closed and you’re not using them. Like what is there to the flat rectangle made? How many flat rectangles made of
⏹️ ▶️ John metal has Apple made since the unibody laptops started all those years ago. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John so many of them. Surely they’re all the same at this point. Is there any room within the
⏹️ ▶️ John flat plank of aluminum to do anything, literally?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think there is, because they’ve turned, I mean, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if they did this on purpose or whatever, but like one of the things that separates the Neo from
⏹️ ▶️ John its more expensive brethren is, and we’ll get to this in a little bit, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen part of it is not as skinny as it is on the other models because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive to make them thin, I guess. Right, it’s a little bit fatter in the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen part. It’s a little bit fatter overall, like a millimeter. And one of the things you can
⏹️ ▶️ John do when the screen part is a little bit fatter than it might be on like the old MacBook Air that came to
⏹️ ▶️ John like a really sharp, like the M1 MacBook Air comes to a really sharp point at the part that you pick up, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the lid, you know, the screen lid. One of the things you can do when it’s a little bit thicker is you can put a
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger corner radius on all of the corners. And I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also by the way, this, the Neo is, I forget the exact measures, maybe like a quarter
⏹️ ▶️ John inch, a half an inch less wide and deep, you know what I mean? Like if you put this on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of a M5 MacBook Pro, you’d see the M5 MacBook Pro sticking
⏹️ ▶️ John out around the edges because this is smaller. So this is a little bit smaller and it has a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John corner radius on all the corners. And the result of that is picking this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing up and just handling it as a thing that you tuck it under your arm and carry it to your,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t know, to the library or to your class or whatever. It feels
⏹️ ▶️ John so good and so solid and so friendly in a way that the more professional
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops do not because the more professional laptops are sharper. They’re thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit, but they’re also sharper, like literally sharper on the edges
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s just the way they’re designed. Rounding this thing over makes it feel
⏹️ ▶️ John pleasant and solid and friendly and approachable. And I know this sounds so dumb. It’s like, it’s a rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ John of aluminum. How friendly and approachable is an extra millimeter? I’m telling you, this
⏹️ ▶️ John was my impression upon picking it up. I’m like, this thing feels great. And it feels great
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way. The only analogy I can have is like the iMac G4 with the little, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John metal arm with the floating LCD display on it, you remember that one? That arm looked
⏹️ ▶️ John and felt so good on that machine that you were like, I can’t believe that if I
⏹️ ▶️ John pay this amount of money, I get this. And that’s the impression I got from the Neo, that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing feels like you’re getting more than you paid for. You’re getting more than your money’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worth. It feels solid and expensive and nice
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that I did not expect it to. I don’t know if I expected it to feel janky or something, but it like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t going on about this, you know, like so it had rounded corners and you were wowed by that. Who cares? This this
⏹️ ▶️ John is my impression that they really knocked it out of the park, that it feels solid. And the second part of this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the trackpad, which I did know going in. I was thinking this trackpad is going to be a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit janky. Nope. It’s it’s great. Like maybe it will get bad over time. I don’t know. This is a floor
⏹️ ▶️ John model. I’m like the first day it came out or the first week it came out. Feels so good. I pressed everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John on that thing. It is pleasant and easy to click everywhere on the thing and it doesn’t feel loosey goosey
⏹️ ▶️ John and wiggly and tilty. It feels great. So I think if you got somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the, a MacBook Neo, they are gonna be so happy, especially if they’ve never had a Mac before and they’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ John had PC laptops. Oh my God, this is so much better than I thought it was gonna be in terms of fit
⏹️ ▶️ John and finish. And I don’t know why I had these doubts in my mind, but I was blown away by it. And obviously it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John got eight gigs of RAM and a bad screen and blah, blah, blah, But it’s like it’s $600 so Macbook neo that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they knocked it out of the park with this machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Coincidentally I happen to also go into an Apple store yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Also for with the goal of like oh like I was literally I was walking past it I’m like oh I should go in and check out all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this new stuff The first thing I did was walk over to the Macbook neo. I must have looked very strange to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staff because I was basically like like fondling it, like at different edges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like trying to figure out, like, at what point is this gonna feel cheap?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I did not find that point. Like, so I was going over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the corners, all of the, like, the rounded edges, the sharp edges, the finished.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, you know, as I often do in Apple stores with, you know, picking up new products, I closed it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I moved it around. And I’m like, what does the bottom look like? What are the feet, are the feet worse?
⏹️ ▶️ John I love even the feet, the feet on the MacBook Air are sharp little cylinders, like they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John domes like they were on the M1 MacBook Air, the current M2, M3, M4 MacBook Air, the feet are kind of like sharp
⏹️ ▶️ John edge cylinders. The feet on the Neo are rounded and friendly with flat bottoms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I move my hands over every inch of that thing. And I opened it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I felt even like the screen, like the interior screen hinge, like above the keyboard, I even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco felt that, like, where’s the sharp edge? Where is the sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cheap manufacturing? I could not find one. It just feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like any other Apple laptop. Like I even, I forget, I’m sorry, I forget who it was. It was somebody, I think I’m asked it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on somewhere, I said a few days ago, like, oh, you can tell there’s like a different, there’s like a not as good of a grain pattern.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked, I couldn’t tell. I ran my hands over the flat parts, does it feel different?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t. I picked it up, moved it around. Is the weight balance off? Does it feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less solid? No. It just feels and looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. I was shocked. I really thought there would be some kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticeable lower quality level about it compared to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t. I was not able to find one at least in the Apple store with a good few minutes of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually, I hope they take some of these decisions and bring them to the MacBook Pro. I’m not saying they need to make it as rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John as this. Like I do like the thin lid on the MacBook Air, Micro Pro, stuff like that. But like some
⏹️ ▶️ John of these decisions are just, they’re not, obviously they’re not more costly. In fact, they save money, but they’re just better decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like at various times we have complained on this show about exactly how sharp certain edges are on Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops and I think the Neo shows that if you’re willing to round things over
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more, it makes for a more pleasant to handle machine. It also helps that this is smaller and it does
⏹️ ▶️ John look like a little baby because it’s not like 11 inch MacBook Air size. It’s not, you know, the MacBook,
⏹️ ▶️ John adorable MacBook one size. Although that was very sharp as well. But the fact that it is a little bit smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is going to make it even more attractive to somebody who doesn’t want to spend two grand on
⏹️ ▶️ John a laptop. They just want a nice laptop and not spend too much money. And this boy, is this a nice laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John without spending too much money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was blown away. And I, of course, you know, I opened it up and I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar tests as John. Like I was, you know, knowing how the trackpad works, I was clicking, not only clicking the trackpad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also I was like, I tried to click it like on the corners, on the edges, like, does it feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad if you click like diagonally from a corner? No. Because it
⏹️ ▶️ John used to, like I have some MacBook Pros with mechanical clicking trackpads
⏹️ ▶️ John that did not feel good. And this does not have any of those problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was shocked. And of course, you know, opening up apps and I even tried like the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like, oh, the keyboard feels a little bit, I thought it felt like a little bit squishier, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I went over to a MacBook Pro to compare and that felt exactly the same thing. No, that must be just
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s like the same keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it felt like it. On the colors, I thought they all looked pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. The yellow and the pink were more pale than I expected. My favorite color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was actually the blue. I thought the blue would be a lot closer to the MacBook Air Midnight color, which is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dark, it’s almost black.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s way lighter than the MacBook Air. And it’s not a light blue. It’s still like a dark blue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s more like a denim jeans color. Yeah, like jeans color, yeah. Yeah, and I thought the blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Neo was a really nice looking computer. And if I were to need one of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I don’t, but if I were to need one of these, I would almost certainly go with the blue. But I also respect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people going for the yellow because it’s a really fun color. But the blue is a little more my style. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was blown away both from just sheer pride in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform of the Mac that I love so much that so many more people are going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco joining us. It’s gonna be like, finally, like all the people who weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to afford the other Macs, like, we’re bringing more people into the fold. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great thing for the platform, as I said. It also made me feel so impressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by both Apple’s hardware prowess and also just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how great computers are right now that everything the MacBook Neo can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, all of the high-end pro apps that, it can run. It might not be as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast as everything else, but it can do it. Your iPhone in your pocket can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also do that. What a time to be in computers. Yeah, it’s not all roses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s some problems that we need to work out. That’s always gonna be the case. It always has been the case. But wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what an amazing time we are in for hardware that not only is it possible to make a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, that is that good for that price. And it’s not like Apple’s not taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any profit on this. You know Apple doesn’t do that. You know they’re making 20 or 30% at least margins on this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to also have all that power in our pockets all the time is an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resource. We have amazing supercomputers available to us all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for not even that much money, that’s wonderful. And I think this product is a hit and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is, Like when you look at what PCs do in this price range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s gonna kick their butts. And they honestly could use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the butt kicking. So this is just fantastic. I’m blown away by how good the
iPhone 17e hands-on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also briefly got to handle the iPhone 17e. It feels great in the hand. It’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just like the 16e. Like you feel it and you’re like, wow, that’s really light. That’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do I want it? No, but it’s great for people who want it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I walk right out of the store and I didn’t even realize until today, I totally forgot to even look for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the studio displays. Whoops. Oh, come on. I was so blown away by the Neo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like, all right, you know, mission accomplished. I’m out of here. walk right out.
Studio Display XDR eyes-on
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t forget I looked at the studio display XDR although unlike a Casey store, they had these
⏹️ ▶️ John back to back. So I couldn’t see them at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that I needed to, but I play with all the settings on it. I was looking for the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John lets you pick between like the reference mode and whatever. And I couldn’t find it in my brief looking there, but I honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t know where to look. It wasn’t, I didn’t see it in the displays thing. They don’t have a lot of, well, there’s two problems. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple store is really bright. So it’s really tough for even 2000 nits to show, you know, because the
⏹️ ▶️ John light sensor, the ambient light sensor is going to put the monitor already at pretty high brightness. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John best you’re gonna get is like 2X because if the monitor is at a thousand nits and HDR is 2000,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks less impressive than if the monitor is at like 300 nits because you’re in a dim room and then the
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR comes on at 2000. But anyway, their sample photos in the photos app didn’t really show off HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John that well. So you’d be forgiven Casey for not being able to see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John They also didn’t have it in the mode. they had it in P3, like the display profile. They didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the combined P3 and Adobe RGB mode. I switched it to that mode and
⏹️ ▶️ John then the screen blinked and then it blinked again and it had switched itself back. I’m like, well, there’s some bugs. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I switched it back into the mode again. Eventually I got it to stick. I couldn’t see any difference, but it was interesting that that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John the default mode for the stuff. But otherwise it looks like a studio display but it has better black levels and it’s brighter.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Cool, it costs twice as much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, I, did you, did you notice the refresh rate at all? Like when you were scrolling a webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, yeah, I could tell it was 120 Hertz, uh, for scrolling stuff, but I didn’t like, that’s why I put it in,
⏹️ ▶️ John put it in adaptive, but I didn’t know how to really test that, but yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s high refresh. It’s a good monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a good monitor. The only, the only thing it has going against it is it’s not 32 inches and 6K, but everything else about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, the only thing it has going against it is that it’s $3,000, whatever the heck the price is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, proportionally, given the difference in size and pixels, that’s not actually that bad
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to the Pro Display XDR.
Sponsor: Zapier
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MacBook Neo teardowns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about MacBook Neo teardowns. First of all, Tech Renew did one where they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did fast forward a bit, but effectively they tore the whole thing down in 10 minutes. I think we talked about this briefly last week.
