712: Mildly Technologically Traumatized
08 Oct 2026Ominous rumors and announcements from our favorite company.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco tries a Waymo
- Follow-up:
- Casey’s MyBMW foibles
- iMazing
- Approov
- Screen sharing
- OBD-II
- Home Assistant + Pushover + Shortcuts? (via Khaos Tian)
- GL.iNet Comet Q
- PiKVM
- Lex Friedman: Claude writes code; I author the apps
- AirPower desk video was by HTX Studio
- …who previously interviewed Tim Cook! (via Elijah Yap)
- Original video (via Adeiko)
- Ubiquiti home Wi-Fi vs. Eero
- FiOS CableCARD discontinuation
- TiVo’s desperation
- One-AirPod vs. two-AirPod audio settings
Settings→Accessibility→AirPods→ your AirPods
- M6/A20 Pro details
- Casey’s MyBMW foibles
- Rumored October event
- Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS
- Post-show: Casey and Marco go Phishing
- Q Barbecue
- Capital Ale House
- Allianz Ampitheater
- Setlist
- Recording
- Cupertino’s
- iPhone Duo 3D-printing model (you want the variant labeled “Fixed the large black areas showing through.”)
- Members-only ATP Overtime: AppZapper 3000 and The Delicious Generation
Sponsored by:
- Coax: Channel-surf your home media server
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Marco takes a Waymo
- Casey breaks BMW’s TOS
- Comet Q KVM
- Apologizing for AI coding
- AirPower desk was real
- Ubiquiti’s home Wi-Fi gear
- Single-AirPod audio modes
- Bye, CableCARD… hi, 5G?
- TiVO desperation
- Sponsor: Coax
- M6 and A20 cores
- Lighter MBPs?
- Logitech-Apple peripherals?
- Apple threatens Full Disk Access
- Ending theme
- P🐠 🖼️
Marco takes a Waymo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have either of you ridden in a driverless car yet? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope. I had the opportunity to ride my first Waymo. Oh, interesting. How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that? It was really. So it's exactly what everyone says. It was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird for like the first few minutes. And then I got bored and looked at my phone. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was just a taxi. And then on the way home, I'm like, let's book another one. And I booked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another one in homes. I'm like, well, as long as Waymo's available, I know like mathematically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's probably safer for me to take a Waymo than a human-driven car. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally immediately was converted. So one thing to know, like I was staying at a hotel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Waymo would not come into the hotel's little like loop driveway thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would only pick me up like outside, like across the street. So I, and I'm sure there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably some reason maybe Waymo doesn't go into private property. I don't know. Because I was thinking, like, even… even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like where it should pull over to drop you off or pick you up, that is itself a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very difficult problem. And I was thinking like, wow, everything about this is a very difficult problem. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get past the entire self-driving thing, which is not a small thing. And then you're like, oh, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where do you park? Like, even that is a difficult problem. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really nice. Like, it pulled up and you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app is fine. Like, it's, it's a modern, decently, seemingly well-made app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um price wise i I compared like, you know, comparing the Waymo to an Uber or a Lyft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the same time, you know, the prices jump around a lot, but they were all within the same ballpark of each other. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wasn't it wasn't significantly cheaper or significantly more expensive. And Waymos are everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there are tons of them. And you just don't like you stop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticing after a while. Even like like, you know, like we had, we had rented our own car. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were also like driving that around. But like when you're a driver on the road surrounded by Waymos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was fine. And being a passenger in a Waymo was fine. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was unbelievable. Like, cause I know I have said on this show years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago that I think it's going to be a very long time before we have fully self-driving cars on all roads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the way that we think. Waymo is not that. It is not on all roads, all like everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can't You can't have Waymo pick you up anywhere and it can't drive you anywhere. But in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the places it operates, it seems remarkably good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super cool. And there was even like, I i was worried, like, you know, like there was one time during the Waymo ride where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it had to make what what seemed like a a fairly difficult left turn into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, you know, pretty moderate volumes of traffic that I was like, when how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conservative is Like, is it going to be really conservative and be sitting here forever? And nope,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just did it like basically the same way humans would do it. You know, it wasn't aggressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wasn't overly like weirdly conservative. It just did it at a safe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and it was fine. And that's how the entire ride was. Like the reason it was so easy for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to stop paying attention to the fact that it was a Waymo was that it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drove like a human. And I know like, you know, if you compare to like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tesla self-driving, I haven't followed that recently. I've heard Tesla self-driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has gotten very good, but it's not Waymo good. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the sheer numbers of it all, it's not Waymo good. And frankly, I don't trust Tesla and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way they have handled safety and problem incidents and stuff before. Like I don't trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to be as safe as Waymo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I jump in here? I don't really disagree, but I don't, to be fair, I don't really know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm talking about. I just want to get ahead of all the feedback. I have understood, and actually Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I talked either earlier today or yesterday, and we'll talk more about that in the post-show or in the after show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I have heard, Marco's heard, we have heard, all three of us have heard, that Tesla self-driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is truly incredible these days. I get that. We understand that. We hear you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don't need to write us. But if for no other reason, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more comfortable in Waymo because it has a broader array of sensors. Like it has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LIDAR. It has all of these things. And I'm not saying Marco's right or wrong about which is safer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I will agree with you, Marco, that I certainly handle the bad times that Waymo has gone through a lot better than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I trust the bad times that Tesla's gone through.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because Waymo's safety record is shockingly good. And even I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure Tesla, like compared to person miles for human drivers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they're probably better than human drivers like per mile driven. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it's obviously, there's obviously some degree of like, you know, irrationality in the same way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are afraid of flying, but not afraid of driving to the airport in the at the same way, despite the math showing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they probably should be more afraid of driving to the airport. Similarly, like, I think people are more afraid about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco self-driving cars than they are by human drivers in a way that is mathematically, you know, not supportive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the data. But yeah, the Waymo, it just was so remarkably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normal and like it was a regular good driver. I couldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe it. It, To people who live in cities that are served by them all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you've probably done this years ago and you're probably like, yeah, what else is new? And literally, I took two of them and now I'm like, yeah, what else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is new? That's all it took. But if Waymo was available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in New York, I would take it all the time. And certainly anywhere that I am going that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is anywhere that I'm going where it would make sense to have an Uber drive me there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Waymo serves that area, I'm going to use Waymo instead. It's that good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's super cool. John, no thoughts? I'm surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, Not for me. I don't like to to be clear. I don't like taking human-driven Ubers or Lyfts either. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm an equal opportunity hater of other people driving.
Casey breaks BMW’s TOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right all right. I have some follow-up to start the show. I have been hacking on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my BMW, or really my BMW's app. The short short of this is, I think we covered this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the post-show from last show. I forget exactly when it was. It's been a minute. But I really would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to, for no good reason, to be completely honest, have information about my BMW and Home Assistant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is so if I want to, and I don't currently have this particular desire, but I want to know I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I want to say, oh, if it's less than 40 degrees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and over 70 degrees when I know I'm going to leave the house in the morning, go ahead and precondition the car. You know, If it's not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a pretty decent temperature range, go ahead and precondition the car. And I do this for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin's car because she has a much more reliable schedule for leaving the house. But I want to be able to do stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you know, be able to know if the car is charging or whatnot. And you know, maybe I can put a light
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the status board in the kitchen, whether or not the BMW is charging, all these sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things, right? I want to be able to do that. Do I need to? No, but I want to. So there were a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggestions after last week's show, many of which were very, very good. Um, First of all, a couple of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked about you know, my theory about certificate pinning and a couple other things. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had Claude decompile a copy of the IPA that I extracted with, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the, oh, shoot, I can't remember the name of the app. Like uh, I amazing or something? Yeah, iMazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe it was. Um, So I was able to copy the app off of one of my phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I had Claude go through and try to decompile it and just figure out, in a broad sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, can you extract useful API information from here? And the answer is yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was bad news because what Claude discovered is the app uses something called approve,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spelled A-P-P-R-O-O-V. And I'll put a link in the show notes. And what this is, is an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attestation service. So basically, I don't know much more than the following, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my understanding is there's some sort of communication between the app and I guess the approved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey servers to verify this is an honest-to-goodness app on an honest-to-goodness phone that's not being tampered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with and blah, blah, blah. And then I think it gives like a short-lived access token or something along those lines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All this to say, I can't just like man in the middle of this thing short of doing some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe some wonkiness with like a with an Android phone where you have a little more access to this sort of thing. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seemed like it was not likely that this was going to work because there's some attestation that I would never be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fake. A lot of people said, hey, you talked about how you do the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high fidelity, I forget what it's actually called, screen sharing in macOS. Have you tried low fidelity?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what I didn't remember when I was speaking about this last week is that the high fidelity screen sharing, I think, actually makes a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey virtual display when you do it rather than just re-emitting the regular display or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There's some way that virtual displays are involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John that, now that all my machines are up on 27 and I'm using screen
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing, the other downside, I mean, one of the downsides you're about to talk about about the high performance virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John display thing, disconnected, but the other downside is you can no longer like go
⏹️ ▶️ John and sit in front of the computer that is being controlled. like that. They're within two feet of each other. Sometimes I'm going back and forth, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you go over to the computer that is being shared with high performance screen sharing, it just has a black screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you try to press a button or something, have ever you experienced this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, I believe that's right. If you are using high-fidelity screen sharing, like you said, the physical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware is blackened or blanked or whatever while you're doing the screen sharing,
⏹️ ▶️ John don't know the next thing that happens, Marco, have you seen this? Um, I don't think so. So this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is the first time that I've seen a Mac do this, maybe in a long time. I'm sure there's some precedent
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. But if you stand in front of it like, oh, the screen's black, smack the space bar or whatever, like try to touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID on it or something. You know, like just I basically go say, hey, wake up. Like the first time it happened, I just thought the screensaver had come
⏹️ ▶️ John on or something. It talks to you. It speaks out loud and says, this
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac is being controlled by screen sharing. If you want to end the screen sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann session, hit the
⏹️ ▶️ John escape key. What? And the awesome thing is that it says that over its audio output,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the computer you're screen sharing from also says the audio because, you know, you can hear the audio
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco computer screen sharing. And when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they're within two feet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John of each other, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John delayed. Really weird. So yeah, that's it because I can't show anything on the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It can't put up a dialogue. You know what I mean? So it's like the thing when it says, you know, picking the
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, surely you've seen this one. If you leave it on the like pick your language too long on the setup process,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it talks to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it starts telling you about voiceover.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly. Voiceover is the bubble. I'm sure you've heard it before. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, it talks to you. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the high performance one is high performance, but it's weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is weird for sure. But people theorized, hey, maybe if you go to the low fidelity one, maybe that'll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. And what ended up happening was if I were to configure everything the way you're not supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, with like leaving the screen on forever, blah, blah, blah. It did work, but it seemed that after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of minutes, iPhone mirroring timed out and locked itself, which was a bummer. I also did try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using an HDMI dongle. I don't recall if I said that last week. That didn't make a difference. A few people have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggested an OBD2 dongle. This is a dongle that you plug into your car, but that's read-only,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I'd rather be able to affect the car, like I was saying. um A few people reached out and talked about, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what about BMW's car data? And I think it's BMW's car data. And there's also a third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service with a similar name, Smart Car, I think. The car data service is also read-only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not offered in the U.S. So now I know how all you EU folks feel. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read-only. Then I forget, forgive me, I'm going to butcher the name here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Chaos Tian from Mastodon. You know them from a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of very interesting work that they've done with reverse engineering and things like that. I'm pretty sure that's right. I hope I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not lying. Anyway, they pointed out, and they were not the only one, but they were the one I remembered, pointing out, hey, what you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do is you could use automations to intercept a push notification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then use like use shortcuts, I should say, to intercept a push notification and then have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone do whatever you want it to do using the my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BMW apps, um, intents and shortcut actions or whatever. I didn't try this, but I know it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should have worked or it should work, Um, which is a really great solution. I didn't try because were a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of other things I wanted to try. Number one, I wanted to try, well, could I like tickle the iPhone mirroring app and just have it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like refresh itself every couple of minutes to try to prevent that timeout? But as it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turns out, Uh, Marco was in town uh, literally this morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yesterday into today. So we hugged it out like 10 hours ago. But anyways, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Marco brought a couple of gifts. One of the things he brought is a 3D printed trinket, which we don't have in the show notes, but we should talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about at some point. Uh, But the other gift he brought is a GLINET Comet Q, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I, which is the one that works with a display port or whatever it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey capable iPhones. And the iPhone that I was using for this sorts of these sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things was an iPhone 15, I believe, that I was previously using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a webcam. So I hooked the Comet Q up to the iPhone, did all the instructions you need to do to get mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and keyboard support working. And then I set Claude off and say, hey, instead of using iPhone mirroring,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could we use this? And I sent a screenshot of Safari using their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically web-based VNC in order to affect the, you know, read and affect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone. And I said, hey, it doesn't have to be Safari. It can be Chrome or Firefox if those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey APIs are better. And this is one of those times that even as someone who has very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mixed emotions about AI, I was blown away because it basically churned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a few minutes and said, in so many words, why are we even fucking around with a browser?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why don't we just go directly to the KVM hardware and see if it has an API?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay, let's see. And it dug.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it turns out that the Comet Q is like a rebranded Pi VPN.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you, Pi KVM. Thank you. And so it said, why don't I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just do that? And I said, yeah, why don't you just do that? So now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I spent the afternoon after I dropped Marco off at the airport saying, okay, let's see if that can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. And it does. And then I thought to myself, wait a second, this iPhone 15, I think, is OLED.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget where the transition was. I don't like the idea that this thing is going to be on even if dimmed because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am begging for burn-in, right? So I said to it, well, hey, can I give you this iPhone's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passcode? And can you make the KVM lock it when it's done doing a refresh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then unlock it when it needs to do a refresh? And it said, yeah, fam, I got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. And now it's doing that. So this is hot off the presses like 10 minutes ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think I've got it. I think I've got it. So I use the Comic Q, which just lives attached
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the phone. Then the Comic Q, so the Comic Q is going into the iPhone's uh, USB-C port. Comic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Q is plugged into power and it passes the power onto the iPhone. And my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Mini will, every like minute or two, wake up the phone, unlock it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check it and see what the state of the world is, and then relock it. Or if I'd like to lock my car, start climatization,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever, whatever, it will unlock the phone. It will do whatever it needs to do and relock it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I turned off the always-on display. So the display is completely blank. This is very early news.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm reserving the right to change my mind on this, but I think I've got it. And it was all thanks to Marco giving me the comic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cue. So thank you, Marco. Thank you, everyone, for your suggestions. But I think Claude and I have gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. And let me tell you, I'm not asking you to love AI. I'm not asking you to think this is the coolest thing in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world. I'm not, I don't think I think it's the coolest thing in the world, but it's really freaking cool that I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to make this work. And I was in the same way that Lex Friedman, you know, has talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, I'll try to remember to put his post in the show notes, was talking about how he's kind of an author.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that was the word he used. I might be misrepresenting him. But you know, he was saying, I do a lot of, almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all my games and apps and whatnot are LLM coded. But says, Lex, I'm the author.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm the producer, if you will. I'm the one who's directing them. And if you don't have me, these apps would be trash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this app is trash because I don't care. I just needed to get stuff into MQTT so Home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Assistant can read it. But the point is, I was able to direct Claude to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what I wanted it to do. And in some cases, like saying, stop messing about with the browser, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idiot. Just go direct to the source. It was even better than what I could have come up with. So I'm not asking you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love AI. I'm not asking you to think it's the greatest thing. I'm not saying it's the greatest thing, but damned if it isn't really for you.
