701: I Improved My Town
23 Jul 20263D-printing for fun and utility, a defense of squircle-icon jail, how AirPlay was finally fixed in Overcast, and cutting-edge modern technology such as audio CDs, FileMaker, and the Mac Pro.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco’s Mac mini catastrophe
- 🗣️ New Member’s Special: ATP Tier List: Emoji
- Follow-up:
- Member’s Special video trimming / John’s Vibe Coded App
- Casey has leveled-up his Sonos experience
- Louie Mantia makes the case for Squircle
- Sony 💔 💿
- A nefarious motivation for Sony ceasing to sell games on disc (via Glen Jarvis)
- CD sales are going up
- Price increase corner: Apple Music edition
- FileMaker
- In defense…
- Marco got Robert Thompson off FileMaker after 18 years
- And a special thanks to Adam Wunn 🙌🏻
- Gurman on post-Mac Pro plans
- EU drops battery removal requirement for Apple Watch & AirPods
- OLED iMacs?
- Ask ATP: What does Marco (or other adults) use 3D Printers for? (via Jack Johnson)
- Post-show: How Marco fixed AirPlay in Overcast
- Members-only ATP Overtime: The internal “roles” system in LLMs, and how it relates to prompt injection vulnerabilities
Sponsored by:
- Leesa: A mattress for every body and budget
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Datacenter woe
- ATP Tier List: Emoji
- John’s new vibe-coded app
- PSA: SonosNet can be disabled
- A defense of squircle jail
- Sponsor: Leesa (code ATP)
- PS disc follow-up
- CD sales are up?!
- Price-increase corner
- FileMaker
- Sponsor: ATP Membership
- Canceled Mac Pro rumors
- AirPods, Watch exempt from EU battery reg
- Rumored OLED iMac
- #askatp: 3D-printing usefulness 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Fixing AirPlay in Overcast
Datacenter woe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Coincidentally, I was going on the ferry back to the mainland, John, uh yesterday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm just going to always say New Jersey every time you say that until you stop. New Jersey? So, as I'm on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the boat, I get an alert that all of my transcription servers in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the data center are offline. Oh, that's fun. So, all the Mac Minis. And I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huh. Now, fortunately, they aren't literally all in that one data center. I have a few that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are at um Cyberlink, which is Mac Mini Vault, I believe, was their name for that, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cyberlink is like the company that behind it um So, I have a few at Cyberlink and I have a few in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because transcripts are prioritized based on the show's popularity, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have something like you know 12 ish total max that are not uh in the data center,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i can I can go without some of them for a while, and you might not notice because the popular shows are still getting transcribed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, anyway, so so I'm on the boat, and i and I'm, you know, I get all this alerts. I'm like, huh, okay. So, I do some quick diagnosis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, can I remote desktop to any of them? Can I SSH to any of them? No. I open up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the UniFi Ubiquiti portal thing of like their site manager. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it says the entire UniFi console is offline. Hmm, that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not great. So, I'm like, well, looks like I'm stopping at the data center on the way home.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I show up and I go into the cage and everything is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. Like, the power is off. All of the power lights are off to everything, including the console
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hold on, let me stop here there. To get into the cage, you have to pass through humans, right? So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say, Oh, no, definitely not. I have to pass through with like a key card. A data center does not typically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a ton of humans walking around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not you know, it's like there's like one guy at a security desk at the beginning who you know, you like wave to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that's it. Like, but then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between me, between the entry door to the building and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room that contains the servers, there's like four or five keycard doors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey see. Um, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need like the keycard and the pin for most of them. So, like, it's it's it's a good amount of security because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like data center, like who rents servers in a small data center like this? It's like banks and you know, government
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they have like compliance and security requirements and everything. So, there's a lot of you know, a lot of security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and logging and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, but what I'm driving at is when you say that the cage was off, you're not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about like the entirety of the data center. You're talking about your particular rack in the data center.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. Oh, everyone else was fine. So, my rack is just everything's off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I'm like, Hmm, that's not great. So, you know, I I opened the door. And even, you know, the door
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also had, like, there's like a big like swinging like cage metal door that also has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keypad scanner on it, front and back. So, you know, nobody else who has access to the data center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room with servers in it can access my servers unless they have my key card You know, like, so it's,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can't access everyone else's, which, again, for security, that's, that's a good thing. So, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, so I figure out that, um, remember I had mentioned when I was describing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I had to learn all this stuff and all, you know, all the stuff I didn't know, I mentioned a couple things. One thing I mentioned is that data centers all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use 220 volts, which I didn't know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything has to be like dual voltage, which most stuff is, which is fine. Um, and also that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's fed from two different banks of power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to have a transfer switch. Anything that does not have two power supplies, um you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have an automatic transfer switch that that like intelligently basically like keeps everything plugged into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one source. And then if that source goes away, it instantly switches to the other source, kind of like a UPS with no battery, just switching between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two different power sources. um Well, my ATS was dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the switch, the power switch thing is just, I go and it's like blinking some weird lights and it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally dead. like, well, that's the problem. OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So long story short, I have to replace that now. You know, I gotten some like cyber power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing and it was like, it was about a thousand dollars, which I thought would be decent. I'm kind of thinking maybe it's not decent now.
⏹️ ▶️ John did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in from both power sources? Of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That didn't fix it. Well, it's like blinking these weird, you know, it's basically blinking all of its lights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at once. And what all the documentation and AI stuff I could find said was basically like, yeah, some part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the board probably failed. Great. So anyway, not super happy with cyber power and that. I'm wondering if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody out there has any specific recommendations for what I can replace it with.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not still under warranty?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably is. It's six months old. So I'm going to, I want to order something else. I'm right now I'm borrowing one from the data center
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you know until I get something else because also all these things have lead times to order. I'm curious, like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like this is actually not that common of a need because there aren't that many options out there. And I think most people who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco racking servers like this generally use servers with dual power supplies. So they can just plug directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into both power sources and they're fine. So I'm a little curious if anybody has any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommendations for, you know, I need to plug in you know, 8C13?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugs, I think they are. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the three prong thingies. I think I think they're C13s. um Anyway, I need to plug in eight of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to something. And they take power from two C20s. So uh we'll see. If anybody has anything specific, let me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Otherwise, I'm going to order some trip light thing.
ATP Tier List: Emoji
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a new member special. Uh, We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did ATP tier list emoji. Uh, John, can you explain to us how we handled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, how you assembled this for us, please? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so obviously we didn't do all emoji because there's just too many. Uh, We did a whole bunch, though, and all three
⏹️ ▶️ John of us just basically submitted lists of emoji that we wanted to put into tier lists, and that's how we came up with the list.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a little bit of overlap, but actually not that much. Um, And this was also
⏹️ ▶️ John another opportunity for me to try out my tier list app last time. A lot of people requested a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John where you could see the tile that we are tiering at a larger size. And so that feature was
⏹️ ▶️ John integrated and it was very useful for the emoji. Although, like I said on the episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could only get emoji at one 60 by one 60 pixels. I don't, maybe that's as big as they are in macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don't know. Anyway, well, there was, there were scaled up past one 60 by one 60. so you
⏹️ ▶️ John could see them better in the video. And yes, like all our tier list videos, there is in fact our tier list specials.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is in fact a video on YouTube and a secret URL that you should not share with non-members. But if you are a
⏹️ ▶️ John member, in the show notes at the very top will be a link to the video so you can watch us put emoji
⏹️ ▶️ John into tier list. And as usual, the episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John all these member special episodes, but especially the tier list end up leading us into weird directions. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like this one had like a lesson at the end that I didn't anticipate going in.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know So maybe you're not interested in what we think about different emoji, but I think we did cover lots of aspects of what makes
⏹️ ▶️ John a good and bad emoji. And at the end, there's a you know a little lesson of all this.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know something Let's say something that I learned from the special, and maybe you'll learn it too. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I have gotten a lot of feedback from people who say they listened to the episode too. And were also surprised that
⏹️ ▶️ John they had different ideas about what emojis were supposed to mean and be used for than we did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Marco, if you are not a member and wanted to become a member to hear this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolute incredible podcast episode and watch the absolute cinema that is John's YouTube video,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do you go about doing that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP.fm slash join. And just give us eight bucks a month. That's it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and I will say that, you know, again, like all the tier list things, that I updated the tier list app for this one during
⏹️ ▶️ John this episode. I thought, this is great. I've named all of the little, you know, I've named the
⏹️ ▶️ John emojis with the Apple name that they give them so we can read them on the show. They just appear in little tooltips
⏹️ ▶️ John like a modifier key that I can hold down and mouse over them. And then it was just the tooltips for being so annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John about appearing. And we had to fight with that the whole episode. Well, you'll be glad to know as soon as the episode ended, I fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John my tier list app. you know
⏹️ ▶️ John reliable and easier to read tooltips. Basically, the problem was I was using the browser native
⏹️ ▶️ John tooltips. If you just do like title equal attribute on a thing, which is fine, that works. It's like native. You
⏹️ ▶️ John get it for free. But browsers tend to have a delay before they show that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you mouse over something with a title equals whatever attribute, it will show the tooltip eventually. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually thing is so flaky and weird. And I guess I was just not being patient enough or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I replaced that entirely with a better system. So next time, zoomed in tiles
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can see them and also tooltips that work. And then the next episode that we do with tier list, I'll
⏹️ ▶️ John find out the next feature that my app needs that it doesn't have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Now, remind me, I'm genuinely asking. I'm not trying to snark. That was almost entirely vibe coded. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Haven't touched any of the code. It's just entirely vibe coded. It was one of my first vibe coded things. Gotcha.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you will not hear anything about those tooltips in the audio version because of the magic of editing.
⏹️ ▶️ John though. Oh, you will. you will hear Casey try to come up with the name of all of the emoji
⏹️ ▶️ John and then me jump in with the actual name once I get the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's exactly how Wayne really is.
John’s new vibe-coded app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then, with regard to the member special, this is a perfect segue. You apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made a new vibe coded app or no?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I talked about this on an earlier episode that I've had this, you know, not that I do any video
⏹️ ▶️ John editing, but when we do these member specials, we do the tier list where we have a video of it. And again, it's just a video of the tier list.
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see us dragging things up. At the very least, that needs to be trimmed. I don't do any
⏹️ ▶️ John editing on it. It's basically unedited like a bootleg, but I trim off the beginning part where we're talking to each other and the
⏹️ ▶️ John end part after we're done. And me being me, I want to do that in a lossless way. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John had been using FFmpeg and
⏹️ ▶️ John ChatGPT for the FFmpeg invocation because I could never figure it out. I would just say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I want to losslessly trim the ends off this thing. Here's the start point. Here's the end point. Give me the FFmpeg
⏹️ ▶️ John command line and I'm going to copy and paste it. But that got old. And so I'm like, okay, in this vibe coding era, I'm going to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a little video, lossless video trimming app that does the same thing. I just give it a file.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have two text boxes, start and end, and it just trims the ends off. That's all it's supposed to do. And I talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about that app, I don't know, several episodes ago. And now I finally get to use it. for the First time I get to use it for real.
⏹️ ▶️ John We do a whole tier list thing. We record it. We get a video recording. I go to the video recording.
⏹️ ▶️ John I find the timestamps, put them in, hit trim, check the video that it produced, and it was messed
⏹️ ▶️ John up. The video ended like 15 minutes before the audio. So like
⏹️ ▶️ John the video was not as
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco long as the audio,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not something that should happen because it was the full video and the full audio. They were just massively different lengths,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably because of variable bit rate or something or not, variable framework. I don't even know. All I can
⏹️ ▶️ John say is it wasn't usable at all. And when I made this vibe coded app, I had mentioned this uh actual
⏹️ ▶️ John commercial app called Lossless Cut that does the same thing and way more. It's like a way more sophisticated app,
⏹️ ▶️ John but essentially does the same thing. You want to losslessly trim audio and video. This does it for you. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to use lossless cut because my stupid vibe coded app didn't work. But of course, after I used lossless
⏹️ ▶️ John cut, I went back to my vibe coded trimming app and I said, I have a video file and
⏹️ ▶️ John I ask you to trim it and the resulting file looks like garbage. Fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John did. So maybe next time my app will work. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Making progress left and right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and I will, I'll mention this in another follow-up item if we get to it. But like, this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I see lots of discussion about like everyone will be making their own custom apps with vibe coding or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Software development is software development. Even if you're literally not writing the code, you like that phenomenon
⏹️ ▶️ John of I've made an app and I think it works on all these test files and then you get a real file and you try and it doesn't work. That happens with apps that
⏹️ ▶️ John humans code too, all the time. Like that's just app development. You're like, oh, I'm done with my app. I made this
⏹️ ▶️ John little tool and it's great. Well, have you? How many bugs does your little tool have? Probably a ton.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether you wrote it or whether an LLM wrote it, it's probably filled with bugs. And so you're
⏹️ ▶️ John going to use it and then you're going to find more bugs. And it's just like the maintenance. There is no avoiding the
⏹️ ▶️ John maintenance of writing something, keeping it working it and finding all the bugs and all the dark
⏹️ ▶️ John corners where they're hiding. There's no escape from that, at least so far. With current technology, there's no escape from that
⏹️ ▶️ John with or without humans. So here I am making these toy apps to make my life easier. And all it's doing is reminding me
⏹️ ▶️ John that software development is software development, even if you're not writing the code.