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes ahead of the department.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay. There you go. iFixit did a teardown. There’s a video as well as a blog post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. They did some interesting things. They were talking about, hey, how does this weigh what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it weighs, in the good way and the bad way. How does it weigh what it does? And so the NEO’s bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case and keyboard is only 8 grams lighter than the MacBook Airs, despite being 6.5%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smaller in two-dimensional area, 101.3 square inches versus 95.1 square inches. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NEO’s screen and lid is 48 grams
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heavier than the Airs. And at 86 grams, the metal H that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under the trackpad that assists in like the way the trackpad works. That’s 7%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the NEO’s total weight, which is bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, weight well spent because that trackpad feels good. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Uh, and the NEO’s full trackpad assembly is almost twice, almost exactly twice as heavy as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M3 MacBook Airs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would not have guessed that, but you would think like, oh, the Taptic engine, isn’t that going to add weight and everything? But I guess having moving
⏹️ ▶️ John parts and like those, those leafs, those steel leaf springs in there and the big
⏹️ ▶️ John heavy metal H, it’s fascinating that where’s the weight? It’s in the screen lid and the trackpad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco metals. Heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t tell. So it’s eight grams lighter. The, the, the bottom case and keyboard is eight grams lighter
⏹️ ▶️ John for 6.5% smaller, but in their video, they had like, you couldn’t see, they put the stuff on a scale
⏹️ ▶️ John with like the one was kitchen scales with a little like non-backlit, uh, led readout or LCD readout
⏹️ ▶️ John for the weight. I couldn’t read the weight. So I don’t know, is eight grams lighter at 6.5% smaller. Is that proportional?
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to know the title, the total to do that math. But anyway, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t dive too far into it, but I would say that most of the weight difference, the reason the Neo weighs exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as the larger MacBook Air, despite having a smaller battery, is the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John weighs twice as much and the lid of the, where the screen is, weighs a little more as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Righto, with the trackpad, there’s a screw in the center of the trackpad mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that lets you adjust the force required to activate the membrane switch that triggers a click,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is pretty cool. So you can, I presume,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not for the user to do it. It’s right. But anyone needs to repair it or if the trackpad ever started feeling wonky or
⏹️ ▶️ John got too loose or got too heavy or whatever, it’s nice to know that there’s an adjustment screw there. They also did the usual thing of
⏹️ ▶️ John like doing whatever, whatever scanning thing. There’s that. Is it a pet scan, cat scan? I don’t know. They’re doing some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of scan that shows the insides of the thing. It’s like an X-ray, but like they colorize it and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you can see the speakers I put in our show. You just look at the video. You’ll see all the images, but in our show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes here I have I’m showing the same speaker from two sides That’s the same speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John from the top and from the bottom I know in our notes it looks like it’s left and right, but that’s just the same speaker So you can see how big the speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John actually is Everything else and those big black squares that are to the left and the right of the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ John is not Decidedly not speaker and good ol’ iFixit opens it up Although they did it so fast and a
⏹️ ▶️ John sped up thing that I had to frame by frame to get these screenshots but they use like a essentially a hot
⏹️ ▶️ John knife to cut open those black things. And yes, the speaker is in, I don’t know, let’s say
⏹️ ▶️ John one quarter of it. And the rest of it is completely empty air.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just hollow inside there. And I think I know why. Do you see these pictures here in the bottom one where that wire is
⏹️ ▶️ John dangling? That’s just like laying on top of that’s not there’s the wire is not inside there. That’s just the wire like, you know, from
⏹️ ▶️ John you see from the top right anyway. There’s nothing in there. It is empty air and it is not air that is channeled
⏹️ ▶️ John to like like a base port to try to like have a tuned length of tube to… Nope, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not it at all. It is just plastic, but it is not flat plastic. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic with those little diagonal ribs for cross-bracing
⏹️ ▶️ John and X patterns. Like there’s… It’s separated into little boxes and within each box there is an X
⏹️ ▶️ John and the box and the X are made of ridges of plastic. And then you see the four holes
⏹️ ▶️ John where screws go in, this is what I think these black plastic things are doing. And probably also doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing in the iPad. These black plastic things are essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John stiffness braces because that square of plastic has nothing to do with the speaker,
⏹️ ▶️ John but is braced in this way and then screwed at four points into the chassis to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it so the corners of the chassis don’t twist and bend. It’s like for torsional rigidity. It is a mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ John stiffener. That is my theory and I’m sticking to it unless someone from Apple’s design team tells me that’s not what this is for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they’re definitely not air pockets to increase base because they wouldn’t put those cross bracing
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. That’s not what the inside of any, you know, base port ever looks like. But you do put things like that
⏹️ ▶️ John in to stiffen things. So, MacBook Neo and possibly also the iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, although I haven’t seen inside their black things, has plastic stiffeners
⏹️ ▶️ John bolted to it to make it so the corners aren’t floppy, which is maybe why it feels so expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because otherwise, like if you had like battery in there, battery is rigid. And so, you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably wouldn’t need to add more stiffeners to that. But in this case, when you don’t have enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery to fill the cavity inside the case, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So that’s, I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very good theory, especially looking at these, you’re right, like this, you wouldn’t design a ported speaker enclosure with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that pattern in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t even tell if that is open to the air, like, cause they didn’t do a good job of peeling off all the plastic. Like this went
⏹️ ▶️ John by really fast in a few frames. So, but it’s just totally separate. Another thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we just talked about how they do take this thing apart and the battery isn’t glued in, it’s screwed in or whatever. And there’s been some talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about, obviously for repairability, you don’t wanna deal with glue and stuff like that. But also like
⏹️ ▶️ John that perhaps this makes it less expensive to assemble. I don’t know a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John about assembly, but I’m thinking that 18 screws versus sticky stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sticky stuff might be cheaper to assemble because you just put the sticky stuff on and you slap it in there. Like a machine
⏹️ ▶️ John can do it that much more easily than a machine can do 18 of these tiny precise screws.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t know, maybe machine does all of them, maybe machine does none of it. But at any rate, 18 tiny screws. And
⏹️ ▶️ John also, this is another thing that may contribute to the weight. The battery in the Neo looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s in like a metal frame with flanges and those flanges are screwed down with 18 screws.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so when you have the sticky stuff, You don’t need a metal frame to hold the battery and
⏹️ ▶️ John then because you don’t need, you’re not screwing anything down. The battery itself is literally stuck to the chassis with
⏹️ ▶️ John glue or in the case of the iPhone, that electrically releasing glue thing. So I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John metal frame adds weight, those 18 screws add weight and it is much
⏹️ ▶️ John more repairable, but it also might be a little bit heavier and might actually be more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John to assemble because you got to put an 18 individual screws versus one sticky thing and slap and you’re done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about these main boards.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, just to compare like what is the MacBook Neo Logic Board compared to the MacBook Air M3
⏹️ ▶️ John Logic Board. And I mean, the Neo Logic Board looks more like an iPad Logic Board. It’s a skinny
⏹️ ▶️ John little thing. It looks like an extended phone Logic Board. Or you can compare it to the iPhone 16 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has the same SoC. And yeah, you can see it’s the same SoC, but the iPhone is just massively
⏹️ ▶️ John miniaturized. I can’t, I think they’re just showing two boards, is that two boards or two
⏹️ ▶️ John sides of the same board? I can’t even tell in this iFixit thing, but you can watch the video and see the size comparisons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Suffice it to say that the logic board portion of Apple laptops has just been shrinking and shrinking
⏹️ ▶️ John and shrinking over the decades. And it is now disappearing to the point where now it looks like an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John logic board. And I wonder if in five or 10 years, it’s going to look like a phone logic board.
AirPods Max 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the unthinkable happened, particularly to Marco, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods Max 2 are out. That is not the AirPods Max with USB-C that came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out a few months ago, whenever it was. This is an honest-to-goodness AirPods Max 2. And, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get to do a victory lap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s just a happenstance that I saw this because some listener said, was
⏹️ ▶️ John asking us to do an Ask ATP in the future, which I don’t know if we’ll do, but it’s saying, like, you should list all of your periodic
⏹️ ▶️ John reminders as an after show or a member special or something. And I actually have a reminders
⏹️ ▶️ John category called far future. So I don’t, so those things don’t get jumbled up. And what do I put in far future stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like this? I went to the far future saying, I wonder what’s in there these days. And the very top item was
⏹️ ▶️ John a check if there’s an AirPods Max 2 for the Marco bet, blah, blah, blah, like whatever. I’m like, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what? AirPods Max 2 did come out today. So I gathered all the info in ATP episode 604
⏹️ ▶️ John at one hour, three minutes and eight seconds. Marco said, after I had said something about the
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods Max and revision, said, John, I think you’re being optimistic. You can make a bet,
⏹️ ▶️ John add it to your calendar. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell the AirPods Max will get another update at least for two years.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did add it to my calendar. There it was. And I added it to my reminders. There it was in my far future
⏹️ ▶️ John reminders. Well guess what? That was September 12th, 2024. Apple got it just under the line.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I didn’t actually agree to the two year bet. I actually agreed to take the bet at three years, but either way,
⏹️ ▶️ John I won and the world gets AirPods Max 2,
⏹️ ▶️ John which are so very different from their predecessors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, they’re very, very different or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’re different in the way everybody wanted because when the one with USB-C came out, you’re like, that’s it, they just added USB-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John where’s the revision?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I want one with
⏹️ ▶️ John an H2. Well, guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, so it’s very similar in the approach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Vision Pro update, which is like, all right, here’s this product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that immediately upon launch, everybody was like, well, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part’s good, but these parts really suck. Here we are, like, you know, many years later,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple has released the next version of it, and literally all of the problem people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have with it are unaddressed, totally just left exactly the same. And it’s like, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, if you liked what we shipped before, here’s an update with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco essentially a spec bump. Nothing else has been touched. It’s like, okay. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference between the AirPods Max and the Vision Pro is that people buy the AirPods Max. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AirPods Max, this is not a product for me just comfort wise. They are extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uncomfortable for me they are so heavy and they did nothing to change that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They did nothing to change the clamping force. They did nothing to change the annoying weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case thing that they come with. None of that is different. They didn’t change the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awkward control scheme on them because they insist on digital crowns and everything they make. They probably do still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound great because the first one sounded great. That part’s probably fine. It is nice that they are matching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the many of the features of the newer AirPods that have come out. So all great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if they didn’t work for you before they won’t work for you now if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you love the air pods max and maybe you have like an older pair where the battery is starting to wear out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you’re annoyed at the lightning cable or whatever then this is this is a great time to upgrade if you still want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use them they are also still very expensive but I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these out in the wild and maybe just because you know people in New York have a lot of money But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I see a a lot of AirPods Max is out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially on young people like teenagers. I’m like your parents bought you a $550 pair headphones. Damn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But but I do see them a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think people are Buying them in reasonable numbers not enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I’m sure it’s nothing compared to like the AirPods Pro or the regular AirPods But it does seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a successful product that has a market. The price and the physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downsides of it keep that market smaller than it could be. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple seems to not care. So for the market that Apple has chosen to stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with for this product and seems to have no interest in trying to expand that market, this is an update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not even a great idea, it’s just, this is an update. Okay, it takes them from being like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco embarrassingly far behind the feature lineup to roughly on par with the feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lineup. And it solves nothing else. But okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did an update.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so what changed? Well now we have the H2 in it, which means you get adaptive audio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get conversation awareness, you get personalized volume, you get live translation, and you get voice isolation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, you get one and a half times more effective active noise cancellation. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a new high dynamic range amplifier for even cleaner audio. You get reduced wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio latency for game mode and iOS, MacOS, and iPadOS, but you get the same color, same price,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same case, same not folding headband thing, basically all the same stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s good that they just, that’s what everyone wanted. They said, why doesn’t it have the H2? It’s kind of like when the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John came out with the M2 and everything else was on the M3. So it’s a catch up thing. It
⏹️ ▶️ John should have the H2. It should have the H2 a long time ago. now it does and it’s got all the features.
