684: It’s Not What Young People Do
26 Mar 2026WWDC 2026 hopes, the state of passkeys, more on podcast transcripts, and how businesses manage fleets of Macs.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Overcast & Transcriptions
- Marco had never seen inside a datacenter
- What about podcasts that include their own transcripts (via Matt King)
- What is Marco using for a job queue? Perhaps Faktory? (via Drew Stephenson)
- Monitoring & control interface
- Imagine a Beowulf cluster of the minis… (via Aaron Dippner)
- Mac fleet management advice
- AirPods Max popularity in New York
- Overcast & Transcriptions
- WWDC 2026 Announced
- Ask ATP
- What’s the deal with passkeys, anyway? (via Phillip Miller)
- Does having an 8 GB RAM computer keep macOS lean? (via Jon Fabritius)
- Will we get an iPhone or iPad Pro that will use macOS when connected to a display? (via Keith Heaton)
- Post-show: Casey is continuing to quiet quit his Synology
- Members-only ATP Overtime: How Apple will add touch support to macOS
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Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- ⌘🩹
- Keeping secrets from friends
- How was Tumblr hosted?
- Podcasts that supply transcripts
- Job queues
- Overcast Transcriber 🖼️
- Mac LLM clusters
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Mac MDMs
- ShazamKit
- Fake AirPods Max
- Sponsor: Babble On
- WWDC 2026 hopes
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- #askatp: State of passkeys
- #askatp: Neo keeps macOS lean?
- #askatp: iPhone-Mac hybrid?
- Ending theme
- Casey’s quiet-quitting Synology
⌘🩹
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Had a terrible cut this week. I cut the the Tip of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my left thumb with a knife nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought you meant like you cut something out of the show last week. You weren’t pleased about it Oh, I’m sorry to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John out of his finger, and he wasn’t pleased with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough Well, so the problem with cutting the tip of your left thumb is that well, that’s my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thumb like cuz I you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m the left hander so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already now using my phone through like you know a band-aid a pass it of band-aids Yeah, well, I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works. It just works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John terribly. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, it’s like first of all, the entire left half of the phone keyboard when typing text on the phone, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now horrendous. And so, I mostly just have to use the other hand. And then, trying to navigate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone because I’m a left-hand phone user, that left thumb is my dominant phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, one-hand navigation finger. So, that’s a mess. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got to my Mac. And that’s the command key thumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could switch the, you know, which side is the space bar. I don’t care about that. But that I can deal with, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t switch the side of the command key. Yeah, I would die. Oh my God. I thought about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just, this is it. This is it. Like, I’m like, should I go on vacation? I don’t know. Like, I just, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do anything. Fortunately, I have now downgraded to a thinner bandage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the cut heals. And I’m almost out of this national nightmare. Man, but there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no worse like finger too heavy cut than your left thumb when you are a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gracious. That is no fun. Yeah. And I, you know, it’s so funny. I’m a pretty good typist. I’m not going to sit here and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, we did the typing test like two or three years ago. I forget which one of us was fastest, but I’m pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m no Jason Snow, but I’m pretty good. But you asked me to space bar with my left thumb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or command with my right thumb. I I’m sorry, you gunned to my head. I guess I’m gonna get shot because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d be I’d be doomed. I cannot do it I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think you know looking at my keyboard. I’m trying to like use muscle memory I don’t think I have ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used my right command key. Yeah, I’m not sure I have either command period. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, yeah, I guess that’s true. Other than that though… Yeah.
Keeping secrets from friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow up. And we have a lot of chatter, as I would expect, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overcast transcriptions. And first of all, I’d like to say thanks to the people who reached out and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said that that was a really good episode slash segment. I’d like to congratulate you, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or thank you, Marco, for doing such a good job telling that whole story, because I was riveted. You know, there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times that, maybe not as much, John, but certainly I will play up the ignorant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey card just to move the show along, you know, something that we’ve talked about about a few minutes before to set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up a joke or something, you know, and oh, really? Tell me more about that. But this is one of those scenarios where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John and I, or at least I, I presume John also, had no freaking clue that this is where that story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was going. Which on the one side is a little frustrating because I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be along for the ride with my friend, but on the other side, made for excellent programming. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a sacrifice we make in our mutual friendships for you, the listener, you’re welcome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco But all kidding aside. This is why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can do things like set up an entire data center of Mac mini’s without ever telling you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only person who knew about all this stuff as it was happening, I told Underscore. Because we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kept it private. We both had a lot of fun, anticipating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you guys would finally find out about it. But yeah, and it’s like when I bought the restaurant, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell anybody on the internet because it’s like, well, this is… And it’s only because like, oh, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to make for a fun ATP when I finally bring it on you guys live.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that did as well. Like when John quit his job. Also true. Yep. So we are terrible friends,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we make for pretty good ho-hosts is what I’m hearing. But anyway, I’m getting on a tangent. What I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to say, all snark and jokes aside, is that we really do appreciate all the positive feedback. So thank
⏹️ ▶️ John Tell your nerdy friends about the episode. This is a good episode. It seems like a good episode to introduce people to the show. You can give them a timestamp
⏹️ ▶️ John link to the segments. They don’t have to hear all our BS before and after it. Yeah, spread the word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, please do. So all right. With that said, let’s talk some follow up. First of all, I want
How was Tumblr hosted?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, how is it Marco that you had never seen a data center before? You worked for Tumblr
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and were kind of their infrastructure or IT person for years. How did what gives man?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so this was a question posed on the Overcast Reddit. You know, to people who don’t, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of aren’t in this world, or maybe are in a different part of this very large world, it might have seemed ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I would have operated Tumblr for its first four years and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never had been in a data center before. And the reason why is because during those four years, 2006
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 2010, Tumblr didn’t have its own data center.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we did was, this was very early in AWS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EC2 didn’t exist for at least the very beginning of that. But what we had instead, you know, what people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did back before compute instances, which used to be called VPSs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or virtual private servers, what we all did before VPSs was dedicated servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is is now in the business I believe they now call this bare metal servers you go to a hosting company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the internet and you just lease a server you know through their web interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or their sales people or whatever and you have a server allocated to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you never see you never deal with the physicality of it they deal with it but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know and you have to do things like you know put in like a raid controller and make sure you have multiple discs and if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one fails either their monitoring or your monitoring with the tell somebody hey, go replace this disk. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you have to deal with stuff like that. Your server can break and you just, you’re out of the stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you don’t have it backed up, too bad. There is not much of a concept of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrading to a different server. Cause like, well, you can, you know, you can copy the data off yourself and copy it onto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new server. But you know, the, the concept we have now, like instances that can be resized, like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t exist. You know, very little concept of like managed images and stuff like that. This is how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers were run by many people at that time at this scale. At that time it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t have made any sense for us to buy, like to have our own data centers or our own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco racks and data centers. We started off the first few years of Tumblr were on roughly most of the time we were on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two servers, you know, maybe up to six or eight at, you know, by the end of the second year or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I put the timeline out all in there. That’s what they were. servers and that’s what everyone did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before you know AWS EC2 and before compute instances, virtual instances,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that we use now. And again that world still does exist, it’s called bare metal servers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think it’s a lot less of the business now than it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. Now I found this Reddit explanation absolutely fascinating so I’m glad you took the time to write
Podcasts that supply transcripts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Some, a bunch of people have asked this, including Matt King, how do you handle podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that include their own transcripts? Because this was what, like a year or two ago that this started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be a thing. There was like, I don’t know how the RSS about podcasts works, but there was like an enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something that you could do. Say something from myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah. The, um, the podcast 2.0 spec people defined a transcript tag, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a podcast colon transcript tag years ago. It can point to, for an episode, it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point to a SRT or WebVTT file. And when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Podcasts launched their transcripts, whatever that was a year and a half, two years ago, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, okay, well, we will do our own transcripts, but if you wanna supply your own, we will obey this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tag. If you use this tag in your feed, the podcast transcript tag, we will show that, I think instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think not in addition to, but I haven’t actually tested it. And the reason I haven’t actually tested it is that very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few podcasts so far actually do this. Not none, but not a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I didn’t feel that it was necessary for my first beta release. I am in the process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of building in the architecture to support that. So I do plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to show transcripts from people’s podcast transcript tags,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from SRT and WebVTT files, if they are present. I haven’t quite decided though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one of the problems is, if you include your own transcript, First of all, you then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot use dynamic ad insertion because your timestamps will be all messed up. And there is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a well-supported standard to embed a transcript in a file that any podcast app would include. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there actually is an old MP3 ID3 tag, I think USLT off the top of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my head, but there actually is, or no, that’s unsynced, I think SLT, whatever it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of those tags is an ID3 tag to specify time-synced captions to be displayed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that feature exists in the MP3 ID3 spec, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know of anything that uses it. So if you were to support like podcaster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supplied transcripts with dynamic ad insertion, something like that that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the file and therefore can be adjusted with the file whenever they insert and remove ads, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be the only way to really do that. But given that these platforms don’t even, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DAI platforms don’t even support chapters, which work the same way, I’m not holding my breath on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s very unlikely for any of them to ever do. So because DAI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms generally won’t or can’t do that, and because almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all podcasts of medium to large size now are monetized with DAI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t imagine that podcaster supplied transcripts are ever gonna be that big of a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now this could be wrong. And another thing they could do is they could supply a transcript with timestamps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just don’t include any ads, but then the real-time display of it will break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the player. Because if their transcript is just their content and doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of the ad content in it, which it wouldn’t in this context, as soon as you reach a point in the show where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve inserted an ad for, say, two minutes, from that point forward, all of the timestamps in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their supplied transcript will be off by two minutes. And so the utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that, I think, is always going to be significantly less than one that was dynamically generated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in such a way that it can synchronize itself back to the ad inserted version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the podcast that you downloaded. So in that way, I think my transcripts are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to provide more functionality than many supplied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcripts will. Because basically, yeah, if you supply a transcript and you have dynamic ads inserted, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna play well together. So even if you supply your own, I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fully made this decision yet, But I think even if you supply your own, I think I should probably also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer mine and maybe just have like a tab picker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the top of the screen that says, my transcript, their transcript, something like that. Because I think if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do that, people might be disappointed if they are supplied a transcript that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has less functionality than my built-in ones do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So even if you accept these transcripts that are offered, which it sounds like you’re not too enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, there’s no real standard for noting like individual timestamps for them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, you know, you had said that you theoretically have the resolution by which you could do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the like Instagram thing of highlighting individual words as they’re being spoken. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presumably, there’s no affordance for that right now, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so the transcript tag, the podcast transcript tag, it supports these, you know, WebVTT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay. So they would then support? Yes. Oh, interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John support per word. They do just timestamp line because they’re they’re geared towards subtitles that will
⏹️ ▶️ John be shown like a TV screen. So it’s like at this time stamp show this text on the screen and then three seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John pass and then now show this text and it’s whole sentences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Well, it is usually but I don’t think it needs to be necessarily like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing stopping the authors of those files from having like one line per word and having you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, having you. I mean it would look ridiculous in the file context, but you know, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately though you are right Casey that like in practice, the way these files are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually authored, the way they are usually used, um, because they come from the world of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subtitles from, from video content, um, they’re made to be displayed in sentences at a time. Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the way closed captions would be displayed on, on videos. So it is, it is very unlikely,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that almost any producer who makes SRT or VTT files would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give world level timing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I gotcha. And then I was going to ask, you know, would you create a spec, you know, kind of in the spirit of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X callback URL, but it sounds like you don’t really need to. You could just abuse the VTT and whatever the other, was it SLT or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SRT, yeah. They’re very similar formats.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could just abuse that if you really wanted to go down this road.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And, you know, the reality is like, I can try to do a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of features around these file formats, but again, because the world of DAI does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really support them, there’s just not that much demand and there’s not that much supply. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support them in the sense that I will download them and parse them and have a way to display them and maybe even display them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by default. I think that would probably be the right move. But I don’t think I’m going to have them replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine. And honestly, I would be very surprised if most of my users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever saw a podcast that actually had them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I get that. That makes sense. All right, cool. Uh