PSA: SonosNet can be disabled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I wanted to share with the listeners that I have, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at this point, I can say I have leveled up my Sonos experience. And if you're not a Sonos or Unify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person, maybe you can skip to the next chapter because this may or may not be relevant to you. But I wanted to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone that. So when I first got my Sonos stuff, that was when I was still on Eero,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it all worked pretty much flawlessly. It was really, really reliable. Then I moved to Ubiquiti. We talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this several episodes ago. What episode was that? I think it was 693. And we talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how what happens is, and my understanding of this is very faint. So forgive me if I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this factually incorrect. But the gist is Sonos stuff would create their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own kind of ad hoc-ish Wi-Fi network that they call SonosNet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what would happen is, particularly if you plugged one of your Sonos speakers into Ethernet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which most of the non-portable speakers have Ethernet jacks, if you plug something into Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and had SonosNet running, it would try to bridge these two networks. And oftentimes, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of spanning tree protocol or STP, there would be some sort of thing that would cause Ubiquiti
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to crash out to use what the children use these days, or basically just freak out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was annoying. And so that led me to following Ubiquiti's official recommendations,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is to either go all in on Ethernet or not. And so I took all my stuff off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ethernet. and It was mostly fine, but like latency, particularly when starting or stopping something, was kind of a pain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the butt. And and occasionally, I felt like I wasn't getting reception, so to speak,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a portable speaker where I really should. you know, I'm not that far away from a Ubiquiti wireless access point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and yet it's still, you know, like pausing or dropping the audio every you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, 30, 40 seconds, something like that. And then if you recall in 693, what we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that Ubiquiti put a shot across Sonos's bow because they had a marketing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video where they talk about, oh, and if you have troublesome IoT equipment and they're focused on like a Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaker labeled as Sonos on their little Ubiquiti dashboard that Marco was talking about earlier, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn on the STP Edge, which will prevent these sorts of issues, yada, yada, yada. And I tried that and it seemed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey help a Smidge, but it didn't really help that much. Well, good news. Our long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey national nightmare is over, or long international nightmare is over, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few, maybe a couple of months ago, Ubik, excuse me, Sonos, this was about two months ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came out with a new version of their apps that lets you turn off SonosNet. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will only use Ethernet or Wi-Fi. It will not create their own ad hoc
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. And so on Reddit's announcement post, there's a kind of an FAQ. Should I disable SonosNet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my modern network? To which the answer is most for most modern high-speed routers, disabling Sonosnet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can actually help things run smoother. Newer routers, you've used Wi-Fi technology that can sometimes conflict with SonosNet's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mesh. So turning it off lets your system lean fully on your home network instead. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you think about it, when Sonos was brand new, the quality of Wi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know when this was, but this is like 20-ish years ago. The quality of Wi-Fi in the home was frigging terrible. And they couldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rely on your home or apartment's Wi-Fi in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a stable connection. And so SonosNet made sense 20 years ago, but I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not so sure it makes a whole bunch of sense now. So there was a different post on Reddit where they have a full-on FAQ.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the questions was, how does this affect surround stereo pairs in home theater? Which is a question I had because you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely low latency between like I have a Sonos Arc Ultra, which is wired into Ethernet, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I have two Aero 1, excuse me, two 1SLs in the back and a Sonos Sub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gen 3. And so how does that work? So the question was, how does this affect surround stereo pairs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in home theater? No changes to your surrounds or sub. They still connect directly to your primary soundbar, exactly like they do today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with or without the setting. That low latency link is its own thing and isn't part of SonosNet, so disabling SonosNet doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touch it. The one nuance, if you had a soundbar connected over Ethernet, hello, with SonosNet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off, it'll stop bridging SonosNet out to your other Sonos speakers. It'll still talk to its own surrounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and sub. And heads up, disabling SonosNet is not the same as disable Wi-Fi in a single speaker. That one does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cut off a surround or sub entirely. Different settings, different results. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, you know, the SonosNet thing was their own thing, and you can turn that off now, which is great. And then additional FAQ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option or question: I'm on UniFi. Can I finally mix wired and wireless without the network going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crazy? I didn't write that question, but I could have. So the answer was with SonosNet running,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could create an extra net, it could create extra network paths back to your UniFi gear. And if spanning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tree wasn't enabled on all the ports with Sonos players with the right port cost, that's where a lot of the chaos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey came from. Turning SonosNet off removes those alternate paths and should clear up that common scenario. I can't promise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it fixes every UniFi issue. That really depends on your topology and the specific problem. But for the wire plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wireless makes my network misbehave headache, this is the fix a lot of you have been waiting for. Hello, that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. That's what I was waiting for. And then finally, I thought it was interesting. The official guidance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Sonos like knowledge base, if you will, has changed slightly. And so we'll put a link to the support article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. A Wired setup without dedicated Sonos wireless. I'm sorry, let me back up. This is to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose between a wired or wireless Sonos setup. And then one of the options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is wired setup without dedicated Sonos wireless network. With SonosNet disabled, you can connect one or more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sonos products to your router via Ethernet cable while the rest of your system stays connected to your home Wi-Fi. SonosNet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be re-enabled at any time. The setup is suitable for situations where your home Wi-Fi is strong, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want to hardwire specific products for a more stable connection. That's me. You want the remaining wireless products to continue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using your home Wi-Fi directly? Also me. And you want to simplify your network setup and keep more control over your home network
⏹️ ▶️ Casey configuration. Yes, yes, and yes. So I apologize for the lot of reading, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought for the six of you that are in the same situation I am, this is a very convenient and useful PSA.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you two don't have any questions, I'll move right along.
A defense of squircle jail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco friend of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show, Louis Mantilla, wrote a very interesting blog post where Louis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was basically saying maybe Squirkle Jail isn't so bad. John, can you tell us about this? This is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey basically presents
⏹️ ▶️ John the argument for Squirkle Jail. Here's why it's good. And even though I think all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John he said are true, I still hate it for the reasons he said.
⏹️ ▶️ John some of his arguments are basically, if you wanted to sum up the gist of it, is
⏹️ ▶️ John that Squircle Jail, which as a reminder is the enforced by the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system rule that macOS icons must fit within a particular shape squircle that Apple defines.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if your icon does not fit in that squircle, Apple will take whatever your icon is, shrink
⏹️ ▶️ John it down, and shove it inside a gray squircle. So it's very draconian. Big Sir recommended
⏹️ ▶️ John this way back when, and some apps followed it and some apps didn't. And Apple decided, you know what? We're done recommending.
⏹️ ▶️ John No choice. You go in the squirkle. That's squirkle jail. And so Louis basically says,
⏹️ ▶️ John this effectively makes it so that the best icons have to be a little worse
⏹️ ▶️ John because the best icons were not always constrained by the squircle. So they are necessarily going to be worse because
⏹️ ▶️ John now they have this new constraint that they didn't have before that makes them more samey and everything. But it also makes the worst
⏹️ ▶️ John icons better because the worst icons were really bad. Like even in the big Sur recommendation,
⏹️ ▶️ John the recommendation was you should be in a squircle that's like this. And the squircle was not the size of the full icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John The full icon would be like 1024 by 1024 or whatever, but the squircle was inset from that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John then things like games would ship and they'd be like, oh, our icon is the character from our game. And he fills
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole thing. And so you'd have like on your dock, you'd have a bunch of squircles and a bunch of other apps. And then you'd have this big square
⏹️ ▶️ John that is taller and wider than all the other icons because they didn't get the memo about using margins because
⏹️ ▶️ John they don't care about the Mac and you're just lucky this game runs on the Mac at all. You'll take what you can get. So Squircle Jail makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it so no matter what garbage you put in your app, no matter what the developer of
⏹️ ▶️ John this app makes for their icon, we will make sure that no matter what it is, it is within
⏹️ ▶️ John the new designated squircle. And that does make it so that you don't have these ugly third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John apps in your dock that just don't fit in and don't look right and look like they're garbagey shovelware
⏹️ ▶️ John because that's exactly what they are. So it's kind of a leveling force. He also makes
⏹️ ▶️ John your market knows how to like, even though all the apps are the same shape, now we can tell that a document is like a tall
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle and an app is a squircle and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, yeah, that's great. But like, I don't need to know their apps. If they're in the doc, I can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell their, I can tell their apps. I don't have to get them confused with folders or whatever. Like that, that apps are, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ John basically is the argument. The, the, The iPhone defined an app as a squircle and apps are squircles And
⏹️ ▶️ John all apps should be squircles because that's the app shape. It's even used in like the SF symbols. is like app, it's just a squircle.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't find that argument compelling because I still wish my apps could at the very least break the squircle, if
⏹️ ▶️ John not be entirely non-squircle shaped. Um, But yeah, it is a leveling. It is a uh, make
⏹️ ▶️ John the bad icons better and make the greatest icons worse. And the average goes up as
⏹️ ▶️ John a result of that, but it makes this sameness that I do not find particularly pleasing. And also, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John people who can't make icons to have terrible icons. That's an important thing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that's, it's like, oh, if only we could help them by programmatically trying to make their icon better.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like, they should be punished for not making good icons. If it's a bad part of a game and they've used
⏹️ ▶️ John the full icon area and the thing looks weird, it should look weird. Let it work look weird. I want the best
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to flourish. And like, I don't, I don't like this leveling. So anyway, you can read it. And he's an
⏹️ ▶️ John icon designer. And, you know, he goes through all like the the downsides of squircle Jail. And he has plenty
⏹️ ▶️ John of complaints about this particulars of icon composer and how it works, as we talked about last
⏹️ ▶️ John week and when we talked about our icons. So I encourage you to read the post because it's very interesting and informed by
⏹️ ▶️ John literal decades of making icons professionally, including, I believe, for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not just like some random opinion. But I personally wish that that constraint did not exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish icons were free to look their best and their worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I love that Louis wrote this because it, first of all, I think it's a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty bold stance to go to write this in the sphere that we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. Like in the Apple nerd sphere, and you have people, you know, people like John Gruber,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, holding up the other end of the argument pretty strongly. And obviously, you know, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. But to come out and say, like, hey, here's actually some pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good reasons why the squircles being enforced actually make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense. But I think what's, you know, you have to also kind of, I don't know if Louis came out and said this, but I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong implication is that these are Apple's reasons. And I don't know, you know, because Louis works very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closely with it in this world. So like my guess is he has heard from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who have told him this is the reason. And that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think is really interesting to hear that like the reason why Apple makes the design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decisions they do is not always communicated to us. It's almost never communicated to us. And sometimes they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do stuff like squircle Jail where, you know, we can't see any upside to this. Like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we from the outside look at this and we're like, why would we do that? Why would they do that? The only possible reason is that Alan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dye sucks. But there actually was probably an argument internally about this particular thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this was this is the reason they went with this behavior. And even though we don't necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agree with it, it was really interesting, I think, to be presented with that argument and to consider,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, well, it isn't just because somebody's stupid. It's because they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a trade-off that they were optimizing for. And they chose differently than I would have chosen, probably, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did have a reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John I've always understood the reason. Like, even when they did it in Big Sur, I totally understood why Apple wanted to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it was obvious. The thing that I hate so much about Squircle Jail is not so much their decision, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I disagree with, that they made in Big Sur that all Mac icons should be squircles. What I disagree with is
⏹️ ▶️ John that they entirely threw out the carrot and just brought stick. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we like, because they tried in Big Sur. They said, this is what we want to do. And adoption
⏹️ ▶️ John was, wasn't terrible. Adoption wasn't terrible. Like, we all saw a lot of Mac icons go squirkle in Big Sur,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think was Mac OS 11. We're very bad at remembering these things, but it was, it was a while ago. And obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John there's a discontinuity between 15 and 26. Anyway, Big Sur was a while ago. And when they did that, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, obviously they want to do this because apps on all their platforms are the same and this is leveling and blah, blah, blah. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes sense from a platform owner's perspective and for someone who is in the mindset of like, look, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John in charge of all Apple platforms and I want this uniformity. But, you know, the argument against it then was like
⏹️ ▶️ John that we don't appreciate that uniformity on the Mac. I don't care what icons look like. I don't care what app icons look like on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPhone, blah, blah, blah. But they weren't happy with the adoption they were getting, which again, I think was
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good. I think most Mac apps post-Big Sur in a couple of years went squirkly.