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Overcast transcripts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overcast is shipping in beta, in beta, Overcast is shipping transcripts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me what the heck is going on here because this sounds pretty freaking great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been working on this for some time. Apple Podcasts launched transcripts probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what a year and a half ago now, maybe two years ago. It’s been a while. I knew back then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh crap, that’s a really good feature and I’m going to have to do that someday,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but how am I going to do that? Apple Podcasts operates at a much larger scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I do with much more resources and I just had no idea how I could possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever match that. Last summer with the beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iOS 26, Apple launched a new speech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcription API on iOS. It basically opened up the iOS speech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model that is used for iOS’s built-in transcription of things like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you speak to Siri, it’s that model. When you transcribe notes, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that model. What this meant is that it ran on device, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very optimized and very fast and very lightweight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, I’ve been looking at different ways to do transcription for a little bit before that, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once OpenAI’s Whisper models had come out. That was a game changer in transcription models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the accuracy was so much higher than what had come before. It was shocking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how good Whisper was. But the problem with OpenAI Whisper is that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really big model, it’s really slow. And so it’s great for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one person using on their computer or some very specialized app users,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part, it’s great if you are transcribing your own podcast that you make once a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whisper is great, but if I was gonna try to offer transcripts and overcast for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all podcasts or many podcasts, that wasn’t going to scale. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are also, you know, if you’re operating at a smaller scale, again, like if you had like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a podcast hosting company and you wanted to transcribe, you know, audio for your customers that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upload, if you’re dealing with, you know, maybe that’s hundreds of uploads a week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something, that’s a very different scale that might be operating at. So there are things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcription provider or transcription APIs from the AI providers. So, you know, OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a transcription API. The problem with those is that they’re not really designed for podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they usually have audio length limits or size limits that many podcasts would exceed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just cost wise, you would be talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hundreds or thousands of dollars per day at the scale that Overcast would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need those to be. And Overcast is not going to take on a thousands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dollars a day API cost. Let’s just say that would require me to raise the price of premium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher than most people would be willing to pay. What happened last summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is when Apple released their iOS 26 and all the OS 26s, when they they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all had this new API in them for Apple’s on-device transcription model. I ran some tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just blew me away how incredibly fast it was. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing I noticed like on a regular m4 like on a Mac on an m4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was running this on my on my laptop and it was able because I wasn’t gonna put you know Tahoe on my main
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac but I saw I was doing all this development on my laptop over the summer and I noticed that you know it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to transcribe if I ran a few jobs in parallel, I could have one M4 Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcribe audio at about 200x the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio’s playtime. So in other words, about about 200 minutes transcribed for every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real-time minute that has passed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was so much faster than anything else I’d ever tried. I noticed, okay, well if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one Mac can do like you know 200x real-time, well how many podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes are there? Let me see Like, what if I just start transcribe, if I, let me get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a couple of Mac minis and just have them start transcribing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most popular podcasts. How many can they get through? And I, you know, I have some information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, I can see what the most popular podcasts are. I can see how many episodes they release, you know, per per month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, and I can do some division and figure out like, you know, usually I can, I can download a copy of what they serve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can see how long it is and start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey analyzing things. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, let’s, let me try. what can a couple of Mac minis do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was blown away by how effective that was. You know, I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t just keep burning these in my house and let me see what I could do. So. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John put them next to the water in the closet, it’ll be fine. Right, exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. So I went to Mac mini vault, Mac mini, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, yeah, their actual name is Cyberlink, that’s the actual company name, but it’s Mac mini vault. And, cause what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, I think they’re the only provider where you can rent a Mac Mini from them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for 100 bucks a month. But if you buy your own and mail it to them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they’ll host it in their data center for only 50 bucks a month. And I was like, well, it doesn’t take that many months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come out ahead if I’m just buying the base model. And it turns out, and I analyze, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, I don’t know if listeners might recall, I recently have had strong opinions about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bang for the buck for M4 family chips and what the maximum bang for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the buck for processing power is, this is why. I did all this analysis last summer, and it turned out the base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model Mac mini was like way more bang for the buck for processor performance than any other configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any other computer. Okay, great. So I got two Mac minis, and I sent them off to Mac mini vault
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Wisconsin. And I even, I leased one, there’s a company called Green Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Host in the Netherlands. I’m like, if there’s certain podcasts that are like EU region locked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found a Mac mini host in the EU. I think the Netherlands is in the EU. Anyway, so at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Europe. And so I’m like, great, all right. So I had those three.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this required me to learn a bunch of stuff. Like I had to first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, I’m installing the Tahoe betas. And every single time there’s a new beta, the API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes a little bit or some limit is imposed or some limit is released or some bug is fixed. So all summer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m updating these Mac minis with the betas. And that was another question I had to like first ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac mini host and like, can I, or Mac mini vault rather, like, can I run betas on your Mac mini?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, is that, is there any reason why I couldn’t do that? And no, there’s no reason. So it’s fine. So I’m running the betas. I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything via remote desktop, like, you know, like VNC, like to, to the Mac minis, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from my own computer. And meanwhile, also doing it all like on my laptop locally and updating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that every time. And then I did like this whole thing. I had to, I had to learn how to basically run Mac servers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is something I really had not done beyond just occasionally having a Mac mini in my my house to be like a NAS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a streaming thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was just a link that I was gonna put in a future episode, but it seems relevant now that I, let me see if I can find it. There was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think in 26.3 or something that FileVault
⏹️ ▶️ John now lets you- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Unlock the FileVault encrypted drive
⏹️ ▶️ John over SSH. Yeah. Like before your thing boots. That would have been nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, presumably these hosting companies will do this for you. you’re paying them for or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who don’t have that, but yeah, apparently we’ll put a link in the show notes to the Apple support article that even before
⏹️ ▶️ John the OS boots, when it’s just at the thing where it’s like, Hey, enter your password to unlock this file vault disc so I
⏹️ ▶️ John can boot the OS. You can apparently SSH in remotely and enter the file vault password. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it will continue with the boot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I’ve, I’ve learned so many things about running max remotely. Like, you know, all the different, like I have a big text document of all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the things I have to do, you know, for a fresh install, like to prepare it and everything because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time there’s a software update, I got to do the whole, I got to do all this again, go to all of them. And of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the summertime, like during the beta period, it’s every two weeks. So every two weeks I’m going and updating all of these, running the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tests, like making sure I can still do what I want to do. And meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to also integrate this, you know, this, these three Mac minis into Overcast’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infrastructure. So I have to build in a job queue, performance and health monitoring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like from from like the overcast transcription app that I’m running on these Mac minis that integrate with my other performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and health monitoring on the server side. And I have to build on things like, all right, well, if the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini takes a job and then crashes, then I have to have some kind of like repeat job queue entry to re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cue that after a while and have some other Mac mini handle it like it was it was such a journey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it was working. I want more coverage. I don’t want to just do like the top 100 podcasts. I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, you know, Anything with more than X followers to it or X subscribers to it great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I got two more Mac minis in August so you know started out like really really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple You know just the three like the two that I own and the one I leased in the Netherlands And then now I’m up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now up to two more now up to five and what five could do was great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know it was like okay all right now, but you know the cost is starting. You know now I’m you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know $250 a month plus the hundred like it’s you know it’s like it’s starting to get like okay This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this is starting to get to a decent amount of money And I thought okay, let’s see how the five do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the five you know it ramps up pretty much linearly okay, how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more podcasts can I cover and It was you know I’m starting to cover like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat reasonable Percentage of popular podcasts, but then I’m like all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right well I also want to do like some of the back catalog, like can I go back like a few months? Can I go back a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years? Like how much can I do? Since I don’t really need a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like help from the host, I’m just running these anywhere. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonder if there’s like a local data center that I can co-locate. Like if I can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, people make these brackets that hold six Mac minis into like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a three U space on a rack. And I’m like, if I can get, let me, let me see, like, what would it cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to host a three you rack of Mac minis in a data center? If I can get that for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hundred bucks a month, then I might, you know, I might be able to come out ahead of what it’s going to cost me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I’m going to, if I’m going to, I was thinking, you know, maybe I’ll have like 10 or 12 of these. Like that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, that could do a lot. If I can, what I was doing with three and then with five, I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I can get like 12 like hmm this this could really be something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I bought a few more and I’m like as I’m doing this I’m like let me see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here I’ll paste you in the slack this is this is where this went.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before you send whatever you’re going to send I would just like to say that I am looking forward to the day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I get a shipment from you padded in Mac Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John when the M5 Mac Mini’s come out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right so you’ve sent two photographs that I will describe. One of them is two Mac minis with little stickies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on them that say, what does that scribe one into? And then a second photograph
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven Mac minis stood kind of upright, if you will,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a post-it per Mac mini connected to, I guess it’s a UPS of some sort?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s a switch on the left and that’s an old iPad on the right. Just as just basically, cause you know, when you run them, they get hot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t want to melt my rug. And so this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my my thermal management solution. The one on the right is on the rug though. Yeah, that well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you just have one it’s not that bad. But when you have seven, you know, it starts to add up. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, all right, now I have a few more and it’s going well. And I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ordered. I’m like as I’m like looking at different data centers like I want to know like, you know, what are my situations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, for racking me somewhere. So I got a rack enclosure to see like what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. And so here’s this next photo here. This is six of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a rack enclosure made for Mac minis. It’s a very simple, you know, just metal bracket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like it’s a shelf with brackets to mount it on the rack, you know, and very little else. There’s not too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And so then, so I started talking to data centers and… Wait, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are so many Mac mini boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco side of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John photograph. You can build a little fort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was really getting ridiculous. Like, because there’s, I’ve now at this point bought seven Mac minis and like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s starting to get, you know, I’m like, do I keep the boxes? Like, what do I do?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, everyone thought it was OpenClaw that was causing the run on the Mac minis. It’s really just Margo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. For the record, I’m looking at this rack mount and I don’t know if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a reason behind this or if this is really the right iteration numbers, but I see Scribe 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, because there were already some already in the data centers. Oh, my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey At that point,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one through six were in the data center. Or no, one through five were in the data centers. Six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that extra one off to the side of the previous photo. That was just one that I just had that was like my beach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac mini. Like, so that was just, I, I, I conscripted it into service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, for this purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just start looking on eBay for a M4 Mac minis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So maybe I’ll be, I’ll be supplying them soon. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is your power bill for the month or months that these were all in the house? Holy crap. I think all
⏹️ ▶️ John those together are less than my Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, by far. That’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true. It’s probably less than your monitor. So the combined power usage of six Mac menus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing transcription is something like 250 watts. Oh, that’s really not bad at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re not doing much GPU work and they’re all just the base model M4. So the top of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the power envelope is not that high. So it’s, yeah, I think it’s like about 50-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watts or 40-ish watts each. It’s like 250 for that whole thing. I was curious too, I measured it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how I know that. Anyway, so I started talking to data centers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was very hard to find any data center that would even take like, you know, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one guy because it turns out what I’ve learned is that most data centers, their business is like big companies or the government,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so it’s like, they don’t have, like not a lot of data centers are willing to talk to one guy. And I found one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locally that was, it’s on Long Island and it was willing, they were willing to talk to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was like, all right, so I’m looking to get, I’m like, what I need would be at minimum, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three U plus whatever I would need for like a network gear or a router or whatever. So like three,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe three or four U of rack space, you know, 300 watts of continuous power usage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever you can give me on the internet side. What would that cost? And I learned basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was too small for this data center, for any data center to care about. That like, I was, I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done anything with data center before. I had no idea what is it like I was picturing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just rent you know space by the rack unit like by the by the you basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I thought I could just ask for like for you and like how how much will that be and like it turns out it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not worth them dealing with that the amount of space that we have on Long Island