Comet Q KVM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god. Okay, I have so much to say. All right, so first. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco sorry. Carry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First, so the GLINET Comic Q, GLINET actually sent me a Comic Q and one of the other PoE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones as a freebie's. So thank you for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they sent me a couple of these sorts of devices as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what happened was, I had one Comic Q and one, the Power over Ethernet one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is great, by the way. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco really love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Comic Q, I'm like, this is so amazing. And, you know, you said it was a rebranded Pi KVM. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more like in the way that Mac OS is rebranded Unix. It's like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is based on Pi KVM, but they did a really nice job around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's um and it's it's a very it's like a much more you know polished, finished product than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of the Pi KVM stuff out there. Of course, you know what you'd expect. So anyway, I i love the the comic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco q so much. I plugged it into my data center hardware, and I'm like, oh my God, I want one of these on every one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Mac Mini locations. like Right now I keep Mac Minis in three different locations. I'm like, I want one of these, at least one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in each location. Plus, these would have made it so much easier to set them up. So I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that I can like bounce around to. So I go, and of course, they're backordered because like when they first launched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier, I think like August, they launched, um they were back ordered forever and I'm like, oh, God. So I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I really want another one. Let me see what eBay is doing. I go on eBay and they're selling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, their retail price is like $140 bucks or so. They're on eBay for like $170,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $175. And I'm like, oh, I do, I really could use one more at least. So I can like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move it around my servers. Like, let me get one more on eBay. And I'm bidding and I bid all the way up. And at the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minute, somebody sniped my bid for like $175. I'm like, oh, geez. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next day, they're in stock at Amazon for regular price. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ordered five. I'm just like, just go. I just want so many of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as it turns out, I don't quite need five. That's why I gave one to Casey. But I will mention they are at this moment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still in stock on Amazon, actually on sale for only $119. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are a nerd who needs a KVM of any kind, like a remote KVM, because the other thing too is like all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Comet series of KVMs, they are themselves able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run tailscale clients. So you're able to connect it to your Tailnet, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can, from anywhere, log into this KVM and, you know, whatever the machine that it's controlling is, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very useful because the KVM itself is a Tailscale node. So once you're in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Tailscale ecosystem, if you manage any computer remotely, especially if you're doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac Mini in a closet kind of situation or somebody else's house or a data center, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this can be awesome to save your butt if something breaks screen sharing. Or if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don't want to leave screen sharing open for maybe macOS security hole reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just not even have screen sharing enabled and just use this as the KVM. Um, you know, Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do your own security research and stuff, but like, it's such a fun little product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strongly recommend like if, if you're nerdy enough to listen to our show, the odds that you are nerdy enough to want one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these, I think, is pretty are pretty high. So I would, I would snag one while you can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, Anyway, so yeah, thank you to GLNF for sending the original freebie, and I bought five more and gave one to Casey. All right.
Apologizing for AI coding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, you just were disclaiming your AI coding work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know, look, I'm going to piss off everybody. First, the Tesla people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm sure they're already writing in. And now everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who doesn't like Tesla, they tend to hate AI. So now I'm going to piss them off. Sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that. I'll do my best. But you said that, like Lex was saying, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being the director of the AI is where the value is now. And the more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use AI coding tools, the more I see, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is obviously not the same thing as like you know compare it like making it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making an analogy to assembly language versus higher level languages. It's it's not quite that. it's it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a It's a larger and more profound jump than that. But the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that AI generally is not very good at figuring out what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do on its own. It is, however, very good at executing on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your ideas. And it's also not very good at doing a lot of polished, nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behaviors. It's not very good at coming up with thoughtful features. It's not very clever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's not very good at making nice designs. And these are all things that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the human can be responsible for making and directing and coming up with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What AI is really good at is kind of the worst parts of programming to a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people of like, oh, I have to build this stupid form and I have to debug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this really tricky thing. Like it's really great at that. And that's the parts that we kind of suck at. It's really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad at the parts that we are good at of like, hey, what if I had an app that did this? Like the idea parts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as like, first of all, as good idea people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also as experienced programmers, we bring skill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to using AI that the average person does not have. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that skill is still valuable. And I don't think we need to be sorry about using AI. I think using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI is helping us deliver great software. But we are the ones still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming up with the ideas, figuring out what's even good to do, and then figuring out all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things to ask it to do, everything to ask for. And then when it gives you the results, we are the ones that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like, this button should not be here. And this is, hey, this feature kind of sucks. Why don't you move it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of navigation? Or this should really be redesigned to fit this other pattern here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are the ones who know what to ask it to do. And if you look at the AI-assisted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coding output as a product, what you or I are able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have AI make with us is so much better than what a random person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who has no experience developing software is able to make because we know what to ask it to do and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know what kind of standards to hold it to. People who were like, oh, it's useless, like anybody could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make that. It's almost like when in the abstract
⏹️ ▶️ Marco art world, you know, like somebody can make abstract art
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a casual observer can, you know, look at some, you know, some painting of some really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool looking circles and be like, well, I could have done that. That sold for $20,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I could have done that. It's like, yeah, but you didn't do that. And the person who did that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their artistic contribution was not that they were the first people to ever think of putting circles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on paper. They put those circles on paper in that way. They had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that idea to do it at that time with those details and those methods and with that kind of story around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and that kind of marketing. And all of that, those are all really important parts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app development and product making. There's a lot of people out there who who just keep one starring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything I make. Oh, he said he made it with AI, so it's useless. How dare he charge money? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And these people, I look, I'm probably going to be dealing with these people for the rest of my career. We all will. But the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what people want is good products that are thoughtfully made, that work well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that solve their problems or delight them in some way. It doesn't matter who's writing the code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether it's some AI model churning out the actual code behind that doesn't matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all to the customers. All that matters is, do we make something good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and does it work for them or make them happy or both? And if AI helps us do that better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's great for everybody. I honestly, I am past the point of apologizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for using AI. I don't think any of us should really be apologizing anymore if it helps us achieve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those goals. And I know that's going to be a little unpopular, but the goals speak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for themselves because what almost all those people also want is for us to fix bugs in our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software or to not ship them in the first place or to work on their pet features. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want us to have the skill and bandwidth that AI gives us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they're uncomfortable with some of the realities of that. And I think, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there's only so much we can do to keep those people on board. I'm sure I've already lost them. So sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don't mean to be flippant about this. I mean this really seriously, that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the skill of making software is now involving using AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agents to help you. And that results in more, better software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that's great. And I don't think we need to be apologizing for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I hear you. And certainly it's been a real help for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me in Call Sheet. And I think that, you know, in talking to my peers and talking to Marco over the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 24 hours and talking to like underscore and talking to other people, it sure seems like not all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my peers, but a lot of my peers are actually further along in their AI journey than I am. And I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of two to four months behind them. But I can tell you that a lot of great stuff has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delivered in Call Sheet that would not have been, just straight up would not have happened were it not for Claude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Claude Code. So, and they are actually a lot of things we've talked about in this segment are former and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey future sponsors. Tailscale, I think, is coming up next week. Claude is sponsored in the past and I think is sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the future. GLINET has sent us free stuff and never asked for anything. It's just, it ended up that we legitimately like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I mean, consider that when you you know, listen to this segment. But genuinely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there's a lot of great stuff that I've shipped specifically because of Claude. And and I, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey struggling. I'm finding it harder to feel sorry for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I don't know. John, any thoughts before we move on? I do not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John is like walking away slow at the homer in the bushes, like, just, I'm out.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I'm not. I don't disagree with anything. If I disagreed, I would have something to say. you know, I'm more or less on the same page.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, if and when I eventually ship the app that I'm working on now, I'll have more to say about it then. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this might be a while.
AirPower desk was real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, last week we talked about an air power desk video that was very, very cool. And there was some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doubt, I think from certainly John and me, that maybe this was AI. We didn't think it was, but maybe. And Elijah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yap writes, in episode 711 John mentioned the Chinese YouTuber HTX Studio and his AirPower-inspired desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Elijah also provided, I think it was Elijah, provided a long-form link to the, I think we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had had one of those YouTube shorts in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I found the real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, thank you. All right. One John Syracuse. found the real link. Anyways, Elijah continues, I confirm he's real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not AI. He even interviewed Tim Cook in 2021. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Adiko writes, The AirPower Table is Real. The video is actually four years old. It originally debuted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Bilibili, I think, which is apparently Chinese YouTube. HTX recently started posting their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bilibili videos translated to English. The original video has 40 million views. We'll put a link in the show notes to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And John also found another video. Can you tell us about this one, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, so I've been looking at this channel now. And by the way, Elijah sent a picture of himself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the person from the video. So he
⏹️ ▶️ John firsthand, real person. And then, you know, I'm pretty sure Tim Cook was talking to a real person too. Anyway, and that was from 2021.
⏹️ ▶️ John So pre-AI-ish. But yeah, I was looking. at other, Everyone's been sending like, here's their latest video on the channel.
⏹️ ▶️ John And similar to I, when I watched this video, I didn't know the story about that other video being four years old,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that makes sense with the air power reference as well. But similar to the other video,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like they make these videos for Chinese language YouTube. And then HTX Studio, like
⏹️ ▶️ John other people might even make them. But an HTX Studio takes them and says, hey, we'll translate them to English. Right. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so, and narrate them and do all that stuff. So at the beginning of this video, we're going to like in the show notes. They say this
⏹️ ▶️ John video is by such and such and we're translating it to English. Anyway, this is a video about high bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John memory. And seeing the style of like, I watch a lot of like
⏹️ ▶️ John science technology explainer videos on YouTube. The style of this video definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John seems different than the ones I normally watch. I'm not, you know, I don't know enough to say this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a Chinese style tech video because it's one video I've seen. I have no idea, right? But it definitely is a slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John different style. And the production value is very high and it looks really
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. And I think they do a good job of explaining it. And so I'm putting it in the notes just to say, hey, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to know about high bandwidth memory, you've heard us talking about it a lot and you know about it because of
⏹️ ▶️ John the Rampocalypse. And that's where all the manufacturers are making high bandwidth memory for AI things. What
⏹️ ▶️ John is that memory? And how is it different than the regular memory that we have in our computers? And also
⏹️ ▶️ John some of the technology behind fabrication. I know we talked a while back about the ASML machines and
⏹️ ▶️ John how they produce the light source they use for masking chips and how insane that process
⏹️ ▶️ John is. This process isn't as ridiculous, but it does give you an appreciation for what goes into something as
⏹️ ▶️ John simple as making a memory chip and sticking it on a big GPU in a data center somewhere and
⏹️ ▶️ John why those things cost $300,000 each, right? How could it cost that much money? That doesn't make any sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're hard to manufacture. So anyway, check out the video. The link will be in the notes. Yep. Very good stuff.