⏹️ ▶️ John But some of them, like Roger Rima, Rogamiba's app, went squirkly, but like, oh, the microphone and audio hijack is just
⏹️ ▶️ John poking out of the thing because it's just a fun way to do it. It Makes for a nice composition. And the thing about Squirkle Jail
⏹️ ▶️ John is not so much the decision that they made back in Big Sur, but it was now if you're one pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John outside that thing, we punish you. We make your icons look worse. Your app that you already shipped that you didn't plan
⏹️ ▶️ John on updating the icon for, like there was no sort of like, oh, you get a pass because you built this app before
⏹️ ▶️ John like we made this decision. It was like, nope, I don't care when your app was compiled. I don't care when it was built. I don't care anything
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. You are going in squircle Jail. That's the thing about it that I think is so terrible. Obviously, I disagree
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Squirkling decision too, but the jail part, the jail part adds an extra insult
⏹️ ▶️ John because it takes people's work and it makes it look worse. And to maintain my point. It makes the
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible icons look better because they were so bad before that being put into squircle jail improves them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they get a sheen on the top. They're the right shape and the right size. They fit in better in the dock. But I don't care about garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John apps. I don't help the garbage apps at the cost of punishing Rogue Amoeba for having a two-pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or what was the other one? Like paste bot had like that a clipboard icon and the little metal, like the metal thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you squeeze to put, you know, to hold paper in the clipboard. The top of that poked out above the clipboard
⏹️ ▶️ John by two pixels. Squirgle Jail. So anyway, please check out the post. It comes from
⏹️ ▶️ John a very informed position and it's it's balanced and very nuanced. It's not like he's coming out strongly
⏹️ ▶️ John in favor of squirgle Jail. He's like, it sucks in these ways and it's good in these ways. And in the end, he is
⏹️ ▶️ John in favor of the leveling because I think because the appearance of one terrible icon in his dock bothers
⏹️ ▶️ John him so much that he's like, yeah, they deserve to be punished and shoved into a
⏹️ ▶️ John spot. But yeah, opinions vary. Well, and we've all seen those apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like we've all, we've all downloaded some like open source thing and the icon is just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big square that filled up the entire bounds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or a squircle that's the wrong size. I just did that recently with an app. I don't want to blame this app because it's not their fault. I think they were
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do the right thing. But their squircle was like top to bottom. There was no margins around the squircle.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it was bigger than all the other squircles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a very modern Apple-y thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the thought process of like, let's make it impossible for people to do the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Let's let's make it Let's enforce with technical measures the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design that we think is right and harmonious and whatever BS or terms you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. It's a very modern Apple thing to enforce by like technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restrictions doing what they think is right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rather than competing on the merits. You're right. That is an Apple thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yes. Yeah, totally. But like you can see how they get there. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I don't I don't think this was the right decision, but you can totally see how modern Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with their modern sensibilities would easily be able to convince themselves that the right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution to a problem is to make it technically impossible to break out of the bounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they want to enforce.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and they were so mean about it too. Like they're just two degrees off of a perfectly valid solution to give
⏹️ ▶️ John just two quick examples. One, they made it so that you get the swirkle icon even on, you can't
⏹️ ▶️ John have like, like I was trying to do for all those times. I had these amazing hacks to be like, on the old OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get the old icon. Like on a macOS 15
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get my old icon. And then 26 and later, I get the new one. Apple's like, nope, we're not going to bother letting you do that. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you figured out a way to do that? We're going to close that hole. We don't want that to happen, which is so dumb because it goes against
⏹️ ▶️ John their uniformity thing because a Tahoe icon in Mac OS 15 does not fit in. It looks really weird, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So they did that. And like, if they wanted to make it essentially like, it's hard to do the wrong thing, make
⏹️ ▶️ John it hard, but not impossible. That's the power of the defaults. People who don't care about their apps, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, by default, they build with the new SDK. We squircle jail them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but then you, then you have the power user problem. The world is filled with people who are like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know what I'm doing. So I'll check the power user box. And then they shoot themselves in the foot.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it's not the shovelware game developers. They're not going to dig out the checkbox buried 20 levers deep
⏹️ ▶️ John to make their icon uglier. Like you just got to, the defaults go a long way. Like there's a continuum, which is like
⏹️ ▶️ John lead by example, which they tried to do in Big Sur. It's a recommendation and lead by example. And I think that got them really far.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they're like, no, it's not far enough. There's still people who aren't following our lead. So then I would have said, make
⏹️ ▶️ John it default, make it actually hard to do it the other way, and then allow people's old icons
⏹️ ▶️ John to still be viewed on the old OS and new icon on the new OS, like have this transition period, right? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John see what your adoption is like. And if it's in the mid-90s, you'd be like, ah, we're probably done. We don't have to really.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they just went straight to Draconian punishing everybody. And by the way, you can't use your old icon on old OSs
⏹️ ▶️ John either, which really sucked. Anyway, this is not the end of the world. It's just, like I said when I posted about this,
⏹️ ▶️ John literally the worst thing Apple has ever done related to design on the Mac, not because it's so
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, but because it's so severe. It is it is a minor thing. It's not that big of a deal. But they have never
⏹️ ▶️ John like punished app developers in the same way when it comes to design, when it comes to
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing and stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John uh you know business practices but They've done much worse things. But design specifically, never have they done
⏹️ ▶️ John anything this bad, I think. Even like brushed
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that was not this bad. What about all the icons in the menus? No, not as bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, brave bold stance,
⏹️ ▶️ John John Syracuse. You can turn that off real easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing to consider also is, you know, you are characterizing this as a punishment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I'm saying it's technically enforced. But I think that also kind of casts an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attitude or an intent that might not have been that considered. It's very possible that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they were writing the, you know, whatever parts of the doc, whatever parts of the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco render icons, they had to change a lot of that when they brought in Liquid Glass and Icon Composer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco icons. Because now these icons are not just bitmaps that they're rendering. They now have this dynamic rendering that we talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about last episode of like they were you're defining layers and effects and it's rendering them in real time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they had to probably rewrite a bunch of parts of the system that render icons in different places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe when they were doing that, they were just like, oh, it's a lot easier to do this, or to avoid some complexity,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to avoid some possible bugs if we just draw in a squircle shape, like, And if we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco draw every icon in the same canvas shape, it helps us somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco implement this feature. And so it could have just been as simple as they were doing that and they were like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, yeah, we got to figure out what to do with old icons. And they might have just like crapped out a solution because they only had two seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Mac OS is under-resourced all the time. And they might've just like had to rush together some kind of solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for compatibility with old icons. And that's just what they came up with as quickly as they could. And maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn't that much thought about of like, oh, we should we should enforce this technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe it was just as simple as like, this is a quick hack. And then it passed some some review and they didn't have time to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything better or no one really thought about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they've had plenty of time to change it since then, but I don't think your idea about the circle simplification is true
⏹️ ▶️ John because all of the icon runtime icon setting APIs let you set it to anything you want. And if you're not in the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store, you can set it to anything you want too. So obviously their icon
⏹️ ▶️ John system still 100% supports all the old icon sizes, formats, and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just don't let you ship an app that does that by default through the Mac App Store. right? Again, if you're
⏹️ ▶️ John outside the Mac App Store, there's APIs where you can get around this. But just, it's punitive because it's punitive
⏹️ ▶️ John to your icon. You did an icon design and they are going to make your icon design look uglier because nobody's icon looks good, shrunken 70%
⏹️ ▶️ John and put on a gray background. That is a punishment. That is a stick to make you do what
⏹️ ▶️ John you weren't doing before. You didn't follow their lead in Big Sur and you've got a tiny thing poking out of the rim of your
⏹️ ▶️ John icon. Like they could have even made the, maybe like you can have some things poking out and it's okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John We won't put you into squircle jail. Like nothing. And again, Tahoe's been out for a while and they haven't made any adjustments.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I also think they haven't made any adjustments in 27. So it seems like they're pretty dedicated to this and I'll just have to live with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But it will go down in infamy. If I could think of a shirt to yell them about it, I would, but I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John think this idea fits on a shirt very well. Shirt toll?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I see what you're doing there. I don't know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works. It doesn't work. No, I need to workshop that one.
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PS disc follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so last week on Overtime, we discussed how Sony is no longer shipping PlayStation discs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or game discs after 2028. Glenn Jarvis writes: One more aspect of Sony's decision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to no longer sell PlayStation discs is its impact on competition. In making games digital only,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sony will run the only store where you can buy PlayStation games. Thus far, Sony has always had to compete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with physical and online retailers, GameStop, Amazon, et cetera. Even if you only ever purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey digitally, you still you have still benefited from this competition and the impact it has on prices
⏹️ ▶️ John And the effect that there's a resale market for reselling discs, that's going to drive down the prices of stores. But yeah, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John why companies love it. Hey, now we control all sales because we don't have to sell to retailers.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don't have to, you know, ship inventory. We don't have to give the retailers a cut of the sales.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's, you know, it's wonderful for Sony, not so great for gamers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. You know what? You know what every company loves? Hey, can we make more money? Let's, let's, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, then we're going to do it. Let's do that. Let's make more money.
CD sales are up?!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and also within the same context, CD sales are up, as it turns out. Jay Peters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the Verge writes: CD sales are apparently going up, reportedly thanks to fans realizing they're an affordable way to support their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorite artists. According to a new report from research firm Luminate, 16.3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million CDs were sold in the first half of 2026 in the U.S., a 16% increase year over year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The growth in CD sales was driven by collection building, price accessibility, massive albums such as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BTS's Aurorang, I probably pronounced that wrong, I'm sorry, and strong K-pop release schedule, Luminate
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this is just the natural progression of the weirdos who were into vinyl, but now there's like
⏹️ ▶️ John a slightly younger generation who are like, OK, well, what is the equivalent? You know, my age minus
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever equals vinyl. And then younger people come along they say, my age minus whatever equals CDs. It's retro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I've seen it in my daughter. She suddenly got into CDs and wanted to see all my CDs, which I did not want to let her touch because
⏹️ ▶️ John she was going to destroy them. But she just took them anyway and she bought herself a little portable CD player. And it's just like yeah i remember
⏹️ ▶️ John this the new the new retro thing that instead of vinyl, it's CDs. The good thing about CDs is they
⏹️ ▶️ John have better sound quality at least and they don't get worse every time you play them. So I endorse kids looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at, and in fact, they probably have better sound quality than most of the streaming they're listening to,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco probably they're
⏹️ ▶️ John mastered, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but uh I still think it's kind of silly, but it's less silly than vinyl. So that's
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. And I don't actually think people are buying them to support artists, but it is true that artists surely get
⏹️ ▶️ John tons more money from you buying one of their CDs than you streaming their song literally thousands or millions of times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, let's just be honest. CDs are cool. That's it. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why kids of various generations keep getting into old media, first of all, it is novel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them and it has the appeal of retro stuff. Like that's why, do you know how many people I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walking around all the time wearing Nirvana shirts who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like 15 years old? It's like. Yeah, weren't born when. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even close to born. Like, you know, like Kurt Cobain died probably 15 years before they were born. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it's not, not even close. But that's, you know, look, like when we, it's like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were in high school and, you know, somebody of our generation was wearing like a Pink Floyd shirt.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I don't know what the offset is, but like I said, whatever the number of years is that you have to subtract, because we weren't going
⏹️ ▶️ John back to like wax cylinders, right? Like we weren't like, oh, wax cylinders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are retro. Well, it wasn't that. We weren't that old. But yeah, but we weren't going back to 8-tracks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. So exactly. So there is, there is some offset of like this number of years before you were born
⏹️ ▶️ John is when things are retro cool. Things before that, nah, don't bother. Things after that, oh, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John just normal. So whatever that offset is,
⏹️ ▶️ John think now that the generation that is of age to listen to music, the offset lands them in CDs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and it's, you know, it's similar to like, you know, it's that same generation also thinks old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy digital cameras are really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, my daughter was into that and borrowed my old crappy digital. I told her the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John phone is better than this. She's like, I don't care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they know it's fine. I mean, yeah, just like, yeah, everything sounds better than vinyl, but no one cares, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's people like novelty. And I think the reason we didn't go back to like eight tracks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we were young is that we didn't have like ubiquitous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco streaming music that we, that would, that would be our alternative. Like we were living in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a music scarce world still. It was just scarce on different media. And if we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were going to go back and try to buy an 8-track player and 8-tracks, they wouldn't have been nearly as cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as CDs are today. Like CDs cost nothing. Like if you, if you want to go buy a used CD, you can go on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever, Amazon or whatever, or your local whatever store and get used CDs for nothing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they they just cost nothing. And I'm sure you can get CD, people still make CD players so that they're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that hard to come by. So for a young person today to get into that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, like it's more different than their experience of music today because it's it works so differently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than streaming in so many ways and it's super cheap and your and their parents have a million of them. so
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and music scarcity is novel. Like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John scarcity was not novel to us when we were kids because it was just the saturation. But once you get into a place where music is no longer scarce,
⏹️ ▶️ John the scarcity itself is a novel aspect of that draws into it. And as for the CD players, like the one my daughter
⏹️ ▶️ John bought is so clearly made for people her age. Like it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it was like a,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you're a teen in 2024.
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, you know, $10 CD player is specifically for you. Like it's not, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you look at it and like, I think I told you about it once, like the door to the place where you put the CD didn't open
⏹️ ▶️ John all the way. So you like, you had to kind of like slide the CD, like you couldn't just put it vertically into it. You had
⏹️ ▶️ John to slide the edge in and put it down. It's like, don't they know? They lost the, they lost the knowledge about how to make CD
⏹️ ▶️ John players non-stupid, but she liked it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's all that matters. Yo, your, your discussion about, you know, what's novel and what isn't reminds me of the Douglas Adams
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you could probably get a career in it. Hello, computers, for at least Marco and me. Or not computers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, like internet, etc., Anyway, the quote continues, anything invented after you're 35 is against
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the natural order of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that quote doesn't go backwards, though. They should have said anything you know, in heavy use 15
⏹️ ▶️ John years before you were born is retro cool or whatever whatever the offset is.
Price-increase corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then let's go to price increase corner, my favorite corner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chance Miller, 9to5Mac, writes: Apple has raised the price of Apple Music, which I saw and was like, Yeah, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I'm not a fan of them raising prices, but I mean, I have Apple One. It's fine, right? So, Chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes: Apple Music Individual goes up to $12. I believe this is a month. Family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes up, I'm sorry, it's $12 from $11, so a difference of a dollar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Family goes from $17 to $20, difference of $3. Student goes from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six to seven, which is a difference of a dollar. But then I kept reading and it says Apple One. uh-oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individual, $19.95, which is remaining unchanged. Family goes up two bucks to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $27.95. And Premier goes up two bucks to $39.95.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then one of you, I presume, John, found a chart by Basic Apple Guy, which points out that when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple One Premier launched, which was roughly 2020 or thereabouts, it was $30 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month, which I thought was actually a legitimately decent to good deal. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six years later, it's $40 bucks a month. And I'm not sure how much I feel about how happy I am about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does that even track inflation, though? Like I put this in here. I wish they had drawn an inflation line. What this shows is basically the prices
⏹️ ▶️ John of everything is going up, but that's just, that happens with inflation. And we've had some difficult inflation times here. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see there's kind of an increase on the plateau, then another increase, so it's not steady. But I didn't do the math to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out what would be the inflation-adjusted price. But Apple one is still a good deal at $40, bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just FYI, the price and everything's going up. And I'm pretty sure Apple Music and Apple One do not include any RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, No, I thought Apple One did include storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Like the actual service is not like it's not
⏹️ ▶️ John are not going up. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what's driving these
⏹️ ▶️ John price increases? Is it because SSDs and RAM cost more? No, this is just a service. But yeah, the price of things
⏹️ ▶️ John goes up over time. And I think this kind of shows that Apple services are, are, I don't know what
⏹️ ▶️ John the economic term for it is, but like changing the price is probably not going to appreciably affect
⏹️ ▶️ John how many people continue to be subscribed to it because people who have the service like the service and are not that sensitive to a
⏹️ ▶️ John one or two dollar adjustment. Because like I said, all these adjustments are, they're per month still, but it's like $1, $3,
⏹️ ▶️ John $1, $2, $2, $2. Those are the increases. So even though percentage-wise, they might be high.
⏹️ ▶️ John Absolute value wise, this is like one extra cup of coffee a month for these services.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think Apple's going to get away with it just fine. But FYI, it's not just things that have RAM and storage
⏹️ ▶️ John that are increasing in price.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, that was a much better joke than I gave you credit for. I was not picking up what you were putting down, and I apologize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The offending person will be sacked. Mark Ehrman writes, prices for monthly AppleCare Plus packages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went up by 50 cents for Macs and iPads, while the annual offering rose by $5. The increases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are exclusively for new signups, so users of older plans will retain the current prices.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's nice. It's too bad they don't do that with the other services, right? Can you imagine? Like, if you're already subscribed, you keep your
⏹️ ▶️ John old price. I guess that's probably not tenable. But yeah, pricing is increased corner. I'm not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure when it will go away, but it just keeps coming.