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ample but power and bandwidth are the expensive parts and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I they’re like okay well we can give you like maybe we can give you half a cabinet but we mostly just do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full cabinets and I was like like like what like the full the whole thing the whole tall rack like the you know 48
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever rack use that’s in a like that’s oh god okay I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like well how much is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know you need another the 15 Mac minis then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well I’m like I’m like this is like I don’t know how much this is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is gonna be a lot to afford so I’m like alright well that’s that’s way above what I what I can do right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m like, all right, let me figure something else out. And so for most of the fall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just ran that rack, or that enclosure of the six Mac minions. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the six in the data center, and then I ran these seven just in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the water closet, it’s calling to you. You know it is, it’s the ultimate, forget about the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire server cabinet, you’ve already got one, it’s got water bottles on the bottom and you just shove this thing in,
⏹️ ▶️ John you close the door.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the good thing, since they’re quiet, and since they work as a nice little heater also, although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not much, I mean, a 250 watt space heater is a very small space heater, but I just had them on top of that file cabinet you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the right there in that picture. I just had them sitting on top of that for all fall, like all the whole, it was just sitting there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just running, and especially because like, you know, as I was coming back on the mainland for the school year, like, well, I have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly good internet connection over here, it’s not gonna be used very much all winter, so might as well use it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m like, all right, if I put six of them here, maybe I can put another six of them in the restaurant because the restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also has an internet connection that is idle all winter long. Like, hmm, like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started like scaling it up in my mind. I’m like, all right, if I can make this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, like I can put them all over the place. Like I have two houses and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a restaurant and maybe I can like send some to Casey or something. Two turntables and a
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna pick up your couch cushions one day, Casey. There’ll be some Mac minis under there. it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco scribe 27 28. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my word. So anyway, so in I had you know that there have been in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the fall around Black Friday and there been a couple times Mac minis went on significant sales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like well if I can get them for like I did the math and I’m like if I can get them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like $500 or less like their retail price is 600 but if it was like 500 or less I would look at it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes you get them for like $4.50. Mmm that’s getting pretty like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s getting pretty good. So there were a couple of times where I’m like I splurged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like you know what if I get six more I can do a lot more transcripts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I would get six more and that happened a couple of times. Well it it soon became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparent that I I was probably ready for the next level.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I called the data center back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll take a cabinet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And it turned out a cabinet was not that much once you had like 18 Mac minis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I got myself a data center contract. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I had to learn a lot about how do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco host things in a data center? I had never even been inside one. Yeah, I’ve never. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never seen one. I was picturing a very different thing than what it was. I was picturing everything like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black, dark, like, you know, loud, awful, like… It wasn’t loud?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was moderate volume, actually. It used to be louder, let’s say. I got this contract with this local data center. They were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very nice, very helpful, because of course, everyone who works in a data center is a nerd like us. So, you know, everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very helpful. And I think they were very happy to see a customer who was not just like a boring bank or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. So anyway, things escalated a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit. Did they provide networking equipment or did you provide that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I provided that. So I’ll get to that in a moment. But I will just show you the final state that I have reached.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. This is what, 36 Mac minis?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I still have the six that are in the beach house and the few that are in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac mini vault. I now have 48 Mac minis. Oh my word, you have 48 Mac Mini’s. Did you
⏹️ ▶️ John even look at like AWS Graviton Arm? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like how much did you price out a cloud-based thing for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or no? Not really. Like I was looking at like APIs from the AI providers and stuff, but like actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do like. So what I like about this setup is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recurring cost is almost nothing. When I build Overcast, I build it for the long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haul because I’ve been around the block. I know like anything I sign up for that’s gonna be like $3,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month that really adds up But this entire thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like $1,000 a month and I have a lot of headroom. I had to pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up front for the Mac minis Obviously, but they’re not that expensive and I was able to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them on sale whenever they were like so like I I didn’t pay that much for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of capacity and And each one of these has 16 gigs of RAM, an amazingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capable processor. Now it has professional, you know, full-time networking in a data center, power redundancy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. So actually, when I compare the processing power I have at my disposal here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus what I’m paying Akamai for, since they bought Linode, like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco destroys anything else I’ve seen in terms of capability per dollar. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better. So I had to learn everything about this. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you see there, as you mentioned, I have my Ubiquiti light up cables, because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course I got a Ubiquiti light up switch and Ubiquiti router, because I know how to run those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already have in my Ubiquiti site manager, I already have multiple sites. I have been at the house at the restaurant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, I already manage multiple Ubiquiti sites. I know how to do it. Their equipment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is rock solid. I had to learn a few other things that were pretty surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So number one, I had no idea that power in data centers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is 208 volts. Oh. Right, you didn’t know either, right? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, US, you know, we have the 110 or the 220 or whatever, whatever 208, whatever it is, like it’s the 220, it’s the high voltage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fortunately, like all modern computer equipment has universal power supplies that it can take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in anything from like 100 to 240 or whatever, like it has a wide range of the power supply levels, but everything else you have to deal with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So another thing I learned is that power at a data center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is usually provided with two different inputs. And they were great. They took me on a whole tour
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the data center and I saw the entire infrastructure of the place. There’s two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of everything, two generators, there’s two power regulation sides, there’s two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HVAC sides, there’s two of everything for redundancy. It’s a very nice data center.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so everything has to be able to fail over. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you are connecting to their power, the back of the rack has a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of plugs. Oh, and by the way, they’re not just like the US,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, NEMA 15, whatever plug, like what you see on the back of a computer, like the, I think it’s the C13 or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C14, they’re that, that is what data center plugs are. Here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll send this picture and you can see. This is the back of the rack. Yeah, that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to see, to see how well you did on cable routing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the colorful plugs you see on the back of the rack, there’s a left bank and a right bank, and that’s two different power inputs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so at first I was like, okay, well, I’ll just plug into one of them. Because, you know, if these, like these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not serving traffic, they’re work consumers. So if some go offline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, it’s not a big deal. Like the queue will just build up, and then when they come back online, they’ll just start working through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the queue. I told the guy who was giving me the problem, I go, that’s because all my stuff only has one input. I don’t have redundant power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supplies and any of this stuff. And he’s like, well, once a year, we take down an entire side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a few hours to test things. And so you don’t really want to be plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that side during that time. And then we do the other side. So I’m like, OK, well, what do people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do people solve this problem? They
⏹️ ▶️ John buy server hardware where they can plug both cables into redundant power supplies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that too. Or it turns out there’s a device called an ATS, an automatic transfer switch. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can plug in the ATS into both sides, And then it offers you a single set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of outlets that is redundantly powered basically. So you can plug in all your single ended stuff into the ATS. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since all of my stuff is single ended, that’s what I did. So I had to learn that. Like there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much about this that I just had no idea. Like this is how servers were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like physically run. Yeah, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really not taking advantage of this rack. Those Mac mini’s are just bare, they’re like the size of the face plate on the old server.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the whole rest of the rack has just empty space. Yeah, well, it’s a lot of space. Yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ John servers are long. Remember even how long the XSERVE was, which is probably the only rack mount server you may have been familiar with? They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, there’s nothing stopping me. If I wanted to, I could use both sides of the rack. I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just put a second set of them on the back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John rack mount holes.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want the hot side going into the hot aisle. You don’t want to be pushing hot air into the middle of your rack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yes, technically you are correct. In practice, as I walk through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aisles of the data center, There’s no heat coming from your rack. Many’s there. No, there, there’s some, but like in practice, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, I walk, I walk past, you know, as I’m walking down the, the ostensibly cold aisle, some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have installed their servers backwards and are blowing hot air into the cold aisle. So like, it doesn’t seem like it’s that, you know, strictly necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this scale. And yes, you’re right. Like the Mac minis are just not producing that much heat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ll see like the big black things I have kind of like at top and midway. Those are fans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a rack mount fans that suck air in from the bottom and blow it out the back because the Mac mini’s are just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having the, having the hot air just go straight up. Yeah. The Mac mini’s are not blowing air out
⏹️ ▶️ John the back of them, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. They’re just kind of, you know, it’s wafting upwards from them. And so these fans suck it in and blow it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out the back, but even the, like, I don’t think it’s that necessary at this scale, obviously, or honestly, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so. I had to learn about 220 volt. I had to learn about ATSs, you know, they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they provide the internet via what they call a DIA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I had to, of course, I’m instantly going to like chat GPT and Gemini, what the heck is a DIA? How do I, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I connect whatever that is to whatever I have? What should I have? What equipment do I need? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco settings do I use? They give you like a yellow fiber wire and they’re like, here you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ran it to your cage. Okay. Now what do I do? And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to like buy like a little fiber transceiver, but it had to be exactly the right kind to go into the SFP port
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the ubiquity, um, whatever router I got, um, the, I think it’s the one of the, the dream machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, max, ultra, I don’t know. One of the high-end rack mount ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I had to learn all this stuff. And this is, you know, for people who work in data centers, I’m sure this is trivial to you because you’ve been doing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever, but like when you’ve never seen it before, that’s all brand new. So I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do a lot of just learning. And again, thank God for like the AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools and YouTube tutorials here and there for certain things. I was able to figure it all out eventually. And again, data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco center people were very helpful with the parts they could help with. So it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really great learning experience. It was very fun doing it. I don’t get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of physical projects. And to be able to wire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up a whole bunch of computers and run all these network cables bundled together and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have everything all organized. I even, I recently set it up so that if one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Mac minis crashes in a way that I can’t reboot it remotely, I can now log
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the power thing and remotely just kick off an entire bank of them and like have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like have it power cycle an entire you know set of six. So I built a manual kicking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine and it’s referencing it’s just it’s a lot of fun. I’m so happy I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this and what this has enabled is Overcast is now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcribing every podcast that has more than one listener.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every single one. podcast well there are language restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m using Apple’s API or Apple’s you know models for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their models only support English, French, German, Japanese,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Italian, Portuguese and there’s one more oh no that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that’s six yeah if I actually look at what Overcast top languages are the one I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want is Dutch they don’t support Dutch yet and that that is one of Overcast’s top languages in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like podcasts being produced that people are listening to. But otherwise, like that covers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of what most people are listening to. Among those podcasts that I can support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this API based on the language, I am able to transcribe every episode that comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, easily catching up every podcast that has more than one listener that is public.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I was like, you know, I want to do the back catalog. And so I started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of raising the numbers of like, all right, let me go back again, start out, go back a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go back to, and then, you know, the, the, you know, jobs in the queue would spike up and then they would slowly churn through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and slowly work through it. I’m like, okay, that’s, that’s good. That’s getting there. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I was like, why the number, uh, I’m just not keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. Like what’s, there was like a couple of weeks where like, I’m just, I was not able to keep up. I’m like, what is going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I bought 48 Mac minis. Why can I not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep up? By the way, when I said a few episodes ago that I’ve seen the Tahoe welcome tour a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times. Oh, gracious. This is why I have seen it so many times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Welcome liquid glass. I’m Zach. I would love to never see that screen again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. So I was like, what is going on? And I, and I looked at, I built a whole logging feature to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for every, so every server could log every action that was taken on a transcript is like what is going on here and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found after a little while there was a bug that was causing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the transcript jobs to not be deleted afterwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they would recur after a few hours. Oh no. So I fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bug and within a couple hours the queue went to zero and I was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh I have more capacity than I thought I had. Oh no Oh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So then I thought, I wonder what it would take to transcribe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco private podcasts to. Because that’s something that Apple Podcasts doesn’t do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wouldn’t that be cool if I could do them too? And so I built that. It turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out I’m able to support almost all private podcasts too. So now Overcast is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcribing every public podcast with more than one listener. Almost every private