Ubiquiti’s home Wi-Fi gear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got some feedback with regard to Ubiquiti home Wi-Fi versus Eero. We talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this in episode 710's overtime with regard to Ubiquiti's new Wi-Fi thinger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, Roland Lebrun writes: I got the Ubiquiti home Wi-Fi thing right when it was announced. I was looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at converting my home to Ubiquiti gear for a while, but I couldn't figure out what to get from their website. So this was perfect for me. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a good starting point in the Ubiquiti system. I've been adding various PoE switches in the house since, and it's glorious. Installation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was easier than my old TP-Link mesh setup. And yeah, I mean, it's been really great for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially once I solved my Sonos issues, which we talked about in the past, but short, short version, I turned off SonosNet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and everything got great. uh However, in contrast to that, Miles writes, I switched from Eero to Ubiquiti and I miss Eero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey greatly. So much constant tweaking and fiddling is necessary and it doesn't feel solid, even with an all-wired backhaul. I also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got the travel router everyone loves and it conks out constantly. I don't know if I'm unlucky or people just like the amount of control and info
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they give you and let the fragility and fickleness uh slide. I understand to a point what Miles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is saying. That has not been my experience, though. I traveled last week to the podcast-a-thon, which, oh, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I meant to put this in the show notes. Thank you to everyone who donated. I don't have the numbers in front of me because I completely forgot to put it in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes, but it was something to the effect of like $756,000 for the year or for the campaign.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We're like just so short, it's so close to 5.6 million
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lifetime, I believe. And I really, really, really want to thank all of the ATP listeners who have even considered donating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's very kind of you and I really appreciate it. Anyways, when I was in Memphis, I used both my UTR and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UTR-LR, which we'll talk about in a pre-show in 10 weeks when I finally get there. And they all worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. So I'm not saying Miles is wrong. I'm not saying that's not what their experience was. But for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's been great. And I haven't heard any other crummy experiences. Certainly, or excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, Ubiquiti is way more fiddly, but I don't actively fiddle with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things unless I desire to. Like, I wouldn't say I'm doing maintenance or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think Ubiquiti gives you a lot of fiddling that you can do, but you don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to. uh, You used to need to. like, It used to be a lot harder to set up ubiquity system. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much harder to know what to buy. It was much harder to set it up because it was, you know, it was much less polished.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, it's really like the app is super easy. It's really well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't like, you know, send a router to totally non-technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to set up. But honestly, I don't think I do that for any brand of router. Um, it's just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ubiquity stuff is really good now and it's way nicer to use than it used to
⏹️ ▶️ John I put these two in there. There were a couple other feedbacks on both sides of this just to show that the same product can
⏹️ ▶️ John get such different reactions from people. And I mean, I'm not, since I don't have personal experience with this, I can't
⏹️ ▶️ John say who's closer to being right. um but i one theory that seems plausible to me is that
⏹️ ▶️ John because there are a lot of things to fiddle, sometimes people will go fiddle with things that they shouldn't be fiddling with
⏹️ ▶️ John and that causes a problem. And then future fiddling to fix the fiddling, you know what I mean? Like enough rope to hang yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of thing, where, I mean, I'm not sure if that's what's going on or whether things really are flaky. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, things like the travel router, there's not much to fiddle with anyway. So I don't understand why that would be flaky. But anyway, I do hear
⏹️ ▶️ John both sides of this and people, people say, I mean, these are totally, totally opposite experiences.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, you two are both in favor as well. But I still hold up Casey's situation as an
⏹️ ▶️ John example of sort of a miles type of thing. And he's like, oh, I turned off Sonosnet. It was fine. But here's
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing. You didn't have to turn off Sonosnet when you had Eero. Why? Like, is
⏹️ ▶️ John Eero work is Eero working around the crappiness, whereas Ubiquity is just sticking to the straight and narrow? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John i don't I don't know the answer to those questions, but I do know that the two first people I knew who dealt with Ubiquiti,
⏹️ ▶️ John one, had this weird experience where it wasn't as good as zero in a way that really mattered to them until they figured out a workaround. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn't fill me with confidence. But, you know, anyway, I'm not in the market for one, but I will still definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John keep my eye on this because I like the tech specs. And I, you know, I don't mind a little bit of fiddling.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I will consider this for four years from now when I replace my Wi-Fi setup again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, if I recall correctly, shoot, I can't remember the acronym. I believe it starts with an S, but basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there's some sort of thing that lets you kind of cross between networks and assign priorities
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to different network nodes where you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. Eero was way more forgiving and Sonos' implementation was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straight up incorrect. And Eero would roll with it, I think in part because it just didn't really care about that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of thing because it wasn't it wasn't not smart enough, but I can't think of a better turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of phrase, but it wasn't smart enough to care about these sorts of things. Whereas Ubiquiti does care about those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorts of things. And because Sonos's implementation was unequivocally wrong, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey caused problems. And so what ended up happening was when I told the Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to stop trying to make your own faux network within the actual network, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked great. And so I understand why Sonos was acting the way it was. I'm sad that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took them this long to finally do the switch or provide a switch to turn off SonosNet. But once they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did, it's been bulletproof ever since. But I hear what you're saying, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like that's definitely a consumer thing of like some product is doing something wrong, but you've just got to deal with it. Like, cause you're
⏹️ ▶️ John a consumer product and people are going to complain their Sonos crap doesn't work, so fix it. And Ubiquiti is more of like, well, they're the ones that are wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don't they just fix their stuff? You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they're the no-talent-ass clown.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why should I change? He's the one who's fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There it is. that's
⏹️ ▶️ John a different mindset. But, you know, who knows? Maybe Ubiquiti is coming over to the other side and they're going to start doing weird workarounds for broken
⏹️ ▶️ John consumer products, too.
Single-AirPod audio modes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, continuing on as we try to speedrun the rest of this, because I can tell John is very upset with me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One AirPod versus two AirPod audio settings. We've been talking about this with regards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to some funky noises when you go mono. Is that right, John? Remind me what the situation was here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like when you only had one AirPod in, it was in transparency mode, and if my finger would touch the microphone
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would make a fuzzy noise. We talked about this last week. It seemed like I had solved my problem, but then everyone was writing in saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, I did the thing that you said Uh, where there's like one AirPod mode and two AirPod mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it turns out in one AirPod mode, I have very limited options. Well, there's a setting for that too, and I forgot to mention it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So if you go into settings, accessibility, AirPods, and then choose your AirPods, there's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a noise control section. And within that section, there is noise cancellation with on one AirPod
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And if you don't turn it's off by default. And if you don't turn it on, you don't even get the option to do
⏹️ ▶️ John noise canceling with one AirPod. And the only options you get are off and transparency, which is another reason people thought,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, one AirPod is always transparency. It's not. That's just the default. And it is a fairly constrained default
⏹️ ▶️ John because your only other choice is off. But if you turn on this accessibility option, then you have all the options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I had no idea that that. Like, I knew that it was by default, it would always go transparency,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when you took one earbud out. And I knew that there was an option to turn that off, but I did not know that detail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, well, if you want this other behavior, like, yeah, it's, it's kind of a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, this is spread in like seven different places and not explained anywhere or whatever, but just that's what this podcast is for.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just so you know, it seems to me, from what I've been able to tell, there are in fact two different settings. There's the one AirPod setting,
⏹️ ▶️ John the two AirPod setting, and then the one AirPod setting is artificially constrained by having an extra option into accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to turn on to get more options there.
Bye, CableCARD… hi, 5G?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. John, you have done the unthinkable and you've beaten me to it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am in my own head I'm playing taps as we speak. What have you done?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well, so for reasons that listeners to rec diffs know, I've been spending a lot of time on
⏹️ ▶️ John phone with customer support and that continues. And I guess I just kind of get, you know, you know, when you're like cleaning,
⏹️ ▶️ John you're like, well, I'm cleaning. I might as well clean all the things. If I'm going to be stuck on the phone listening to hold music and
⏹️ ▶️ John dealing with customer support, shouldn't I also do the thing where I call Verizon and deal with my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey card? Discontinuation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like November 5th is the cutoff date, isn't it? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John to catch everyone up, Verizon is my ISP and they are dropping support for cable card,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is how my TiVo gets its television signal. They're dropping support because the law that required them to support
⏹️ ▶️ John it lapsed and was not renewed. And so they don't have to support it anymore. And so they're not. So they basically
⏹️ ▶️ John said, hey, we were forced to give you this cable card and you enjoyed a decade or two of amazing third party
⏹️ ▶️ John products that made our TV product better. But that time is over. Your cable card will no longer be supported.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to keep getting television from us, you're finally going to have to let us put a stupid box in your house, which is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John just a much worse, you know, TCP IP based
⏹️ ▶️ John video streaming box branded by Verizon. And I don't want to do that. So my plan was,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, I'll just,
⏹️ ▶️ John before November 5th, I'll call them up and I'll try to get rid of my TV service.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried on the website before that, you know, can I just see if I if I drop down to like the cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ John TV service they have or something? And it kept telling me my bill would go up and not down. So I'm like, I'm going to have to call.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, you don't want to call Verizon. So my plan was to wait sometime between when they gave us the November 5th
⏹️ ▶️ John date and the date itself somewhere in the middle because I didn't want to be doing it on November 4th when everyone else is scrambling
⏹️ ▶️ John and they're all messed up. And I didn't want to do it when they sent the email to everybody. So here we are kind of in the middle.
⏹️ ▶️ John I called them. A nice person uh at Verizon, after penetrating their various
⏹️ ▶️ John systems to get to a human being, um told me uh that I could save money by not having TV uh
⏹️ ▶️ John you know because that's what I asked. Can you just get rid of the TV? Am I allowed to do that? I said, yeah, sure. um
⏹️ ▶️ John and they they noted some that I had some ancient plan and they noted I had been a customer forever and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I'm like, yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann know.
⏹️ ▶️ John They said what everyone else, what the email said and what everyone else who has done this said, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John normally we want your equipment back. Don't even bother. Just keep the cable cards. They're
⏹️ ▶️ John yours. We don't even want them. Recycle them. Do whatever you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can't even return them to us. We don't want them back. So thanks for that. That's how much they hate the cable cards.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's right. What are they going to do with them, though? It's useless. It's just recycling. Yeah. So they,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I, at first, I said, is there, there's not a way that I could have like a really cheap TV
⏹️ ▶️ John plan without having any Verizon equipment in my house? And they said, no, there's, that's not a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can do anymore. So I'm like, all right, fine, just kill the TV entirely. We used to call that cutting the cord,
⏹️ ▶️ John which never made a lot of sense and has made increasingly less sense as time has gone on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because obviously, no cords are being severed. Although it is funny, when I first moved into
⏹️ ▶️ John this house, the people who owned this house before me had RCN internet. I don't even know
⏹️ ▶️ John if they still exist or somebody bought them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John RCN cable-based internet. And they had canceled that service, apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know this because outside the house where the RCN coaxial cables came in, they were literally cut,
⏹️ ▶️ John like cut ends of the cable were sticking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco up. I saw where they
⏹️ ▶️ John had cut them. Like, wow, someone really did cut the cord. But anyway, the fiber optic
⏹️ ▶️ John cable that comes into my house that is currently or was providing television, telephone,
⏹️ ▶️ John and internet has not been cut, thankfully, and still exists. Only now, it just provides
⏹️ ▶️ John internet and telephone. And yes, I still have a quote-unquote landline telephone. Don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey add me, as they say.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fine. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a cool number. I want to keep it. You know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can transfer those. anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John you can transfer that to voice over IP. But honestly, the voice over IP things weren't any cheaper than what Verizon is giving.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could transfer one and it would be a big hassle and it would cost me the same amount per month. So I looked into it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn't see a lot of savings there. Anyway, so yeah, now I have no more TV and
⏹️ ▶️ John my bill was reduced. My monthly bill or will be reduced once the new monthly bill comes
⏹️ ▶️ John from $250 per month to drumroll $100 per month.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pretty good. Yeah. Pretty, pretty good. And they also said, and by the way, we have a
⏹️ ▶️ John new five gigabits Fios option.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I said, how much more per month is that? And they said, it's $10 more per month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I'm so mad at you,
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, they're doing to the credit of the person who I talked to at Verizon. They did not try to convince
⏹️ ▶️ John me not to cancel my TV service. They didn't try to do anything, but they did try one upsell. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ John receptive to that potential upsell of the 10, you know, try to sell this person more faster internet access.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here's the thing. Two things. One, they have to come into your house and change the equipment. I'm like, really? I
⏹️ ▶️ John just got the equipment changed for the one gigabit upgrade. didn't seem that long ago. This equipment can't handle five? They said, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we need to go in and change the little box with probably an even smaller box.
⏹️ ▶️ John And two, I can't use five gigabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ethernet. All My whole home network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is one gigabit. I don't have
⏹️ ▶️ John any switches. I don't even have 2.5 gig switches. I have everything is 1 gigabit in my house. So I just
⏹️ ▶️ John tuck that one into my back pocket. So Casey, I do not actually have five gigabit per
⏹️ ▶️ John FIOS for both of those reasons. One, it required someone to come to us and change equipment. But two,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would need to change all my switches. Uh, And it's not that many. Like, I have maybe three switches that
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have to upgrade. I could probably leave like the TV entertainment center as a one gigabit switch Cause who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the computer room and the Synology and like, you know, I might need to fish out all the cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know if the cable can handle five gigabits. I don't remember if it's Cat6 or Cat 5e. Um, uh, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco might. Before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody writes in, we know cat five E can do faster over shorter distances. Good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, Well, it's a pretty long distance. I'm at 100 feet. It's a long, like, and it's not coiled up
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere. It's a hundred legit hundred feet because, of course, the fiber optic cable comes into my house at the far
⏹️ ▶️ John opposite corner of where I'm sitting right now. So there is significant amount of routing through the basement to get
⏹️ ▶️ John to where I am. So anyway, the main barrier is like, I haven't really found
⏹️ ▶️ John any even 2.5 gig or 5 gig switches that are inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ John and not hot and don't have fans and are reliable and blah, blah, blah. So I'm just going to let this sit for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it's good to know that if and when I decide that one gigabit internet is not fast enough for
⏹️ ▶️ John me, this is out there waiting for me. And I'm excited about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm very jealous that the five gig is there. I looked like a month or two ago and we couldn't even get two gig internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. So I am jealous. But I can tell you that my Ubiquiti equipment, a small, small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of it, is 10 gig capable. So I have 10 gigabit, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet, but intranet between my computer and my Synology. And that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I think I have one more port available that can go more than uh one gigabit, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to figure over time that the, the, you know, that type of speed will come down
⏹️ ▶️ John in price to more consumer things. we'll use, you know, chips will be fabbed on a better process someday. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the things won't be as hot. They won't need as many fans or ideally any fans. And just like a gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ John switches used to be expensive way back in the day, and now they're just commodity junk you can find anywhere. That'll happen
⏹️ ▶️ John with 2.5 gig and 5 gig and 10 gig eventually. So maybe I will upgrade eventually. I'm just keeping that
⏹️ ▶️ John one in my back pocket for now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it's funny. like I honestly, I cannot think of any reason why I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need faster than gigabit. Like, I don't i don't want to like bogate myself here. Like, I don't think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i need that for anything. I wouldn't say ever, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I i'm never limited by my gigabit speed. However,
⏹️ ▶️ John always the server on the other end that's the problem. Right. like we're i'm it's it's It's very difficult to max out
⏹️ ▶️ John my connection during normal work. You really need to do some sort of like peer-to-peer BitTorrent or Steam download or
⏹️ ▶️ John something to really actually saturate my gigabit. And it's not, you know, so if I had a faster connection, it would just be
⏹️ ▶️ John even harder for me to find things on the other, on the wider internet that can fill that pipe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But however, of course I want it. Like there's,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there's no reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John $10 a month? Yeah. If I, if I had the routers, I would have immediately upgraded.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. I would, like, I would definitely pay the $10 a month and just start like, you know, buying hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dollars worth of new Switches to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John upgrade. That's
⏹️ ▶️ John the second part that I'm a little wary about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah. Like, I would definitely, like, that would definitely trigger like an upgrade of all the Switch infrastructure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it's like, And I really don't need it. And that's a thing. But boy, would that be cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. No, I feel like I mostly agree with you, but the one thing that consistently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consistently maxes out my downstream bandwidth, downloading a new Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't have great luck with Apple's stupid Akamai, CDN, whatever thing they're
⏹️ ▶️ John don't get the best speeds from them. You know what this means, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our work. We need it for our work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That's exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unlike the other consumer products that you can buy, you can't just actually choose that 5 gigabit fiber so you got to wait for Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John or some other ISP to offer it in your area.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. The only other choice we have around here is Comcast, and it's never going to be that fast, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least not symmetric anyway. Sigh. That's all right.