FileMaker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I asked, it was either last episode or the episode before about FileMaker and what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heck is it? I think it was two episodes ago, or no, it was last episode, then we got some feedback about it. so, some of that feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey includes Anonymous, who writes basically answering the question: why are people still using FileMaker?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous says, FileMaker developers would probably admit that they are not the most technologically, or excuse me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey technically knowledgeable, but they understand the business problem they are trying to solve better than most quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers in any language. Over the years, many businesses have tried and failed to move off of their old FileMaker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey systems. But now with Agentic Coding, more and more people are thinking it's possible. Claris is making a big deal about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their upcoming Agentic development support because it's the only way FileMaker will survive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If it were actually possible to quote-unquote Vibe code a FileMaker app versus a web app, I still think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FileMaker has some advantages. I promise this next part is not meant to be a sales pitch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you asked what it's like to be a FileMaker developer. And these are some of the key reasons people still use FileMaker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today. FileMaker doesn't scale to thousands of users well, but it's more than powerful enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for small businesses to run their internal systems. Therefore, if FileMaker works, why spin up all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this extra web technology that you don't understand as well? FileMaker is just an app that can work with no internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection. It's an easy way to deploy an offline app on iPhones or iPads to collect data in the field, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in low coverage areas or on the ocean. FileMaker apps aren't subject to all the increased CVEs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey due to AI, making it a safer choice for businesses to deploy internal tools. I first discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FileMaker before I even knew how to code, and now, even though I do know how to code and agents are helping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me code much faster, there's still something special about FileMaker being this all-inclusive app and platform that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your app can be deployed into securely that is intriguing. For those of us who know how to write
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code, it's easy to miss the value in an app like this. I think FileMaker's biggest hurdle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is their licensing doesn't allow someone to try and use it for free for more than 45 days, which allows more modern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps like Monday.com to gain more of the market.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this is a list of things that are, you know, things that are still
⏹️ ▶️ John nice about FileMaker. And the largest argument for most FileMaker things is,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, is it currently working and it supports your business? Then you don't need to change it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you enjoy the advantages and it's working, so it's fine. But it is so clearly just technology
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don't think anyone should start off using in this day and age. Even for a totally local thing, it's possible to make entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John locally running apps that are not based on web technology or like, you know, just a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John app or, you know, even if it's like a local web app, like we have so much better technologies. And we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John see as we go on. Like FileMaker, these, you know, the the apps and and forms and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that they make, they never looked good. I remember back in the classic macOS days, they always looked weird and
⏹️ ▶️ John they continued to look super weird. And as for them being no CVEs due to AI finding flaws,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that's just a security through obscurity thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann If you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann if you pointed any kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of security researcher, human or otherwise, at FileMaker and its various apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would rip it to shreds because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann they're
⏹️ ▶️ John not made with security in mind. Now, I granted they're not network connected, so that helps them avoid things like this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I do not endorse starting any new projects in FileMaker, but the people who like it and
⏹️ ▶️ John use it, there's no reason that they shouldn't continue to use it because if it's solving your problem, like if it ain't broke, don't
⏹️ ▶️ John fix it, right? And I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann think
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the largest argument. And that's why, like I said, the people who have a business running on FileMaker, as long
⏹️ ▶️ John as FileMaker keeps going and stays as a viable application and they keep updating it and your thing
⏹️ ▶️ John keeps working and they add little handpins over time, there's no reason to look elsewhere. But yeah, if you're
⏹️ ▶️ John starting something fresh, I would still recommend maybe not FileMaker in 2026.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Point of order, you said that they're not network connected. I think that can be true, but it's not exclusively true because I believe a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few people wrote in and said that they have a way to deploy FileMaker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the web. So before we get a bunch of feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it's just the argument this person was making is like you can use them entirely offline and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I would not vouch for the security strength of FileMaker at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because you could also use like a SQLite database and any app, like there's a lot of ways to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve this problem with today's software and tools, especially as we're about to get to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So Robert Thompson writes, Marco got me off FileMaker after 18 years, which of course
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely piqued my interest, and I presume Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. Robert writes, for the last 18 years, I used it to run the back end of my wife's wedding business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It handled leads, contracts, staffing, timelines, payments, and automated tasks like email reminders. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was also slow, looked terrible, never worked on mobile, and required basic plugins that cost hundreds of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every few years. Worst of all, building anything in it felt like coding in scratch with commands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dragged and dropped into a script editor. John nailed it. It's software anyone can use to create a database one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey step above Excel. This past May, when our renewal came up, we were quoted $4,100 for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a three-year server license. That same week, HP 690 was released, and I heard Marco talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using Cloud Code to build his saunter map app in under an hour. I thought, if Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can submit to the App Store in under an hour, I can do this in a month. So I said, screw it. Installed Claude Code on a local Linux
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box, hit the fable window, and ran it. We should disclose once again that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been sponsored by Claude. We will be sponsored by Claude. This obviously does not, we didn't write
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of this stuff, but just so you know, they are a former and future sponsor. Anyway, continuing with what Robert
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, within three days, I'd recreated and greatly improved the system we had used for 18 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything is better. It's fast. It's organized in a proper web app. I can process a detailed lead with fancy timelines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my phone in under a minute standing in line. It's amazing. The entire rebuild cost me $100. We've
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now been using it for two months, and it's been remarkably solid. And I've been having a blast adding new features. If I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hadn't caught that episode, I would have paid $4,100 and been stuck in FileMaker hell for another three years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Instead, I got out for $100.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is the other thing about people who are using FileMaker. Like if it's working for your business or whatever, there's no need to change it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you're in a market like that, where it's like you are using some very old technology and your business relies
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, someone out there knows that your business relies on it. And maybe they also know that you're not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John in a position to change that, which is why you've been using FileMaker for 18 years to run your wedding business.
⏹️ ▶️ John But lo and behold, now suddenly you're not stuck in FileMaker. There's this new alternative
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not open to everybody. But if you're the type of person who's basically a FileMaker expert, it's not that far
⏹️ ▶️ John of a leap to go to like, I bet you could do some vibe coding stuff to make a decent app. Now, how will this
⏹️ ▶️ John turn out? Again, see my caveats about vibe coded apps. It's really easy to get the first one up and you're amazed that it works and everything. Where
⏹️ ▶️ John are all the bugs? Is it going to be as problem free as the thing you've been using for 18 years? So on and so forth. But on the flip
⏹️ ▶️ John side of that is the excitement of building something new with modern technologies and so on. So I'm not saying everybody who's on FileMaker
⏹️ ▶️ John should vibe code their replacements, but the fact that that's now a viable alternative, I would imagine, is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to further accelerate the decline of FileMaker usage. And I'm not sure if it's going to raise or lower
⏹️ ▶️ John the prices of these weird server plugin licenses that people are charging. But yeah, when you're in a technological
⏹️ ▶️ John backwater, things get weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And then both of, or all three of us, I should say, really wanted to shout out Adam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One, who wrote us, John apparently computed a nearly 3,000 word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email with 15 screenshots explaining the history and functionality of FileMaker. It was fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think it's published anywhere public, so I can't share it. But I wouldn't even begin to try to summarize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But we wanted to shout out to Adam because that was really incredible. So thank you for taking the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You asked, like, what is FileMaker and why do people still use it? I feel like that could have just been like a blog post somewhere and that answers
⏹️ ▶️ John every one of your questions with copious
⏹️ ▶️ John and history, like the background, where did it come from? How do people use it? Like, if you were interested in FileMaker, that was the
⏹️ ▶️ John answer. It's a shame that he just emailed us and did not publish it on the web. But maybe, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John he'll make a FileMaker database where people can view it through their cloud integration.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, right. Also, for an email to stand out among the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FileMaker emails that we got.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which we continue to get. One just came in while we were talking, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. For one to stand out as being long really is saying something because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the average word count of the FileMaker emails we've gotten has got to be like a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least. Like it seems like everybody who uses FileMaker not only is emailing us, but also has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot to say about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going to shout out
⏹️ ▶️ John to Adam too. I think it was his email. I think he's actually a pretty good writer. I think it's maybe because I'm reading too much German stuff. And I was reading this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, look at these sentences. They make sense. They logically connect. They're just, It's never confusion
⏹️ ▶️ John about what you know. something refers to. It's like, wow. I don't know if Adam is a professional writer
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, but it was very well written.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think at this point, everyone who uses FileMaker is a professional writer. like that's That's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what our emails are showing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, this Adams really did stand out as being especially good and thorough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe it's because they're all older and actually learned how to write in school or something. I don't know. Maybe it's just ageism I'm thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John all the old people are writing about FileMaker all But anyway, FileMaker fans are out there and they're writing us. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I salute them, but I think uh The file
⏹️ ▶️ John maker is not ascendant, let's say.
Sponsor: ATP Membership
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Canceled Mac Pro rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some topics. We have, speaking of Gurman, we have a Gurman sandwich.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have two Gurman topics with something else in the middle. And we start with Gurman writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few days ago as we record: Early in the development of Apple Silicon, Apple was working on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a processor that would be even more powerful than its Ultra chips, offering twice as many graphics and main
⏹️ ▶️ Casey processing cores. These chips are often referred to as the Extreme chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm told Apple had developed both M2 Extreme and M3 Extreme chips before winding down those projects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey due to cost and demand concerns. All
⏹️ ▶️ John right, Pause here for a second. I'm paraphrasing, as I often do with German, and I'm like editing him on the fly to try to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John sensible. But I think what he said was that he refers to them as Extreme chips. I'm not going to say we're the
⏹️ ▶️ John first people to refer to the quad chip as an extreme chip. I think it was an obvious kind of like suffix with
⏹️ ▶️ John the suffixes that we knew to call, you know, they got the pro, the max, the ultra. And imagine if they had
⏹️ ▶️ John two ultra stuck together. That would be extreme. So he has to establish up
⏹️ ▶️ John front, hey, they were making the M1 extreme, which I think there was like leaked like diagrams of how the four things were
⏹️ ▶️ John going to interconnect. Like the inter, you know, the interposer on it on the ultra is just like end to end. They just connect to each
⏹️ ▶️ John other. We know what that looks like. Uh, And then it was like, well, they never came out with anything bigger than that, but here was the plan for the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 extreme or the M1 quad or whatever. And here's how it was going to connect and stuff. And obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn't ship that. This post here, which was like, I don't know, a few days ago, was the first time I've
⏹️ ▶️ John seen a sourced non-frivolous, like, you know, a information
⏹️ ▶️ John from what has historically been a reliable source, which is German, even mentioning an M2 and M3
⏹️ ▶️ John extreme. Maybe I've forgotten the history and those were like roadmapped out or whatever, but it's saying his
⏹️ ▶️ John wording here, which I didn't change is Apple had developed both, er I'm told
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple had developed both M2 Extreme and M3 Extreme chips before winding down those projects due to cost and demand concerns.
⏹️ ▶️ John What does developed mean? Does that mean they were they were on a roadmap as in like
⏹️ ▶️ John we had a bulleted list of the chips we're going to make and those were on the bulleted list? Does that mean some people were
⏹️ ▶️ John at the point where they were designing that? Does that mean they had like how far did they get in development
⏹️ ▶️ John before they canned that? Because if they canned the M1 extreme for
⏹️ ▶️ John cost and demand and blah blah reasons, like as far as I can recall, that's
⏹️ ▶️ John like the last we heard of extreme, which like they were going to do the M1 one and it was too big and they just really never revisited that topic. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said in a past episode, at some point during this, when I was talking about this topic, we got that other completely
⏹️ ▶️ John unsourced, unreliable who knows rumor that like, oh yeah, don't expect anything extreme sized until after the M7
⏹️ ▶️ John or the M7 or later because the current roadmap includes none of them. But maybe he just
⏹️ ▶️ John only has vague information, so that's all I can give. But saying they developed them before winding
⏹️ ▶️ John down those projects doesn't tell me how far along they got. So it's not actually that interesting. It could be
⏹️ ▶️ John that when they laid out Apple Silicon before a single chip had been designed, they just laid out all the chips they're going to make and these run
⏹️ ▶️ John the list. And then just when they canned the M1 Extreme, because we know about the M1 Extreme because like
⏹️ ▶️ John we saw they got at least this far because here, this diagram, this is apparently supposedly an officially leaked Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So they got as far as this drawing. Did they get further
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco than that? I don't know. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I've seen nothing about the M2 or M3 Extreme, but just FYI. Gurman now says those were apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John more than a twinkle in someone's eye.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They were certainly more than a twinkle in your eye, but no, I hear what you're
⏹️ ▶️ John saying. No, they were only a twinkle in my eye. I cannot make them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself. It sounds like it lines up with, you know, roughly what we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard already. They had these extreme chips that were like in development or being considered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or being worked on, and they decided for whatever reason, probably cost, not to ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. That I don't think is new.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or not to make them. Like, not just not to ship them, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to even make this. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't remember if I talked about this on the show, but I had some information back in the day of like that they got to
⏹️ ▶️ John the point with the MWARM extreme where they were asking vendors, if we asked you to do this for us, how much would
⏹️ ▶️ John it cost? And they would give back numbers that were basically like the equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of saying go away. As in they would give a number that they know no sane person would ever accept.
⏹️ ▶️ John we just won't, we won't do this for you. Here's a made-up number that is so much higher than anyone will pay. And
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, Apple said, yeah, we're not paying that. And that basically killed the project, the M1 Extreme.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So Mark Gurman continues, as for new Mac Pro hardware, there were two additional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey models developed by Apple that never saw the light of day, J170 and J190.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The former was a new Intel Corporation Mac Pro. So a new Mac Pro with the Intel CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry, I didn't edit out the corp
⏹️ ▶️ John usually edit his thing when he says Apple Inc. Intel. That's a Bloomberg style thing, not German's fault. But yeah, a new Intel Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. The latter was an M3 Ultra version that was supposed to launch alongside the M3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultra Mac Studio in early 2025. Were you at the point that you would have bought that, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John would not have bought that. So this is the, you know, the code name. So again, that
⏹️ ▶️ John there were two additional models developed by Apple. What does developed mean? Well, apparently they were developed far enough to get code
⏹️ ▶️ John names. I don't know when that happens in the process. Do you give them the code name before you start work on it? Maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ John A new Intel one is interesting just because like, I guess they could have put newer Xeons in it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I'm not sure what kind of revision that would be because it's not like the Intel one was like super dated and in desperate need
⏹️ ▶️ John of an update. But okay, so there was another Intel one and it makes sense to can that one because Apple Silicon's
⏹️ ▶️ John coming along. The M3 Ultra version is what everybody thought when they came out with the M3 Ultra Mac Studio, whereas the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro does the same thing. Not that it would have been great because we think it's stupid that the Mac Pro would be exactly as powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John as the Mac Studio. And it's like, well, you did it once before. It's no stupider when you do it the second time, but they didn't even
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. So I maybe that one got farther along. Maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John got to the point where they actually did work on that one and then just decided, we're going to can this whole thing. Let's not bother.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, this is the first information I've seen, certainly about, oh, there was going to be a second Intel Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro somewhere in the timeline. I mean, I guess that was maybe there is a hedge. Like we don't know when Apple Silicon's going to be ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we better get another Intel Mac Pro ready just in case this takes longer than we think. And it didn't. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the M3 Ultra Studio or Ultra Mac Pro to go with the M3 Ultra Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M3 Ultra Mac Studio was already pretty weird because it was a generation older chip introduced. But
⏹️ ▶️ John still, it was Apple's most powerful chip. And if they were going to keep the Mac Pro on life support for a little bit longer,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what they should have made. Again, I don't know how far along it got, but oh well. More details
⏹️ ▶️ John for the sad death of the Mac Pro.