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast, like above a certain, I forget where I think I set that threshold at something like 10 or something like so if you have a membership that has at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least 10 people something like that then you know an overcast then that will be transcribed as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all of this is running on these 48 Mac minis.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you really need 48 at this point? I’m not trying to snark I’m genuinely asking you like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you think is your steady state need if in order to handle the load that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I fixed the bug that was causing them to repeat themselves, I thought I could never get enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, when I’ve reached a steady state, I do drop below 100% use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what I’ve been doing is just going back more and doing more back catalog work. Whenever my Q
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would hit zero, I would just like lower the threshold. I was like, all right, now, now go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five years. Now go back seven years. Now go back 10 years. And every time I would do that, the number of jobs would spike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and then and then they would slowly churn through them. And they prioritize new releases and they prioritize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular podcasts. So there’s not much cost in having the queue be full of a bunch of work to do. Eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would catch up at the new level because all those back catalogs will have been transcribed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I just lower the limits again. The next thing to do is lower it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts that have one listener. Because right now I’m at like if you have two or more listeners, you’re gonna get more than one listener,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s one thing. But if I go to one listener, then that like, I think that like doubles the number of podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something that I have to do. So that’s its own decent size jump. But once I’m done with a lot of the back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco catalog work, I think I will be probably ready for that at this level.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I also, I realized like, I will have a surplus of computational
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power here before too long. So what do I do with that? And well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can start moving work to them first of all, like things like imagery sizing that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, my main Linux servers at Akamai, they’re doing a lot of that kind of work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can move that to these. Why not? They’re super fast. They have all this great stuff. I even actually tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier in the winter, you know how a lot of podcast apps will use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dominant color in artwork
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tint the interface in some way? I tried running that on these, like where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the jobs they would do, like so one thing they do is language detection. as I look into more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like smart transcript features, I can do things in the future that I haven’t done this yet, but I can do things like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, automatic chapter detection or topic detection or summarization, things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, now I have all this computational power I can do that with. And it’s not gonna be the same as if I was running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, Chachapiti’s flagship model or Claude’s flagship model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not that kind of hardware, but it is basically a whole bunch of computational power that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be almost free to operate over time. And so there’s a huge incentive for me to move work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them or to find work they can do that would help the product. So I’m not worried about that. I think I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have plenty of work for them to do over time. And also I had to solve the issue with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamic ad insertion. I need transcripts to reach a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimum level of functionality for me. One of those is like, all right, I definitely want them to be time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco synced. I don’t just want a static transcript that just dumps all the text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of one version of this, but then the version that you have that has different ads in it doesn’t line up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything has to line up. And I thought, well, how do I do that? I spent a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the summer just trying, developing and testing different algorithms to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically make signatures of the audio. To analyze the audio to say, alright, Where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what kind of? Waveforms are there or what kind of frequency pairings or frequency patterns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like they like I tried all these different algorithms like somehow characterize what this audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so that way when the server transcribes the version that it gets and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then you on your phone Download your download of that podcast, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yours has different ads spliced into it So that you know it might not line up or it might have things inserted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or removed I want my transcript generated from the server to be able to be lined up with what your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone got from From its different download of the same podcast So how do I do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what actually is like a unique way to identify different parts of the audio? Honestly, I gotta say AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very helpful in this AI did not write the algorithms for me But it did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell me what kind like it, you know, I was asking AI models last summer like how do different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies solve this problem? Like what do different apps use for this? What kind of approaches are there? And it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, here’s what, you know, Shazam uses for its fingerprinting. Here’s how Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does theirs. Here’s like, they tried to take some guesses on how YouTube content ID works. Like there’s all these different things like, okay, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually very helpful. I was able to, over the course of a few months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a signature algorithm that worked, that was able to read the same file. And I could like, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was doing tests. I would like download something from here, then download something through the Netherlands Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I was renting and like, all right, we have different ads now. Compare these, like can the algorithm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find the parts that are the same and line them up correctly? Can it detect which parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were inserted or removed so I can then adjust the transcript in those areas? And it took months,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I finally got there. And between the transcript algorithm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the signature algorithm, all of those things were just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco barely fast enough to plausibly run on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they all used APIs that were built into the iPhone. So I’m like, wouldn’t it be great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I was able to offer on-device transcription for any podcast episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I didn’t do myself, server-side. And so from that point, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developing the entire pipeline as something that also compiled and ran
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS. And I’m happy to say I was also able to ship that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that in the beta today, like any podcast that I haven’t transcribed, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just hit transcribe on your iPhone and it’ll do it. It might take like a good three to five minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on how long it is. And it uses the new background activity API that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco introduced in iOS 26 for Final Cut exports. It uses that one where like you can do like the long running processing task
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you start it from the phone or from the app in the foreground, and then it puts the progress in the live activity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you have iOS 26, you can transcribe on device too. And critically, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making the same transcript. Like it isn’t like the ones you make on your phone are worse than my server ones. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same. It’s the same models between the Mac and iPhone. It’s the same models with the same quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and running all the same process. So that I think is another great feature of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I gotta say, the signatures took the longest by far. And I had to learn all sorts of stuff too about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long running Mac processes. Obviously, memory leaks weren’t gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tolerable, but that was easy to get around, or to avoid rather. But things like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I do if my process crashes? And the answer is launchD. You basically have a launchD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that you create that says just automatically always make sure this app is running, and if it crashes, just open it up again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was doing the image color detection that I was saying earlier, like detect the dominant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color in this image, there was a part of that code that kept like seg
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faulting in a really deep part of the Accelerate framework and I could not figure out why. It seemed like, it was actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of Apple’s sample code and I couldn’t, it was so deep in the stack, it was like, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just a bug in the OS about this call that I’m calling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was no way to avoid this crash. So I learned XPC and I made it its own little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco XPC child process so that when the image detection would crash, it wouldn’t crash the whole transcription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco client. Like I had to learn, I had to learn things like, you know, Apple Remote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Desktop, which is how I meant, right now this is how I’m managing all these servers is I literally have, I have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a setup script, but then, and I can SSH into all of them. So like when I update the transcription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, I use a script to just SSH, copy it all over and relaunch it. But if I have to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change Mac settings or things like that, I have to like log into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen of the Mac with remote desktop and do it that way. I’m sure that Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like it admins know of way better tools to do this. I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear about those because this is ridiculous. Um, and I don’t want to log into 48 max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do like OS updates down the road. Um, so I would love to hear about those, but just lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of learning about like how to run fleets of Macs. And Apple does not make that easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They seem like they don’t really spend a lot of time considering that. But it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been running just fine. It is working. One trick I learned, for a long time there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, in like what used to be called Mac OS server, and is now just built in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things in the sharing panel is called content caching. Content caching basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs detect if there’s a content caching server on the network, And if there’s like a software update that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through, the ContentCache Mac will download it. And then when every other Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your house does that software update, it’ll just pull that copy over your local network.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instead of, you know, if you have five Macs, instead of each one downloading Mac OS, you know, 26.2.1 five times,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll download it once the ContentCache server, and then all of your other Macs will download it directly from that one. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that matters a lot when you have 48 Macs on a network. So, you know, I designated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few of them to be content caches and, you know, just little stuff like that. Like it, it’s been a really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall experience. It’s been a massive undertaking, just like the amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of work this has been on so many levels, the signature algorithm, the transcript
⏹️ ▶️ Marco algorithm, like building out the whole queue processing system for external servers that aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my, my main Linux server network, the health monitoring, the remote desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s so much here. And then serving the transcripts, using them in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, lining them up. Like when you do get a different signature, like how do you line up that signature with the one that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcript has? There is so much work behind this. But where I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I got to learn a bunch of cool server stuff. I got to do some really tricky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programming problems, which that’s always fun for a programmer. If we’re honest, we love tricky problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when they’re frustrating and take months to figure out. But we do love when we finally do figure them out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now I have a very capable computational cluster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can throw a bunch of work at and it gets it done very cheaply. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe I am the only podcast app to do private podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least server side. I also believe I’m the only one where you can like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it on device if they don’t have it. I’m certainly the only one besides Apple that’s going to do it for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s I am so I think I think this was all worth it. And the feature is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great and will only get greater over time. Right now it’s again it’s very basic right now it’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can you can view the transcript and you can tap or you know it automatically scrolls with the audio it highlights what’s being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said you can tap anywhere in it you can scroll around tap anywhere and it’s a seek to that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of obvious features that, like, well, once you have transcripts, you will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously also want X. Things like transcript search, that’s an obvious number one. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should be able to search transcripts. I’ll get there. Chapterization, summaries of sections.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of that kind of thing. Yeah, I should do that. Clip sharing, where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share a clip. Yeah, that should be transcript-based. And the output should include the transcript. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree. There is so much that now follows from this, but this has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taken me almost a year and I wanted to get this, like I gotta ship something. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta get this out there. And even this, like there were a couple of days last week where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I broke the build on my own phone. I broke its ability to use transcripts. So for a couple of days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after I had been using them for a while, for a couple of days I couldn’t use them and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hated it. Like I noticed immediately, because what I do is like I swipe over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the transcript view, like whenever I’m listening to a big show that has stupid DAI ads, like I’ll hear of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, another ad for the Apple card, awesome. Oh, another ad for pure leaf iced tea, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can go over the transcript and I can skim, skim, skim and just tap right after because it’s very obvious where the ad ends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s great. Like features like that, you get used to that. Or even just like a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what did they say? If you’re listening to a podcast and a bus drives by and you miss a couple of words,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have to seek back and repeat the whole 20 or 30 seconds you can just swipe swipe swipe and see oh that’s what they said okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like stuff like that it’s really great for that kind of thing it’s also really great for like you know if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if there’s a podcast that like oh you I know somewhere in here they mentioned something like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can squeak you can quickly skim around and find it or if it’s like oh I got to listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this episode before tonight but I don’t have that much time but there’s information in it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to know generally what they talked about. That’s all you can, you can skim the text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what they are talking about faster than you could hear it. So you, if there’s like, if they’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about baseball, you can skip it. You know? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, there’s all sorts of little benefits like that. You know, much of the benefits of chapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in podcasts that do it, but just applied to all podcasts. It’s, it’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience and it is very clear to me having developed this. and now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it, it is extremely clear to me that this feature is table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stakes, that all podcast apps need transcripts. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you are used to navigating a podcast with transcripts, using seek forward and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seek back buttons feels like you’re a dinosaur. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is very obvious to me that podcast listening and podcast navigation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco require this. for any app that wants to be like a serious podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience, you know, to be a good listening experience, you need robust transcript