Job queues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple of people wrote in, including Drew Stevenson, with regard to how you’re managing all this. And Drew wrote, for background
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cues, did Marco consider something like factory, F-A-K-T-O-R-Y?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My jobby job uses it for processing media in the background on some Mac minis, and it’s rock solid and covers all the edges
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around running job cues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast infrastructure uses tools that were proven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and boring in 2013. So what does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that mean? It means things like MySQL, it means PHP,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it means Memcache D, Redis, and Beanstalk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco D. That’s my server stack. It’s those things. You know, Nginx
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the PHP, FPM plugin, like that’s what I’m using here. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this queue is, is Beanstalk D, which is very old,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very boring, and it works fantastically. It has almost no features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no one that I’ve ever met uses it, but it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve been running it forever. I do use Redis’s queues for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed crawling because they allow me to… The way Overcast is feed crawling, basically I have these crawl
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers that run the Go process that I wrote a million years ago and then instantly forgot Go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I learned Go just to write that one process, haven’t touched it since, and have since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completely forgotten go. But I mean, I think today if I ever need to add anything to it, I just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI help me because I need to relearn this entire language. But anyway, the way those work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they crawl the feeds, they stuff the content of a changed feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into Redis, and then they add to a big Redis queue so that other processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PHP processes that parse those can go pick them up and crawl them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Redis though is even heavier duty for this case than Beanstalk which is – Beanstalk D is like what if Memcached
⏹️ ▶️ Marco D but for queues. Beanstalk is where I put lighter queue work in Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is not feed crawls. And that’s things like checking for redirects. It’s things like checking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artwork updates on feeds. Things like that, sending notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sending – processing my ping API, stuff like that. And so I built transcripts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top of the Beanstalk section of Overcast. of the queue consumers that’s running on the Mac minis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just hits an API endpoint on Overcast web service and says, Hey, give me, give me some jobs, give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me some jobs, give me some jobs, you know, fairly straightforward setup, I think for queue processing. Now again, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of other queue services, queue stacks, things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. I haven’t used the services because they’re just too expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like again, like the, what Overcast processes overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in its job queues, especially if I include feed crawling. We’re talking over a million
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jobs a day, easily. Any kind of like managed queue service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you actually price out what it would cost, it’s a lot at this scale. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t use those, I just run it myself and it costs nothing. Because running BeanstalkD is incredibly lightweight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It costs nothing. That’s the same reason I send Apple push notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself. I wrote a simple PHP class to do it, It’s not that hard. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I manage it through BeanstalkD, and I send them and it’s fine. Because I send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably millions of push notifications a day and it costs me nothing. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the processing time, the server resources to send those is as close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to zero as you can imagine. It’s just nothing. Whereas if you again go to some service to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for you, and you start paying, oh, it’s just X cents per thousand notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever their pricing ends up being, for most apps, that’s fine. When you’re doing millions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things a day, that could be like tens to hundreds of dollars a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you spread that over the, you know, 12 years I’ve been running Overcast, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real money. So if I can write it myself in less than a day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have it work entirely with my own stuff, then it costs nothing to run over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have to worry about like what happens if this service gets merged with some other company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or shuts down or sunsets or changes their pricing model and now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into enterprise and costs 10 times more for my use case. All those things that happen constantly in our business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have to worry about them. So that’s why I do a lot of this stuff. The boring old way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a few simple processes running on some Linux servers that don’t need that much from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. It is not cool, it is not sexy, it is not trendy, it is not what young people do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And none of those things matter to me because it works really well for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, with that said, you did do a Marco thing. Well, you did more Marco things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should say, because it’s what I do best. I looked up for the show notes, the Beanstalk D website, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is exactly the kind of website you would expect for a thing that’s been around since the beginning of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this tracks.
Overcast Transcriber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you did another Marco thing, which is you wrote yourself a little app to manage stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did? Yes, or at least it sure looks like you did. You posted on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a screenshot of something that says Overcast. Oh, yeah, the Overcast transcriber.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is this is the actual thing that is running on the Mac minis. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the app that transcribes things that pulls the jobs from the servers and actually, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, interesting. I’m sorry. So this is the app that’s actually doing the work. Oh, my mistake. No wonder we were confused.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. One copy runs on every Mac mini. I select, I assign each one like which, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, the Apple speaks transcription API only supports three languages being installed at once on the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for reasons I don’t know. Maybe that made sense on the iPhone for some reason, it’s also enforcing the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so it supports six languages, but only supports three of them being installed at once. So I have a simple picker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top to choose which three languages. They all do English, and then they all kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of split the other five languages, because there’s way more English than any other ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s what that is, and I pick how many jobs I want, and I run them. And if this app ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crashes, or if the computer reboots, no problem. LaunchD just starts it back up again, and it’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. And then this app checks in with my main servers. Each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these checks in once a minute, or something like that, and it reports its stats of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many jobs it has done in the last minute or whatever. So that way, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many minutes of podcasts has it transcribed? That way the servers can then kind of watch out for anomalies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if for instance, one of the Mac minis doesn’t respond at all, it will alert me and I can go reboot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or something. That doesn’t happen very often. But also if one of the Mac minis is reporting like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a suspiciously high or suspiciously low job count per minute or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcription minute rate per minute. I can then go take a look and see like something might be wrong there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the app itself, that the Overcast Transcriber app that you see here, that app also tries to monitor itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if for instance, it can’t get jobs for a long time, for more than a few minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if a job never completes and it never refills its jobs after a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of time, it will quit itself and let LongestD restart it. Like if something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird has gotten wedged somewhere. This kind of thing doesn’t happen at very high rates,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when you’re running 48 instances of them 24-7 for months, you know, they do occasionally need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like weird things like that, you know, sometimes happen. So anyway, that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very cool. And I’m glad you provided a screenshot, which we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
Mac LLM clusters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron Dibner wrote, given that Marco now has a 48 Mac mini cluster, while they each only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have 16 gigs of RAM, it is possible to spread LLMs over multiple Macs these days. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all probably seen the videos of four Mac studios clustered over Thunderbolt, but you can also do it over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet just a bit slower. And so I presume, John, you put in a link in the show notes to a Beowulf
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cluster. Can you explain that, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s just the old Slashdot thing. Marco remembers this, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I heard about them. I don’t think I ever actually have seen one.
⏹️ ▶️ John The meme was, and I’m surprised there was not a like, know your meme page for this. I guess it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John old. It’s such an old meme that like, it’s not worth documenting as a meme on the internet. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Beowulf was like a, we’ll put a link to the Wikipedia page. It was a system where you just take a bunch of commodity servers
⏹️ ▶️ John and then distribute a job across them. And you’d say, you’d run Linux on these random PCs and you’d be like, but now
⏹️ ▶️ John I have five PCs and I have a job and I can break it up into five pieces. These five PCs can work on it. And so all the Slashdot
⏹️ ▶️ John nerds back in the nineties were like, oh, Linux is awesome. And Beowulf was awesome. And anytime
⏹️ ▶️ John there was any kind of hardware story on Slashdot, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know when it started, but people started posting. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John just became a meme where people would say it about things that are not computers or whatever. It was started
⏹️ ▶️ John half serious and became a meme. And so Aaron Dibner basically just wrote, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these about
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac mini’s like you could take one job and distribute it to all 40 and they’d all work on it at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what he’s referring to, we’ll put a link to this in the show. is this thing where Apple gave
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of YouTubers a stack of Mac Studios. You’ve probably seen them in the thumbnails. I think it was like four
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studios with like a little miniature, little cute little Mac Studio rack kind of.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s to promote their RDMA over Thunderbolt technology that was added in Mac OS 26.2. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John link to Apple’s developer site about that tech. What they say about it is RDMA over
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt enables low latency communication between Thunderbolt 5 hosts for use cases, including distributed AI
⏹️ ▶️ John inference using MLX. And so what the YouTubers did with this stack was they got like the biggest model that
⏹️ ▶️ John they could get that wouldn’t run on a single Mac studio because it didn’t have enough RAM, and they would run it
⏹️ ▶️ John on the four Mac studios combining their RAM and do performance numbers or whatever. We’ll put links
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes to two videos, one from Alex Ziskind, the title of his video
⏹️ ▶️ John is I ran a trillion parameter AI on a Mac, and then Jeff Geerling also has one that says Apple didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to go this hard, but there were others. Many YouTubers got this. So if you want to see an example of a technology
⏹️ ▶️ John that Aaron is talking about, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. And it’s the same type of deal. It’s like, can you distribute
⏹️ ▶️ John something across multiple computers that wouldn’t fit on one? And can you do that quickly?
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously doing it over Thunderbolt 5 with machines that are right next to each other is really fast. Doing it over ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably a little bit slower, but that’s what he’s pitching here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and so the main downside of this for my use case is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, as John said, speed of the communication is everything. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Ethernet between these Mac minis is just one gigabit, because these are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the base models. So they don’t have 10 gigabit ports. I also don’t have a giant 10 gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch there, but you know, that could be remedied. But they only have one gigabit ports, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these Mac minis only have Thunderbolt 4, because Thunderbolt 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac mini currently requires the M4 Pro chip,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like triples the price of the Mac Mini and does not triple the performance for my use case. So I didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. So because I have the base models, I could only do it over ethernet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that would be probably slow enough that would probably not be worth doing. And the pitch for
⏹️ ▶️ John this is that you would use, somehow use some bigger model than what you’re using. Because the model
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re using now runs on your Mac Minis. It fits in 16 gigs of RAM. It’s, you know, runs on the phone. Like the pitch
⏹️ ▶️ John is, well, What if you wanted to run some more sophisticated model that wouldn’t fit in the RAM of a single
⏹️ ▶️ John one? You could take, lop off a portion of your 48 and say, this is like, this cluster
⏹️ ▶️ John of four is the big, beefy transcriber for the top 10 most popular podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John and we run a bigger model there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. But right now, this is something that like, I’m going to look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at these kinds of uses in the future, especially because like, once I’m done transcribing the back catalog for as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many podcasts as I can, these are gonna be at like, you know, a third to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half capacity. So I’m gonna have a lot of extra computing power. And I mentioned before, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would definitely want to move some of my heavier tasks from the main servers that are, you know, the main Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers. I’d love to move a lot of those tasks to these, you know, to whatever degree that’s reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible, but that’s not gonna work for everything. So I’m still gonna need a bunch of servers. So I will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to maybe get creative on like, what do I do with this computing power that I have here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And ideally, things that can stay within one machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are better because it’s easier to scale that, it’s easier to share code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the iPhone and the servers. So ideally, I would just keep doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more things with Apple’s foundation models. And we’ll see this summer at WBDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there might be updates to the foundation models. And maybe they get things like larger context windows, which should make them more useful and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of ideas I have on how to use them. So we’ll see how these go in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the future. Right now, they are being criminally underused in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they, let’s see, my current, my memory use, I just pulled one of them up here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of them that’s under like, you know, full transcription load right now is using about seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gigs of its memory, of its 16 gigs. So I have about half the memory that I could play with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, they are really not using their GPUs much at all. that will change once I’ve moved image resizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them, but it won’t change that much. So I think I’m gonna have a lot of CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a lot of GPU capacity that I could use and a decent amount of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’ll see how I can play with that over time. But right now I’m still going through back catalogs and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see what the summer brings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I would be remiss not to mention System X. Do you remember this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Give me more context.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a zillion, I believe it was XSERVs all networked together to be a very impressive-
⏹️ ▶️ John Virginia Tech thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Mm-hmm. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot that was the name of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Is that considered a Beowulf cluster in your mind?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it’s exactly the same thing. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. I mean, obviously, they’re not, it’s not like Beowulf
⏹️ ▶️ John was a specific piece of software, but it just became a meme of whenever you take a bunch of stuff and connect
⏹️ ▶️ John it together and make it do something that no individual part of it could do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Coming all the way back around to Aaron Dibner, who started this whole conversation, Aaron writes, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Insider article is a bit outdated, But the idea is there. It’s totally doable for a setup of your kind. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was, I believe, pre the thing where you can chain them over Thunderbolt. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was done via Ethernet, if I’m not mistaken. But you can look. We’ll put a link in the show notes. once you look at it for yourself.