AirPods, Watch exempt from EU battery reg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, EU drops the battery removal requirement for Apple Watch and AirPods. Hartley
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Charlton over at Mac Rumors writes: The European Commission on July 14th adopted new exemptions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to its batteries regulation that free the Apple Watch and AirPods from having to offer user-removable and replaceable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey batteries. The Commission has expanded its list of exempt product types to six additional categories,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folding and wearables like smartwatches and fitness trackers. The reasoning largely mirrors why devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like electronic toothbrushes were already exempt. Opening a compact, sealed enclosure and failing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to reseal it properly could let water in and create a safety risk. Products can also qualify for exemption if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their construction makes battery removal inherently dangerous or if there is no realistic way to build in user access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given current manufacturing methods. The iPhone was already exempt from the removability ruled under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the original regulation thanks to its battery cycle life and water resistance rating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I've seen a lot of people speculating that this was like the evidence of some kind of lobbying effort
⏹️ ▶️ John because like the electric toothbrush exception. Well, there are electric toothbrushes with replaceable batteries. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John not technologically impossible. So did the electric toothbrush manufacturers just lobby better somehow?
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, seeing a regulation like this where it's like, well, we don't want to require
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are, you know, as this thing said, no realistic way to build it with current
⏹️ ▶️ John technology. That seems to not be a thing they worry so much about when making software regulations. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John so much because, you know, that's the problem with software. Anything's possible in software, but there is a feasibility curve
⏹️ ▶️ John to software like, what are you asking people to do and how long would it realistically take and what kind of impact would
⏹️ ▶️ John have and how much would it cost? Whereas with hardware, they're like, ah, people probably can't make an electric toothbrush with a replaceable
⏹️ ▶️ John battery that's safe, even though those products already exist. It doesn't quite make that much sense. But I'm sure Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is super excited to not have to worry about it for the watch and especially the AirPods. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the AirPods is the only product where it's like, okay, well, you could do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are earbuds with replaceable batteries. Like AirPods themselves use those
⏹️ ▶️ John little coin cell, whatever, that's smaller than a coin, but the little disc batteries, like you could see how
⏹️ ▶️ John it could work. But exempting it is just like, do we want to fight this fight? It's not
⏹️ ▶️ John that big a deal. And we did talk about this ages ago, that the iPhone was exempt simply because the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John in it lasts so long. Like they have some threshold that's like, how many cycles does the battery have to survive to and still maintain 80%
⏹️ ▶️ John of its life or whatever? And because the iPhones use expensive batteries or good batteries, that it gets exempted
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. And so when this, when the rumors about this was first swirling, was like, in Europe, everything's
⏹️ ▶️ John going to have replaceable batteries. The phones are going to go back like the old days where you could, when you drop your phone, the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John cover falls off and the battery flies out. Remember those days? It's the thing that used to happen, kids, if we would drop
⏹️ ▶️ John our phones and the battery cover would fall off and your battery would come out. And we didn't care because it was… uphill both ways in the snow. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John put the battery back in. And anyway, and you know, air air pods will have replaceable batteries and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Watches and everything will have replaceable batteries. And they've just, that's not the reality of these regulations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Regulations are much more pragmatic. It almost makes me wonder, like, okay, well, what does this apply to? What benefit is this
⏹️ ▶️ John giving to customers? So we'll see. There was an item that I didn't end up putting in the notes for yet
⏹️ ▶️ John another over-ear headphone that had replaceable batteries. And
⏹️ ▶️ John its innovation was not the fact that it had replaceable batteries, but that it had replaceable batteries that were even easier to
⏹️ ▶️ John change. It looked kind of like, they're like kind of like cartridges. Think of like a big, thick SD
⏹️ ▶️ John in the ears. Yeah. Like, and I, I love that. I love seeing manufacturers compete
⏹️ ▶️ John with each other to not just, you know, say, okay, well, our thing is like, has replaceable batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John and more reusable, just to make that experience better. I think they were gaming headsets. like, And that makes kind of sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if you're in this really long gaming session and you're, you're, uh, you're, what do you call it? Headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John die? That's really bad. You're like, oh, well, I can plug it in. Is there a cord that can reach while I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John still playing the game? Because, you know, if it's a built-in battery, you need to charge them. First of all, you better hope your
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones can charge while they're in use because some of the worst ones are like, okay, when you're charging and it doesn't work, like you can't
⏹️ ▶️ John use it while it's charging because it will outrun the charger or something because the charging wattage isn't enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even if you can plug them in, like the Sony ones, like, oh, I can kind of snake the cable from my PlayStation
⏹️ ▶️ John and it barely reaches my ear if I don't move my head too much. And it's just, ugh. But what you can do in two
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds, oh, my headphones are dying. Swap, swap. And that's what these things are fighting on, which, you know, like competing
⏹️ ▶️ John on. It's like, not only can you change the battery, you do without even taking your headphones off because they're, it's easy. They're
⏹️ ▶️ John like on the outside. They slide right down. You shove a new battery in and you're good to go. Love to see
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But apparently, none of this removable battery stuff is coming from any of the Apple stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, as far as I can tell, including, I guess, the AirPods Max, if they ever revise them again. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess uh Chalk one up for Apple in the battle versus European regulations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also, like, it's, it's worth looking at, like, the actual problem they're trying to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. Making regulations is hard. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you make a regulation like this, okay, it's well-meaning, and there's a lot of reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why you would want replaceable batteries. First of all, it makes things last longer. So it reduces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco e-waste. It also makes things more repairable, which helps people afford them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and use them longer. And so like it helps people who are need to be on a budget. It helps reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waste. It helps just make devices better and you know, just more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functional to be able to have you know, better batteries easily replaceable for longer. So there's
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a lot of things. Also, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John long use sessions without
⏹️ ▶️ John to recharge, you just swap your battery. We used to do it on plane flights when laptop batteries didn't last as
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in a long gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John session, you just swap your battery and keep going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So there's a lot of reasons why a regulator would have the idea or we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be presented with the idea, we should require that all these gadgets that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently have these sealed up batteries, we should make them all replaceable. There's lots of good reasons for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are. But see, the problem with designing regulations is that a lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the implementation details are like actually going to be impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or will work against your goal or will work against other important goals or will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have so many holes poked in them that the regulation is effectively useless. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this is, you see exactly what happens here. Like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this particular regulation, well, how do you make, how do you take a device like an Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an AirPod and how do you make the battery replaceable? Well, first of all, you have just sheer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size issues of like, okay, batteries, in a device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this, if you're going to open up an AirPod, say, what are you opening it with?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like what tools? These are sealed up devices for water resistance as well. So there's a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sealing and gaskets and glues and stuff to seal up water. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how are you going to get to the battery? And then how are you going to close the device back up after you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get to the battery? And that's a really tricky thing. The smaller and more intricate and more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precisely manufactured these devices get. Generally, what that means is you have to have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like removable panel or some kind of, maybe if you have, it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like screwed on or something, but you have to have then screws and you have to be able to open those screws or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like some way to pop the thing open or something. And then you have to have some way for it to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assemble back together. Snapping or tabs or panels, all those gaskets for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waterproofing, things that are currently glue have to become gaskets. And what that does is that adds a bunch of size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and mechanical complexity. It adds points for mechanical failure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it adds ways that the water resistance can fail either before or after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery is replaced. So by saying you want the batteries to be replaceable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to extend the life of the device, what you're also then mandating, if you don't make any exceptions, you're also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then mandating, oh, well, the device also is going to have to kind of get bigger and bulkier and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe less reliable and maybe less water resistant when the battery is healthy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that's full of problems right there. Then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batteries that are in these devices that are not user serviceable can also not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of safety um like guards against them. Like You don't want, if someone's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be opening up your device and swapping out a battery, you don't want that battery to just be like a raw lithium-ion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cell with two wires coming out of it. You want some kind of, you know, look at look at what replaceable batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are. They usually are themselves encased in plastic or metal and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have you know, custom connectors that are like safe. So like if a baby licks it, you know, it's not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. Like there's all these different, you have to have all these different safety considerations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around, well, what is the the battery part that you were inserting and removing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do you get those over time? Is it a standard or is it custom? There's all these different considerations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to do. And then what that does, when you when you have like the additional layer of plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or metal around the battery and whatever is keeping the battery safe when you are removing it and inserting it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that also adds bulk and size and weight and material and waste
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to those products. So it really does start to become pretty cumbersome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a product that's very small, like a watch and like an earbud. But even phones, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phones these days don't have a lot of free space. You know, like, I don't know if you've seen the inside of a modern iPhone or,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it's pretty crammed in there. So you can start to see like, okay, this regulation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's very well-meaning, but the actual implementation of something like this in the modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world has all sorts of complicating factors that either make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nearly impossible to do in a lot of devices or make it such that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you did it, you wouldn't really want that resulting product or it would make the product substantially worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it's a hard problem. And like, I think it's worth considering like when you hear about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a regulation like this, instead of doing some kind of knee-jerk reaction, going back to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco squircle jail with Louis' post earlier, like it's worth kind of learning the other side of the argument. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why wouldn't Apple want AirPods batteries to be replaceable by users?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it only because they want to sell you more AirPods? Like, that's certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reason, but that's probably not the only reason. And there might be really good reasons that you might not be considering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you might not know about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Interestingly, at this point in technology, I actually think replaceable batteries in AirPods is
⏹️ ▶️ John easier than replaceable batteries in phones. Obviously, there are already phones and earbuds that have
⏹️ ▶️ John replaceable batteries. But if you look at the battery in an iPhone, that's not, it changes from year to year.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's not a standard battery. It's custom. And not only is it custom, it's custom usually for the specific
⏹️ ▶️ John model of the specific phone. It's not the same even within a generation between the Pro and the Pro Max, totally different batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ John Next year's Pro is going to have a different battery. There's no standardization there. So it's very difficult. And
⏹️ ▶️ John just to reiterate, this regulation, according to this MacRumors article, is about user replaceable. It's not
⏹️ ▶️ John just about like you'd send it to a shop and they replace it. Whereas earbuds, they just use coin batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John from watches or whatever, You know, watch style batteries. Like even the AirPods, if you crack them open, all is in there is a standard
⏹️ ▶️ John coin cell battery thing. Or AirTags, AirTags. You know, How are you going to
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how a door and do the extra stuff and blah, blah, blah. And is it a standard? The answer is, yeah, they're standard batteries that
⏹️ ▶️ John already fit in there. In fact, the entire AirTag is defined by the battery that is inside it, which is very standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John That defines the entire product. And they find a clever way to make a little door. And it doesn't matter about waterproofness
⏹️ ▶️ John because whatever. And by the way, I don't even know what the waterproofness, if that's, that's not really worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't really know how waterproof the AirPods are because they have like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John these speaker grills where the moving air from the speaker driver makes sound that goes into your ear.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know if you immersed it and that filled with water. Would it be fine? I don't want to find out. I know people have sent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the guideline is they're okay with like sweat and rain, but not immersion, I think is the
⏹️ ▶️ John Although some people have sent their AirPods through the washing machine and said they work fine. So, you know, your mileage may vary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten better over time, and it varies between models also.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the point is, we have a large menagerie of uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John differently sized, standardized, extremely inexpensive coin cell batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John available for devices that size. Whereas for the phone, we do not have a large
⏹️ ▶️ John selection of adequately powerful, standardized, easily to buy batteries. It's all 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John custom with literally little wires and a press connector. Like it's not not friendly at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if I had to pick like what device do I want this regulation to land on, I would pick the smaller ones and not
⏹️ ▶️ John the phones because the phones, everything you talked about, the you know the size, the bulk,
⏹️ ▶️ John the phones will get hit by it so bad because phones really are pretty darn waterproof these days and phones are totally non-standard
⏹️ ▶️ John and there is no room in phones and every millimeter counts and it would just be really bad so i'm kind of surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John that they didn't end up applying it to uh airpods but you know just like the toothbrushes the electric toothbrushes
⏹️ ▶️ John that have replaceable batteries that have been on the market for years and they're fine there's earbuds that have been on the market
⏹️ ▶️ John for with replaceable coin cell batteries and they're fine like it's technologically solvable but when you're talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John like it's difficult to make regulations i was kind of thinking like um uh you guys know the monkey's paw i
⏹️ ▶️ John have to ask because
⏹️ ▶️ John not a movie but it's a pop culture thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah i it's uh wasn't a poe story or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah and it's been parodied in a million things you may have seen the simpsons
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey episode about it. including the simpsons
⏹️ ▶️ John so the idea is that there's the monkey's paw which is this magic thing i mean you see it with like uh making a wish on a
⏹️ ▶️ John genie you know you rub the bottle the genie comes out and you make a wish lots of make a wish stories do the same thing and same thing with the monkey's paw
⏹️ ▶️ John which is this will grant you your wish and so you say i wish for whatever and it always grants it in like the worst possible way it's like
⏹️ ▶️ John i wish for a million dollars and then it like it kills your mom because she had a million dollar insurance policy so you
⏹️ ▶️ John got a million dollars but now your mom's dead how do you feel right that's the monkey's paw the monkey's paw curls
⏹️ ▶️ John right you whatever you ask for it's gonna the worst possible thing is gonna happen making regulations is like making
⏹️ ▶️ John a wish on a monkey's paw no matter how you phrase it okay i want a million dollars i don't want anything
⏹️ ▶️ John bad to happen i don't want anyone to lose a million dollars i just want to have it and you have to go through all these caveats
⏹️ ▶️ John and no matter how you say it it's like okay and it's not it's not the magic of the monkey's paw that causes this to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John it's the adversarial companies that don't want to do what you're asking that you're asking them to do so they
⏹️ ▶️ John will find a way you know malicious compliance or whatever to not do it or just leave the market or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John so it actually is a difficult problem and it is not a friendly relationship between regulators and the products
⏹️ ▶️ John but uh that's not a reason not to do regulation like that is entirely a reason
⏹️ ▶️ John to just get better at it uh you know so we'll see how uh this
⏹️ ▶️ John goes in the eu but it seems like the eu is being very pragmatic and careful and maybe bowing
⏹️ ▶️ John to lobbying efforts so that they can sort of and i think this is a good approach you know like a ratcheting approach don't do it all
⏹️ ▶️ John at once do it a little bit at a time allow give people time to adjust don't do it in the really hard cases oh if the electric
⏹️ ▶️ John toothbrush people complain fine you don't have to do it but little by little bit by bit you know as
⏹️ ▶️ John the years pass you keep changing the regulation making it a little bit harder. we get solid state batteries and we we can put
⏹️ ▶️ John way more power in less volume and weight oh we ratchet up a little more uh that's what the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John world should be doing so i endorse the eu's efforts here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh real-time follow-up it was not Edgar Allan Poe. It was WW Jacobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, we regret the error.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in the chat room said they wouldn't have come up with a monkey's paw example that was that bleak. I think that's literally from one of the stories.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't think I came up with that on my own. It may have been from the original story, but that that's the monkey's
⏹️ ▶️ John paw for you. Don't make a wish on the monkey's paw. It's bad news.