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features now. And that will only get more so over time as we kind of evolve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our UIs and our playback experiences to use them more and to offer more, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer more utility that’s powered by transcripts. So I think this is, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t always arrive to the party on time with this kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m, I’m here now and I’m very glad to be here. And it was a long road to get here. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton of work and a ridiculous amount of unboxing Mac minis,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m really glad that I’m finally here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This does sound really incredible and it sounds like it was an astonishing amount of work and expense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, to a not small degree. Um, uh, one of the things I keep wondering as you talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, to the degree you are willing and capable of sharing, how are you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storing the transcripts? Because, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know, the obvious answer is, oh, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of text. Well, no, it’s not because then you have timestamps
⏹️ ▶️ John but I mean, where is he storing it? Well, that’s who,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But like where, where?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco R2, Cloudflare R2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. And what is the data type?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know some of this is special sauce. You don’t to get too specific, but to the degree you’re willing to share, like what is being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stored for each of these transcripts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you know me, of course it’s a custom format.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to say, it would normally be JSON, but knowing Marco is not going to be JSON.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is JSON under there somewhere. But of course, I’m like, well, if I customize it, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compress it to be a lot smaller than that. And so, yeah, there’s compression, there’s shorthand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s like, you know, Delta encoding. The total
⏹️ ▶️ John storage space for all the transcripts of all the podcasts in the world in text form gzipped can’t possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well, I wasn’t always storing them on R3. I started out storing them in a database and like that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid. R2, not R3. Yes, sorry, R2, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think your problem is going to be that the minimum block size of R2 is probably bigger than all your transcript
⏹️ ▶️ John files. So it might actually behoove you to combine them into multiple files if you cared about storage, which you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but keep in mind also that like these transcripts, so right now in the UI and over overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is displaying each kind of line of text, so to speak. It’s roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one to two sentences, maybe. It’s displaying them like a series of short paragraphs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When it is highlighting whatever is being spoken, it highlights the entire paragraph at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I actually have word-level timing. Oh, gracious. That was my next question. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual data I have is much more precise than what’s showing. I have word-level timing and word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level confidence. So I’m actually storing a good amount of data for each translation. Like I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if the API is gonna give me this information, I’m gonna store it. And you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not necessarily use it for anything. Maybe I won’t use it now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but maybe down the road I will. Like for instance, if you’re doing clip sharing, you know, if you look at what, like there’s other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps out there that will export videos that have like live captions of what’s being said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That tends to look a lot better if you highlight word by word. Or if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing something worth exporting a video or a picture, and say like the block, the current block of text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just too long to fit, like in the frame, you’d wanna be able to shorten it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you would need, you know, sub frame precision for that. So I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the API has given me word level timing, I’m gonna store it. I don’t store everything like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of it, it will give you like alternate transcription options. If it’s not too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confident what was said, it’ll say, well, I think it’s 60% sure it’s this, but 40% sure it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be this. I did experiment with those at first, but I found that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alternatives that it was suggesting, they were such low confidence most of the time, it wasn’t worth storing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I mostly did not store
⏹️ ▶️ John On that front, by the way, that’s another one of my questions. So you’ve got all these text transcripts now, and as you noted,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re using models optimized for the fact that they can run on the phone and they’re inexpensive to run on the server
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth, and they’re not gonna be up to the standards of the gigantic models that
⏹️ ▶️ John you could run in the cloud or whatever, right? But once you have the text,
⏹️ ▶️ John like as I was looking, I was testing this feature earlier today, and I looked at the part of the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John episode where someone sang a line about someone walking the length of the city,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the transcription was, they say he walks the lake, L-A-K-E, of the city,
⏹️ ▶️ John because length and lake sound similar. But what I was wondering is,
⏹️ ▶️ John could you do a post-processing pass with some
⏹️ ▶️ John LM thing where you feed it the text? Because I think any kind of good
⏹️ ▶️ John model would say, the lake of the city doesn’t make as much sense as walking the length of the city.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it could figure out from context clues in the English language sentence structure that lake is the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John word choice there. And especially if you have stored alternatives, it doesn’t have to hear the audio. It’s not correcting the transcription
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, oh, I’m gonna use it more properly. It’s obviously then you’re just doing transcription twice. But I do wonder if
⏹️ ▶️ John doing like essentially text grammar correction or best guess
⏹️ ▶️ John correction with like a system prompt that says, you know, like if you had like a summary description of the
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast from the description in the fee, this is a technology podcast. I don’t know if that would help with length of the city, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John just a world knowledge model would pick out those lyrics and correct them and put in
⏹️ ▶️ John length. I do wonder again, for maybe for the top 100 most popular podcasts in the most recent episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John that doing a second pass and saying, this is my transcribed thing by my little models, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John chucking the text to another model and saying, fix this up and make it so it doesn’t say link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is something I’ve thought about. Um, and, and yeah, and look, the accuracy of the on-device model is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, but not amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got, you had to do the thing that everybody does, which is you put a big warning at the top and say, you know, this is auto-generated, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said there are probably errors because they are there are probably errors. Yeah. You know, because, you know, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my testing, it is good enough to know what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s good enough to have an idea of what’s being said to get most of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be able to figure out a lot of that stuff. It is not perfect enough to be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a document that you’re going to show somebody or.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially with like proper nouns and stuff like that, where it’s going to struggle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Exactly. Like it again, like it’s it’s the iPhone dictation model. I think you know roughly
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not it’s not like a world knowledge model That’s gonna be like oh I know the name of that because that’s the name of a country in
⏹️ ▶️ John the capital of that country is what no it’s not doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That right like whisper is better at that Parakeet seems in most people’s testing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Parakeet seems like it is a little bit better at that. So that’s why I’m gonna look at that soon, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not like massively better because that that is mostly just down to like model size and complexity
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Are you, are you resigned to redoing all of your transcripts on M sevens with the more powerful model in a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can. So there is a versioning system in the transcript data. So. Yeah, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just saying like, are you, are you already setting up to say like, I know I’m doing all this work, but at some point in
⏹️ ▶️ John the future, I’m going to have to redo it. All like all the whole back catalog again, because the models will have gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John that much better. And because the M seven will be that much more powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, so like I expect over time this will get better, but like so going back to like you know if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know using like a big model somewhere to clean up the transcripts that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on my list to investigate. I think the costs would be prohibitive to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for everything. But as you said, like if you if I just do it the same way like do have like a popularity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimum. I do it for everything over this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder like because because it’s not transcribing audio. It’s just text. I wonder if it would just be trivial for
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you know, because like how much text is there, honestly, it’s a tight, such a tight, it’s like, forget about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the text would fit in 1,000th of the context window of these giant things these days. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so much easier than transcribing audio, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so like what I’m gonna look at next, well, maybe not exactly next, but what I’m gonna look at soon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that I have the transcripts, what smart things can I do with them? And that, again, that would be things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finding like topic changes and trying to make like a table of contents, you know, make chapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that aren’t that, you know, if podcasters don’t have them themselves, summarization of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chapters maybe, so I could say, okay, at this part, they’re talking about volleyball. That’s the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I want to be able to offer. And my plan in my mind, which I have not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tested anything yet, but my plan has been to evaluate, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I go to the big API company, or the big AI companies and use their APIs. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would use the OpenAI or the Gemini or the Cloud API to say like, all right, here’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco block of text, find me where the topics are, clean up any errors that you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are probably unlikely to be what the person actually said, you know, stuff like that. That is the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big step in making transcripts better. I’m not ready to do that yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like I had to get this part out first.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you use private cloud compute, or is that only
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco allowed to do
⏹️ ▶️ John like by users from shortcuts? Like I’m wondering if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John could. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could theoretically write a shortcut and shell it out to private cloud compute, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I would get throttled really quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there is a limit on that. I mean, I’m thinking about like on device, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you mentioned obviously like transcript search and yeah, you know, full text search of transcripts, blah, blah, blah. You know, you can do that on
⏹️ ▶️ John device. Again, it’s not that much text. You’re searching through one podcast’s worth of stuff, probably even if you do all podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. But I also think there’s a place for you to be able to do essentially LM powered
⏹️ ▶️ John search, where you just chuck the whole transcript into the context window and let the person ask a question.
⏹️ ▶️ John and it finds the part, you know what I mean? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for one episode, that’s easy. Yeah. Doing it on device, doing that on the iPhone, the context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window is only 4,000 tokens. So it’s pretty tough. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right. Well, that’s why I was asking about private cloud compute, if you could just chuck the whole thing up to a cloud model. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like it would fit in the context window of a big cloud model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would absolutely fit. Like if I wanted to offer that like with a big cloud model through an API, like I could offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that way. Yeah, bring your own API key or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gross. I would find a way to do it cheaply. I would see what can I do for nothing or for near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing. A lot of this, I mean, first of all, API costs for high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models are only going down over time and it’s only going to continue. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m asking for is not that complex. Like this wouldn’t require a really high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking and logic reasoning model. It wouldn’t require that level.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you could run this on your Mac minis with some like open weights,
⏹️ ▶️ John like llama model thing. Cause you’re really just doing fuzzier full-text search essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know? And I’m not saying you should do this first. You should just do plain full-text search first. Cause no AI, no anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John just full-text search when people type in words and you match and blah, blah, blah. But because it is just
⏹️ ▶️ John text, any kind of remotely reasonable, small
⏹️ ▶️ John LLM powered thing that you can fit the transcript into the context window and then just ask questions
⏹️ ▶️ John about it and get a timestamp out of it, that would be amazing. Because as someone who spends a surprising
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of time searching for transcripts, like when I tried to find the quote that I just read about the
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods Pro Max thing, I foolishly didn’t put that information in the reminder. So I’m like, oh, sometime in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey AirPods Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Marco said something and I said something and I had to go find that,
⏹️ ▶️ John just a little bit, just a little tiny bit of fuzziness helps. goes a long way
⏹️ ▶️ John because, and especially for like, are the transcripts gonna get AirPods Max? Is it gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John get AirPods? No, that’s, I guess, Air and Pods are two words and you have to think about sound-alikes and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I think any little bit you can do to help pass the sort of very simple full-text,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, non-AI full-text search will really make this feature more powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think like that’s something to look at, like, you know, in time, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these things get cheap and I can run more of them locally. Like, you know, one limitation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that all these Mac minis are just, again, they’re the base model. They’re the 16 gig of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base model. So there’s only so much I can do on device when you start talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger models. That being said, there’s nothing stopping me from, say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding a couple of high RAM Mac studios to this, and then, you know, they would take on a certain type of job. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could do that. What
⏹️ ▶️ John do you think Apple’s using for its transcripts? Are they using their M2 Ultra base servers?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably, yeah, because like, yeah, whatever Apple podcast is doing, yeah. Or they could, they might’ve also done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same calculation and figured it’s actually cheaper to just do a whole bunch of base Mac minis. Cause it, you know, it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like when you look at like number of, you know, transcription minutes per minute that you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the base model Mac mini versus if you get like the highest end M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max, or I guess it’s an M4 Pro in the Mac mini. So the highest end M4 Pro, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not twice, It’s I think it’s like it’s about twice as much at the most,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s like four times the cost. So it’s not worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to imagine that they’re using it to be worse to their transcriptions with probably with parakeet models.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t know. Someone from Apple right in tell us, are you actually using Macs to do podcast transcription or is this all farmed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, with Apple, it could go either way because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have they have different deals than you would get with AWS in terms of pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, of course. Going through any like doing all of this, Like any answer that begins with, why don’t you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, why don’t you just use AWS? Why don’t you just use OpenAI, whatever it is. Well, I just asked if you had priced it out. I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you ended up doing would be cheaper. The answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousands of dollars a day. It’s what that