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Mac MDMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The entire internet wrote in to tell Marco about Mac Fleet Management Advice. I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Yeah, no, well first of all you asked for it, second of all it was helpful, and I don’t think I saw any of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being like, man, how did you not know? Everyone was very helpful and very kind. So even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Marco’s behalf, I was fascinated reading it, I’m sure Marco was too, and we appreciate it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently there are many, many different ways of approaching this. I’d like to leave aside the announcement from today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yesterday, whenever it was, for just a moment. But based on what you have read, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you haven’t had the time to read anything, what would you say is your summarization of what you’ve learned?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what companies do that have to manage large fleets of Macs, of course, is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting them all up one by one like I did here. No one does this. No one should do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What companies do is they have this thing through what I believe until yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was is called Apple Business Manager, and or something like that. There’s a lot of words that all sound very similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Apple has like a business API. You can configure machines to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be set up for your business and locked to your business with MDM, which is the framework they use to like to manage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, corporate iPhones and iOS devices and Macs. You can buy these things through your Apple Business Rep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through Apple’s business channels, or through certain authorized resellers, and have the machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serial numbers automatically enroll to your company when they connect to the internet for the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. So you can, they call it like zero touch deployment, I think, so that you can like ship a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop to a remote employee, and when they plug it in and set it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets activated to the company’s management system through Apple. That is very cool. And gets all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff it needs to get right from there, which is very cool. And once you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are in these systems, you have full management over them. So you can do things like push
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software updates and stuff like that. And you know, run, you can run programs, you can change settings, you know, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, like you can have all that central manage. So that is basically what I want. Um, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, the only downside is when you already have the machines preexisting, like I do here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone said, like in order to enroll them into this kind of management, you need to wipe them and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need physical access. So it would be a process of, you know, I would like, you know, go, you go to the data center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one day, bring a big cup of coffee, keep it below the Mac Minis, John. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just go through like one by one. All right, reset this one, reset this, you know, just take them down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one by one, reset them, wipe them, put them in the thing. But before this announcement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple Business, which happened yesterday, the day before, yesterday, before this announcement,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was like the second part of it, which was, okay, Apple Business Manager would have like the component of like registering the serial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers, associating them to a business that had an MDM thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then what everyone else did was have their own MDM providers through companies like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jamf, former sponsor of the show a long time ago. This is what most big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco businesses do is they have one of these MDM apps that the problem with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those from my use case and you know they provide a huge amount of functionality because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually it’s not only providing like the basics of MDM configuration and stuff like that but But they also usually have additional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services they layer on top of it like security packages, stuff like that. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem is that all of those MDMs, or at least most of them, you’re paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like $6-12 per Mac per month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, again, you have 48 Mac Minis that literally don’t have users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not a great selling proposition for me. all of the features of these MDMs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that do like, you know, user security management, making sure your users have good passwords and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making sure they don’t browse weird things on the internet. Like that’s all stuff that businesses do need for their computers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t need for these computers. These computers have no user. They run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one app. You’ve seen it now. Like it’s a very simple arrangement. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m doing right now to keep them up to date, Their software I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep up to date yet because that hasn’t really had a need yet. I guess I’ll get there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I’m looking at something like an MDM, mainly for OS updates. But there’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other software package that I use on them that’s pretty important. Casey, you’re gonna love this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco former sponsor, maybe current sponsor, I don’t know. So the way I access these machines,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re all behind the router at the data center, So they all run tail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale. And that allows me to say, you know, SSH, you know, into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scribe 23, and it just gets me there. So what I do now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I have to update my transcriber app, is I do, you know, an archive build on Xcode, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco export the binary after it’s signed. And I just use SSH
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to SCP it over to each of these Macs. And like, you know, the, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSH script like you know, have launch D stop the app, SSH the new one into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place, have launched to start the app again. And it just goes through the 48 servers and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does that to each one in succession. And I can push an app update to all of them in about 30 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve kind of already built a lot of what an MDM would give me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in a more nerdy way. But I would what would be even better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is if I didn’t have to run tailscale on all of these. So if the MDM situation can do things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote desktop or remote viewing, remote control, if it can do those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and give me network access to them directly without me having to run something like TailScale on them, that’s great. I don’t know that it can do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. Maybe some of them can. I haven’t had time to look that much. But for the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part, most of the features that the MDMs offer are mostly things I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need. So it’s not really worth me paying a lot for one of these services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there are some like really cheap ones. And getting to the announcement now, coincidentally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple announced yesterday that they’ve merged all of their various like business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backend services into the new thing just called Apple Business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So Apple Business is apparently a thing where they’re,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, doing their own MDM or providing their own sort of solution. I’m a bit fuzzy on it, but let me read a couple of things that John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was kind enough to pull out of the newsroom announcement. Uh, Apple today on March 24th announced Apple business, a new all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one platform that includes key services companies need to effortlessly manage devices, reach more customers, equip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey team members with essential apps and tools and get support. Apple business will be available on April
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 14th as a free service in the U S and 200 other countries. Apple business essentials, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey business manager and Apple business connect. Those will no longer be available. Once Apple business launches, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of slurping all those up and making one unified interface. It sure seems to me like if I were you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would at least kick the tires on this first and see what it’s got. And then if you need to go the route of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jam for something else, then so be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, that’s that’s my current plan is like now that Apple is launch is about to launch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they said April April 14th. Yeah. Now they’re about to launch their own first party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like better more featured version of this. I would rather just use that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I will look at that when it comes out in In the meantime, my pile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hacks is fine, but I will look at those, especially as I approach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this summer’s beta season, if I do end up wanting to run betas on some or all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these, that’s gonna be a burden. So having centralized software management
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be a lot nicer. So we’ll see when the time comes.
⏹️ ▶️ John My one suggestion, and a lot of other people wrote in with a suggestion as well, is it does seem like you need something
⏹️ ▶️ John probably from Apple that can handle OS updates and stuff like that. Although the various reports we got about the
⏹️ ▶️ John quality of Apple’s previous Apple business manager software and their MDM stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ John not all glowing, but you know, and this is the, this is a new product, Apple business supposedly. So there might be
⏹️ ▶️ John some growing pains there, but the other part of it, the part where you’re, the part where you’re SCP being a
⏹️ ▶️ John file onto a bunch of a max, like everyone, uh, that’s where the second piece of advice we got is like
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix nerds are saying there’s a million, uh, you know, free open source
⏹️ ▶️ John command line packages for configuring a whole bunch of Unix-y
⏹️ ▶️ John servers. And yes, they’re not, you know, it’s a Mac, but it’s also a Unix-y server. And if all
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to do with, if all you’re doing is essentially something that you can do with SCP now,
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than doing SCP in a loop and dealing with that and everything, there’s a million software packages,
⏹️ ▶️ John most of which probably run on the Mac that you can try. A lot of people suggested Ansible. There’s also CFEngine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Back in the day, there was Puppet. I don’t know if it still exists. A lot of those things do have a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to run on the Mac. They’re, you know, they’re Unix-y command line things and you have to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John how to get that installed on the Macs. But if you’re the only job of that part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John system is, oh, and by the way, there’s something that I wanna do that I can do from
⏹️ ▶️ John like a shell script or whatever, just you can do that outside of Apple’s things. And the reason I worry about it having not
⏹️ ▶️ John used these products is like, you have a new version of the transcription app that we just talked about before.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want to get that to all the machines. I’m sure Apple Business Manager has a way to get the new version of
⏹️ ▶️ John your transcription up to all the machines. I’m also guessing that it takes its time
⏹️ ▶️ John environment, everyone needs the new version of Outlook. It rolls out when it rolls out.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no like, I want it to go to all 48 machines now, now, now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I can’t imagine it’s taking 30 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, even if they offer that as an option, it’s just like, that’s not what those things are made for. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably never even want that in a situation where you’re deploying to 2000 Macs. You don’t want them to all instantly get the new version of
⏹️ ▶️ John Outlook. You want it to roll it out. So maybe depending on if Apple Business Manager or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, if Apple Business has some gaps rather than saying, oh, now I need one of those commercial MDMs
⏹️ ▶️ John that charges me an amount per Mac per month, at least look at like Ansible and some of the
⏹️ ▶️ John other Unix-y stuff that basically are a fancy distributed way for you to
⏹️ ▶️ John run Unix commands on a fleet of servers without you having to deal with the plumbing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, so my argument, so that would be though, like I already built that with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSH and a shell script. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like- I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like it’s just, how good is your error checking and how parallelized is
⏹️ ▶️ John it? How fast can it do all 48 machines, yada, yada. Like there’s a reason these things exist. Things like Puppet
⏹️ ▶️ John sprang into existence because people used to write scripts that would loop over things and distribute tar balls and untar
⏹️ ▶️ John them and do, you know, and then they made products out of that because doing it manually kind of sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and again, like this is the kind of thing, like what your needs are determines a lot about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the solution here should be. My needs are so simple here that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if all it’s gonna save me doing is like, you know, right now, like I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a simple text file that’s about 30 lines long that is my instructions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for setting up a new Mac mini. And there’s not much, it’s not that hard. You know, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I changed like five settings and you know, mostly about power management, like stay on, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stay on, no really, always stay on. And you know, give it my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSH public key and say, all right, you know, accept anything from this, go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and oh, and turn on remote desktop. That’s about it, like that’s roughly all I do. If something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, well, you know, you can have more control over it by installing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different product. okay, but right now I install no different products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have all the control I need. So to me, I would say like that additional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity, even if the product is free, setting aside any kind of cost, the additional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity of having another thing being involved, that’s another moving part, that’s another company that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can go out of business or another thing I have to keep updated or that might break in three years with new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS update that Apple gives or whatever. every one of those moving pieces I evaluate, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this giving me enough benefit over my current situation to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth its additional risks and complexity? And because my needs for these are so simple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the answer to that for a lot of these things is no. Now, not for everything. And again, like, software updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the big thing that I definitely would like to be automated better. But adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other layers, any other packages, any other products, they all have to pass that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test before they’re gonna be worth it for me. And they’re gonna be worth it for a lot of businesses before they’re gonna be worth it for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wasn’t suggesting you get rid of your little 30 line thing that you run. I was suggesting you just get something else to be the plumbing
⏹️ ▶️ John to run your 30 line thing. That’s it. Because, you know, again, if you just, it’ll do it more
⏹️ ▶️ John in parallel. They can monitor if it’s been successfully done on all the machines. If you update the machines, it will immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John redo it because it’ll see that it hasn’t been done. That type of thing. That’s what you’re getting. It’s just the plumbing. It’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John a fancy, remotely run a bunch of commands on a bunch of machines for me and make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that if those settings ever get changed or if anything changes in the machines that you set them back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the way they were. And it’s also a fancy plumbing way to say, and if there’s some files you want to be on
⏹️ ▶️ John those machines like your app, just tell me where it is and I’ll make sure it’s the latest version is always in all the
⏹️ ▶️ John machines. And that’s what you’d be getting. I haven’t actually used Ansible myself. I have used Puppet and I hated it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there is, you know, like, There’s something to be said for doing it all yourself, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if it turns out to be tedious and you’re spending a lot of time dealing with that, those unique, what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John saying is I would look at those unique things before I would look at one of the fancier MDMs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, anything else with regard to overcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think I’m just, I’m working through all the.