TiVO desperation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of TiVo, they're getting a little desperate, John. I wonder why. You got an interesting email recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can you tell me about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I'm not going to read the whole email, but it was like kind of coincident with me deciding to make this call. They
⏹️ ▶️ John sent out an email to all their existing customer or their remaining customers, let's say, and said, hey, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John that feature where you can skip commercials by hitting a button? We're going to charge money for that now,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is hilarious. Like the whole, you know, not to rewind all of DVR history,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like Replay TV came out and let you skip commercials and they got sued out of existence. And TiVo was like, we don't let you skip commercials. We just
⏹️ ▶️ John let you skip forward 30 seconds. It just so happens that most commercials come in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey multiples of 30 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John So hit the buttons as many times as you want, right? Eventually, late, late in the life of TiVo,
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo said, you know what? Let's just give them a button to skip commercials. We know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Let's just, let's just
⏹️ ▶️ John give them a button. And so they made one button on their remote skip all the commercials. So what used to be knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John how many times you had to hit 30 seconds skip and often was also like, enter the secret code to enable 30 second
⏹️ ▶️ John skip. Anyway, they just gave you one button on their remote that would skip all the commercials. And that was pretty cool. And
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, now that they're taking their remaining customers to say, hey, do you happen to live somewhere that can still use
⏹️ ▶️ John TiVo? Maybe using TiVo over the air because they can do this over the air as well. So if you're using TiVo with an antenna, but you still have
⏹️ ▶️ John commercials, we know where the commercials are. And we were giving you a button to skip them, but now we're going to charge
⏹️ ▶️ John you a fee. So instead of you watching commercials and like people making money by showing you ads, we're going
⏹️ ▶️ John to charge you money to skip those commercials. And if TiVo was in any way relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world, they would be sued out of existence, but no one cares about them anymore. So they'll probably get away with this right before they die.
Sponsor: Coax
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by COAX. So imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you're a child of the 80s and 90s, like I don't know, me, and you really reflect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fondly, at least in part, about going through the TV guide, the, the, the, the cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guide that was on the TV. For children, you would go to a particular channel and it would scroll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the list of all the things that were on all the other channels. And almost all the time, what ended up happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was 99% of it was trash and there were like one or two good options. Well, imagine that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what if all of the options were good options? Because all of the options come from your own media.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's kind of what Coax does. So Coax is a zero config, zero hassle way to watch your home media server and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Plex or Jellyfin or Emby, like it's streaming into your house over good old-fashioned coaxial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable, hence the name. So this is really clever. And what's really great about Coax is sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you sit down, you know you want to watch something, but you're not really sure what. And you've got effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infinite choices, be that because of a streaming service or particularly if you're like me, because of all the stuff you've
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amassed at home. Well, Coax, to a degree, removes the element of choice because it's pulling from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your own library, but it also adds a tiny bit of time pressure because it effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey treats these things as though they are on right now. So that means that you can browse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and watch all kind of in one, and it's really, really clever. Additionally, Coax
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a custom-built video engine for handling direct playback of MKV files. And despite that, the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bundle is under 60 megs. And it supports all four major platforms, macOS, iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TVOS, of course, and even VisionOS. That's how you know that we ain't messing around here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it is really, really clever and really, really fun. And if you're interested, and you should be, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should go to coaxtheapp.com, c-o-a-x-th-h-e-a-pp-p.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and check out coax. Again, c-o-a-x-th-h-e-a-pp-p.com. Check it out and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give it a whirl. It is zero config, zero setup. You can go from, hey, that sounds interesting to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow, I'm using it in just a few minutes. We thank Coax the app for sponsoring the show.
M6 and A20 cores
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have a bunch of details about the M6 and A20, and I could take a stab at this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think it's probably best served for John. Why don't you just take us through this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is from the High Yield and semi-analysis YouTube channels. And YouTube does this weird thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John you're like, okay, what channel is this from? So I can put it in the notes. And it shows it as being attributed to both. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they have some kind of collaboration feature. So I don't even know which, like, which channel is the primary channel for this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I'm just telling you what it says. We'll put a link in the show notes. Obviously, we'll also include timestamp links to the sections we're going to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about. But suffice it to say, I think one of these channels is the place that like gets the chips and cuts them open.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And the other channel is someone who gives like commentary and analysis. And I'm not sure which is which. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, they got the chips and cut them open, which is what we always want to do. is like, let's see what
⏹️ ▶️ John the heck is in there. And obviously, once they do that, they're using informed,
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to say speculation, but educated guesses about what everything is. And some things are very sure, but this is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John this. This is definitely that. And other parts of the chip they say in the video is like, we don't know what this is and
⏹️ ▶️ John we're not going to guess. So there is a large amount of unlabeled area, but it's probably this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, here are some tidbits. I've pulled the highlights that I thought were interesting from this video,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, with timestamp links. So the first bit is that the M6 uses the same
⏹️ ▶️ John super cores as the A20 Pro and also the same E-cores as the A20 Pro with only
⏹️ ▶️ John small changes, likely due to chipped area optimizations rather than core differences, according to the video. So that answers
⏹️ ▶️ John the question we kept speculating about and has changed over time. It used to be that the M chips would
⏹️ ▶️ John have the like the big, the, you know, they weren't called super cores then, but the big, the power cores from
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous phone chip. And then when the new phone chip comes out, it would be one core generation ahead
⏹️ ▶️ John of the M chips. But since then, the scheduling of everything having to do with silicon from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has just been all over the map. And right now, the M6 and the A20 Pro are in sync. They've
⏹️ ▶️ John got the same super cores and the same e-cores. Question. And again, we'll put a link in the show notes to a stamp
⏹️ ▶️ John stamp. You know that because they look exactly the same when you cut the chips open and you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at them, like there's a very sort of telltale pattern. You can just eyeball and go, yeah, that's the same. I see that's the same core.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there's that answer. Second, the A20 Pro's e-cores have
⏹️ ▶️ John eight megabytes of L2 cache. And they go through this in the video, trying to label the cache levels as L1,
⏹️ ▶️ John L2, L3, L4. It's difficult because Apple keeps adding layers. and other like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John L2P versus regular L2 because they don't want to go like L5. There's
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of cache on these chips. But anyway, the A20 Pro cores have eight megabytes of L2 cache.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is the L2 cache in the phone chip and the Pro phone chip
⏹️ ▶️ John has been on quite a journey. The A18 Pro, four megabytes. The A19 Pro, six megabytes. The A20
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, eight megabytes. That is not a normal progression for the amount of cache in it. Let me just tell you, because cache
⏹️ ▶️ John on chip takes space and it costs a lot of money because it takes space. And it's not the same as the RAM that in
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM chips or whatever. So Apple has apparently found that giving more cache
⏹️ ▶️ John to the eCores in particular is beneficial and it has doubled in only a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, it makes a huge difference to performance usually. That's why it's a big deal when chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increase the caches because it usually helps performance substantially. And it's a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple will often use it to give a chip generation a boost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the core itself didn't get that much better like in kind of non-cachable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or non-cached workloads but they like And oftentimes it is like during a process shrink
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this where like, oh, we have more real estate to spend now because the process shrink. We can throw more cash at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that makes the speed difference even better for most workloads.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And the tricky bit with cash is it's like, I mean, Apple has less of this problem
⏹️ ▶️ John than other people, but you're like, how much is the right amount of cash for what level cash, for what cores, for blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah? Like, what is the right amount? And so that's why you end up with something like A18 with four. They're like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I didn't look up what the A17 was, but then they go to A19 and be like, we think the E-cores can benefit from
⏹️ ▶️ John more cash. So they go to A19 and they go to six. And like what they're looking for is like, okay, we don't,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can't just say like, oh, just give it as much as it wants because every every tiny little square millimeter on that chip is so precious
⏹️ ▶️ John and so expensive. Any millimeter used for cash is not used for something else. So you really want to spend it wisely.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don't want to give like the e-cores this huge amount of cash and like turns out they use like one eighth of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's just a waste of space, a waste of power. It's a waste of everything. So you're cautious. Like, let's go from four to six.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then they said, actually, six wasn't even enough. We should give them more. Like, and they're determining from real
⏹️ ▶️ John world use, like how much of that cash are they using? How much does it benefit? And, you know, with simulations and stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John also, like, what are real workloads that are running on our phone chips? Do they actually benefit from more cash?
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it make them faster? Does it make them more power efficient? Like, whatever. Does it produce less heat? Does they have to go to DRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John less often? And so they've decided from the A18 to the A20 that the E-cores need double the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of cache. And in comparison, if you look at the shared S slash P core L2 cache, that
⏹️ ▶️ John has stayed at 16 megabytes that entire time. So the E cores went from 4 to 6 to 8,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the S and P cores, 16. That seems to be the right amount. And obviously it's more, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the right amount for them. So keep an eye on the caches. Let's you know where Apple feels like they've been underperforming in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John and where it's worth spending die area on in the future. And speaking of memory, let's go on
⏹️ ▶️ John to memory bandwidth. I forget if this was in the specs when we looked it up,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don't recall it being there. But just in case it wasn't, when we were looking at the chips when Apple released the products,
⏹️ ▶️ John like on their, on their web pages, but what they say from looking at the chips is that the 16
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabyte M6 has the same memory bandwidth as the M5, which is 154.6
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabytes per second. Only the 24 gigabyte and 32 gigabyte M6
⏹️ ▶️ John have the increased memory bandwidth lengths to the faster 1066, 10667 megabits DRAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have 170.7 gigabytes per second. And so if we didn't say that before, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John worth knowing your RAM speed depends on how much RAM you get your Mac with.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it doesn't matter to you, it doesn't matter. But if you're doing like AI workloads and you actually are bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John limited, um I mean, I don't know if you'd try to do AI workload with 16 gigabytes of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John but who knows? Maybe using a small model. But keep in mind, the 24 gigabyte and 32 gigabyte M6 have faster
⏹️ ▶️ John memory bandwidth than the 16 because they just use faster RAM chips. That's just a choice that Apple made.
⏹️ ▶️ John Moving on to the GPU, the core counts for the base no suffix
⏹️ ▶️ John M chips. The M1 had eight cores. The M2, M3, M4, M5 had 10
⏹️ ▶️ John cores. And the M6 has increased the core count for the first time in four years, going to 12. So that's another significant
⏹️ ▶️ John advance. M1 had eight, and they just said 10 cores is enough for anybody for the whole rest of the time. M6 says, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what? It's a shrink. We think maybe more cores would be worthwhile, especially now that they have this AI neural
⏹️ ▶️ John accelerator or whatever things in them. So that's worth noting as well. We've finally
⏹️ ▶️ John moved beyond 10 cores in the GPU. And speaking of cores, the M6
⏹️ ▶️ John chip is the first M chip to come with all three kinds of cores. It's got
⏹️ ▶️ John S, P, and E. And I didn't realize this when we were talking about it, but it's… Oh, I didn't either.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, because it's a stupid naming. You're like, what the hell? But anyway, the M5 only has S and E cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John the renamed S and E cores. The M5, Pro Max, and Ultra only have S and P cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John And remember, P is the medium now. So like we've got the one that has really big and little, that's the M5.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the Pro Max and Ultra have really big and medium. They don't have any of the E cores. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the M6 traded two of its S cores for four P cores. So they traded two
⏹️ ▶️ John big cores for four mediums. And they share the same cluster with the S cores and most of
⏹️ ▶️ John the cache. So if you look at the chip layout, like the what used to be like the power core cluster,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the big cores, they have their own set-aside bunch of cache that is only
⏹️ ▶️ John shared by however many S cores there are. And when the M6 traded out S for P cores,
⏹️ ▶️ John those P cores share that same cache with the S cores. So they're in these little like clusters. The E cores have their own cluster
⏹️ ▶️ John and they've got their own cache that we just talked about. And then, of course, there's the system level cache that's above that.