⏹️ ▶️ John costs. Well, and you would also have to learn an entirely different set of things
⏹️ ▶️ John than you learned for this project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco True, yes. And one thing I also really like about the way I’ve built this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can run all the same code that I’ve already written. Like, so first of all, there’s an advantage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple’s APIs are really good for a lot of this stuff. So for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the music detection I’m doing, that’s using Apple’s built an audio classifier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can do stuff like detect like when dogs are barking, like, you know, I’m not using that part of it, but I could,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s all just really easy. It’s using platforms and languages, tools,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all of these things that I’m already familiar with. I already am using, I’m already deploying, I’m already like in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In this case, running these transcripts is using overcast code. The same code is running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the servers and in the app. I only write that code once, I’m able to use Swift instead of like PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever else I would use on the server. There’s all sorts of benefits to having this just be one codebase. And like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I am, as I’m, you know, getting older in my career,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as the world is getting more and more like, there’s more and more in the tech business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one can keep track of all of it, but there’s high value in specializing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so in my case, if I can write really good Swift code, or if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, I mean, to the extent that we’re still writing code in a few years, who knows? But if I can write really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good Swift code and I’m really familiar with Apple’s platforms and Apple’s APIs and Apple’s infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how to run all that stuff, it’s easier for me to become an expert in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to keep that up to date, rather than I’m already falling way behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my Linux server side knowledge. Just because I don’t do that much of it anymore. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, I still run a lot of servers for Overcast, but they’re not changing that much. I’m not getting a bunch of new ones all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not keeping up with all the most modern tool kits and things that everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using these days. So specialization is, I think, is high value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me. The fact that I can just run, I can do all this cool stuff using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s tools and using the languages I already know, and everything I run on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the server can run on the phone. That’s amazing. And then down the road, if I’m still running Overcast in 10 more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, at that point, the phones will be so fast, I won’t need these Mac mini’s anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My guess is I will probably never replace these. By the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there would be a major upgrade in performance that would be worth replacing M4’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know if I’ll need these anymore. Because the phones will be so fast, they might be able to do everything on device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, there might be no reason to have all this work farmed out to these Mac Minis.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you’ll need a coordinate server so that it knows, you know, this person A
⏹️ ▶️ John has already started transcribing the latest episode of the daily. So everybody else just hold off and wait for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t bother burning your batteries. Maybe let two people do it just as a backup or three.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, right now I already have that infrastructure in place. Like right now the code is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already there for the iPhone app to be a transcript worker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just not activating that because there’s not much that an iPhone can do in like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, like there’s a type of background process, there’s a type of background refresh task,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the one that was introduced in iOS 26 where you can like do the final codec report with live activity, not that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a previous one called a background processing task. And you can request
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system, wake up your app in the background and give you a block of like high CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time when it is charging. So that way you can burn some battery power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not like, you’re not like doing a disservice to the user cause it’s charging. So usually that’ll run like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when your phone is charging overnight. So I could use that time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like everyone’s phones to do some work. I’m not because that kind of feels a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong cause that kind of feels like I’m stealing resources from people. and the amount of work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get done on an iPhone in that time slice, they give you like three minutes or something. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to even transcribe one episode of most things. So I’m doing all this work myself. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in five or 10 years, when the phones are a lot faster, some of that math changes. Maybe I can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do all of the work during people’s overnight charging if I wake up everyone’s phone for one minute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can all do all the work. Like maybe, I don’t know. Maybe people can opt into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no idea. But keeping all the code in Swift, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS code base, or at least compatible with the iOS code base, even if I never do that scheme,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it still allows me to do things like, you can on demand, hit the transcribe button and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcribe a podcast I didn’t get to yet, or that I won’t get to. So there’s all sorts of benefits to doing it this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking forward to you reinventing BitTorrent when you go the route of having all these phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do like a minute worth of transcription at a time. I can just see it now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t thinking of using them as like a, as a, as a, uh, uh, transcription farm, but rather instead like
⏹️ ▶️ John on demand, you know, because obviously the phone is already downloading an episode because you
⏹️ ▶️ John to a particular podcast, the RSS feed updates, the new episode downloads, you know, all that stuff happens
⏹️ ▶️ John on people’s phones and it’s happening because they, you know, it’s not like, oh, someone’s using my phone to download podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s because you subscribe to it. Like you control that the user subscribes to a podcast and they want it to download
⏹️ ▶️ John the latest episode when it comes out so that when they open overcast and hit play, the episode is hopefully already there. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John already happening. I feel like part of that process could be, oh, and in addition to me downloading
⏹️ ▶️ John the episode, I’ll also transcribe it for you. Or queue it up to transcribe
⏹️ ▶️ John it as soon as the overcast is in the foreground or whatever. And I was saying in that type of scenario, you don’t want 70,000
⏹️ ▶️ John people transcribing the new episode of The Daily, right? When it comes out, because it’s just a waste
⏹️ ▶️ John for all those phones to be doing the same work, but rather you just pick, well, these 10, everyone who wants to do it talks
⏹️ ▶️ John to a coordinate server and says, Hey, I’m about to transcribe this episode. Are there any other phones out there
⏹️ ▶️ John already transcribing it? Cause there is, I’ll just wait for the layer done because they’ll transcribe, they’ll upload the text and I’ll download
⏹️ ▶️ John the text and you know, that type of sort of energy saving type of thing. But yeah, that’s definitely down the road when you have the computing power
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that, basically with the consent of that it currently downloads,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I mean? Like it’s downloading because they subscribed. I think people will be fine saying, and also when you download
⏹️ ▶️ John an episode for for me, transcribe it too. And they don’t care how it happens. They just don’t want it to hurt their battery. They just want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John magically be there. And it’s not really possible to do that now. But like you said, in a few years, I feel like if you
⏹️ ▶️ John did that, that would, people would accept that perfectly. They would accept it the same way they accept the fact that Overcast downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John the episode for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. And like, there’s already like, right now I’m already doing what I can to share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work where appropriate. So like, for instance, the signature, the audio signature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like analyzes the audio and tries to line up with DAI. That is the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the copy of the file you have is the same. It’s a little bit heavy. It runs at like 600X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so real time. So, you know, it might take a couple of minutes or it might take a minute for a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode or something. And that does run on the phone. And it has to, because like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone knows what it downloaded. I don’t know what the phone downloaded.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you do a content hash before you even bother on the signature just to see if it’s literally the same file
⏹️ ▶️ John or do you not bother?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so first I do like basically an MD5.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you get the deprecation warnings from the stupid MD5 library yelling at you that it’s a broken
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco algorithm and you don’t care?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t, I think it’s one of the SHA families, but it’s one of the fast SHA ones. Okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still using MD5 and Xcode, I know there’s a way to change it, you can use a different API to get it the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but a different API is slightly slower, and I’m like, screw you, I’m just gonna use this API forever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, go on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, so yeah, I first do like a file hash just to see, and then I go to the server,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I say, do you have the signature for this file hash? So everyone who downloads ATP, since we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use dynamic ad insertion, only one person is ever gonna generate that signature. And it’s probably gonna be the transcript
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers that do it, because they’re also embedding the signature that they get in the transcripts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for podcasts that don’t use DAI, the phones don’t have to do this work at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. You need to add a button to the ATP CMS that I can click that forces immediate transcription
⏹️ ▶️ John of the latest ATP episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t need to. It’s a popular podcast on Overcast, so it’ll be prioritized.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you have the Ping Feeds API that people use. I’m just asking for the equivalent of that for transcribing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. It’s not gonna happen. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John a public one, just for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I don’t need to.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, we’ll see. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you can download the episode onto your phone and transcribe it for everybody. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so the signature thing, yeah, it’s like it checks, it hashes the file first in the fast way, asks the server, do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know what the signature of this hash is yet? For most podcasts, most of the time, they’ll have that. The only reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would have to transcribe, you would have to use the signature yourself, or generate yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is if the version of the file that you got has different ads than anybody else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has gotten, then your phone will generate the signature for that hash and submit it to the servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I am doing work sharing as much as possible there. So like, the work for the signatures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t being duplicated. the work for the transcripts isn’t being duplicated. But you know, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still has to happen sometime. But yeah, usually you’re not facing that on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if I get a copy of 99PI that has that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got local Richmond ads and nobody else has seen these ads yet, how are you how are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you trans? How are you making the transcript from that? Like are you uploading my mp3 to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your server to churn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it? Oh God, no. No, I mean, that would that would be impossible. So in that context,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would happen is your phone would download the transcript
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Overcast already has for that episode. The transcript would be, as you mentioned, for a different set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ads that was ingested in the copy that my servers got. And your phone would generate its signature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the file it has. And then it would look at its signature and the transcript signature and it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find the common ranges between them. So basically like whatever is not different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the two copies, it finds those, aligns the server-side transcript to those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your local copy, and then any ranges in your local copy that were not on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the server copy, it just doesn’t transcribe those. So you’ll see gaps in the transcript with like an ellipsis there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I believe is the same thing that Apple Podcasts does on their transcripts. Anyway, so your phone is doing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bare minimum work it needs to do to figure out what audio was it served and then how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, how does it line up the transcript to that audio? Gotcha. You can do a local transcription of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the ads. I could, I mean, why? Yeah. We’re sponsored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by true leaf iced tea or whatever it is, say that over and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just so glad I don’t listen to shows that have the dynamic ad insertion that, cause it’s, I hear everyone talking about it and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, I mean, I guess I’ve heard a few of them and it’s not great, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I, I signed up for the Verge’s paid thing, which has ad free podcasts. finally, thank God. But they still
⏹️ ▶️ John ad bumper, so it’s weird. I mean, I know we have the ad bumpers too, but I feel like it’s incorporated in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John you wouldn’t know. It just sounds like a segment break, but their thing totally sounds like places where
⏹️ ▶️ John ads should go. I’m also a Verge subscriber.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have the paid search engine podcast one, and their ad bumper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like 45 seconds long. It’s huge musical science. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to skip forward past it every time. Even though I have the Verge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco membership, I’ve been still keeping the Verge cast public feed so I could test how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my transcripts handled DAI. And I’ve heard the same ad so many times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between that and like, I like Trevor Noah is probably the biggest, like the most popular podcast I probably listened to, I think. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that of course is full of DAI, like all, all the big shows are full of DAI. Um, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kind of looking forward to having this finally be out there and having the signature stuff be, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done so I can stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey listening to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these ads and just go back to the membership versions.
⏹️ ▶️ John One final quick feature request for the olds in the audience. You need to make that text bigger or at least an option
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a text bigger on the transcripts and also make the margins fatter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is following the body text size that you set. So it should it scales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with dynamic text. There needs to be a separate setting
⏹️ ▶️ John for that. I mean, I think just I I’m thinking of like the lyrics and Apple Music how
⏹️ ▶️ John huge they are. I’d be happy if they were that big. But I understand music lyrics tend to be shorter than podcasts. so maybe there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John limits there, but my old eyes say, why is this text so small? And also maybe do bold for the current
⏹️ ▶️ John section instead of regular for the current section and faded gray for the other ones. Anyway, those are my two quick feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the UI for it is very much like a 1.0 version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this UI. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John bold the current word since you have that info, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all day. Well, the reason I didn’t do bold is that bold causes the text to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change width and therefore reflow.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no San Francisco variant that doesn’t do that? Actually, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know if there, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously there’s monospace numerals, but I do wonder if there’s a variant that does not change metrics
⏹️ ▶️ John when you bold it, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but I will check.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then just change the color of the current word, because you got the info, that was, that would really help like the
⏹️ ▶️ John read along type thing of seeing the word, like the little blue word, or whatever color you make up, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, that’ll be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like, and what Apple does with their transcripts is they, like the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, It’s almost like the genie, or the, what’s the zoom effect on the dock when you hover over things?