ShazamKit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know bugs and reports and feet the other thing is I said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know that I was I had spent a huge amount of time last summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting an algorithm to fingerprint the audio so I can align it around dynamic ad insertion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did not realize that shazam kit was an API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it offers exactly that functionality. Oh no. So I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, like I’m going to try it. I’m going to see like, you know, is their signature better than mine? Like, is their fingerprinting, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it better? I don’t actually know. So I’m going to experiment. I’m not going to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this week or anything, but sometimes I’m going to experiment with that to see like, should I basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start using their alignment instead or in addition to mine? But that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was kind of a little bit like, oh no, did I spend months doing something from scratch that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has an API to do? see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know Guy Rambeau had reached out to us to tell us about ShazamKit. Perhaps you heard it from others.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s right. It was from Guy. Yeah, that is indeed where I heard about it. And yeah, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, oh no. But we’ll see. So part of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fingerprinting algorithm is it has to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very low granularity of time. Like if the block size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s working on is like a 10 or 15 second chunk, that might not be good enough for what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing here. Like my fingerprinting, the sample resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it is something like a quarter of a second. And it also has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a small enough data set that like whatever the fingerprint that you generate for an entire podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to be a reasonable size. It can’t be like many megabytes of data if you’re gonna do that resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across a three-hour show. So I’ll see, I don’t know what exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their data is stored and what resolution it is, so that’s all gonna be part of the experimentation phase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see, should I switch to theirs or not? depend on things like that.
Fake AirPods Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in a final piece of follow up for today, AirPods Max and their popularity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in New York, you had commented that everyone and their mom has a AirPods Max in the New
⏹️ ▶️ Casey York metro area these days. How is that possible, especially when some of these people are kids, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 15, 16 year old kids or whatever? Apparently all of them, or maybe most of them anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did not know. Yeah, I, so many people have written in to say either they, either they suspect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re fakes or like they live in Manhattan and they see that the fakes and I can I can verify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m in Manhattan about about once a week I do see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know the guys in the streets that sell all like the fake luxury goods on those little tables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah there’s always air pods max lookalikes on those tables too and every like all like the store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windows that are like the like the random little electronic stores there you look and you’re like I bet most of the stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and theirs probably knockoffs. Like, you know, they also all have AirPods Max lookalike headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m sure many AirPods Max looking fakes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are sold. But I’ll tell you, I’ll be damned if I can spot one. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people say like, oh, you can tell they look cheaper, their finish is wrong, they have a plastic crown, like different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things people have told us to like try to spot them. But at the distances that, you know, I’m not gonna like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, hover over someone’s shoulder start eyeing the details of their digital crown to see like, Hey, is that plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or metal? Can I tap that for a second? You know, like I’m not going to, you know, at, at regular distances,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t tell. Um, so I, I assume I’m sure lots of them are fakes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also think a lot of people are probably buying them because they are like visually iconic and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is still selling them. And you know, they, if Apple wasn’t selling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These, you know, in any meaningful quantity, they wouldn’t have even given them the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half-butted updates they did give them. They would have had no update forever. So someone’s buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. Yeah, I bet a bunch of them are fake.
Sponsor: Babble On
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Babylon. So if you’ve ever shipped
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey ship your localizations via strings or God help you, a spreadsheet to some faceless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company that has 80 million salespeople and three translators. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forever later you get translations that sound, I don’t know, something like an office printers mad at you, but Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least they’re in Japanese. Or option two, and you’re probably going to want to go with option two, you work with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Babylon. They’re a small, dedicated localization team. You can talk to them in Slack, deliver strings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during a sprint, and get answers quickly when something in your UI breaks. So I’ve been working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Babylon, and that’s Babble on, get it? Very well done. I’ve been working with them to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do localization for call sheet for Korean and Japanese, and it’s been really, really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said to them, hey, I’ve already got all my localization files in this public GitHub repo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you want me to send them to you myself or can you just slurp those up?” And they said, no problem, we’ll slurp them up. And they even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offered to jump in Slack with me and I said, okay, that sounds great. And I figured, to be honest with you, that I was getting the white glove treatment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of the whole, you know, ad read that we’re in the middle of and all that. But no, they assured me this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their normal operating procedure. And not only that, when they started looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these translations in the context of the test flight, after I added them, of course, there were a handful of times that they said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you know what, now that we see this in context, I don’t think we gave you the best possible option. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go back and redo this one or that one. It’s been really, really great to work with them and my Japanese and Korean
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WWDC 2026 hopes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC 2026 has been announced. It is June 8th through 12.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So happy birthday, Marco. Anyways, suffice to say, June 8th through 12th,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently in episode 673 back in January, which for my purposes is like 700 years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we talked about what we were looking forward to in 26. I have zero recollection of what I said, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I’m sure there are things. I I mean, there are definitely things I’m looking forward to, but nothing is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaping out at me at right this moment. So John, other than the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John not looking forward to that. It’s not look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward to. No, I think best case scenario, the Mac Pro gets killed. Everybody. See? Yeah. I mean, I don’t understand why they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t killed yet. I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re waiting for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John well, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting for the Mac studio. Like that’s, but it’s by far the most likely scenario that like the Mac, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco studio will be updated at some point in the future. And at that time they will just continue to the Mac pro. Like that. I think I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the most likely way this goes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand why they’re waiting though. It’s not as if the Mac Pro is filling some need waiting for the Mac Studio to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? It just doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, what I remember from the January
⏹️ ▶️ John episode is we were talking about like tech things for the entire year, narrowing it to WWDC. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John subset of things that I talked about on that episode are still basically the same. I’m still looking forward to M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra or whatever new chip that they haven’t yet announced. And presumably that will be in a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio. and I’m looking forward to both because I’m interested and also because I’m probably gonna buy one. So I’m kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John was looking forward to it and now kind of a little bit scared about how much it’s gonna cost to get that eight terabyte SSD and the amount of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna want. We’ll see how that goes. And then the other thing that I also talked about, I think in the January episode was,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s see how Apple does with their AI stuff. Like they were supposed to like roll out a bunch of new series stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in supposedly 26.4, which was just released, but notice it didn’t arrive in 26.4. In fact, we had an item
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes that just kept getting pushed off forever. that was basically like, hey, remember Apple’s dates that it set for
⏹️ ▶️ John itself, that they were gonna do some Siri stuff in 26 point something, and then more in 27? Well, it
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like they’re missing the 26 something date. And so maybe it’s just, we’re just waiting for a WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John for Siri not to suck as bad. So that’s it. If Siri can get any better and
⏹️ ▶️ John M5 Ultra, Mac Studio. Hell, even M5 Max, Mac Studio, even if it’s not, if there’s no Ultra at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John just the M5 Max, Mac Studio and see how that’s priced and for me to figure out what I’m gonna get. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m looking forward to slash dreading.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like the obvious answer here is, okay, what is the AI story? I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the elephant in the room, right? And I don’t know, on the one side, I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure what it is that I want them to tell me with regard to the AI story. But then again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is so very good at telling me, oh, you never know. You needed blank, but you did. And then I say, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right. I absolutely did.
⏹️ ▶️ John What you want them to tell you is Siri doesn’t suck anymore. That’s what we’re all waiting for is just because almost
⏹️ ▶️ John I always feel like everything else like the world is passing them by and all the other areas like it doesn’t need Apple’s help to do
⏹️ ▶️ John any AI stuff. People are doing it anyway, but Siri is the one thing that the world can’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John better. Only Apple can only Apple in the way that they never mean it. Only Apple can do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is we’re all stuck with Siri until Apple fixes it. John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Giesinke, Ph.D.: That’s so true. With regard to development tools
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and things like that, I think there’s a couple of things that I’d really look forward to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m skeptical that any or all of these will happen. Number one, I would love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them to start really leaning into documentation even more. They’ve been doing better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over… No, no, they’ve been doing better.
⏹️ ▶️ John They really have. Adam Draper, M.D.: You make fun of me with Mac Pro, Hope. Geez. John
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Giesinke, Ph.D.:
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. You’re right. You are not wrong about that, John. I really want to argue with you, but you are 100% correct. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hoping for lower app store fees.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re both right. You’re both right. I cannot argue. But a man can dream. So, yeah, so I mean, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love them to, I mean, I don’t think they would ever come out and say, hey, we’re actually going to write documentation now, but it would be cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they, you know, just did a better job. And then again, in their defense, they’ve been getting better and better over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the years, but there’s still a long way to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Getting better isn’t better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a direction, but it does not express the position.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, speaking of documentation, like just one of the things that’s been bothering me lately because I’ve been really
⏹️ ▶️ John like sort of digging down to some really minor stuff in my apps because I’m not adding major features and
⏹️ ▶️ John just looking for like really obscure bugs and stuff. Can you imagine if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote in its documentation what threads thing happen on in the functions they
⏹️ ▶️ John provide and the APIs they provide? Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco God. Because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really important for me to know, Hey, hey, what thread is that callback gonna be called on?
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, when this block gets called, what thread? What thread is it? What thread? And you can guess and you can check,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you check at runtime, it’s like, it seems like this is always called on the main thread. Is that always gonna be called on the
⏹️ ▶️ John main thread? Am I just getting lucky? That would be an example of where you would add documentation or give us a source code,
⏹️ ▶️ John one or the other, please, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, definitely. Another thing I’d like is, please, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please, For the love of all that is good and holy in the world, can you make tab
⏹️ ▶️ Casey management in Xcode make any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John f*****g sense whatsoever? That’s not possible. Any sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any amount of sense, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s never made sense to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the love of God, anything would work other than what you’ve got right now and the seven tries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you had before it because oh my God, tabs in Xcode, they’re the bane of my existence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe I’m a moron, I don’t know. I don’t think a lot of people are very enthusiastic about this, but it drives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me nuts literally every time I do my job.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s just ignore
⏹️ ▶️ John the tabs and pretend they don’t exist. I have tab blindness in Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I just don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John see that strip of the UI. I don’t interact with it. It is dead to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If only. Yeah, I, cause I never, I’ve never once learned how to navigate via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tabs. So I just don’t, I navigate from the sidebar only.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The only thing I do with tabs is I have my own custom keyboard shortcut, which I really regretting cause they have no way to
⏹️ ▶️ John sync these, but anyway, I have my own custom keyboard shortcut that I have to constantly change as they mess with the tab
⏹️ ▶️ John system, which adds a second pane with the same file that I’m editing to my right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I use the X to close it. That’s my only interaction with that bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well make it make sense. Apple, please. Um, and then, you know, obviously just in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new APIs are fun. Uh, especially if they’re, you know, mostly fully fleshed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. But that being said, I would also love for Apple to just tell us, you know what, we’ve gone through and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have improved all the existing APIs, you know, The things that aren’t async await friendly already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now are, you know, I would love the proverbial snow leopard year for APIs as well. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I’m barking up a tree that they’ll never commit to this, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. What do you think, Marco? Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me, I really just want to see the AI tools
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Ah, yes, that’s a good call.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Like what they added last year, you know, The first year of quote Apple intelligence was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for developers, nothing. We had nothing that we could possibly do for iOS 18.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Last year with iOS 26, they gave us a lot of APIs that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think overall look pretty good. Most developers I know have not had a ton of time to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build with them and I certainly haven’t for the most part because of Liquid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Glass really took up a lot of our resources and a lot of our time. The one big one, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I did use was the speech transcriber API, which is great. A couple of weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little things here. If you’ve seen a podcast that uses the word billion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a sentence, how the speech transcriber transcribes the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word billion is one, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like whatever the number is. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a one followed by nine. That’s how it… And so you see this with no commas, no thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separators. So you see this one giant, you know, this one followed by nine zeros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of a sentence, it’s hilarious.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just got a notification today that said you’re getting a call from 1,000,000,200.