⏹️ ▶️ John There's lots of levels of caching in these chips, but you can see physically speaking, like, and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John why they made that trade, right? Because yes, you drop two of the biggest cores, but in exchange, you
⏹️ ▶️ John get four of the medium cores. And apparently that trade off on the M6 has been beneficial for the workloads
⏹️ ▶️ John that chip sees, as evidenced by Marco doing his benchmarks and other people benchmarks on the chip so But yeah, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John the only one with all three sizes because it's got the biggest ones, a bunch of mediums, and a bunch of littles as well. And it'll
⏹️ ▶️ John be interesting to see for like the future generations, the M7 and so on. Do they keep this thing where like the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Max and Ultra only have big and medium and the littles are only for the no suffix one or do they mix
⏹️ ▶️ John it up on all of them? um Yeah, we'll put a timestamp links to a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially frames from the video that show all these different cores and you can see what they look like. You can see
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual relative sizes of a small, medium, and large core and how much bigger the large
⏹️ ▶️ John cores are than anything else. And then you can see for yourself that the cores are the same because they look like little maps of a city
⏹️ ▶️ John and then when the maps match, it's the same core.
Lighter MBPs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, there is a rumored October event. It is the 7th of October as we sit here recording,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there is a rumor that there was going to be an event, I think, on the 13th, something like that. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we don't plan to do a full preview or anything like that this episode, but there were a couple of tidbits we wanted to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. So, on the 4th of October, uh, Gurman posted: I'm told the new OLED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touchscreen MacBook Pros are lighter, significantly lighter. Apple's re-engineered the machine's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interior, miniaturizing parts and rearranging components to make the computer much easier to carry. The current 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro weighs as much as 4.8 pounds compared with the 3.3 pounds for the 15-inch MacBook Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So any meaningful reduction would be immediately noticeable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you scared? This is not new information. I believe when the OLED touchscreen
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pros were first rumored, I think more than a year ago, maybe two years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like, this is going to be a new case design, and also the case is going to be thinner and lighter. But this is like late breaking, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn't add these italics. Gurman put these italics in there. Significantly lighter, which I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to say, as I mean, I'm not really, obviously, as a MacBook Pro fan, I'm not. I'm not a laptop fan, but
⏹️ ▶️ John uh as someone who cares about uh pro level max anytime I see uh
⏹️ ▶️ John something about the pro level laptops getting thinner and lighter, I worry. Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John point. That's your desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Because their track record is not amazing in this area because last time they made the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pros thinner and lighter, that was the wonderful 2016 generation that we all hated. And it made them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly worse as MacBook Pros. And when they finally redesigned them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M generation to be better, they made them a little bit thicker and heavier. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowed them to give them a better keyboard, all the ports we needed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, great battery life, and great cooling. So what I'm wondering here is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is kind of what is at stake here. So to make them significantly lighter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don't need to change the keyboard for that. So that's probably, at least for that reason, the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do need to change the keyboard to make it super thin, but maybe they don't, maybe, let's hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's not on the table right now. Okay. Weight comes mostly from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the metal and the battery. Now, maybe, you know, if they have like different ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to design the frame to save weight, sure, but like, wouldn't they have done that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already if it was that easy? Like, that's kind of what I think. Like, I'm a little worried about it coming from that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most likely answer is that it comes from making less battery in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is not something that I want. So I… But you shouldn't care that much about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you're using it on
⏹️ ▶️ John your desk all the time. It's plugged in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That one, yeah. But the one that I like travel with, my wonderful little M4 14-inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I worry about that. Like the 14-inch one is where I'm concerned about the battery life. The 16-inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm, you know, because I use it plugged in most of the time and because it has great battery life, it'll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably be okay. You know, if Apple had to thin it down a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit and maybe cut the battery by like, I don't know, 10%, I'd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be willing to give that up. But probably not more than that. Because, you know, the other thing is what they used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do with their thinning efforts to the laptops back when battery life was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, pretty rough a lot of the time is they would figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out some benchmark. And they would say, okay, the laptop, when doing this benchmark,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now it has you know, 27 hours battery life or whatever. So we have excess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery that we can get rid of. And all we need is, quote, all day battery life, the definition of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shifts around constantly. But what they do is like they'll optimize the battery life for that benchmark. And they'll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, OK, well, if you're doing this, you know, web mixed workflow, whatever, your laptop only needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to last eight hours or 12 hours. So we have too much we can shed it. But what happened in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past was the power consumption of the chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the laptop had a pretty big range between relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idle and when it's working at full blast. And when it was working at full blast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would get nowhere near the battery life they would claim because they were optimizing for that idle time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as the chips got more efficient at being idle, I know that's a weird thing to say, but like as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip design has gone on, we've gotten much better over time at reducing the idle power usage or like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the low power usage. And we have that, you know, with the e-cores and everything, we see a lot of that. The problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a lot of things would, a lot of things that people did all the time with pro machines, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developing software, editing video, like, you know, things that push the machine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that, that's what pro people buy their pro consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers for. And whatever benchmark Apple tested the battery on, it would be nowhere near reflective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that kind of use. And that kind of use you'd get like two hours. And whereas the mixed web, you might get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 12 hours or, you know, whatever. Most of that problem was a long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chips now are different. Computers now are different. But I do worry a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they are going to save significant weight, they almost certainly have to do it by cutting the battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or at least by cutting the battery capacity, I should say. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do we really want that? Is that a really good trade-off for people on the pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it makes total sense on the lower end stuff on the air, or if they're going to have like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if they're going to like have a kind of a mid level where they currently have the 14 inch with the M4, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do they cut that down a little bit? Who knows? But like, I, excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, the M5, or now, I guess, soon the M6. But I really worry, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut this, are they cutting into the battery life significantly of actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro workflows on their Pro hardware? And if they don't cut the battery life, are they cutting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the cooling? Because what's also heavy are things like heat pipes and heat sinks. Those are also heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the better the cooling, usually it comes from either larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat sinks with more fins and stuff, and or different materials like copper that are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think copper's heavier than aluminum. I could be wrong. But are they going to also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the cooling worse? Am I going to hear the fan more on my pro desktop laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I'm using here as it's under load? Because when it was new, I never heard the fan at all. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it's, I guess, three years old, I'm starting to hear the fan sometimes. I'm sure it's filled with dust. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they going to be able to do this in a way that doesn't compromise factors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are really important to a pro machine? And I'm a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skeptical of that. I'm more than a little skeptical of that. I'm a little scared of what this means.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I think I'm with you almost all the way there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the thing that I keep wondering, and maybe I'm too optimistic, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if these new computers come with the two nanometer chips, with a, you know, a process shrink or what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you, if these new chips are considerably more efficient, then maybe the net
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change is nothing. And you can make a strong argument. I could make a strong argument.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, then let's have more battery life. you know, like Instead of removing battery, let's have more battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life. And I'm not here to say that that's wrong. And I honestly don't know if I would prefer lighter or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more battery life. I think for me, I'd actually prefer lighter because I'm so infrequently in a position where I need a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of battery life. But that's not the same trade-off everyone else would make.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but also like, but like, you know, I think what you, like you said that like, you know, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they shrink the process, you know, that that makes the chips save power. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at idle. But what usually happens is whatever the like the total
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like full blast wattage that they engineer the chips and the thermal envelopes around them for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually that ceiling, that thermal ceiling stays the same. Having the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process saves them on idle power and it usually allows them to just cram more in there. As we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said earlier, more cache, more cores, you know, that they can maybe ramp the clock speeds up a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like whatever it is. The top of the power budget, they usually keep in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same range for a given computer family because it's designed around the thermals and the enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else. So that's what I worry. At Idle, they might say, oh, look, we have all this excess battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we measured in this web, you know, this like web and AI usage benchmark that's using like non-local AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models, which so they're basically web browsers. Yeah, it's getting great, great battery life. It's like, okay, great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what if we push it? Is it still getting great battery life if we push it and if we actually do the things that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco demonstrates their machines doing in their marketing videos? That's the question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that's totally fair. The other thing I'm thinking about is, you know, as John has had us just comparing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, you know, phone chips with Mac chips, we haven't, or Apple hasn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explored the thermocouple thing. What's it called? I can't remember the darn name of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John vapor chamber?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vapor chamber. Thank you. We haven't explored that in laptops, have we? Because we have fans. But would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that help? I don't know. And would that reduce power usage? Well, reduce thermals, reduce power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usage, reduce battery draw. I don't know. I'm not a hardware engineer, and now that's obvious,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe that would be helpful. I'm not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John don't know if they can scale up like that. Maybe they should put a thermal pad on the MacBook Air first.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're so behind and uh not behind, but they're so not particularly caring about thermals
⏹️ ▶️ John on some of their consumer laptops. But I do think that Intel and Johnny I've really screwed us all up on
⏹️ ▶️ John this front because we just have this this past trauma of the MacBooks that Marco just uh you know mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John like the the 2016 models and it's just you know the whole that whole era of taking
⏹️ ▶️ John the ports off the computers and making them thin and coinciding with Intel being crappy. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just it was just bad all around. um And I think this is making all of us understandably
⏹️ ▶️ John worried about what is otherwise just the normal progression of laptop advancement. I mean, if you just look at the history
⏹️ ▶️ John of of the laptop period from like the Powerbook 100 series up till today, it is that
⏹️ ▶️ John exact tension that Marco was just talking about, which is like, oh, so you've got something that takes less power. Are you going
⏹️ ▶️ John to use that and spend it on increasing your battery life? Or are you going to spend some of it on making the thing thinner and lighter?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it's always a trade-off. Like if you just spent it on battery life, we'd have laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John the last seven days and they'd be as thick as a Powerbook 100 and no one would want them, right? Because they're just, no one wants to carry
⏹️ ▶️ John them. It always cracks me up whenever I see these in my attic and just pick one of them up. I'm like, holy cow,
⏹️ ▶️ John these things are big. You don't remember how big they were compared to today's until you see one of them. You're like, is this a joke?
⏹️ ▶️ John like just you know They were so And I'm not talking about the 16-pound Mac portable, which I also have
⏹️ ▶️ John in my attic. Not even talking about that. I'm talking about the thin and light power books, which were a revelation.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're so huge, right? So we always spend some of our technological dividend on making them
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner and we balance that with how much more battery life that we want. And the same thing is true of shrinks. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you spend on increasing the clock speed? Like, we have, we have, we can dissipate 15 watts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why should we ever not dissipate 15 watts? Let's just crank up the clock speed so that, yeah, it's lower power when
⏹️ ▶️ John it's idle. But why don't we crank up the clock so it is the same power usage as the other one? And the chip
⏹️ ▶️ John will be faster and it will get more work done. And sometimes, thanks to race to sleep, that can actually even save you
⏹️ ▶️ John power because you're like, well, I'm done with the job sooner. So even though my peak is still 15 watts, I'm at 15
⏹️ ▶️ John watts for five seconds instead of 10. So it actually does save battery life. And how do we want to spend that dividend?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we just have so little faith now in Apple ever wanting to go in the other direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John We're like, Apple, you are not allowed to spend the dividend on making it thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and lighter because the last time you did that, you way overspent on thin and light and gave us a laptop that was out of
⏹️ ▶️ John balance. So I'm not particularly opposed. You know, I'm not saying laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John progress must stop and they can never get any thinner and lighter and all future gains must be spent on battery life. that
⏹️ ▶️ John That's not a tenable position. We're just worried that Apple will make the wrong choice because they very recently
⏹️ ▶️ John did and it sucked for a long time given how long it takes Apple to rev these. Like we've been on this
⏹️ ▶️ John case design since they basically quote unquote fixed the laptops, right? Since they ditched
⏹️ ▶️ John the old one, put the ports back on, made them a little bit thicker and heavier. And so it makes sense that like after many,
⏹️ ▶️ John many years of using this design, which people generally like, that maybe we are at the point where
⏹️ ▶️ John we can make a new case that is thinner and lighter because that's part of where the lightness comes in. It's like some people are saying batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John aren't that heavy. What happens when you make the case smaller is there's less room for battery. So even if you're like,
⏹️ ▶️ John save money on the case or save weight on the case, make less case. Once you make less case,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's less room in the case for battery. And then you lose battery there too as well. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not sure what they're going to do here. Now, Casey's point about two nanometer, remember that the rumor is, and I've seen
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing contradicting this, the plain old no suffix M6 is it. And so if
⏹️ ▶️ John any of these OLED touchscreen MacBooks are going to have any chip in them that is quote unquote better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the plain old no suffix M6, it's going to be an M5 Pro and M5 Max, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they're not two nanometer. So don't don't look to those chips to save you anything because they don't
⏹️ ▶️ John get a shrink. They're the same chips we've had, which is fine, but like there's not really a two nanometer dividend
⏹️ ▶️ John to spend in that case. It could be that only the plain no
⏹️ ▶️ John suffix M6 MacBook Pro will be the one that is significantly
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner and lighter because it's got the two nanometer chip and it is the low end MacBook Pro. It is, you know, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John a no, isn't that what you use, Marco? is your 14-inch and no suffix M chip?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, it's the M4, the regular M4. And for that purpose, I've actually been very happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a little slower to build, you know, than my big one is, but like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot less expensive and it has very good battery life. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do actually use the battery life of my laptop. So that's why I'm a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little nervous about them possibly shrinking it down because this is, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I love the balance of this machine currently. If it could get lighter, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that'd be nice. But again, when these things are in contention, I'd rather keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery than make it a little bit lighter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So, well, on the plain M6 one, I mean, it has the potential
⏹️ ▶️ John market advantage of the fact that Apple is not rumored to roll out the M6-based
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air anytime soon. But also, what differentiates an M6-based MacBook Air from an M6,
⏹️ ▶️ John no suffix, M6 MacBook Pro? Well, in this case, OLED and touchscreen. OLED is another potential power
⏹️ ▶️ John savings, especially if you've got a lot of black pixels on your screen, I guess. And, you know, I don't know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John power difference is with the tandem OLEDs versus an LCD, so maybe it's a wash, but that is another
⏹️ ▶️ John potential thing out there. And obviously the touchscreen. That's another feature that is going to differentiate,
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably, the plain No Suffix M6 MacBook, OLED MacBook Pro from
⏹️ ▶️ John an M6 MacBook Air at some point in the future. Remains to be seen if the redesign
⏹️ ▶️ John does actually make a thinner chassis for the M5 Pro and Max models. Maybe it will have a thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John chassis and these will be crappy ones because that chassis is made for the next four years and it will come into its own
⏹️ ▶️ John when the M7 Pro and Max come out because they will be on two nanometer. A lot of open
⏹️ ▶️ John questions here, but yeah, just, you know, with a late breaking German rumor, like again, we're not going through every product they're going to announce.