Rumored OLED iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally, tonight, there is an OLED iMac rumor that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has just sprung up. Literally, earlier today, Mark Gurman writes: Apple's working on a new iMac with an OLED screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's about it. That is the entirety of the rumor. That's it. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mean, that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that's exactly the level of reporting that most people care about the iMac. And it's not to say the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like a bad computer. It's just not an exciting computer. It serves its role very well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people like it for its role. And for the most part, it's pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the non-interest in the iMac is why this rumor is interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ John even in its totally sort of like detail-free form. And there was like no timeline given,
⏹️ ▶️ John although again, trying to parse what Gurman wrote because he wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John about other iMacs coming with an M5 or an M6 chip or those two machines. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John one? Presumably that's coming before the OLED one or whatever. So don't expect the next iMac to have an OLED screen. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumor is Apple is working on a new iMac that has an OLED screen. Timeline and everything else unknown. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John And presumably, like I said, there will be a refresh of the current version iMac with a different chip at some point before the OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John one. The reason I think this is interesting is because the iMac is like not
⏹️ ▶️ John a top priority, let's say, from Apple's Mac division and Macs themselves are not really a top priority.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's kind of at the bottom of the barrel in terms of Macs that need to be updated. And unlike the Mac Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio, with, you know, for reasonable reasons that make sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John people who buy an iMac don't need a newly refreshed computer every single year. They're not on the cutting edge running
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardest, you know, LLMs on their system. They just need the most power. No, they're fine with it
⏹️ ▶️ John for years. So it's fine for this to be in a slow update cycle, which is why I think it is fascinating
⏹️ ▶️ John that there even is a rumor, a glimmer of a rumor of a plan of anything about an OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac because it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why is the iMac going
⏹️ ▶️ John to get an OLED screen? I understand that like the laptops are going to get there. The most popular line of Macs. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it just so happens that laptops have smaller screens because they're portable. And so it's
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot easier to make a 12, a 13-inch and a 15-inch or 16-inch, whatever. OLED screen. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper. It's smaller. It's like, it's great. iMacs are, what are they, 24 inches now? I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That's getting pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John big. Apple just came out with a bunch of 27-inch screens and
⏹️ ▶️ John have OLEDs and they cost a bazillion dollars, including the one that they didn't even really change.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, there are no timelines involved here. But I would really not expect to
⏹️ ▶️ John see an OLED Mac rumor until OLED had spread to every,
⏹️ ▶️ John or at least OLED rumors had spread to every nook and cranny of the Mac line. And I would think the OLED OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac would be the last one because again, a 24-inch OLED screen. Maybe it's not HDR, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you can get it cheaper because it's not HDR. And still the Studio Display XDR will be better because it's brighter and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. But what a weird place for OLED to appear. Not weird for it to be on laptops first. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we'll see if those make it into this year or early next year. That makes perfect sense. But the next place I
⏹️ ▶️ John would have expected it before we just had the new monitors come out, which resets the clock for six years or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John is on the super expensive big Mac monitors. That's where you'd expect to see OLED next. They're already
⏹️ ▶️ John three grand or whatever. Throw an OLED on there. But they were like, nope, mini LED, special custom, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. And so I guess the iMac gets the OLED before, essentially before the Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John because from Apple anyway, obviously there's old third-party OLED monitors. And believe it or not, I know we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John these ages ago. I'm still waiting for some of the stuff that was announced to CES to come out because that's just how CES
⏹️ ▶️ John works. So still, we're halfway through the year and a bunch of stuff that they announced is not out. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we don't have any great recommendations for Mac-ish, Mac-compatible OLED monitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John But eventually they'll be out. But yeah, you get a fancy Mac Studio and your choices are
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple super expensive mini LEDs, third-party OLED or mini LEDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the iMac is going to be out there at some point with its own OLED and the laptops will have OLEDs. Maybe the MacBook Air will have OLEDs
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Mac Studio will be like, where's my Apple OLED? I don't know when that's going to happen.
#askatp: 3D-printing usefulness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some Ask ATP and Jack Johnson writes, as someone who has never considered having a 3D printer, I was very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interested to hear how Marco and the family have found it to be useful. What are the sorts of problems it solves? How often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you experience a situation where a 3D printer is useful? I have an 11-year-old and imagine it would be easy for her to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find fun things to use it for, but I'm more curious about non-toy applications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has been something that I've really enjoyed. The toy applications are very fun. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go on the different sites like Maker World and Thingiverse and all this. You can find lots of fun toys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they delight people. Like One of the things that like I, I found like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny milk crate, like somebody like replicated the design of like plastic milk crates, and you can scale it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to whatever size you want. If you make them really tiny, they're really cute and it's really fun to have them on my desk. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printed one, one or two on my desk and then instantly Adam and Tiff spotted them and each demanded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own. So now I have a few more and like they're all over the house now and they're adorable. So there's all sorts of fun stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that that you can do. Of course, everybody prints like, you know, the dragons and all sorts of stuff that kids
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to play with. But the toy applications, I would say don't discount those. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the functional side, what I what I enjoy about a 3D printer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionally is I think this is maybe like the satisfaction that a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people have gotten when they get into woodworking that I've never done. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there is a problem that I spot around the house, I can have a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good chance of being able to solve it. That also applies to other people's problems around their houses. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, having the restaurant, there's like there's a bar. It has like this wood ledge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the bottom of the bar that like you could rest your feet on. And that piece of wood cracked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco along like where people, if you like stand up and put all your weight on it, it can crack in like the part over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ledge. And we needed something that would hold it up that was strong um while, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like a day while we went and, you know, went off island and got got some other stuff. But like we need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we need like a fast solution. Like what can we do to hold this up today? So I printed a little bracket.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I quickly designed it in on shape and I printed a little bracket with like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little ridges, like triangular ridges ridges to support it. And I printed it in PET CF. So it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super strong and resists moisture because that's important in where we are. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um And I made a really, really strong corner bracket to help hold it up until we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get some metal in there. And you know what? It's still there because it's actually stronger than most metal brackets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can find around here. And it's strong enough to last the rest of the season. And then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the offseason, we're going to replace that piece of wood. So like, that's one example. Another example is I go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a physical therapist sometimes and she was saying that that she had one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those Vaso machines that like, it's basically like inflatable pants. Like you wear these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like airbag things around your legs and they inflate and squeeze different parts of your legs and it can help you know, a lot of leg stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have some connector that attaches air hoses to a machine and it's a plastic connector.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And she said, she has a whole machine out of commission because the plastic connector on it broke. So she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can't attach the hoses correctly and the company's out of business and nobody sells these parts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I said, all right, give me the part. And in one day, I quickly replicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the part and printed one out in a pretty hard TPU. So it's very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very strong because TPU is a little bit flex. Like it's like it's bamboo's TPU for AMS. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's a pretty firm TPU as they go. But because it is flexible and has really good layer adhesion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's really strong in a lot of ways. And I was able to print that out. And the whole thing took me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including printing time, an hour and a half. Like it was like a half hour to model it and an hour to print
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And I brought it to her and it fixed the machine. Like just having this part now, like you have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing enabled. We have wagons here at the beach. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you like haul like a farm. It's like a big farm wagon. You like haul it up to the town to pick up your freight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you haul it back. And the hardware store in town sells these wagons. So everyone in town has the same wagon and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all look the same. Also, when people come over here, they don't know that these wagons are actually purchased and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco privately owned. So we've had people just kind of grab our wagon thinking, oh, these are just public for anyone to just take whenever they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need. So as a result, many wagons have name signs on them and many wagons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have air tags attached to them somehow. I solved both of those problems. I made a custom name sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of ASA because it has very high UV resistance with two colors. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has our last name on it and has a big cavity behind it to mount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an air tag in one of Elevation Lab's 10-year AirTag battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enclosures. So I'm going to screw that onto the wagon tomorrow and with some security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screws. And now I have a name badge with a 10-year air tag for my wagon in town.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All Again, all custom modeled stuff I've made um, to solve very specific problems. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the in town, there's a, the Chamber of Commerce in Town has these like animals around town that like, and they had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these QR codes under them. And the way they put the QR codes on them was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically by cutting out like pieces of like cardboard with, you know, a taped on sign,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like laminated to resist the rain. so And they look terrible. And the head of the chamber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a friend of mine. And she learned how to 3D printing. And she's like, can you make us QR codes? and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, Siri is talking in my pocket. It's it's going great, guys. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I, again, use the ASA because it's very high UV resistance and I have black and white ASA.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I made little QR badges for and they're now all over town. So I improve my town by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like being able to do this. Tiff had, uh she has like a square ice cube maker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like for like cocktails that she makes fancy cocktails. And she brought it over from the mainland, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and New Jersey? It has like a special storage box to store the square
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ice cubes in the freezer so they don't touch each other and stick together, you know, melt together and ruin like the clear awesomeness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. Well, she left the tray back in back on the mainland, John. and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John New Jersey, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so So it took me five minutes to model a quick little like plastic divider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you could then put four of them in this plastic divider and just put it in a plastic bag. And that replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need for this, you know, box in our freezer. I have a coffee filter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holder that I made where like next to my coffee station where I like make coffee every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I make coffee at the beach two different ways, depending on how many people I'm making it for. Either a regular coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pot, which has those cone shaped paper filters, or arrow presses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it's just me or just me and Tiff, which has small circular paper filters. I made a coffee filter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holder that mounts on the wall, fits exactly, like snaps onto like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gap between like the tile backsplash and the wall. So like it fits perfectly with no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adhesives, no anything, just like snaps on there. And it has nice like wave shapes on it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it's the beach and holds both of those coffee filters. My flagpole mount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here at the beach, I have a flagpole at the back of my house. Sometimes it's American, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's fish, sometimes it's the Progress Pride flag. It depends on my mood. And it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metal and it's the beach. So it all corroded and rusted like crazy. So I printed a flagpole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mount that somebody else modeled, but I modified the model to account for a couple of screw holes I wanted to add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. And I printed that also out of PET-CF because it's super strong and very moisture resistant because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super strong carbon fiber reinforced plastic at the beach will probably not corrode as quickly as metal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It probably will just be there and last for a very long time. So this is just like a subset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, I mentioned in the past I made like a custom shower drain filter back in the other, on the mainland,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John. I made a custom shower drain filter. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John can't say it
⏹️ ▶️ John in New Jersey this much. You're overwhelming me.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco See, I'm breaking the system. You're
⏹️ ▶️ John scalloping me with the mainland.
⏹️ ▶️ John DDOS. If only you could fix my breaking OXO
⏹️ ▶️ John cheese grater thing, but unfortunately the part that breaks is essentially paper thin, and I'm not sure if there's any 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John that can withstand that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you're willing to be a little bit flexible on the design details, try me. But no, like
⏹️ ▶️ John can you do things like paper thin?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It depends on where the strength has to be and in what direction and how, like, if can I add some like support?
⏹️ ▶️ John It has to be paper thin because it slides into a paper thin slot, unfortunately. Well, look, I could try.