⏹️ ▶️ John It read out a phone number as a, as a, just a long integer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s actually, that’s one of my longstanding gripes is like, you know, oftentimes I’m wearing AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when a message comes in and it will announce the message and it never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows what numbers are even like it’ll be reading an address to me and it’ll read the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll read like the zip code as like, you know, one thousand five, you know, and but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best is when it reads out tracking numbers from shipment notifications to you. Oh yeah, that’s a long. It’ll read through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole thing like and oh my god. Anyway, those those and whatever whatever part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of machine learning or Siri is being used to announce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco messages to you in AirPods is really primitive. And I would love for that to get better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s separate. This is a diversion from my other main topic because whatever that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API is that’s generating that speech is really dumb and also unreliable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like still, I will still like I’ll have a message, you know, you know, boodoo, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so has sent you a message, but I can’t read it. And I go and look and it’s like a regular sentence. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, what, you couldn’t read that? What, something broke? Or it’ll say, so and so has sent you a message,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’ll start reading it, and it’ll just stop, like halfway through a sentence, and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fail. I’m like, okay, thanks, I guess. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that area needs attention. It’s been in the sentence for a long time. Anyway, but what I’m looking forward to for WDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continued progress on the AI related APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for developers. Last year was a great start. We still are nowhere near the vision of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Intelligence originally with like the app intent powered system to do all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That we are constantly rumored to get it. It’s like next year is gonna be the year of Linux on the desktop. Next year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna be finally the OS release that we get the app intent based Siri intelligence system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see if that comes out. I, you know, there’s a lot still to do in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrating AI with the system, giving developers ways to integrate AI into our own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, and making the AI that’s tying all this together better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are in the infancy of that process on Apple’s platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as that gets better, we are going to be able to make much better apps and our customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be able to have much better experiences and our apps will be able to do better things with the system and with other apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through AI integrations and everything. But right now we are almost nowhere along that path.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s what I really wanna see is like, give me the next step on that path. What else can we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now do with AI on Apple’s platforms without like bundling in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our entire, bundling in a three gig model with our apps? Like what if we just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Apple’s platform things like, what can we do now that we couldn’t do before? what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limits are raised, what new capabilities are added. And then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just really wanna see some revision to Liquid Glass. Now I know, I know we talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it over time last week, I know that we’re not gonna have a huge undoing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re not gonna, they’re not gonna throw it all in the trash and give us something that looks like iOS 18 again. That’s fine, that’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m asking for. And I don’t think that’s not what most people are asking for. What I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is revision, improvement, iteration on the concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of liquid glass. The number one thing I want to see is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there should never be a common pattern in Apple’s stock UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that puts blurry text under other text I’m trying to read. Now, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not all of liquid glass. The biggest offender here is bars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text, like toolbars and navigation bars. Navigation bars in iOS problems, the bars on top of a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the title bar and a couple of buttons and text that scrolls under it. Toolbars are the same thing at the bottom of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen where you have buttons in the bottom. With liquid glass, there are no bars anymore. Your content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just blurs and scrolls under everything. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helping anybody. And when most people have trouble with liquid glass, either conceptually or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really like in terms of reading it, That’s like the number one thing on the hit list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the lack of solid or mostly solid bars and having to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blur text under other text, which makes it difficult to read. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not an easy problem to solve. With the design language they have chosen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to require a decent amount of design to really to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to some kind of defined bar with a defined edge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the bar itself maybe is made of frosted glass or something, you know, and pretty heavily frosted, hopefully.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that would alleviate almost the entire problem. Like if they just made bars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a defined area with a border that ended and a background that is mostly mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solid, you fix this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would be shocked if they did that. But if you look in Mac OS 26.4,
⏹️ ▶️ John they did do something that you can see in the system settings app. Lots of people used to post,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, screenshots of the system settings app, which has a search field on top of the left sidebar.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as you scroll the left sidebar, the left sidebar has text items like general sound, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that text would scroll underneath the search field. And as soon as you scrolled anywhere other than
⏹️ ▶️ John at the very, very top where basically where there was any text below the search field, the search field has placeholder text
⏹️ ▶️ John that says search, and then you could also read whatever the item was that was underneath it
⏹️ ▶️ John from the sidebar that had scrolled up there. And so it was like search with a word superimposed on it, and then you would type
⏹️ ▶️ John into that field and it was terrible. In 26.4, the search field is a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John more frosty and you can no longer read the text underneath it. You
⏹️ ▶️ John still see some of the text through it. You can tell the text is there. You can see a black shadow scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John by as the text goes underneath it, because it’s real important that you do that for some reason, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t read the text anymore. So that’s my guess of what they’ll do in 27 is
⏹️ ▶️ John not actually have a defined bar, which I agree would be way better. But my hopes are my expectations are set
⏹️ ▶️ John at the 26.4 level, which is like, no, they’re not going to bring back bars because they’re too stubborn and it would be too hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what they will do is crank up the frost dial and make it so that you can’t literally read
⏹️ ▶️ John text that’s underneath the controls.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that that will help. It is not a solution. It is a band aid.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I agree, but I think it’s what they’ll do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, agree. Yeah. Like I I’m with you. Like I am not, this is not something I’m optimistic about. This is not, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wish, not an expectation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it? You’re looking forward to, but we’re ready to be disappointed. Like Casey with the documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s it. Yeah. This is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. I’d say I have similar odds of success here. I, I trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple has really good design talent. and I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they could make defined bars look good and look modern.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t… we don’t have to like… It’s been done many times before by Apple. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can keep like so much of the liquid glass design language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not necessarily at odds with that. You could keep so much of how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls look, toolbars, buttons, the animation, the way they blob up and blob back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together and like so many of those things are totally doable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a mostly solid bar with a border Like and even if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole bar could be a capsule who cares like there’s so many different ways You could do it and you could make the bar frosted you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make them whatever you want it to do There are ways to design this to make it look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fresh and modern It doesn’t have to look old and the old way wasn’t the only way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it They can do it. There’s lots of options. It just takes the will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe the humility to some degree to realize like, okay, this direction of liquid glass has too many problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in real life. Let’s rethink some of that. And you don’t need to throw away the whole language to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. So anyway, that’s what I would hope to see is those two big pillars. Better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI APIs and liquid glass being more usable. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’ll get probably both of those but probably neither one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done to the level I want it to be done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I’m interested to see how this goes. I think to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s, you know, settling… What is the term, term or phrase from Godfather,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settling the family debts or whatever it is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Settling all family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toolbars. They need to do that with Siri. I concur with you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually, especially on iOS, I mostly like Liquid Glass, but the thing that drives me nuts is the toolbar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey treatment. I mean, there’s other things as well, There’s other things as well. But the thing that drives me nuts the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often is that I am looking directly through a toolbar and don’t even know it. And so I completely agree with you there, Marco. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll see. I mean, time will tell. I’m excited to see what happens. I’m excited for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to do our Monday night show, as we always do. As far as I know, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us will be remote, so I’m not trying to quietly announce anything. But anyways, it should be fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m curious to see what Apple does.
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#askatp: State of passkeys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. We haven’t had the opportunity to do that in a little while. And we’re starting with something that could have been written
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Casey List, but was actually written by Philip Miller, who writes, Pesky’s have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me befuddled. Amen, brother. When they first emerged, I took a wait and see approach and that’s where I remain today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, amen, brother. Even though many sites and services pressure me to adopt Pesky’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are all three of you fully embracing Pesky’s now? What are the biggest pitfalls of, or excuse me, And what are the biggest benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of passkeys for someone like me, who’s a faithful user of tools like 1Password for managing traditional passwords and two-factor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey codes? What are the real risks of passkeys? Am I being foolish to worry about scenarios where my Apple devices are all lost in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a house fire and now I’m locked out of every account? With 1Password, everything is backed up in the cloud and I can keep my emergency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logging credentials on a single sheet of paper in a safe deposit box. Are passkeys equally resilient? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will also add a fourth question. What about family passwords? My understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that you can share passkeys, or maybe not originally, but certainly now. But there’s a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, you know, one of the great things about 1Password is that it has family vaults,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you can get a family account with a family vault where, you know, Aaron and I will share a bunch, if not most of our passwords.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I know nothing about this, even though I should. I don’t know, Marco, if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thoughts on this, but let’s start with you, if so, but I’d very much like to hear John’s perspective as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. I have some thoughts and then we’ll kick it to John who will have the right answers. The way I’ve embraced pass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keys is when a website asks me, hey, you want to make a pass key? It’s much better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blah, blah, blah. I will usually at that point say yes and do my fingerprint or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have also found that as I am still bouncing between Apple password or Apple passwords
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one password, although more one password these days, since I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using Chrome as my default desktop browser. The way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both of them handle passkeys is fine. You know, with Apple, you go to a website, if he wants a passkey, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show you the standard like touch ID, face ID prompt. And you you know, you do you authenticate that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it gets you in with one password. If you have the browser extension, it just if it’s if it’s unlocked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already, it’ll just show a little thing in the upper right corner. And it’s a you want to use the passkey click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to log in, you click to log in and it logs you in. Both of those are fine. The one password