⏹️ ▶️ John By next episode, they will, in theory, have announced all these and we'll be talking about the actual products, so there's no point. But with
⏹️ ▶️ John him re-emphasizing the significantly lighter thing, it is something to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John for because we're all traumatized. That's what it comes down to. Mildly, technologically traumatized.
Logitech-Apple peripherals?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, on the 6th of October, so this was yesterday as we record, two days after the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey report, Gurman writes: Apple's upcoming push into smart home devices will include a doorbell, thermostat,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and other accessories developed through an unusual partnership with LG Electronics Inc. The products will be part of an ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of devices that work with Apple's new smart home hub, as well as an upgraded HomePod mini and fresh TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set-top box. Please, Apple, please, new Apple TVs. The products developed with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LG will include a smart deadbolt lock, indoor security camera, outdoor security camera, and floodlight camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Though the two companies work together to develop the accessories, the products will carry the LG brand. LG is handling manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and product support.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is another late-breaking, very late-breaking rumor of like home stuff that's going to be announced. Again, we're
⏹️ ▶️ John not going through all the products, but it's all the stuff that was rumored for months and months. But this wasn't in
⏹️ ▶️ John the rumors right up until now Cause they're not really Apple products. I mean, Apple does this with a bunch of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John They, They partner with Belkin to make a bunch of stuff that they don't want to make. They shuffle a lot of stuff off to Beats.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they do stuff with Logitech as well. Um, you know, there's, there's always lots of rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John about how much of this product that is not Apple branded was actually designed by Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, A lot of people writing about the story I said, hey, remember when Apple partnered with LG to make a 5K display
⏹️ ▶️ John back when they didn't make any displays? um, I hope Apple wasn't particularly involved with that product
⏹️ ▶️ John because it wasn't a great product. It wasn't particularly reliable and it had a lot of problems and it
⏹️ ▶️ John was ugly and the stand sucked. Although Apple's really great at making sucky sands. So maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And expensive ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, other products, like you look at the Belkin's one, it's like, oh, this is, you know, again, the rumors are this Belkin product is
⏹️ ▶️ John literally Apple designed this product, but they just don't want to deal with it. So they say, Belkin, it's your thing. You brand it. You support it. You manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ John it. We just gave you the design. Go and we'll put you in our store. These LG products, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John not getting particularly excited about because it's just like another one of those partnership deals, but it really
⏹️ ▶️ John does make it seem like Apple, you know, Apple always wants to encourage HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, but they're pushing to the home with the HomePod with the screen and blah, blah, blah. We'll talk about that next week,
⏹️ ▶️ John because presuming they announce it. It's like, well, we want a whole ecosystem of HomeKit devices. And there are
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of third parties that make HomeKit devices. But it's like Apple does feel some responsibility, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with the supposedly new HomeKit architecture. So like, we want like good devices
⏹️ ▶️ John in all the important product categories, but we don't want them so much that we want to make them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's kind of like them with the Wi-Fi hubs. Like, well, presumably Mac users need to have Wi-Fi in their home,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we don't care enough to actually make it. So you're on your own. And here it's like, well, I hear
⏹️ ▶️ John people like smart locks and, you know, smoke detectors and thermostats,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we don't care enough about that to even bother. Hell, we can barely get ourselves to make smart speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we do want them to exist and we want to show them on stage. So who's willing to partner with us to do this?
⏹️ ▶️ John And as a couple of commenters pointed out, kind of like home Wi-Fi stuff, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple. Some of these devices are the type of thing where maybe people would want to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy from a brand with that they trust and believe in, especially when it comes to privacy,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a lock, you know, or like a security camera. And the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John they chose LG, which is currently going through a scandal where their TVs are listening to you even when they're turned off,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not great from a privacy's perspective. But like, that's, that's the problem with Apple. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have this topic keeps getting pushed down and it will surely not be, probably not be next week because it'll be an event video, but maybe the week
⏹️ ▶️ John after that. The whole push by new management slash Turnus to change
⏹️ ▶️ John the way Apple releases products and how many products they release and how often and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John There's just kind of like this really old, tired looking elephant in the room, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why doesn't Apple make Wi-Fi things? Everybody needs Wi-Fi and it's so annoying picking from third-party products.
⏹️ ▶️ John People were sad when they gave up printers, although Apple really was just rebranding other people's printers then. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John home security cameras, locks. If ever there was a product where Apple's privacy-focused
⏹️ ▶️ John design and reputation would be a marketing advantage for those products, those would be
⏹️ ▶️ John great candidates. And it seems clear that Apple wants to make sure that they have good products
⏹️ ▶️ John in those categories available. But again, they don't care enough to do it themselves. So they're outsourcing
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So I'm currently left wondering based on this rumor. And by the way, there's FCC diagrams. You can see what these things look like. They
⏹️ ▶️ John just, they don't look like Apple products. They look like LG products. I'm wondering if any of this will be mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John at all in any significant way in the presentation or whether it will just be a slide and say, and
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of third party, you know, manufacturers are making products as well. Like I can't imagine Apple actually featuring
⏹️ ▶️ John these. It's not like they feature the Belkin products. They just mentioned, oh, and also these are available. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that does this, you can buy this in our store and it's made by milk. And That seems more likely
⏹️ ▶️ John than anything else. But the story just made me sad about all the products that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has decided are important enough to have, but not important enough for them to make and do a good job. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I shouldn't be complaining because if we look at, Casey, what quote-unquote good job they're doing
⏹️ ▶️ John on streaming boxes and smart speakers, all those categories, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes takes a little bit longer than we would like to make significant updates to them. So maybe I'm wishing
⏹️ ▶️ John for them to come and do the same thing to these products and maybe to be better in the hands of LG, but from a privacy
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and their track record in this area is really mediocre. You know, they have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you mentioned, like, you know, they've done those with Belkin and LG before, and those products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have usually been pretty mediocre. And it is Apple kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like half-assing an initiative. Like, yeah, we want all these smart home devices. Well, we're not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to make an ecosystem that actually attracts people to make these products on their own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, we're not going to make our own versions. So we will, yeah, we'll co-develop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, whatever it is with LG or Belkin or whatever. But then what you get at the end is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products that neither company really gives that much of a crap about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it shows. You know, I've had many of these products. I've bought like the random Belkin things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past. I had the LG Ultrafine monitors that are now somewhere in Casey's house. And I've
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front of me Yeah. And I've had the LG HomeKit cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I had four of them. They all sucked and broke after reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short times. And this is exactly what we're doing again, it sounds like.
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna work this time because it's the new home kit It's so much better than the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's the thing. like The entire path of home kit so far has been like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of half-assing stuff that they occasionally care about for two seconds to put it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some you know event video and then they never touch it for you know months or years after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And the products all kind of suck or don't really ever pan out or only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work briefly. but like Or the ecosystem itself doesn't pan out and all the things that are promised, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one ever makes them or one company makes them and then stops making them. This is how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this has gone for years. Why would this time be any different?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It sounds like they're basically running the same playbook. So like what why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would it work this time when it hasn't worked before?
⏹️ ▶️ John There's a couple things in favor of it now. First being that Siri is no longer embarrassingly terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is merely slightly behind the competition. But like that, I mean, that's the whole reason the the home pod for the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever they end up calling it, has been delayed as long as it has, because the rumors are this hardware has been done forever. But the software wasn't.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now Siri AI is here and you can talk to it in a more sane manner. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John recently, today I set two reminders on my phone with voice and both times it asked me what app do
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to use? Cool. It had never asked me that before. I've been using the phone since
⏹️ ▶️ John launch day. Infuriating. Anyway, um in theory, there's a software story here
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes it so that the products like, we'll see, we'll see when they present the, whatever their smart home
⏹️ ▶️ John hub thing is, how they presented it. Is it presented like a weird off to the side hobby like Apple TV?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it presented like a new big thing? But the fact that they have a voice assistant
⏹️ ▶️ John that could conceivably power a non-sucky product of that type does
⏹️ ▶️ John mean that there are some things that are different. Now, does that help at all with smart locks and cameras?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, not at all. It's totally unrelated. But it does mean that maybe Apple will be more interested in HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ John now that they have like more of the pieces to provide a successful solution.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the home pods are still a problem. There's still a rumor that they're going to make another big home pod and maybe they're going to make a new mini,
⏹️ ▶️ John but those are so small and underpowered and can't do any Siri AI stuff anyway. So maybe they're it's going to be a while before they get
⏹️ ▶️ John dragged into it. But this new thing is like, here's our new approach. This presumably has the smarts
⏹️ ▶️ John to run Siri AI in a reasonable way. It is much more capable. It has a screen
⏹️ ▶️ John on it and it potentially could be the hub for your home to talk to these other devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John which are admittedly lesser and maybe just featured on a slide somewhere. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the actual products themselves, like it all depends on how good the HomeKit standard is and all that other stuff. We'll see how
⏹️ ▶️ John it goes. But it's kind of like, you know, when they outsource to Belkin for like a dongle,
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Like it's literally the same dongle that Apple would sell. It's just got like a Belkin stamp on it somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and the color of the plastic is different. Like, I don't think anyone cares too much about that. It's when they do it for
⏹️ ▶️ John things like monitors where you're like, Apple, we would kind of prefer that you make a good one of
⏹️ ▶️ John these instead of something where the USB-C port flakes out after two years and the things burn in and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. And not, again, not that Apple's track record is stellar, but like, and of course they would charge a hojillion
⏹️ ▶️ John dollars for it. But I'm not, I'm not jazzed by a bunch of LG uh, home kit products, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John am actually interested in the, I don't even, I haven't even kept up with the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ John what they're going to call us. I keep calling it home pop with the screen. Have either you heard rumors of what the supposed name is, or is that still?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, everyone's just guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like HomePad or whatever, but there's people's guesses.
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePad. God, I hope it's not. Oh, and speaking of names, Microsoft announced
⏹️ ▶️ John the Surface Pro, no, Microsoft Surface Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John today ish. um Like their next line of laptops, and they're using Ultra and the thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you're like, well, that means that the MacBooks won't be called Ultra. I mean, maybe, but maybe Apple doesn't care. So just keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple absolutely would not care in that case. like
⏹️ ▶️ John It is funny. If they are called Ultra, it is funny that that Microsoft is preempting them by like a week
⏹️ ▶️ John with its own ultra. It's not like other companies aren't also doing Pro and max and Ultra. Like yeah apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and for for good or for ill, Apple sets these stupid trends and people follow them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then, you know, Apple, even rumors of what Apple might name their things causes trends. And they're
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we're going to beat them to the punch and call our computers ultra, even though Apple already called its watch Ultra, but then didn't call its folding
⏹️ ▶️ John phone ultra. We don't know what's going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John all the things just
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Anyway, tune in next week. We'll find out what they actually announced and if LG is featured at all anywhere.