⏹️ ▶️ John like it i could also Maybe the next, the next broken one I have, I'll mail to you and you can see what you can do about it because I have one
⏹️ ▶️ John that's in the process of breaking right now and it's probably going to be totally broken soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So like what I would say is if you are interested in like the functional side of 3D printers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are definitely very satisfying for that. You almost definitely want an enclosed one. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fortunately, there's a lot of really good enclosed printers now. Like, you know, I would definitely go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bamboo because they're easy and I know open source people, I please don't make me fight that fight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bamboo printers are easy. They're awesome. I would say right now, the ideal sweet spot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of functionality to price in their lineup is the X2D. printer. Uh, it's, It's a relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new model. Um, It's the one I have here at the beach and it is awesome because it's dual nozzle, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helps with a lot of like support tasks and things like that. Um, and it, it only costs it's cost like a hundred bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than the P2S or something like that. Um, And it also has a heated, a heated enclosed chamber.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has dual part fans. It has a really good filter, like an air filter. So if you have it in your office, it's not going to kill you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hopefully, maybe. Um, And so with that, you can print basically any material
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you'd want to print on a home 3D printer, including all these cool carbon fiber ones. Like the, The X2D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can print all of those. Um, If you want to go a little bit higher end, you can use, you can get the one I have on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mainland John, um, the H2S, which is um, basically all the same capabilities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but single nozzle and larger. Or the H2D, if you want dual nozzles on that, um, and that you can print larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts there. But for most people's needs, I think the X2D is awesome. And uh, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about, with all the accessories, you're looking at about $900. Um, but it's,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can strongly recommend it. Anyway, having that having that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creative outlet for me, I've loved every bit of it. It's absolutely fun. It's absolutely great. And it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super functional. And and you can kind of, you kind of have a superpower. Like If you can just fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your problem or someone else's problem, like when I fixed my PT's vaso machine, like she's thrilled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was literally like this, probably, I don't know, probably a thousand dollar machine that was useless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and she had no other way to fix it. And I spent an hour and a half and probably, I don't know, $2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth of TPU and fixed it. So to have that ability is really fun. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've never had that in any other way. I really enjoy this. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say definitely get an enclosed printer, try it out. It's super fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can start like the first custom parts I made, I was using Tinkercad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is this web app that AutoCAD makes for children to learn how to 3D model in school. And it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very simple. It's you know, just drag and drop modeling. I did move to, I did migrate to OnShape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for almost everything I do now because OnShape is parametric, which is wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like, you know, Once you are, especially if you're a programmer, like if you're listening to this show, it's likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you'll enjoy OnShape. There's a bit of a learning curve. You know, I watched a couple of YouTube videos to learn you know, the basics of how to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco navigate it and what to make and stuff like that. But what I like about OnShape is you can basically define
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things as variables. So you can, instead of drawing the circle and saying this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hole is five millimeters across, you can say this hole is hole width across. And then later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, you can change hole width. And so if you, if you're, as you're like iterating a design, that can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very handy. I love OnShape for that. And OnShape allows you to do things that are impossible or difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Tinkercad. Like if you want to have like a nice, you know, a fillet or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it's not pronounced fillet. I don't think it is. But if you want to have like a fillet, like a curve on an edge, or if you want to chamfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an edge like Johnny Ive, like you can do stuff like that a lot, like very easily in OnShape,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whereas in Tinkercad, you really can't. And that makes your parts generally look and feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and often work a lot better than you can do in Tinkercad. But Tinkercad is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast and easy to learn. And so you can do a lot with it. And as you're learning, that's a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great place to start. So yeah, if the price is okay with you, I'd say start with the Bamboo X2D and Tinkercad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsor of this episode, Lisa, and to our ATP members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can join us at ATP.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking about the internal roles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system in modern LLMs and how that relates to prompt injection vulnerabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is going to be a deep dive. It's going to be kind of fun. So listen, atp.fm slash join to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get overtime and all of our other membership perks. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's KC-Liss, M-A-R-C-O,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann A-R-M, E-N T, Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann U-S-A-S-A-A-C-U-S. It's accidental, accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann They didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Tech
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
Fixing AirPlay in Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Marco, you apparently have fixed another long-standing bug in Overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can't say that I've hit this bug, to the best of my recollection, but I believe this is not uncommon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this doesn't say that it's a bug. It says you fixed AirPlay. Was AirPlay broken?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that depends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey so All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was kind of broken. um When I first made AirPlay 2 support in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast, which I think was around iOS 13 or something like that, like whenever AirPlay 2 came out, iOS 12 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 13, I think. When I first did that, it was a huge undertaking because the way AirPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1 works is it just has like a fixed, usually a two-second long buffer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you just play audio in your app the way you're playing audio anyway. And AirPlay just buffers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up for two seconds and routes it to the speaker. And that's fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's, you know, everything has a two second delay, including like your pausing and everything. And that that's kind of an inconvenient,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the the UI showing two seconds off on the timestamps, like it's not great. AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works totally differently. And the main behavior that you need to know for apps is that AirPlay 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buffers up to usually about a minute and a half of audio. So the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire way the app deals with it and supplies audio to it has to be aware of that. It has to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a few different ways to be able to render ahead all of that content without the UI showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you're a minute and a half ahead, et cetera. So there's an API to do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just use AV Player, like the default media playing API for Apple, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handles all that for you. You don't even have to know. And most podcast apps, that's just what they do because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they need to do fits within AV Player's capabilities. But AV Player's capabilities do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not allow for a way for me to do smart speed. So I've never used it with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a few contacts on the watch, which I'll get to. So AirPlay 2, it was a pretty big undertaking to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the other API Apple provided that gives you more raw access. It's this whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sample buffer renderer thing. And that's for apps that play basically raw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco custom audio streams to work with AirPlay 2. And there's this one sample project that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco published back when they launched the API. And that's basically the only documentation for this API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's very limited. Almost no one uses it. So the information available out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on using it is pretty slim. It's pretty difficult and cumbersome to use. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems easy until you try to do anything and then you run into problems and you're like, oh, this is a weird bug. Okay. Anyway, before the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast rewrite, which I guess is now launched about two years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, what I had written for the AirPlay 2 system basically worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it didn't, it wasn't perfect, but it worked enough. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I did the rewrite, that required me to change a whole bunch of the code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the AirPlay audio stream player that I wrote. I didn't actually change anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the AirPlay stream player, but I changed all of the code around it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manages open files, that sets up the audio stream and manages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what file is playing and how times are reported and everything like that. Like All of that changed with the new architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the actual airplay component I'd written didn't. But for some reason, after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rewrite, everyone was complaining about airplay bugs. And I would occasionally see them myself too. Like bugs I'd never seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, playback would sometimes just stop randomly or it would glitch. And like, that's, what's going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on here? What, what changed around it that would cause that kind of problem? And I couldn't figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out. And it's been one of the most common complaints about Overcast, so much so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually added a checkbox saying basically force AirPlay 1 usage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when I saw that option appear in Overcast, I'm like, oh, there must be some real problems with AirPlay
⏹️ ▶️ John 2 because when that option appears.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could not figure it out. So a few days ago, over the weekend, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was playing an episode of a podcast that I noticed was making audible glitches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over airplay. Like every about every second or two, it would have like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like static blip in in the stream as if it was garbage audio data being played in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sample buffer. And it was happening every time on this one file. So I'm like, oh, this is interesting. I have a reproducible
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to pause here for a second just to say that the excitement that programmers feel when they get
⏹️ ▶️ John a 100% reproducible instance of a bug they've been chasing for years is like, I don't know, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John sure there's like a an equivalent of scientists, like when they do an experiment and something happens that they can't explain. Because when you're scientists
⏹️ ▶️ John you're doing experiments, you kind of know what's going to happen or whatever. But if something happens that you can't explain, you get so excited. If you're
⏹️ ▶️ John a scientist, you're like, was it a mistake? Am I just mistaken? Let me just look at it again. Maybe it's just like an experimental error. Blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. It's the most exciting thing ever. For a programmer, it's like, it reproduces a hundred percent of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because once you get something that reproduces 100% of the time, you will fix it. Because like now you can't, there's nowhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, first I'm like, I'm looking through. I'm like, I don't, I still don't see why this file is doing this and why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other files aren't either always or never doing this. There's nothing special about the file, but whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that file was doing it. I was like, great. So I bring up Fable. By the way, Claude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a past and future sponsor of our show. So I bring up Fable and Claude Code and I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this file that I'm playing is glitching about once a second, maybe a little more, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about once every second or two. It's making these audible glitches every time when I play it through airplay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Audit the airplay code, try to figure out why and fix it. And Fable goes and churns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away for 10 minutes, whatever. It's not a fast model, but I'm like, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco churning away for 10 minutes or so and looking at everything. And yes, I'm improving all this stuff. Do you want to run grep? Yeah, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go ahead and run grep. Do you want to fetch this sample project on the web? Yes, please fetch the sample project on the web.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do whatever you want to do to try to solve this problem. Well, not
⏹️ ▶️ John shift tab for auto mode, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. I've discovered this recently as well. And I stand by that that I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially as you're getting used to how this whole flow works, I wanted to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I wanted it to come to me after basically every step and say, is this cool? Is this cool? Is this cool? Is this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool? But as I got more and more confident with the tool and, and instructing it and so on, yeah, shift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tab to go into auto mode and then basically just walk away for 20 minutes and come back.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's great until it deletes everything. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. Right, right, right. Did you hear the story from Rands? He was working with one of the another company's models and he
⏹️ ▶️ John put it into auto mode and just deleted all of his code. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. I fixed all the bugs. It's still a danger. So just keep that in mind. But but anyway, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, make your estimation about the risk versus reward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. I had to go through and it's like, all right, I found a couple of edge cases. Like this, Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco documentation of this feature says you should be calling it this way and you miss this other chase, this other chance here. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this thing ends up failing, then this thing is null and then this thing fails out. And like it found a bunch of like, you know, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minor bugs like that all around my code. And it's like, all right, I fixed all those bugs. Try it now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried again and it's still glitching. And I went back, I said, that didn't fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keep looking. So it churns away. And, you know, another 10, 15 minutes, like it's churning away. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improving everything, all of its grep commands. And, you know, eventually it's like, all right, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made regression tests and I tracked the entire audio path and I looked through every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible way that your audio engine generates audio for this. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found everything was sample perfect. There wasn't a single sample drop. So it's not garbage data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, but I found this, some other little edge case over here and I fixed that. So try it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Okay. So I build it. Try it now. It's not fixed. So I go back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm saying it's still not fixed. Sorry. Sorry. Keep going. Keep looking. So it's like, okay. It goes 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes later. It's like, all right, I found, I dug through, I replicate, I made sure that your structure of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code matches the structure of the sample project exactly. So you're calling it exactly the same way Apple is calling it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Build and run Apple's code on your device and see if that has the problem. So I build and run Apple's code and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, it doesn't have the problem. Okay. So let's go back. Okay. So eventually Fable's like, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, try playing it with smart speed and voice boost turned off. Try playing it at 1x
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 2x. And I'm like, oh, actually, the glitches are faster at 2x.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I eventually learned the reason why Apple's code wasn't glitching was that Apple's code doesn't have a speed control.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when I played it at 1x, with or without smart speed, at 1x,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, okay, all right. So Fable's like, all right, I got you. So it went over, you know, audited the whole like speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control thing. And it's like, all right, well, if you call the speed, it's like, it's probably some kind of like difference in device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clocks, like in not like the time of day, but like the audio refresh clock or the audio sample
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate clocks. So it added all this logging. It's like, all right, run on your device and airplay it this and see what this log says.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it's logging like which clock is being used to determine what the time is and everything. And it's like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, is it the sample rate of the hardware? Is it the sample rate of the file? If those things are different? And, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, is AirPlay using a different you know, media time clock and, you know, for its algorithms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything? All this logging. Didn't fix it. Okay. Then it's like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, you should file this as a bug with Apple. This is a platform bug. And I said, I'm not doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I think I talked about this before, but earlier than you've gotten to now in your story,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have turned to the thing I've done a few times, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, but at least I enjoy doing, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is, hey, this Apple framework that doesn't have good documentation that is obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John involved in this problem that I'm seeing, decompile that sucker. Figure out how it
⏹️ ▶️ John works. I can't do this. I literally can't. I don't know how to decompile. I don't understand the assembly code. the I don't understand
⏹️ ▶️ John like machine code or whatever. But these things, like I have Hopper installed. I have a license for it. It's got an MCP
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Decompile the AirPlay 2 library. Figure out how I'm supposed to be
⏹️ ▶️ John using it because I don't trust the Apple sample code from two years ago. I'm not saying this would have solved your problem, but I've done this multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John times, which is, again, why I said, like I said in an earlier episode, I love having the source code for
⏹️ ▶️ John Darwin because that's where all the low-level file system stuff is. And I just go to the source code,
⏹️ ▶️ John man. Like, it's so glorious. But yeah, AirPlay2 source code, not available to you. But you know who it is available
⏹️ ▶️ John to? An LLM with a decompiler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never thought of it doing that. I've heard of people having success with decompiling with LLMs, but I've never thought to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John it's only if that's the source of your problem. It sounds like you've already narrowed it down to smart speed, which is not like really AirPlay 2's fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, it's narrowed down to speed. Like, to, like… And so the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast has done the audio engine so far, I write the whole pipeline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that deals with smart speed, voice boost, and the sample decoding from the file and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I use Apple's audio unit for speed up and slow down, the base speed changes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you're playing at 1.2x, like smart speed is engaged if you have it, but like I'm using Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio unit to change the actual media time of the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Apple has a really good algorithm for that. It's really power efficient. It sounds really good. I set it on its highest quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode and I just go. And that's served me very, very well. There's a couple of problems with that algorithm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of them is that the highest it goes, you can set it to whatever speed you want, but if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you set it higher than 2.9x, the way it speeds up audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that is just by cutting out chunks. So it's not really speeding it up after that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It kind of maxes out at 2.9 and just starts cutting words and cutting like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, subsections of the audio after that, which is not helpful, I don't think. And that's why in Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Overcast speed label that says 3x is not 3x. It's 2.9x.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And 2.9 and 2.8 and 2.7, I like shifted them a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit to kind of ramp up to that fake 3x that wasn't really 3x.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco From what I understand, almost every other app does something similar, or it just does 3x and lets it cut out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those chunks, which I find unacceptable. um and that's at that point, SmartSpeed is getting you more than that anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it doesn't really matter. um But anyway, so I'm like, how how can you work around this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Fable churns away and churns away. And it's like, okay, the problem is that Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AirPlay system library, when you use the playback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed on this file, like when you tell Apple's code to play this file at 1.2x