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is, I think, a little more convenient of just providing the security in a different way, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re both fine. My main issue with pass keys is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s kind of like that old XKCD comic that’s like, we have too many standards. Here, I made a new standard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me, like technical and security perspective, they’re amazing. They’re way better than everything we had before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But from the actual user experience of using them in practice most of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just another thing that gets added to the pile of things that we are supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep track of and you know have in a password manager or something and you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to share maybe with mixed success with family members or co-workers or whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be done very well in an ideal implementation of passkeys both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on on like you know the platform side and on like the website side they’re better than everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else the main downside with passkeys so far is that the way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see them being implemented by websites and services is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as a replacement for passwords but as a replacement for two-factor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s actually just taking this other complex thing and replacing it with a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complex thing. Now the security of a passkey is way better than, you know, most of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other systems or alternatives to it, but the user user experience of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still really clunky in a lot of places. And ideally it would replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire login. Like ideally you could just have it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically if you have a passkey for the site you’re on and it shows you a login screen, it just prompts you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use it and it logs you in all the way. That would be the ideal case. And you occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see sites like that but it’s not the common case. So that’s kind of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of mixed opinion of them is that they are a great technology that solves a lot of problems. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also create a lot of inconvenience in certain contexts. And they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not really making logins on websites that much easier in practice, not because of their inherent technology,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the implementation decisions of those websites.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve really come around on Passkeys for the past six months or so. I was always trying them
⏹️ ▶️ John out whenever they were offered or whatever, but now having implemented them or having asked
⏹️ ▶️ John the coding agents to implement them for me more precisely and
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing all the details there and all the different trade-offs and everything, I still
⏹️ ▶️ John think implementing them is the most annoying part of FastKeys because the input, like, if they want to get better
⏹️ ▶️ John adoption on websites and stuff, they should really streamline that and work harder to give
⏹️ ▶️ John friendly libraries that are easy to use with good documentation, Casey. But anyway, the coding agents can
⏹️ ▶️ John do it, so it’s not that bad. But just a quicker view, like what’s good about passkeys,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would you wanna use them instead of passwords or whatever, they have a bunch of security advantages that passwords
⏹️ ▶️ John and two-factor stuff are never going to be able to match just because they’re inherent in the technology. The first is
⏹️ ▶️ John that when you use a password on a website, the server
⏹️ ▶️ John stores something on its side that could potentially compromise you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You hope they don’t just store your password in plain text, but as we’ve seen, some websites do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you have no way of knowing if the website is incompetent in storing your passwords in plain text. So there’s that. Second,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they don’t store it in plain text. Let’s say they store encrypted hash of your password
⏹️ ▶️ John or what they should be doing. What algorithm are they using for it? Has the algorithm been broken? Was
⏹️ ▶️ John the algorithm secure 10 years ago, but now it’s not anymore. And all this is relevant because websites
⏹️ ▶️ John get hacked and what people leak from them is account information, which is usually your email address,
⏹️ ▶️ John which whatever, people don’t like that to leak, but you know, your email address is not a secret.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also some hash thing for your password. And you’re like, well, that’s secure. They can’t get my password
⏹️ ▶️ John from that, can they? Well, again, what algorithm are they using? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t get it now, but three years from now, they’ll be able to do it with some Nvidia GPU or something that can crack it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Paskeys do not store secret information on the server. Again, you’re assuming that they’re implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way, but I can tell you that passkeys don’t involve the server storing something that
⏹️ ▶️ John is secret. The server, what the server store, it’s public information. They store your
⏹️ ▶️ John public key. It is public, anyone can have it. It’s not a secret. You can give it to the world. And they use
⏹️ ▶️ John that to verify through this protocol that you’re being signed in or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if a website gets hacked, the only thing they can leak about you is your email address, which again, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think is actually secret because spammers just spam every email address in the entire world. I just go through every combination of letters,
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers, like, anyway, so that’s good. Second thing is, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to make a human decision about where to enter something like a two-factor code or a password.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not involved in that process. The Passkey system has the computer do that for you. Yes, you’re still vulnerable
⏹️ ▶️ John to like DNS poisoning or something else, but the point is, social engineering is how people get hacked. They throw up something
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of them that looks like a webpage for the website they’re familiar with, and they just blindly
⏹️ ▶️ John enter their password in there. And yes, password managers like one password, which by the way is a current and former sponsor.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason we recommend them is you should be using a password manager because they will automate a lot of this for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can always manually and people know how to do it because they’re like, oh, I don’t, you know, the password
⏹️ ▶️ John autofill is not working or whatever. And people learn you can right click and do autofill. Or they, I’ve seen even technically
⏹️ ▶️ John non-savvy people go find their password in whatever their password thing is, usually
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple passwords or whatever, and copy and paste it into a text field. People do that today because they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to, because it doesn’t, you know, autofill isn’t everywhere, or they don’t know you can right-click and autofill
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac and recent versions of Mac OS. So they make human decisions about where to put things,
⏹️ ▶️ John like their two-factor code and their password, which is why every two-factor code comes with an all-caps screaming at you saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t show this to anybody, we’ll never ask you for your two-factor, because it’s so insecure. People get social engineered
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. PASCs will never make you make a decision about where to put things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s automated based on the identity of the server as verified by TLS, blah, blah, blah. Again, DNS
⏹️ ▶️ John poisoning and man in the middle and stuff, like that’s outside the scope, but the point is
⏹️ ▶️ John that will obviously work with all the other password systems as well, but they don’t ask you to make that
⏹️ ▶️ John decision. So this whole realm of social engineering is eliminated because humans don’t, can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John literally can’t, and don’t decide where to put their credentials. And that prevents you
⏹️ ▶️ John from screwing yourself when you get like phished or whatever and you think it’s a regular login screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then finally, I think this is one of the big advantages that starts to shade into the social,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is for most accounts these days, like if it’s something important,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, okay, you have a username and you have a good, generated long, complicated password
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s stored in a password manager of your choosing, right? And also a second factor to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John even more secure. And that second factor, sometimes they make it do SMS, which is incredibly insecure and websites
⏹️ ▶️ John demand that you do it, but a lot of places will let you use an authenticator app, like Apple Passwords or Authy or 1Password
⏹️ ▶️ John or a million other apps that are better than SMS and they’ll do that six digit code or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they need those two factors because there are so many other vulnerabilities in terms of phishing and
⏹️ ▶️ John getting your password cracked or reusing passwords and all sorts of stuff like that, but they need a second factor. Passkeys
⏹️ ▶️ John are secure enough that you don’t need a second factor. And nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John drives me more crazy than having to log in a two-step process. I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John get an email and enter code and do a thing. Even on sites where I have a password, they insist on mailing me a login.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s like, well, what’s the point of me having a password? Like, just let me pick what I wanna log in with. But multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John steps are annoying, which is why when I did all my personal sites, I used PASKIs
⏹️ ▶️ John only, because it is a one-step login process. There’s no second screen after you log in with a PASKI
⏹️ ▶️ John where it should ask you for a two-factor. Now, to Marco’s point, lots of websites say, oh no, we’re gonna use the pass keys
⏹️ ▶️ John as a second factor or we’re gonna make you pass key login and then ask you for an SMS code. It’s like, why, why?
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s a learning curve there, but the potential is because they are secure enough for all the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John that I said before, they can be the only factor which simplifies login. So every
⏹️ ▶️ John website, every web service that I use that lets me only use a pass key to log in, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thank you. This is the way
⏹️ ▶️ John it should work. And there’s not many of them and it’s taking a long time, but I see progress. I mean, hell,
⏹️ ▶️ John atb.fm does it now. You can choose to use a password, a passkey, or neither one of those,
⏹️ ▶️ John or an email login link. You can do all those things. Now, there’s still the question of like, okay, but if you can do email resets for forgot
⏹️ ▶️ John password, doesn’t that make passkeys less secure, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Passkeys are, to answer the first question, are you embracing them? I am embracing them
⏹️ ▶️ John to the extent that websites will let me. I’m embracing it with the websites that I maintain, that
⏹️ ▶️ John I build for myself, for my little toy things, And every time they are there, I always use them and I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like it when they’re not the only factor to log in, but they can be. They can be and I feel good about them being
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And you can share them with like Apple passwords. You can have family passwords and passkeys
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. And it’s good about, and 1Password did the same deal. And it’s good about like most of the browsers
⏹️ ▶️ John are good these days when you log in. It’s like, well, what if I have more than one passkey to a website? It will let you pick. And they’re identified
⏹️ ▶️ John by like email address or username or whatever. So you can have multiple passkeys to a website and it’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, everything’s great. And in terms of like the failure scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John losing stuff, like the name, 1Password, again, current and former sponsor,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have 1Password that you actually remember to unlock your password vault. Same thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud Keychain, Apple’s password manager. Maybe that’s the 1Password that you should actually
⏹️ ▶️ John memorize and have it be complicated, don’t have it be simple, because that is sort of the keys to the kingdom
⏹️ ▶️ John there. What if your house is on fire? What if you lose all your devices? But if you’re on vacation and your phone falls into the ocean, what am I going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do? This is one of the complaints I hear about passkeys is like, I can’t just write it down like a password. I can’t just print
⏹️ ▶️ John out a piece of paper with a password on it and have it there. Well, first of all, you can write down
⏹️ ▶️ John your like Apple ID password, which is the keys to your, you know, iCloud key chain. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John write down your one password password and put it in a safe deposit box or whatever. So you can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But second of all, most sites, even if they do like passkey as your only login,
⏹️ ▶️ John will also give you backup codes, which is like print these out. And in case of
⏹️ ▶️ John fire, like put these in a safe deposit box in a remote location on a piece of paper, and a lot of them will force you
⏹️ ▶️ John to prove that you wrote them down somewhere by asking you to enter them or whatever later you only see them
⏹️ ▶️ John once and you’re never going to see them again. Those are your like lifelines. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like people like I want to I want to see my past key. I want to see that like the giant base 64, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like the past key systems hide that from you as as much as possible. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason they hide it is not because they’re trying to lock you in or whatever. The reason they hide it is because they never want a user to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to get at that, because if users can get at that, people will fish it. People will say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re having trouble with our passkey login. Go grab your private key from your password manager and paste it
⏹️ ▶️ John into this text field and people will do it. So that’s why they make it basically impossible for a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John person to get at that data. But websites with accounts, almost, especially if they’re important
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re technically decent, almost always have backup codes. Print out your backup
⏹️ ▶️ John codes, store them offsite somewhere, have multiple copies of them in physically secure
⏹️ ▶️ John locations. So if everything burns down and you lose every single one of your devices, and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, how am I gonna restore my digital world? Backup codes is the answer. And also
⏹️ ▶️ John email-based password resets. But if you really get hacked or something and you can’t get your email, backup codes. Backup
⏹️ ▶️ John codes are the answer. So yeah, I’m enthusiastic about passkeys.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was less enthusiastic when they first rolled out, but again, like I said, now having implemented them a few times and using them more every
⏹️ ▶️ John time I find a site that uses one, like, yes, yes, more of this, just this one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and nothing else, and I feel good about them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, it sounds like I’m gonna need to start embracing them then.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you probably already are, but it’s like Marco said, what if your site you use makes you use it as a second factor or something else like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John You just have to wait, or maybe send them an email and say, hey, I wish you did something different.