Apple threatens Full Disk Access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I apologize that we're probably going to end on a maybe not stupendously happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey segment, but we really need to talk about it before it becomes stale and before we forget about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime in the last week, I forget exactly when it was, Apple put up a fairly vague post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on their developer website. And I would like to read to you the entirety
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that post because it's not that long. It reads as follows. We give developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to protect users' private data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Full disk access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to function properly on the Mac. Some developers are using full disk access in ways that could put users at risk,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exposing everything on their systems, including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history, without users' full knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and understanding. For communication apps, this could also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with. Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this extraordinary level of access can only do so with explicit user action. Addressing this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before granting such access so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thus ends their entire post.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the adjective I would use to describe this post is ominous. Yes. like
⏹️ ▶️ John you're like first I don't really understand what what possessed them to do this other than as a PR move
⏹️ ▶️ John because it's clear that they're not ready to tell us what they're going to do, but they're like, we're going to do something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you know, it is obviously, I I think it is spurred on by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AI agents that, that you know, like meta released theirs. I know there was an article where the guy said it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read his messages, although that's kind of disputed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't think it's disputed that it read his messages. It's just disputed what his story is. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like there's a press, there's a public relations angle to this, which is there's been a series of stories recently
⏹️ ▶️ John from people using Macs with AI agents and being surprised that the AI
⏹️ ▶️ John agents were able to access things on their Macs that they thought they shouldn't have been able to access,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though from a technical perspective, I'm sure they could.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they make this announcement, which is like basically saying, we know about this and
⏹️ ▶️ John we're going to do something about it, but we're not ready to tell you what we're going to do about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, based on past experience, Mac users and developers are worried.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most recent precedent that is cited in a lot of the stories about this is what they did to screen recording or screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John um i don't forget what it was originally called, but the thing where it lets Mac apps
⏹️ ▶️ John see other pixels on the screen. um And I think it was in, was
⏹️ ▶️ John it in Sequoia or something? They changed that to make it more onerous. Whereas before
⏹️ ▶️ John you could grant something screen recording permissions, like say, let's say you have an app that takes screenshots for you. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of important for your screenshot app to be able to see the screen, to make pictures of it, because it's a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ John app. And it used to be, you'd get the app, you'd install it, you'd run it, and it'd be like, hey, I need screen recording
⏹️ ▶️ John permission because I'm a screenshot app. And you'd be like, OK, fine. And then Apple said, but we don't like
⏹️ ▶️ John that because lots of apps can trick people into giving it screen recording permissions and people won't realize that they did
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And then from that point on, forever and ever and ever, that app can see every pixel on their screen. And that's
⏹️ ▶️ John a security problem. So what we're going to do is, if a user grants an app screen
⏹️ ▶️ John recording permission, we're going to say, OK, fine. But then like next week, we'll go, hey, hey, you
⏹️ ▶️ John gave that up screen recording permission. You sure about that? You sure you want to keep doing that? And the user will say
⏹️ ▶️ John yes. And then we'll say, all right, we'll ask you about it again anytime you restart your computer or once
⏹️ ▶️ John a week, whichever comes first. And from the perspective of a user who bought a screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John a screenshotting app and just wants to use it, multiply that by however many
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that need this permission, you're constantly being barraged with, hey, we know you gave this thing screen recording permission, but
⏹️ ▶️ John are you sure? Are you sure you want to give it a screen? Stop asking me. Yes, yes. The app
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to have it. I want it to have it. It's okay. The flip side of this is what your phone does, something similar,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, I don't know if you know this, but the whatever app has been, has precise tracking on your
⏹️ ▶️ John location and you've given it that and it's been doing that for six months and it's ran in the background for 20 hours. Are you sure you want
⏹️ ▶️ John it to keep doing this? For whatever reason, I find it slightly less onerous on the phone, but on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's just too many apps that need too many permissions that if the policy is we can't ask you
⏹️ ▶️ John once because we ask you once, like they'll social engineer you into saying yes and you'll forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we need to say, I know you said yes, but maybe you didn't really think about it. So here's
⏹️ ▶️ John another dialogue for you to not mindlessly click OK on and read it again. And if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John mindlessly clicked OK on this one, don't worry about it because in a week or 24 hours
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the hell we decide, we're going to ask you again. And that is maddening to Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John users who are just like, let me just use my computer. Let me just use it. But on the other hand, it probably saves
⏹️ ▶️ John some people from social engineering and security things. So that's the bind Apple is in here, at least the bind that it seems to
⏹️ ▶️ John think it's in, which is we have full disk access. It is one of the hardest
⏹️ ▶️ John permissions to give already. Like, and to be clear, what full disk access does,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you're a sandboxed Mac app, you can't just read any file in the file system. You can read your own files
⏹️ ▶️ John only, but you cannot read any other files. You know, like, how does any app work then that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn't have full disk access? Are you telling me TextEdit needs full disk access because I can open a text file from my desktop? No.
⏹️ ▶️ John What they did was fairly cleverly, I think, made it so that sandbox Mac apps can't
⏹️ ▶️ John read anything except for their own stuff unless the user does something
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes macOS think that the user is saying it's okay. So
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, if you go file open in TextEdit and you open a file, that is you
⏹️ ▶️ John as a user giving the app permission to read that file. And so you don't, again, the app doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John need full disk access. It gets targeted access just to the file that you picked. If you drag a
⏹️ ▶️ John file onto the TextEdit icon in the dock, that also grants TextEdit permission to read the file
⏹️ ▶️ John that you dragged on because user action caused that to happen. In that way,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have applications that seem like, well, surely this has full disk access, but they don't. An example is
⏹️ ▶️ John my app Hyperspace, which reclaims Disk Space by requiring you remove files.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's got to have full disk access. Nope. I've never needed it. I don't. The app doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John need it and doesn't even benefit from it because what Hyperspace asks you to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is say, what do you want to scan? And then it shows you an open dialog box or lets you drag
⏹️ ▶️ John a folder onto the window or drag a folder onto the dock icon. All of those actions give hyperspace
⏹️ ▶️ John permission to read the thing that you told it to read. It still has no ability to read anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn't need it because there's always a user-initiated action. So you're like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would anybody want full disk access? Well, obviously backup programs do, but sometimes there is no user-initiated action.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes, like, for example, if you're going to make like a finder replacement,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's no user-initiated action to let you like, just it needs to read the whole hard drive because it's a file browser. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like a screenshot app. Screenshots have to have screen recording permission. And a file browser,
⏹️ ▶️ John you kind of need to have, unless every time it launches, you say, show up an open dialog box and tell it to pick
⏹️ ▶️ John the top level of your hard drive, which would be ridiculous, right? So let's say you do
⏹️ ▶️ John need full disk access. It's so hard to do. First of all, you can't just pop up a dialog like all the Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ John versions. You can't pop up a dialogue that says, do you want to give us full disk access? No, that doesn't exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John We all know if you're a Mac user, what you have to do. The app has to put up written instructions or
⏹️ ▶️ John like try to orchestrate some other windows and say, you have to go into system settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to find where this thing is. You have to add us. We can't do it. We can't show
⏹️ ▶️ John you a dialogue. We can't ask you a yes, no question. You have to do this outside of our app and then come
⏹️ ▶️ John back here. The second thing is Mac apps can't even tell whether they've got full disk access.
⏹️ ▶️ John There's not even a way for them to check. I'm assuming this is so they can't nag you. Because like every time you launch it, it can say, hey, I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John have full disk access. You can do heuristics. Like let me just try to read a random file. And if I can't do it, assume I don't have full disk access.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like the APIs are, what I assume is intentionally sparse. And they're going
⏹️ ▶️ John to make this harder? Harder? How? Like that they'll have to like
⏹️ ▶️ John put a drop of blood into system settings before they'll let them enable full disk access. Like how
⏹️ ▶️ John could this be harder? And the only thing I can think of is they'll do it with screen recording, which, yeah, you can grant it, but we're going to nag
⏹️ ▶️ John the user about it forever. And we're just going to say, you know, this, you know, super duper still has full disk
⏹️ ▶️ John access and it's had it for six months. You sure you want it to continue having it? It's like, stop asking
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Stop. Like, I just wish there was a big off button on this type of thing. So we don't know what they're going to do. So it's not worth
⏹️ ▶️ John worrying about what they're, you know, what any specifics, but everything I can think of sounds the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ John And before we get into the AI bot-based things or whatever, one other tangent here that
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven't heard anyone talk about and I don't quite understand why. So I want to make, definitely make the point here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Full disk access and like giving some, you know, the Muse Facebook AI agent full disk access and then it reads your
⏹️ ▶️ John messages from your messages database and says like, oh, I noticed you were talking with whatever and you're all freaked out or whatever because you didn't realize
⏹️ ▶️ John you gave it full disk access. Like that's the, that's part of the PR disaster that we're dealing with here. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And everyone's just like, well, it's just like, you know, if it's a Mac and you give it full disk access,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that's, that's what's going to happen. Like, and, you know, debating about that control and how hard or easy it should
⏹️ ▶️ John be. But there's still one other issue here, which is why is that data unencrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John at rest on your Mac? Good question. And that's mostly just a legacy of
⏹️ ▶️ John these things. These programs and apps exist for a long time. So to define some terms,
⏹️ ▶️ John encrypted at rest means when it's sitting in a file on your disk, Is that file just have your
⏹️ ▶️ John messages in it, like in text that you can read? Or is that file itself encrypted? Setting aside like disk encryption,
⏹️ ▶️ John because like when you're logged into your account and your disk is unlocked, even though your disk is technically encrypted,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's for like when someone takes your computer and like unplugs it from the wall and runs away with it, the bits
⏹️ ▶️ John on the disk are encrypted. So that unless they can decrypt the disk to boot from it or log in with it,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can't get those bits, right? Set that aside. Once they are logged in on
⏹️ ▶️ John your computer and the disk is unlocked and the operating system is booted and they're in your account, then
⏹️ ▶️ John there are files on the disk which may or may not be encrypted. If you look inside those files, are your
⏹️ ▶️ John messages just there and readable? Or is that file itself filled with essentially gibberish because it's encrypted?
⏹️ ▶️ John You want the data to be encrypted at rest, which means the file, even if I give you my messages database,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can't read it because it's all encrypted. And who can read it? The messages app can read it by getting keychain
⏹️ ▶️ John entries that only belong to the messages app that no other app can see. And there's no permission for that. There's no
⏹️ ▶️ John permission, I believe, for let me see keychain entries that belong to other apps. That would be bad. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John only the messages app can read the encrypted at rest messages database file from the
⏹️ ▶️ John disk. That would be a safer way to store messages on people's Macs, Apple. Same goes
⏹️ ▶️ John for every other unencrypted at rest database file. that's probably, let's be honest, a SQLite
⏹️ ▶️ John file somewhere on the Mac. They should be encrypted at rest. They should be in little encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John disk images or like whatever solution they want to do for this. If that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was encrypted at rest,
⏹️ ▶️ John an AI agent with full disk access would have the privilege of reading a gibberish file that it
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot decrypt. And then it would have to find a way to find a security flaw to get the keychain access to
⏹️ ▶️ John decrypt it or whatever. So I'm not saying it's a it's a solution, but like that might
⏹️ ▶️ John be better than making full disk access harder for everybody to use, harder for developers to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with, harder for users to deal with. And yes, harder for AI agents to deal with. But like, what if they just couldn't get at the
⏹️ ▶️ John messages and then maybe have more granular permissions where you can grant people not full disk access,
⏹️ ▶️ John but access to my mail, but not my messages or my messages, but not my mail or whatever? Many
⏹️ ▶️ John solutions exist here. And not, uh, most of them have nothing to do with annoying users even
⏹️ ▶️ John more when they want to have one or more Mac apps that can read the entire disk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, the good news is based on past history, we know that Apple's going to handle this the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real easy way by adding another 300 frigging dialogues for us to clear and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approve and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, that's the, that's the, you know, it goes unsaid, but we should mention it again. Dialogue fatigue. The more of these dialogues
⏹️ ▶️ John you put up, the more people just go, yes, okay, yes, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go, go, leave me alone. Go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don't care, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is self-defeating because you're like, what will make it secure? We just need a few more, more, a few more dialogues, bro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just a few more, right? And it's counterproductive. And this is a known anti-pattern of
⏹️ ▶️ John security. It's like, you know, like I, when you hear it, you're like, well, it does make sense. If I,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I gave it full disk access, like, I do want it to remind me next week. It's like, but yeah, but once you have decided,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, that screenshot app, it's fine. I want it to keep it forever. You have no mechanism to make that happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You're going
⏹️ ▶️ John to get bugged about, like, it's the second you go from, oh, I'm glad this reminded me to please stop reminding me. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John just a forever of please stop reminding me, you know? So they definitely need better controls for this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on the AI agent front, like, what if I want to dedicate a Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ John to an AI agent and have it do stuff for me or whatever? It's a huge headache because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the security
⏹️ ▶️ John system on macOS is made for human beings. Every part of it, like when I mentioned before, like, oh, when the user
⏹️ ▶️ John drags a thing onto a thing that like, you know, that gives it permission or like it tells the user,
⏹️ ▶️ John go to system settings, then click on security and privacy, then click on accessibility, except it's been renamed
⏹️ ▶️ John in macOS 27. It's called something else now. And then find the app. And if it's not there, hit the plus button and then go
⏹️ ▶️ John to the open save dialog box and find the app and drag it into blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. That's for humans to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. So much so that a lot of the dialogues you see, for example, if again, if you're using a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app and you see a dialogue that comes up and says, hey, app such and such wants to access files on your desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that OK? Have you seen that dialogue before? There's no way to grant
⏹️ ▶️ John that permission preemptively except by trying to do a thing that requires it. And then it throws
⏹️ ▶️ John up a dialogue and you as the user have to say, OK. And by the way, those dialogues
⏹️ ▶️ John are not visible to AI agents running on the system. They're only visible to humans.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like They're masks from the like accessibility structure of things in such a way that the
⏹️ ▶️ John AI agents can't see and click those. Like it's basically it's preventing an AI agent from acting like a person
⏹️ ▶️ John and being like, I'm just going to grant myself everything and go through system settings and grant and grant and grant. Some of, not all,
⏹️ ▶️ John but some of the things that appear on the screen that you have to say okay to cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John be seen and therefore cannot be acted upon by AI agents, which means that if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to run like a headless Mac Mini that's doing stuff, very often that headless Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ John will not be able to progress because there's something up on the screen that it can't see that requires you to connect
⏹️ ▶️ John through screen sharing and click on it. Does it sound familiar, Marco? A little bit. This gets
⏹️ ▶️ John into the second thing, which is like, what if you're managing a bunch of headless Mac Mini servers? Now you're
⏹️ ▶️ John like the AI agent and you're like, what, why is this computer not doing stuff? Oh, what was your thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John It wanted you to to uh click okay to say that, yes, you've upgraded to Mac OS 27.