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, anything other than 1x, it glitches. So it has a problem. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should file this with Apple. And I'm like, well, I'm not doing that. Work around it. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fable then did was go and write its own speedup algorithm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, the main algorithm to do this, it's called WSOLA. I'll link to an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously ChatGPT written blog post about WSOLA. I have known for years that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ever wanted to write my own speedup algorithm, I need to write my own WSOLA implementation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the algorithms I've written for Voice Boost especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that by having written those, I know enough about signal processing now that if I needed to write my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own W solo, I don't know how it's pronounced, I could do it, but it would take me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably like two weeks to get it right. And I don't know if mine would sound as good as Apple's or if it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be as power efficient as Apple's. You know, I use all the Accelerate VDSP code as much as I can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I'm sure they're doing lots of tricks and they've had this forever. And theirs sounds good, so I've never touched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. The other problem with relying on Apple for this, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that on the Apple Watch, I've never been able to run SmartSpeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and VoiceBoost because the Apple Watch does not expose that API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in AV Audio Engine. And the AV audio engine on the Apple Watch is the only way to achieve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart speed. So I have to use AV audio engine on the watch to get smart speed. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I do, I don't have access to the speed-up component. So I wouldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to play at beyond 1x if I had smart speed enabled or voice boost. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Apple Watch, I've never had smart speed or voice boost. I've just used AV Player because it allowed me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to at least do the basic speedups. So as Fable's trying to fix this airplay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with Apple's speed up algorithm, it just wrote its own WSOLA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco algorithm and just tried that. And it's like, okay, I wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my own with Solo or whatever. See if this has the problem. And so after I picked my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jaw up off the floor and looked at the code, I was like, wow, it's full of VDSP accelerated code. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's like, this is a really good implementation. It looks like it has all the right windowing functions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm like, oh, wow. This is, huh? Isn't that interesting? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pick up my jaw off the floor and I go test it and it works perfectly. The airplay problem is solved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I was like, okay, use that algorithm whenever you're using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco airplay then. Huh. And then it took me all of about five minutes before I realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, now that I have my own Wasola algorithm, also add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speeds above 3X. That's where that came from. Because why not add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speeds? Now that I have this, it's like, well, this was holding me back all this time. And now, listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are saying who would possibly ever want speeds above 3x, I assure you there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who want them, not least of which blind people. Because blind people, especially blind people who like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts and are nerdy like us, tend to ramp up the speeds of things like voiceover on their phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything as they get used to it. And once you start ramping up your speed of processing speech,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you'd be surprised what you can understand once you are accustomed to it. So there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are lots of people out there who actually want podcasts faster than 3X. So I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why don't you make speeds up to 5X? Or first I said up to 4X. And it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, I did it. And by the way, I didn't tell Fable about my little,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really 3X, 3X, but when it was adding all those speeds between 3 and 4, it said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also fixed your fudge about the 3X speed earlier and all the speeds leading up to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was like, okay, touche. like you That's pretty good. All right. I would have asked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to do it anyway, but I didn't have to. So it added all the speed And then one, one beta build later,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm like, why stop at four? Let's go to five. I tested it out. Like, does five work? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it strain the CPU? No. Okay, go to five. Why not? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the current pending version of Overcast that's waiting for App Store review as we speak, it goes to 5X.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it's a real, those are real speeds that don't cut any audio out because now I have my own WSOLA algorithm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was stolen. And so I'm also like, okay, while I have this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why not bring smart speed and voice boost to the watch now? Because now that I have this part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can then use that to bring the entire AV audio engine. So I had Fable do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it literally took one prompt and about 15 minutes of churning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it brought the entire audio engine to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch. I had to modify a couple of things about the UI because it made some crappy UI to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco toggle on and off in the watch screen. I made it less crappy. And I was looking at, oh my God, I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all I really needed was that WSOLA algorithm. Everything else I had, all the other components I had written
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked fine on the watch. Like I had written them all cross-platform. Everything else was there except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And for me to do this ever in the past, again, this would have been at least two weeks for me to write my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And it probably wouldn't have sounded as good or been as performant. I even did a stress.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test. I'm like, all right, what if I play this on the watch at 5X with SmartSpeed and Voice Boost?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this going to crush the watch's CPU? No. 5%. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. Like, this is amazing. So I am blown away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by, first of all, how much work Fable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did to help me find the airplay bug. And it was really, really good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it made the entire rest of the airplay subsystem much better and more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stable. And it accounts for more conditions. It complies better with what Apple's sample code wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to do. Like it fixed all of those problems. It audited the entire rest of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the audio stream that I build to see, is anything generating garbage data? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure nothing possibly can. It did amazing work. It found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of small stuff and a couple of big things. And then it wrote me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this algorithm that, like again, it would have taken me a while if I if i could even do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well at all. And that that enabled me to do these other two major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that people have been asking for for years. And yesterday I went for a run and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had overcast on my watch and I played a podcast with SmartSpeed and Voice Boost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just, I'm so blown away by how well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these modern high-end models are able to find and fix bugs in code. And the code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they write, I'm still not letting it write that much code. um i i but the its ability to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fix bugs, like it's shocking. it It really shows me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how flawed humans are. like because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like i'm not a I'm not a bad programmer. I'm not an amazing programmer, but I'm not a bad programmer. I'd say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm like a decent to good programmer. A lot of this code that I've written over the years, like this audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing code or like the low level database code, like a lot of that I've written very carefully, much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of which I actually have done tests for. By the way, there's tons of tests now in Overcast, thanks to all of this work from Fable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote almost none of them, but there's a lot of tests now. And all that code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I've written over the years, like I would have, like, I went through all my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco emails recently. I went through one-star reviews on the App Store. I went through the Reddit comments. And anytime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found a new bug for the last like, you know, couple of weeks, I've just had fable be like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some users report that like the, it's showing an infinite spinner on the purchase screen for some users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't know why. Figure it out. And it'll churn away for a while. And it'll usually come up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with something that I didn't come up with of like, oh, well, if the connection fails over here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this variable is set to nil, it never retries the connection. I'm like, huh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at that. So I'll say, all right, fix it. And I'll look over the fixes it makes. And it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually only, you know, a couple of lines difference. It's usually not that much code that it's writing to fix these bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's just changing a couple of lines. And I look and I'm like, holy crap, it's right. I missed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And so I've been going through and the last couple of weeks, again, I've been fixing so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs. Because I'll tell it, like, I'll think about some part of the app that people complain about. I'll say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, people complain about the reliability of streaming playback under low network connections. Go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at the streaming code and fix anything you find. And it'll go, it'll churn away the streaming code and it'll say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, yes, here's, in this case, you know, you didn't account for this. And over here, if the server returned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 200 here, it would corrupt the data here. And it's like, oh my God. And again, like you go look, you're like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's right. Oh, my God. So fix that. Or, you know, people, people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reported for years, like, hey, ever since the rewrite, it doesn't show up very well. I've talked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it on the show. It doesn't show up very well as the suggested app when you plug in AirPods or when you connect AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it used to. So I told Fable that. I said, hey, this used to work. It works worse now. Figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out why and fix it. And it'll churn away on my like upcoming media intent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code that handles all that. And sure enough, it found some stuff. It's like, oh, well, actually, if there's a race condition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during launch, and if this database a little before that database, then this one would fail here and it would cause this problem. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you messed up here, here, and here. Oh, my God. And sure enough, you go look. Yep, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure did. And now it's fixed. This is such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a game changer for so much. Because as it turns out, as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, humans are pretty imperfect. And there's, and so many of these,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the bugs that it's finding for me are bugs that have been keeping me down for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years. And I've kind of alluded to this recently, but like I've
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, I've had a really hard time staying motivated to work on Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently because it seems like I'm just bogged down by just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old bugs that I can't find or fix because I've looked for months or years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can't fix them and I can't figure out why and I've never been able to make tests that actually show them or whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. And now I can just ask this AI thing to fix it. And like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the kind of thing there are lots of programmers out there who you can like, you can hire, they can contract hire somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who's like a real expert in this kind of thing, who's really good at debugging, who can look at the kind of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like this has existed for a long time, but to hire somebody like that would cost a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money. And I usually have either not been able to afford that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if I could afford it, it's like I could just barely afford it with overcast profits. And I'm like, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't really want to, like, that's not really worth the cost of maybe getting someone to maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix it if it's going to cost, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, you know, for the, to have them here. It's like, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be like a lot. It's like, that's, that's going to be, you know, pretty difficult for me to justify or or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. Whereas like now, for like I'm on, I'm on the $200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month plan now, only because I've been hammering Fable like crazy, but I did most of this on the $100 a month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan. For $100 a month now, yes, Claude's a past former, and future sponsor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For $100 a month now, like I can have this amazing bug fixer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available to me whenever I want. So I am. So literally every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time a bug comes to mind that people have reported or that I see myself, I'll just go tell Fable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, this audit the code paths around this and see if you find anything and fix it. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has fixed so many bugs in Overcast. So if AppReview ever actually reviews this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm on day three right now waiting, but if AppReview ever actually reviews this, the 2026.7.1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of Overcast contains major bug fixes, major improvements,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it's all like stuff that was on my bug hit list. And the last version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 0.7, that one I included things like priority playlist priorities were messed up after the rewrite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, they were. It fixed it. And it was so subtle. It was like, you know, like there was like a reverse greater than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less than thing and like a couple other like minor things like that that like I would never have caught. It fixed it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it made a bunch of tests to make sure it fixed it. Like in this one, I fixed storage usage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs, airplay bugs, sync bugs. I had it look at the server sync code and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app sync code and say, hey, this is how this syncs. Figure out any possible way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the sync might have a race condition or lose data or anything like that. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found some and it fixed them. So this has sync fixes. This has airplay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixes, storage usage fixes, so background execution fixes. Like there's so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many fixes in this build. And I did it for almost, almost for free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in almost no time. So I do think, again, as I was, as I say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time I talk about AI coding these days, obviously this does not come with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no downsides or no cost to society or no cost to developers. This all has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some costs and some downsides. And depending on how you stand on certain things, those may be significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you or not. But I think if you put these tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the hands of conscientious people who know how to make good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software and who know what to ask for, the implications to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software quality are massive. And again, like i don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't want people to gloss over the fact that Apple is themselves using Claude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavily. And when you see that giant list of fixes that Apple's delivering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the 27 OSs, those obviously came with tremendous help from AI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like If you think otherwise, I think you're you're deluding yourself. Ask anybody who's working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this business today. If you know anybody in Apple, ask them. They're using it heavily. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see in one year, a huge list of performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements, bug fixes, like little nice-to-haves being finally added,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's because they're getting assistance. Again, this is a bumpy road and it's not without its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems, but the implications here for the possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements in software quality are just so immense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And granted, it is also allowing people to make more crappy software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time programming has been made easier, it enables people who are not very good programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make software. You see, you know, PHP, Visual Basic, you know, like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've been a user of all, of every language has done this. And every time the accusation is always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, look at all this crap written in PHP. And like, yeah. But PHP also like enabled a bunch of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, enabled people who couldn't program before to program at all. And people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who were good programmers were were perfectly able to write good software with PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI is kind of that same, that same type of step, but in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much greater step all at once. It is enabling a lot more people to write software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in good hands, it is also an amazing tool to enable people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what they're doing to make even better software than they've ever made before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I wanted to tell this story in part because I'm just so blown away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by it. And also in part to maybe, you know, if you're a programmer out there and you're inspired, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it tackle whatever bug is on your hit list that you haven't been able to find or reproduce.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just say, hey, go look at this part of the code. I'm pretty sure something is able to cause this behavior and I can't figure it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Give it a shot. You'll be shocked what I can find.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it's funny. If it's funny you bring this up because over the last few days, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when Fable was, I don't know if it was unlimited or if it was just more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flexible usage, you know, or whatever. I forget exactly what the situation was, but I know that I am now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paying for Fable in a way that I wasn't just a few days prior. But anyhow, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had John in, you know, in the little disembodied head of John Syracusa in front of me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, you know, every time there's a new model, especially with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fable, you should just point it at your app or your repository
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say, find bugs. And I did that. And for the handful of you that are on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the call sheet test flight, I can assure you, and you've seen, there were a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of builds that were just like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like all of these different,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey admittedly, fairly esoteric bugs. Like it's not the same win that you're talking about, although I have had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those in the past. We've talked about it on the show. But a lot of little things that were like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey edgiest of edge cases that I wouldn't in a million years have found. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were they really affecting that many people? I don't think they really were. But is it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better that they're now affecting, hypothetically, no people? Yes. Yes, it is better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I prefer it that way. And I have been really pleased with how this has gone. And I have run it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in auto mode, but when it's done churning and whatever, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will go through line by line, like it's some fresh college graduate and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make sure I understand everything it's done and and what it's doing and why it's doing it. And there are times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I will go back and forth with it and be like, I don't think that's right. Or justify to me why you made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choice A, B, or C. And usually I end up realizing, oh, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see what it did and it's right. But I want to go through that process for me anyway. I want to go through that process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of understanding what it's done because otherwise I feel like I now have some phantom coworker whose code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't understand. And that's not good when you're a team of one. And so I like spending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time to go through and understand top to bottom, inside and out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, what's being done to what I still consider to be my code. But the point I'm really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to make is I have fixed a plethora of bugs that I wasn't even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aware of, much less things that, you know, have been latently bothering me for years. I think your story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is more impressive and more interesting because this is a problem that it certainly affects way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more people than any of my silly bugs do. But nevertheless, it's still useful to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get rid of these bugs, no matter how big or small.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I've been doing this for a while. And I wanted to give you the same caution I gave you last time. I was talking about my LLM
⏹️ ▶️ John bug fix releases, which is, you know, there's some error rate per line. How many defects per line of code
⏹️ ▶️ John does any individual create? And humans are flawed. So that that is the non-zero value. It's also true of LLMs.
⏹️ ▶️ John The more code they write, the more defects they're going to add. And me being the person who was always pitting my speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John cylinders against each other to see who's better, well, I've been doing the same thing with all the various coding models.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in particular, a fun thing to do is to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as Casey said, I'm always saying find bugs, find bugs, find bugs. And by the way, on that topic, I was trying Google's
⏹️ ▶️ John anti-gravity recently, their like coding agent thing. And I said, find bugs in my program.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was like, nope, can't do that. That would be insecure. I don't find it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I figured what his message was. It was like, I can't find, I can't take an open-ended request to find bugs because this is a security
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. I tried to phrase it 17 different ways. And every time it would come back to me with some snarky thing, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, even if X, Y, and Z, I still can't do it. I'm like, all right, well, you suck. Anyway, and I,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also I did have, I did have Fable drop down to Opus 4.8 at one point because I did something that
⏹️ ▶️ John pissed it off. And it was like, nope, I can't do that. Yeah, I had that too. It's like, it's all my own source code, man. Give me a break. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John since I have multiple models going against each other, what I will often do is, first of all, I'll
⏹️ ▶️ John always ask them all to find bugs and see if they find the same bugs. And they don't. They don't find the same
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs, which is not, which is like a little bit disconcerting She's like, how many bugs are there that they can
⏹️ ▶️ John find entirely disjoint sets? And why are they not finding each other? Like, why it is this bug that
⏹️ ▶️ John once it's pointed out, like Margo said, like greater than or less than flip, once it's pointed out to you, you're like, oh yeah, that was dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ John Must have been a typo. or I was just stupid, fat fingered or just wasn't thinking, right? But why did the other model not
⏹️ ▶️ John find that? And it's like, I guess they're just not looking at the whole code base or whatever. But anyway, so they find different bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on occasion, I will ask them, you know, I usually phrase it as propose a fix for this bug
⏹️ ▶️ John because there's seven ways this can be fixed. And I know which way I would go, but you propose a fix to it. And often they will
⏹️ ▶️ John propose something. And I've been doing this thing where I will have multiple checkouts and I will say, okay, model
⏹️ ▶️ John one, you fix the bug. Model two, you fix the bug. And then I will show each other the fixes
⏹️ ▶️ John made by the other models. I'll actually do this across three models. And I will say, and I will be like, here's a fix for this
⏹️ ▶️ John bug. Are there bugs in this fix for this bug? And then they will find bugs in each other's fix
⏹️ ▶️ John for the bug. And all that has told me that basically other
⏹️ ▶️ John than their ability to inexhaustively search forever and ever and do things so much
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than a human, they still create some number of defects
⏹️ ▶️ John per line of code they generate. And I don't know if it's higher or lower than any particular human
⏹️ ▶️ John would be, but either way, it's non-zero. So keep that in mind when you're there messing with things.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you find that bug that's like, oh, that's never going to happen. Like that's such an edge of an edge of an edge case,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel better with it being fixed. If the fix has lots of lines of code,
⏹️ ▶️ John think twice about it because you may have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just introduced a
⏹️ ▶️ John much worse bug than the one that you were fixing. And you're like, oh, I'll solve that problem by having another model
⏹️ ▶️ John or even the same model look at the fix and find bugs in that. It's not a, it doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John converge as far as I can tell so far. Again, with current technology, this changes every freaking week. We say this all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, just because we're saying this now doesn't mean it's going to be true literally next week, which is why we keep going
⏹️ ▶️ John back to this well and trying it again. But right now, in my experience with the top end models, they do not
⏹️ ▶️ John converge on perfection, just like humans don't converge on perfection. But they do, like, as we've all
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out a million times, they are such an incredibly powerful tool for helping that you absolutely should use them if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can stomach it. And they do amazing things that were not possible before, but they do not yet converge
⏹️ ▶️ John on perfection, which is kind of a shame. And what's also a shame is that we don't use curse words on the show or in our titles
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the time. And so we can't call this episode F everything we're doing 5X.
⏹️ ▶️ John Youngsters don't get the 2004 that this the Onion article is. They don't know about the Gillette
⏹️ ▶️ John Razor because 2004, I guess we're probably still watching ads on TV, maybe, people who didn't have TiVo. So we knew about the Gillette
⏹️ ▶️ John five blade razor or Actually, was it just three Blades then and five Blades came later? Anyway, I guess to
⏹️ ▶️ John go to know your meme or something, but we'll put a link in the show notes to the original Onion article. Yeah, all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kids walking around in their Nirvana shirts. Never seen it.