#askatp: Neo keeps macOS lean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Fabridius writes, do you think that the eight gigs of RAM constraint in the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Neo helps keep or make Mac OS lean a self-imposed limitation that can prevent lazy bloat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the is the iOS team cursing the hardware cost cutting people? Well, probably a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of both. Right. I don’t know. I will say that. Um, I’m friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a handful of Apple engineers and without disclosing and they,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve never told me anything secret, but without like blowing up their spot or anything, I will say that all of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about perf or performance a lot. Like you know, just, oh, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been working on some perf stuff lately and that’s all they’ll ever tell me. It’s never anything more than that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear that not infrequently. And if you think about it, you know, if things perform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well and maybe not specifically around RAM, but if things perform well, that can also reduce like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery drain and strain and so on. So maybe John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a point here, but I think Apple just genuinely really cares about this stuff, irrespective
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the fact that they have low RAM devices still floating around in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think the main thing to keep in mind here is that when you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at where RAM goes on a Mac, Mac OS is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you have to worry about. What you have to worry about is all third party apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially apps that use things like the web frameworks like Electron and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. So you have Chrome itself. Chrome is a big resource hog compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Safari in most ways. And then all of the Electron based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, they just gobble up RAM like crazy. There’s not a lot Apple can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do about that really. The OS does its best, but for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what you have to worry about. And now, that being said, when you’re designing an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app like that, you look at the installed base of what people actually use, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if computers that many people use are going to run that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of app very slowly and it’s going to blow their computers up, you don’t care. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire industry doesn’t care. And you just have to suck it up as the user. You want to think that they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at the entire field of computers out and be like, should we maybe not use all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the RAM in the world? Should we maybe put a second of effort into not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco duplicating this thing over here? Nope. Nope. No one thinks that way at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one pays attention. Not a single software developer ever cares about that kind of stuff when making things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, various electron apps and things like that. So like, Apple does care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot. No one else does. Yes, the 8GB RAM constraint in the Mac Neo keeps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco macOS lean, But Mac OS wasn’t your problem. The problem is everyone else, and they’re going to do whatever they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. And the best thing Mac OS can do is have really good swap and virtual memory support.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it does. Mac OS can use a lot of memory, especially when things run away. But the real
⏹️ ▶️ John question is, and this is the question when the new came out, when we were discussing it, if you’re going to roll out a
⏹️ ▶️ John brand new computer in 2026 with eight gigs of RAM. How long
⏹️ ▶️ John will Mac OS run on that computer? Because that’s the question. Like I don’t think their
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will feel constrained to keep Mac OS lean because they needed to run on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Neo. I think they’ll decide based on wherever Mac OS is going, how long the Neo
⏹️ ▶️ John will be supported. And I’m sure I’ll be supported for years because like not being able to run on the Neo, like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t even boot Mac OS with a case. No, it’s fine. You’ll always be able to boot or whatever. But like there is a certain point where they’ll add
⏹️ ▶️ John some feature to Mac OS 31 or something. They’ll be like, well, this feature, we just can’t fit
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the Neo. and at that point, the Neo will no longer run, Mac OS 31, 30 will be the last one that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John run. But I’m just making up numbers, like that will happen. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think because the Neo has so little RAM, it is definitely in danger of being
⏹️ ▶️ John the first line of Macs to be dropped from a software revision.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously like with the process of transition, like the Intel ones get dropped or whatever, but just look at like Apple support, like
⏹️ ▶️ John how far back they go on the MacBook Pros for various versions of Mac OS versus the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Airs versus the minis and stuff like that, Apple will drop hardware when it becomes unfeasible
⏹️ ▶️ John given their software plans. And so I don’t think Apple will feel constrained
⏹️ ▶️ John by the Neo and I think there is the potential for the Neo to fall off the end of the supported
⏹️ ▶️ John list longer than let’s say it’s contemporary M5 MacBook Air with 16 gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that one will last longer than the Neo for multiple reasons. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I’m not optimistic about Apple feeling constrained by the RAM size.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know if software people are cursing Apple’s hardware choices, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to think some of them have to, because it’s like you have all these grand vision and when we got the big Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John dividend where all the Macs went to 16 gigs, it’s like finally, finally we broke out of that eight gig jail and we fell
⏹️ ▶️ John back into it. I’m not slamming the Neo for it because it makes sense on the Neo, I understand that, but one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that is going to hold back, especially this first gen Neo is, it arrives
⏹️ ▶️ John at a time where eight gig is the, especially with the RAM crisis and everything, it arrives at a time where
⏹️ ▶️ John eight gig is, it’s the only choice for that machine, given the prices
⏹️ ▶️ John and given the current RAM scenarios, like it could have been way worse. And currently
⏹️ ▶️ John eight gig is a little bit under what you would want from even the low end machine, but it’s just, it is what it is. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John when the next one comes out, presumably with 12 and the A19 Pro in it, 12 is a little bit better. It would be
⏹️ ▶️ John better if this one had 12, but it doesn’t. Like I feel like if Apple continues to use the A-series chips and does not adjust
⏹️ ▶️ John their A-series chips to be up to 16, like to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep, you know, cause it’s possible they’ll do that because we all know the Max gets stuck at the base
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM for way too long. And right after the base RAM on the Max
⏹️ ▶️ John gets bumped, that’s the best time ever. And as time goes on, we’re like, we all love the MacBook Air 16
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of RAM. In 10 years, we’re all gonna be complaining of the Mac, okay, 16 gigs of RAM in the base model.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause Apple just does not change the base RAM to keep up with the times. And so there’s that curve
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna walk. Is it the case that the A series chips will just eventually hit 16
⏹️ ▶️ John and stay there? Is it the case that the A series chips will end up with 18 while the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John still doesn’t have 16 because the phone just outraces them because the Mac stays static for so long. We’ll see how that turns
⏹️ ▶️ John out down there. But like we’re currently in a situation where the A series has half of
⏹️ ▶️ John what the base Macs have. And that’s probably the worst, I imagine the worst it will ever be. And I’m hoping that gap will
⏹️ ▶️ John narrow as Apple, again, if Apple keeps doing the A series chips on these, I think they’ll start designing
⏹️ ▶️ John the A series chips like for the three years from now with the Mac in mind for like peripherals, like USB and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. And maybe, you know, we’ll reach RAM parity there. So yeah, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not optimistic about the positive effects of the 8GB RAM on the Neo. I just think that
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we have better RAM days look forward to in the future.
#askatp: iPhone-Mac hybrid?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Keith Heaton writes, how long until we see an iPhone with an M chip or an iPad pro with the ability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to plug into a Thunderbolt dock or a studio display and present Mac OS to you? I just know that a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside your pocket will eventually happen. Michael Cook writes, does the MacBook Neo now mean that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple will likely never allow the iPhone to plug into a monitor and be used like a computer the way you can with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iPad or a Samsung Dex D E X. I just, I, I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be awesome. except I don’t think it would be as awesome as I think it would.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really just don’t see Apple doing it. I think having this mythical like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dual boot or dual mode iPad would be incredible, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just really don’t see Apple doing it. I mean they’re steadfastly refusing, mostly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to allow windowing on iPadOS. I know obviously that’s different now, but they certainly steadfastly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fastly refused it for years. I just don’t see this happening. And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really has anything to do with Maple Gnu. I just don’t think this is Apple style.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like incoherent from a software message, like technically possible. Sure. But it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple seems not to and I kind of agree with them make toaster fridges,
⏹️ ▶️ John Jekyll and Hyde kind of devices where like it runs two different OSes. Yeah, sure. You
⏹️ ▶️ John could do that from a technical perspective. But it’s weird that like it’s a phone when it’s in your hand, but it’s a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s not and like how to synchronize the world of the phone and the Mac with each other. And obviously you’re taking
⏹️ ▶️ John up more disk space and you kind of need to have power being supplied when you’re hooked up to the monitor too, because otherwise it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John drain your phone battery. And like, it’s just, it’s a weird product to pitch, even though this is exactly what I pitched
⏹️ ▶️ John in one of my early Mac world, uh, back page articles, which was like a laptop with a screen that folds back
⏹️ ▶️ John on itself. And when you fold it back, it runs iPad iOS because those, those are the pieces available at the time. And it’s an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John idea, but like Apple never took us up on it. I think what people mostly are looking for here is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John either they just want like an ultra portable, like Mac-like experience that goes everywhere with them and like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the folding phone will help with that or whatever. Or they’re really what they just want is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John wherever I go, I want my whole setup with me. And they’re just, what they’re asking for, I think, is
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple would hopefully deliver, well, I don’t know, over the years is a better cloud sync experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, because that’s the way this is done, like in the Google world, for example. Wherever you go with your Google
⏹️ ▶️ John account, there is, if you’re tied into the Google world, there’s all your stuff. You got your mail,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got your Google photos, you got your Google Drive, you got your Google Docs, like it doesn’t really matter where you
⏹️ ▶️ John land, all your stuff is there, whether it’s a phone or tablet or whatever. And if you have that experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, if that’s working well, you don’t need to plug your phone into a monitor. All you need
⏹️ ▶️ John is to be able to just like log into a guest account on that monitor thing and just get all your stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John use it kind of like more like a thin client or whatever. But yeah, I just think this is a product choice
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple doesn’t want to make. And like I said, I kind of agree with them because it’s just weird
⏹️ ▶️ John to run iOS and Mac OS off the same device, setting aside the amount of disk space you’re wasting
⏹️ ▶️ John and having to divide it up or whatever. It’s just it’s not an efficient use of resources. And it’s a difficult product to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John to people. And it’s difficult product for people to like if you had this and you
⏹️ ▶️ John used it, you’d be like, yeah, but it is kind of weird that I run Mac OS and then they run the iPhone OS and the only
⏹️ ▶️ John place they sync is through the sipping straw of like iCloud stuff. And it’s just, I don’t think it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John good idea. I don’t think it’s gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think that’s the kind of product that it sounds like a fun, interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea, but I think the reality of it would be weird and would disappoint people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple is pretty good in most cases, Vision Pro, from keeping products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the market that would end up that way. All right, thank you to our sponsors this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode, Babylon, Squarespace, and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. You can join us at atp.fm. Slash join. One of the many perks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic this week and overtime. We’re gonna be talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how Apple is going to add touch support to Mac OS. Speaking of which,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this will play right into what we were just talking about here. There’s been a new government report. We’ll be talking about that in overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us to listen at atfm slash join. Thank you everybody, and we’ll talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John 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 accidental, they did it mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check podcast so long
Casey’s quiet-quitting Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve been, I don’t know if quiet quitting is really the right term of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey art slash phrase for what I’ve been doing, but I’ve been for lack of a better way of describing it, quiet quitting my sonology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still in and of itself, I still actually really do love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my sonology. I have a DS, a 1621 plus, I believe. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I can, I’ll put a link in the show notes. Uh, but it’s, I don’t think it’s made anymore, so I may or may not be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to find a good link, but I’ll put something in there. Um, but I have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working on trying to set myself up to have the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go away and be okay with it. Now I would still need a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giant ass array of disks because I have a gazillion files. I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have something like 10 to 15 terabytes worth of stuff, active like stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Synology, you know, and then another like, and about that much again in free space at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moment. But I’ve really been disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the path that Synology has been going recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which if you squint, doesn’t look that different than Apple services. It’s a different application, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks kind of similar, but that’s neither here nor there. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean- That’s probably not a coincidence. Like Apple inspires companies how to become gatekeepers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make more money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco exactly it. Because Apple’s really good at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And honestly, that is the executive summary of what I’m about to tell you, which is that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, a couple of years back, and we talked about it on the show, but a year or two back, they said, okay, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey future Synology, you know, NASA’s disk stations, as they call them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they will be forced to use first-party Synology hard drives, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are themselves, you know, relabeled like Western Digitals, I think, or something like that. The details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly don’t matter. if they are legitimately their own first party drives, honestly, I don’t think that really matters either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But this thing that was always and forever, you could put whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive you wanted in it and they would slurp it up and it would be fine. But they’ve announced that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, no, no, no, no, no, you must use our first party stuff. Now, in the defense of Synology, I can make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some arguments in favor of that. It’s far easier to control these things. It’s far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easier to guarantee that it’ll work the way they they want it to and that’s the way you want it to. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can figure out legitimate reasons for this, but I feel like even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are not taking it away from legacy users like myself, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still gross because at some point I’m going to want a new bit of network attached