⏹️ ▶️ John thought it was genie. Genie is when the minimized window comes out and little
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Oh, sorry, yes, yes, yes, yes, sorry. Magnification is what you’re thinking of on the dock when the icons get bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, yeah, when you scroll your cursor over the dock icons and the one you’re on grows up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in size and the other ones shrink around it, yeah. They do that with their transcript text. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current line of the transcript is bigger and bolder and the rest kind of like fade into smallness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and into the sides. Yeah, that’s not great. It does solve some problems, I think creates others. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so I will play with the UI. There’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iteration to be had here, but gotta start somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now this looks incredible. You should be very proud. I know this was a lot of work.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t believe you’re announcing it when it’s beta though, because now everyone’s like, when
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be released? Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the good thing is like, I, so I mean, honestly, it’s a big enough deal. I considered skipping the beta and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going directly to the public. Not a good idea. Yeah, I realized that was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John wise. I know you’re anxious to get it out, do the beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t, honestly, I don’t expect this to be in beta for very long. Because my goal here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not to revamp the whole feature with beta feedback. My goal here is make sure it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the level, like to the 1.0 level, and then get it to everybody. So we will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, you said it would be half an hour. It was 70, 82 minutes? That’s it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty accurate if you add the Markov multiplication factor.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I thought I was gonna have this done by the fall. So, you know. Yeah, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, 1Password, Zapier, and Lisa. And thanks to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about goals and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features and the future of liquid glass in Apple’s 27 series OS’s coming out this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer and fall. That’ll be fun, I’m looking forward to that. There’s been a couple of rumors recently on that, so we will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about that in overtime. At.fm slash join to join us to hear that. Thank you so much, 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 can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, check the
Neutral: New BMW i3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there is some new news that broke. It was spoiled,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, yesterday’s we record and is officially news, I believe, today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The BMW i3 reveal has happened. This is not the little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John car that most cars… Yeah, not Tiff’s car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that the sound it makes? Yep, that’s it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only when the range extender’s on. No, actually, the old BMW i3 was before EVs were required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make all those noises, so So it actually makes no noise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, the i3 has been announced. So this is the Neue Klasse or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I’m sorry, Germans. That is basically, let’s make an EV from the ground up, rather than taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the petrol cars, the gasoline cars, and retrofitting an EV into them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even though, I mean, again, I’m an apologist for the i4, because I thought it was incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this is from the ground up, let’s make an EV. And so reading from a couple of sites, starting with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Verge, Sebastian Kroes, BMW’s head of interior design for the Neue Klasse cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told me that the iX3 was designed with an emphasis on verticality to make it look taller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The i3, on the other hand, has an emphasis on horizontality. I don’t think I’m pronouncing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco those words right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think they’re words either, but I’m doing the best I can. If you’re a German designer, it is. This is design-ese.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. most directly seen in the series of lights that span virtually the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sedan’s entire nose. The company hasn’t quoted a formal capacity for the i3, but I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expect it to fall somewhere around the 109 kilowatt hour usable battery capacity of the ix3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SUV. Enough for what BMW says is 440 miles on a charge, and 400
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kilowatt charging should mean that adding over 200 miles of range happens in about 10 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. Neither of the two motors in this car uses permanent magnets, which has a few advantages. First, you’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no rare earths here. Secondly, the i3 can disable its motors and coast without needing a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disconnect system, unlike the Mercedes, which apparently does. From Ars Technica, weight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distribution is close to 50-50 with a low center of gravity thanks to the battery pack. And torque delivery is rear biased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of corners. And under regenerative braking, the rear axle regens more than the front at first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to stabilize the car. So technology wise, this looks really, really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like this looks incredibly impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Visually, I’m not as convinced. So to my eyes, the profile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is excellent. The front is a vast improvement from the pig nose of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i4. You know, when I told you I loved the i4, I said that while just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ignoring the fact that the kidneys took up the entire front of the car. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is better. It’s a little weird, but it’s better. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like the back at all. And the interior, I am not here for the vertical braces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the steering wheel. You’re just gonna have to see to understand. And I’m not here for the trapezoidal center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen thing. However, on the whole, this looks really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you mentioned this being spoiled yesterday or whatever. Well, the way BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John has rolled this out has been, I mean, obviously they had the original concept cars,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Noia, Classic, whatever, however many years ago those came out. And then obviously the iX3 is
⏹️ ▶️ John out and you can buy and is the first car on this platform, although it’s not a sedan,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously. But this car, this exact car, the i3, they’ve been doing the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for, I think, maybe a year, at least six months or so, where they’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John allowing journalists to see and show the car, quote unquote, disguised. And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in the car world, you know, the normal way you disguise cars is you put a bunch of things
⏹️ ▶️ John on the car that use like black and white, like dazzle camouflage, but just all sorts of weird swirly black
⏹️ ▶️ John and white patterns to make it so you can’t get a read for what shape the car really is. Often they’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like a bra over the front and rear so you can’t see what the front grill looks like. And sometimes they
⏹️ ▶️ John put other panels on it of like cardboard or wood or whatever to just hide the shape of the car.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this car, the i3, has been shown to journalists with essentially a wrap
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Meaning like if you put a red wrap on your car, people think your car is painted red. Just a complete,
⏹️ ▶️ John just a wrap. But instead of the wrap being red, the wrap is Dazzlecam. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, how much of this car are you hiding when you just essentially put a wrap on it? Well, you can see the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John car and yet it’s maybe a little bit harder to see what shape it is, but there’s the car. There’s nothing disguising
⏹️ ▶️ John it except for an ugly paint job, essentially. But still, I was holding out hope that when I
⏹️ ▶️ John saw the finished version of it, it would not be as homely as the camouflaged
⏹️ ▶️ John cars they’ve been showing to the press. I mean, they would let them drive them in the snow and do all this stuff, but that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John car. And anyway, uh, there’s not much that can be done to save this. I was hoping that they could de-emphasize
⏹️ ▶️ John those giant, uh, you know, headlights on the front, uh, with styling that was not
⏹️ ▶️ John apparent with the wrap on it, but nope, they’re there. They’re big. I don’t like them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also in general, even though they said this car emphasized horizontality or whatever, it looks tall,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially compared to the existing i4. I think the existing i4, like, did
⏹️ ▶️ John they make a coupe of this? Whatever i4 I’ve seen in the road, I’ve taken pictures of it before. The current i4,
⏹️ ▶️ John body shape and back looks so good and so pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John and athletic and nice. And then you get to the front and it’s got big beaver teeth. I understand that. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not a fan of the front, But if you never see the front and you just see it from the side and the back, it looks amazing. This car
⏹️ ▶️ John looks tall and squat from the side. This car has ugly taillights and an ugly rear and this car’s front,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, is not actually an improvement over the buck teeth. It’s just ugly in a different way.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You are so wrong, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ John As for Casey’s steering wheel that he doesn’t like, I think I could post this on our little Slack channel. I think if you get the M Sport
⏹️ ▶️ John steering wheel, those spokes are hard. I’ve put a picture of it into our Slack. Those spokes are horizontal, not vertical,
⏹️ ▶️ John which helps it a little bit, but I am also dubious about the comfort of the steering wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the way that they’ve, it’s not like a tube around it. They’ve really done these big cutouts and like these strange sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you have to look to see it. It’s a strange steering wheel. I’ll give them credit for making the squircle
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more Urkley than squir. I mean, it’s not a circle because you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put circles on car wheels anymore because it’s against the law, but it’s not as bad
⏹️ ▶️ John as like say the Corvette wheel, which is just really weird hexagon thing. I do like that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve updated their architecture. This is basically the same thing. Same architecture as the ix3 so it’s good
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they went to 800 volt with this so I’m sure it’ll be a great car, but just the styling
⏹️ ▶️ John problems happening over there in Germany continue to be Dire, I mean not all
⏹️ ▶️ John in Germany is I feel like Porsche styling has still been pretty good I’m mostly on board with it a Mercedes styling and a
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW styling They’ve been they’ve been in a rut for what two or three decades now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s near as bad. Certainly this doesn’t look near as bad to me as it does to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think it’s been two decades. It’s probably been one-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no, you start with the BangleBot. That’s the 90s, right? Or is that 2000?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that was early to mid 2000s, I believe. And even, I don’t know, and it wasn’t all of the cars. It was some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cars. I don’t know. Like the 3 Series has mostly been good with, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the E90 that I had was good. The F10 was most, or no, That’s the five series. It’s an F30 is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m thinking of. F30 was all right, and then it got ugly after that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just didn’t know what was gonna happen. So you look back in the F30 and you’re like, wow, that was nice. Yeah, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s got dumb store handles. It’s got basically Tesla door handles. In 2026, 2027
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey model year, you’re gonna do a Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ John door. They’re not exactly the same because there is a mechanical pull on them, I believe, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they might still have to redo them for China. You know, we did that story about China banning electronic door handles.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they might still have to redo them for China just because the electronic mechanism makes it come out like the Model
⏹️ ▶️ John S handles. So it doesn’t matter that there’s a mechanical pull if you can’t actually get your fingers behind the thing because they made it,
⏹️ ▶️ John like why? Why? As you noted, Casey, the i4 has flush door handles that
⏹️ ▶️ John you just put your fingers under and pull. And I don’t even know if those are mechanical. Those might be metal, what do you call
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Electronic switches. But the point is they could be mechanical because you don’t need anything to happen. You just walk up
⏹️ ▶️ John to the car, stick your fingers underneath the handle and pull. Like it’s, I sent you the video of like the Honda Prelude
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. whatever that was like 1995 Honda Prelude, flush door handles, 100% mechanical.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just put your fingers underneath it and you pull and the door opens, but no, not on the BMW i3. They
⏹️ ▶️ John have to electronically come out like it’s 2012 and you’re a model S. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With the exception of the door handles, I think both the iX3 and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new i3 look probably like incredible cars. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think these are gonna be hits.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there are good cars, I just don’t like the styling. And I don’t like the shape of the steering wheel. I also don’t like the trapezoid screen. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I do like the, like, distant dashboard, that stripe thing. I think that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John a good idea. Lots of other cars have done that. I mean, Toyota Prius famously started this trend, I think, of like
⏹️ ▶️ John putting things farther away than you think they would be. And I think it does work. Yeah. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John might be a little tight in the backseat. I’ll have to wait until I see some tall YouTubers get into this thing. But it’s nice
⏹️ ▶️ John that they updated their platform. I think they have a bright future. because as you’ve noted with the i4,
⏹️ ▶️ John their previous platform, which was hacked into their gas car platform, was already pretty good. And presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve learned things since then. So I think this car will be a great car as long as you
⏹️ ▶️ John can stay inside it so you don’t have to see the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, the i3 looks incredible to me overall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t share how much you hate it. I think it looks great. And I would be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy to drive that car around. I think the, like, as, as I think of like, you know, but will my next car be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like my current lease is, you know, it has about a year and a half on it. I think I’m going to look very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard at the I three and the I X three. The I three, it still doesn’t have a hatchback, right? Isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey regular trunk?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although they apparently showed a touring version, which to us is a wagon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Probably not going to be in this country. Yeah, probably not here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, but it will exist somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allegedly. Yeah. They always get better models in Europe, but yeah, like I, the, the IX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks just smaller and sleeker enough compared to my ix that it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be nice but it still has like the utility of the big liftback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trunk which I I do like and use all the time I think even even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to have like one of these regular sedan i3s to drive around most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I would really hate not having a liftback trunk now because I got so like ever since the Model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S, like I’m so spoiled by having a big trunk opening. It’s so useful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so good. I don’t think I can really have a car without it anymore. And I’m hoping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like whatever the next gen of the i4, maybe we start to see what that starts to look like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause that could be a good future car for me as well. But I think this thing looks great.
⏹️ ▶️ John why more people don’t copy what Tesla did with the S. Just like the lift back on a sedan
⏹️ ▶️ John is such a good idea. Everyone should be doing it. I think, who does it? Audi does it. Audi does it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but Porsche has, well, they have the weird, the ugly, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wagon. I mean, the I4 was the I4 was a liftback, you know, because it’s an I4 Grand Coupe.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they mostly do it because of NVH. Like, it’s harder to like isolate the cabin and people want a luxury car and yada yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it can be done. I just think people, more people should copy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, it’s it’s a massive advantage.