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage and I, I don’t want to have to fill that with very expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology drives in the same way that all things being equal, I would put third party RAM in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mac, hi John, or potentially a third party SSD in a Mac, hello again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, if such a thing were possible in the Macs that I buy, but it isn’t, not without a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. So I’ve been trying to set myself up for, all right, what would the future look like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I gave up on my Synology? And to be clear, I think this will happen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t think it’s gonna happen anytime soon. I’m talking like maybe five plus years before this happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I wanted to set myself up for it. And so what I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing is trying to treat the Synology less like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a computer and more like a giant array of disks. And that’s in no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey small part because I think what I am likely to replace the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with if I were to do it tomorrow is a, I almost said Synology, is a Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UNAS, which is a giant array of disks, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s very little else. I mean, obviously there is a computer in there, but not really from a user’s perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By contrast, a Synology will let you, you know, you can run a shell on it. Well, I mean, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that on the UNAS as well, I believe, but you can run stuff on it. You can install software on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology. You can run Docker containers on it. And I was running a zillion, like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus Docker containers on my Synology, which by the way, even despite having added third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey randomized synology as an add-on rather than a replacement, that didn’t go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exceedingly well because while this is a computer and it is meant to serve things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not really meant to be a server if you ask me. And maybe you listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might disagree with me, but that’s kind of my perspective on it. It’s supposed to do basic survey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff but not be like your one server for your small business or for your home or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so, what I’ve done is, I feel like I’ve talked about a little of this on the show, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you recall way back when, a year or two ago, I got a little tiny NUC, a little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel PC that I had shipped off to my dear friend in Connecticut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with an antenna with the intention of streaming New York Giants games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Connecticut to me by slurping them up over the air. Apparently, my word of the day, I’m sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by scooping them up from the air and using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the absolutely excellent channels app, sending them, you know, sending what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey antenna got into my house. That didn’t end up working out because my friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lives far enough into the middle of nowhere, Connecticut, which is a thing, despite what you’d think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that his signal from his house was basically useless. And I had left the computer, the NUC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there for the longest time because, I don’t know, there was no real need to repatriate it, for lack of a better word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then it occurred to me, you know what? You know what a NUC would be really good at? Running a bunch of Docker containers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I realized my Homelab experience is finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leveling up, and I need to do the thing that all self-respecting Homelabers seem to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now I’m going to get all the Homelabers yelling at me for saying so. But nevertheless, it seems like all of the Homelabers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I know and respect, like my friend Alex, who’s from Tailscale, who does incredible videos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Tailscale channel about Homelab stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tailscale on YouTube, that is. So anyway, Alex is a big fan of Proxmox,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey P-R-O-X-M-O-X, which I am not really well qualified to describe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I would say is basically like an OS that lets you run VMs and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LXCs, which is sort of, but not really like a Docker container. Or you can run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a virtual machine that itself is basically its only purpose is to run Docker containers and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I repatriated the NUC, I put Proxmox on it, that’s been working pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It only had, I believe, stop me if this sounds familiar, when I bought it, I didn’t buy it to do this sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of thing, I bought it to be a channel server. And so it only had eight gigs of RAM on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, which once you start running five, 10, 15, 15, literally 20 Docker containers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And by the way, Home Assistant and Pihole all on this device, I quickly found that eight gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of RAM was not sufficient. And so for the tune of like $180 or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that, just a few weeks ago, I bought 16 gigs of RAM, which I think a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year ago was like literally 30 or 40 bucks or something like that. But now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was something to the order of $150, which I… On
⏹️ ▶️ John spec front now, is the NUC more powerful than your Synology? Does it have
⏹️ ▶️ John more RAM? Is the CPU better?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe the CPU is better. You know, it’s a fair question to which honestly I don’t know the answer. I have to assume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. And I can tell you based on the behavior of the NUC and the way these containers run on the NUC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is way faster. Way, way faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much RAM does your Synology have with the upgrade? Do you remember?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to say it’s the same. I want to say it’s 16 gigs. And I will try to look that up as I continue
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, Synology is doing other things because it’s doing disk serving stuff. But I do wonder, like, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you really shouldn’t use your Synology as your home server. So I bought the smallest, tiniest, least powerful computer
⏹️ ▶️ John I could get that’s not a Raspberry Pi. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fair. I mean, actually, now that I think about it, maybe the crux of my problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which didn’t occur to me until just this very moment, is that there is literally no storage on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology that is not a spinning platter. I don’t have any sort of SSD in my Synology in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any way, shape, or form. Oh, yeah, that’s will definitely make your Docker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John containers right slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s very true. And so perhaps maybe that was it. But even if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is it, I still stand by. I want to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do what I can to get myself in a position that if I decide to leave Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind, I’ll be okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John On that front, by the way, we should note that we have the story on the show a while back, but the Synology partially reverse
⏹️ ▶️ John its decision on the hard drives and only they only do it on the enterprise ones now and the consumer ones, you can put any drive you want on them or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. We talked about it in the past, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there- I meant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to bring that up and I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ John They walked it back a little bit, but your point stands is that, A, they did it in the first place and B, they didn’t undo all of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. And I apologize, I meant to say that and I got myself sidetracked, so thank you for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bringing that up. Total physical memory on the Synology, 20 gigabytes. So a bit more than the NUC actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it is as simple as an SSD, but like I said, I stand by going down this path just to see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my future would be like. And truth be told, I think for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s gone really well. It was a disaster at first when I still had eight gigs of RAM and was running 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or so containers. That was not great. But once I put in the 16 gigs, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this particular NUC supports more than that, and certainly it’ll cost a second mortgage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get more than that, but this seems to be fine for now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am currently running, let’s look at Portainer. I am running,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s see, something like 22 containers on it of all various shapes and sizes. Most of them are very small. A couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them are not as small. And in addition to Home Assistant, in addition to PiHole,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s been working great, and I’m really, really happy with it. Proxmox has a bit of a learning curve,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s also really good. There’s a listener to the show whose name is escaping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I’m so sorry, I don’t have it in front of me, but I will link their website. I believe I brought him up earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He has a bunch of really great information about Proxmox and Home Assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and these sorts of home labby things. So I will put his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website into the show notes as well. But between all these things and between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alex’s tutorials on YouTube, I’ve been able to stand up this little Proxmox node. I have now decommissioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every single one of my Raspberry Pis. The one in the garage got decommissioned a couple of years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because there’s a Home Assistant integration for my garage door opener, so I didn’t need that anymore. The one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the bedroom, or I should back up, the one in the office was running Pi hole and little else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That got decommissioned once the Pi hole moved to the Nock. And then finally, the one in the bedroom was running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the little LED attached to my bed, and that got decommissioned for an ESP32 dev board that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running ESP home. So that’s driving the LED, which I presume takes even less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey power than the Pi zero that was previously running it. So I’m really, believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or not, mostly simplifying my life in terms of computing equipment. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so at this point, I feel like if I were to leave Synology’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ecosystem behind, I think the only thing I would really miss is Synology Drive, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kind of faux Dropbox that I use. And I’ve talked about this on and off over the years. But one of the great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things about the Synology Drive application is that not only does it, know, you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are your own cloud, which for me in this context, it’s a feature, not a bug. I can make an argument
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the opposite, but one of the great things about it is you can use Synology. So I think it’s cloud sync to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take your Dropbox and basically put that inside your Synology drive. So when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to upload like the file that I’m recording right now to Marco for him to process later,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have Dropbox running on any of my computers and I haven’t for like five plus years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I simply put it into the Dropbox folder within my Synology drive and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the appropriate folder in my Dropbox in the drive, you know, root, and it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go ahead and sync that to Dropbox’s cloud so that then Marco can pull it down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s worked incredibly well. I think I can replicate that with some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open source stuff. It isn’t quite as slick and it isn’t quite as nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the combination of, oh shoot, what was it? Sync
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thing and something else, shoot, I forget what the other one was. Oh, R-Clone, Sync Thing and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey R-Clone. The two of them put together, if you squint, are kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of what Synology Drive and Synology Cloud Sync does. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did trial that like a year or so ago, and it did do the trick. I just, like I said, I don’t love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it quite as much as I like Drive. But at this point, I am in a position
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I think I can divorce myself of the Synology and be okay. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at that point, Marco, we’re going to have to figure out what the VibroSlap is used for.
⏹️ ▶️ John We might have to get a new sound for you because speaking of spinning discs in your Synology, it made me think when you were
⏹️ ▶️ John rattling off all the things that you’ve consolidated onto this NUC. How are you backing this NUC up?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny you bring that up. is a shoe. What is it called? Proxmox backup server PBS, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe, where it has its own mechanism for doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. And basically all of that is going onto the Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I mean, so the reason I ask is because like you have so much set up there, like the time
⏹️ ▶️ John you had invested into setting up those 20 containers and consolidating everything. And it’s not redundant storage, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Synology spinning disks, the old cruddy rust that presumably you’re you’re not using RAID zero on the whole thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope. So you have some hardware redundancy. Oh, what if the SSD goes bad? What if a kid spills a drink on
⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever? Do you wanna reset up your entire life on that NUC or do you wanna restore from a backup?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the question is where you put the backup. And as you noted, it’s on the Synology. So you may not be out of the woods yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but that is actually one of the only things that the Synology is still doing other than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive that would be hard to replace. I would probably have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do a cloud backup or whatever. It’s just a question of like making sure it’s some automated process. You actually are protected
⏹️ ▶️ John because one of the things that Synology’s have going for them is that if a drive fails, you’re protected. Two drives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, you’re exactly right. I have no reasonable way to contest what you’re saying. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought has crossed my mind. The good news is a lot of this stuff, not all of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of it, a lot of these containers, let’s just say, as long as I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Docker Compose somewhere, which I do, I have that in a private GitHub repo, most of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could stand up again pretty easily. And most of what these containers emit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not everything that I do with containers, but a lot of it, most of what these containers emit is stored on the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyhow. And it’s one of those things, if you know, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, someone in the chat room mentioned R2 and you mentioned R clone. And for some of the stuff that I did for my
⏹️ ▶️ John private websites, I ended up using R2 because it’s part of CloudFlare and it’s their S3
⏹️ ▶️ John replacement. But Transmit, my favorite file transfer client,
⏹️ ▶️ John does not talk to R2 for some obscure technical reason. I think they don’t do chunk transfer encoding or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I couldn’t use Transmit. So I had to find a nice app to,
⏹️ ▶️ John a GUI app and then a command line app because Rsync doesn’t work with it and Transmit doesn’t work with it. So I ended up using
⏹️ ▶️ John Rclone for the command line because Rclone will talk to R2. And I’m using Forklift, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac file transfer app that’s been around for a while. I wonder if their name is a play on the transmit
⏹️ ▶️ John truck, but anyway, Forklift exists and it also talks to R2. So this is, I guess, this is an endorsement for R-Clone,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, I mean, I really feel like R-Sync should get support for R2, but R2 is a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of a, well, it’s S3, but the letter is one lower and the number is one lower, and it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ John compatible with everything, but not my favorite apps and not my favorite command line tool. So I’m glad R-Clone exists
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m glad Forklift exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I had not heard of Forklift before. That’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John old. It’s been around for a long time. CyberDuck also works with it. Someone mentioned that I’ve used, I use CyberDuck as well. I liked
⏹️ ▶️ John Forklift a little bit better. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t use R2 for backing up the Synology. I have other means for that, that I’d rather not discuss here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, uh, part of the reason I don’t use anything to back up the Synology, anything like that, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back up the Synology is because it’s something like 15 terabytes and that is prohibitively expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even like the, um, what is it? Ice or something like that. There’s, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the glacier. That’s what I’m thinking of. I
⏹️ ▶️ John use Backblaze B2 to back up my Synology and it’s not that, I have as much data as you but it’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s bad enough for me that I can’t stomach it but I’m also frugal as hell so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you expect? But no, I’ve been really really happy with this. It’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thanks to the unnamed listener, I want to say his name is Derek, I’m so sorry, I will put a link in the show notes though,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who had helped me a lot both in terms of his website which is excellent and in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terms of you know actually some kind of personal email support which was very kind of him. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sent him some ATP stickers as a thank you, don’t worry. But that and, you know, Alex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Tailscale’s YouTube channel has really, really opened my eyes into a different way of approaching this. And I’m actually really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really happy with it. Now, ask me again when this, you know, poops itself tomorrow and I lose everything. But sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here now, it’s been going really, really well and I’m really happy with it. And if I decide to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get rid of the Synology and go a different route entirely, like in UNAS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I am mostly ready to do that, leaving aside, you know, transmitting or transferring all this