⏹️ ▶️ John software update complete. Like it was that. like, And granted, an AI agent could see that and click through
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But like this, this is all part of the same thing, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John the needs to run a Mac without a person in front of it in specific scenarios
⏹️ ▶️ John where you want that to work. Mac OS is very hostile to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn't lend itself to that easily. Out of the box, it is almost impossible. There's lots of blockers
⏹️ ▶️ John where it's like you as the human need to click through a bunch of crap that you don't care about. And imagine if you have like
⏹️ ▶️ John something running headless that needs full disk access, imagine if that thing throws up a dialogue that AI agents can't
⏹️ ▶️ John see every seven days that you have to click OK to. You'd have to have like some automation that goes through all your
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac minis and say, yes, I know this app has full disk access. Yes, it's fine every
⏹️ ▶️ John seven days. And if you if you miss it, the app is blocked until you go through and click the dialogue. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ John very much like MDM of like, how do I set up all these computers and have them install the OS or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know this is probably better for follow-up or whatever, but I wondered if Marco wanted to make any comments on
⏹️ ▶️ John the various bits of advice slash snark from the people who are MDM experts have
⏹️ ▶️ John been sending his way based on his experience with MDM. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, not really. I think what I've mostly seen is people saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A, why didn't I join the giant, like, I think it's a Reddit community, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac admins, like there's some, there's a giant community of people. Why didn't I join that and post there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have no good answer except I didn't feel like going through all of that when AI could just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell me answers that I needed. And then the second most common feedback was, oh, and by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, and just a little bit more on that. I don't have an amazing history of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco posting to a new community and getting helpful responses. Sorry, internet, you have a bad
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann in that area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that's another reason why the idea didn't even cross my mind to go join some giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco community and post a newbie question because historically the internet and its communities have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not been kind in that kind of situation. So yeah, sorry. But then also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a lot of like, well, why don't you use a real MDM? Because all the things you complained about, the real MDMs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do it. It's okay, not helpful when, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's like, why don't you you use something different as opposed to like, well, I was using Apple's built-in business thing because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's built in and my needs are pretty small and it's free. And all of the other ones that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe have like a little bit more intricate settings and everything, those cost a lot of money and that wasn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it for this use case. So that's why. But the responses I got, some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them were very nice in tone and very helpful. Many of them were not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it kind of reinforces that first point there. So that's all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So I saw, because they sent most of that feedback, just the ATP feedback, I saw it as well. And I think like
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the part of the frustration is like, oh, Macs are not made for automation or whatever. And they're
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, I automate Macs all day. You're just using the wrong automation. It doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John necessarily negate the point that Macs aren't designed for automation because I do feel like the good products
⏹️ ▶️ John that do this are incredibly complex. i haven't been subject to these
⏹️ ▶️ John products when I worked my jobby jobs, because they were all running on my Mac, uh various different brands of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of which are even uh sponsored ATP in the past. Some of them do amazing things. But I always
⏹️ ▶️ John feel for those companies because the amount of support they get from Apple at doing those amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John things always seems to be limited. Like they're kind of on their own where Apple's like, well, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know you've got some needs and you want to make an MDM and we'll provide you a way to do it. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, put it in feature requests. We'll see what we can do. And they're like, we're going to find some heroic way to work around
⏹️ ▶️ John your broken ass stuff. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John these MDM companies have to do. Like they are really just battling against an OS and a vendor
⏹️ ▶️ John that wants to support them, but not that much. And then sometimes there'll be a major new version of macOS that will
⏹️ ▶️ John have some horrendous bug that totally breaks their ability to automate some part that's essential. And they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to figure out how to do it because their customers want to upgrade eventually to the new version of macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John for a variety of reasons. And the MDM vendors, like, you can't upgrade yet because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John broke X, Y, and Z. And we have to figure out a way to hack around. I mean, I mean, that's just
⏹️ ▶️ John part of working on any platform, but they're in a very difficult situation because the things they're doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like when you have to work around like, oh, there's a layout bug in some new control, like there's lots of options that we have. But when you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to work around something like, oh, I no longer have access to this value that I need to unlock this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to set this feature. It's very difficult to figure out a way to do that. It's not just a matter
⏹️ ▶️ John of Oh, I guess got to make a custom control. It's like, I'm stuck. I have no way to do this. Like just like
⏹️ ▶️ John Super Duper with like when Apple breaks stuff having to do with it, it's one piece of software that's allowed to make bootable systems
⏹️ ▶️ John now. When they break that, Super Duper has no recourse. They just have to like beg and plead with Apple or try to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something heroic. So I do feel for these companies, but yeah, like those products are
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated and extremely powerful. And And it takes heroic efforts to make them. And as
⏹️ ▶️ John you pointed out last time, we talked about this, Marco, expensive often, much more expensive than the free Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you're using. And yeah, you get what you pay for, but like they're made for
⏹️ ▶️ John companies where paying a couple bucks per computer per month is not that big a deal
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to the other expenses. But for a single person operation with no employees and a significant
⏹️ ▶️ John number of Macs that they have to manage, it does start to add up, especially if you need none of the features except for
⏹️ ▶️ John like, please set up this Mac with Mac OS so I don't have to in a non-automated
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Like it's amazing that it's possible and these products are great and powerful. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people heard when Marco was complaining about this was like, you can't automate Macs, which if your job is moderated
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs, you're like, well, what the hell? Of course you can automate Macs. But I think what Marco was saying was, I can't automate
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs right now with this free product. And, you know, and again, it's not like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just made a dummy mistake. I should have, I should have picked this one of these commercial products. It was much more expensive, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple supported this better, first of all, it would be better for people like Marco, but second of all, it would be better for these big companies
⏹️ ▶️ John too, because they, I'm sure they wish that they had better vendor support from Apple as well. I'm sure they wish Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John gave them more capabilities and broke fewer things and generally uh, you know, catered to their needs more,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, like every developer thinks, right? Um, So yeah, like, and maybe this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it feels so long ago that we were talking about the AI RAM dividend.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember those days?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Remember that? It's a phrase that doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John make any sense anymore, right? To refresh everyone's memory, Apple added RAMs to their Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, they do that periodically anyway, but it was long overdue. And everyone's like, they're adding this because
⏹️ ▶️ John you can't run uh, Apple intelligence with with too little ram So they put
⏹️ ▶️ John more RAM in all their phones and all their iPads and all their Macs. And yay, it's the, the Apple Intelligence RAM dividend.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was short-lived. Now we have now we have, uh, AI
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the opposite and making RAM really expensive. Uh, But in a similar vein,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are certain parts of the software ecosystem, including involving Apple, where people were like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's a thing I've always wanted. And the vendor, Apple whoever, uh, was never doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now all of a sudden, AI agents want it and the vendor did it immediately to empower
⏹️ ▶️ John the agents to do the thing. And sometimes it's the thing like, I don't care if AI agents use this, whether it's like a new API
⏹️ ▶️ John or a new service or a new whatever. I'm just glad they added it because now I get to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I am wondering if Apple eventually gets a clue in this area that the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that AI agents are stymied by Apple's stupid security may cause Apple to rethink
⏹️ ▶️ John its approach. And that will benefit not just AI agents, but actual humans who are also annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John by the lack of options. And we don't have time to go into more of them, but like imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had control over how your Mac behaved and how granular the stuff was. And if you could say, stop
⏹️ ▶️ John reminding me and stuff like that. Like it's not a consumer facing feature, but kind of like the MDM
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, the ability to do this, the ability to say, you are a headless Mac running AI
⏹️ ▶️ John agents and I'm going to turn off all the controls. And no, I don't mean turning off system integrity protection, like more granular controls where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can say what it can and can't do and that it wouldn't bother you after you made those decisions. That would be amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So watch for that in three to five years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsor this episode, Coax. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking about AppZapper 3000, the new app, and the delicious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation that it references. Join to listen, atp.fm slash join. Thanks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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-I-RACUSA. It's accidental, accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann They didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
P🐠
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Casey breezed by earlier, I woke up in Virginia this afternoon or this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I forced Casey to go to another concert.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This time, it was a Phish concert.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twas indeed. You know, my recollection, which we have long since established, is garbage. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I said to you at some point, hey, you know, Phish is coming. You know, ha ha, maybe we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should go. Ha ha. And then I think either I caught you at the wrong time or you forgot about it or whatever that ended up happening. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then like a few weeks later, you said, wait a second, did you know fish is coming to Richmond?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I said, yes, yes, I did. And then next thing I knew, in a good, friendly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, not in a nasty, jerky way, you basically said, hey, guess what? We're going. I'm flying in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that's what we did. So Marco, you flew down. What was it? Yesterday morning arrived yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early afternoon. We went to a different barbecue spot in town as we are wont to do. We went to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a place called Q Barbecue, which is my second favorite barbecue joint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in town. I don't know if you have things you'd like to share about that. I'm happy to hear it. Otherwise, I'll just plow forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was good. It was a big pile of meat. That's exactly what I wanted. Exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we did that and then hung out at the house for a little bit and then went downtown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go to the concert. We got a couple of ciders at a, not a brewery,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a place that a beer purveyor downtown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specialize in beer, but yes. uh, this is capital ale house for locals. Um, Anyways, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got some very tasty ciders uh, while we were there and then went to the show. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was at the same location that the Goose Show was, the, the, at least for my family, infamous goose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show last year um And we were, what, like literally two seats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right of where we were for the Goose concert. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and this is part of why I insisted on going to this because this venue, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know how to pronounce it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco properly. I don't know how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say it. The travel insurance people. As it turns out, travel insurance, you know, one of life's extended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warranties, is very profitable. So they can build stadiums, amphitheaters, rather. There we go. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it's arranged is there's like the general admission pit in front of you. And then right behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pit is the first row of like regular seats, but it's elevated up above the pit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such that if you have one of those seats, your feet are like near the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pit people's backs or shoulders who were standing there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are sitting like almost a full person above the pit. So that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have that front row of seats, not only do you have a perfectly clear view because you're like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole person above everyone there, you could even sit down and have a perfectly clear view.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you are a great distance away from the stage so that you're not like right on top of them, but you're close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough still that you can still enjoy like the whole light show and you're still close enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see everybody. It is, I think it might be my favorite concert venue that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've ever been to because if you can get that front row, it's just the best seats you'll ever have. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's what we had for Goose. And because I found those seats on StubHub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get for this fish show, I was like, oh my God, we have to go because look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seats. I found them again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And when Marco said a minute ago, a great distance, what he meant by that was an excellent distance, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distance. And so, yeah, I was looking as I was watching the show last night.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like when we were standing, we were approximately vertically speaking eye to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eye with the band. You know, maybe they were a little bit above us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit above them, but roughly eye to eye. And like Marco said, above the entire pit. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really an incredible place to watch a show because not only if you're old, like we are, not only can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you sit down if you'd like, but there's that rail right there that you can lean on. And so you can kind of put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of your weight on your on your hands instead of on your feet for three straight hours. Um, It was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so my review of Fish is basically as follows. It's pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That's what I got. I'll take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think that this is something I would seek doing. Like if Fish was here and Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not like, hey, guess what? We're going. I don't think I would go. But if Marco said to me, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fish is here and we're going, I would say, okay, sounds good. So it was good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um there there was uh the the first set, it was the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey situation as Goose, which really I should say Goose is the same situation as Fish, where there was a set, a set break
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like 20, 30 minutes, another set, and then an astonishingly short encore break.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was like 60 seconds. I think probably because they were bumping up against curfew. And then like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 10, 15 minute encore, and then that was that. And the first set I thought was pretty good. The second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set opened with a song whose name I've heard 10 times in the last 12 hours and I've already lost.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Life Saving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. Life Saving Gun. Is that right? Yep. Okay, Life Saving Gun. That song
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went for like 41 minutes. We'll put the set list in the show notes. I am not opposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a long song. In fact, some of my favorite goose tracks or performances, I should say, are 30 ish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. Um, That one kind of lost me for a little bit, if I'm honest. But the funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing is, you know, I asked Marco on the way, well, obviously Marco asked me what I thought. And I asked him on the way out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'll get, I would like to hear your expanded version, but the short, short version what Marco said on the way out of the concert was, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was really, really good. And by pure circumstance, as we were almost at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the car, I heard my name shouted at me, which was fairly unusual.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it's dark and my eyes are tired and dry. And I couldn't see who the heck was shouting at me. Happy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouting, not angry shouting. I couldn't see who was shouting at me. And as it turns out, as I realized who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was that was looking at me and gesturing or whatever, I walked a few paces that way and I realized it's my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends Matt and Jade, who I hadn't seen in years and I knew were really into fish. Well, I bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all this up to say, you know, we introduced Marco and blah, blah, blah. And and I knew that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two of them could speak the language and Marco obviously could speak the language. And within seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I heard was, but they were, but it was the effusive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of that because they were all like, oh, oh my God, did you see this? And what about that? It was, it was adorable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I very much enjoyed being a fly on the wall when that was happening. But um, what did you think of the show?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think, as you mentioned, the 41-minute long life-saving gun, before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show, Casey was asking me kind of what to expect. And I was telling him, I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, you already know what Goose is like live. Goose is basically following Fish's format for their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closely. So yeah, you have the first set, 20-minute break, second set, brief
⏹️ ▶️ Marco break, encore. And he's like, are the songs really long? And I'm like, well, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally similar to Goose songs. You know, Most songs, maybe you get 10 minutes out of them. Some of them are a little shorter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them go a little longer. Some of them, they will occasionally, maybe once per tour,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they'll expand one out into like a half hour. Well, literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, two hours after I tell him that, we get we get the 41
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minute song. This is the longest song I've ever seen them play live. Like, I haven't gone to that many shows, but it's it's definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the longest one I've seen live. And I was like, and by the time they, you know, bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it back around at the end of whatever that was, um, and they start, you know, playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the, you know, the main riff of Life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann Saving Gun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again to end it, I was like, oh yeah, we're still in that. Like, they have, I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgot where we were, basically, like, in the you know, after, after that long. And I'm like, and I kept looking over at Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm like, cause you know, the first set, the first half of the show, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was much more like high energy jams, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann just really going at like very, everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very melodic. And I had told him, I'm like, you know, kind of like the way the way I describe fish versus goose. I mean, they're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they're not, their actual musical style is is more different than you might think. But the way I kind of describe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them in short is, you know, fish, like the highs are higher and the lows are lower. they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They go a lot more directions. um It can get a lot a lot more experimental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um in a way. And Goose, you know, as Goose develops and gets more experience and and gets more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just kind of develops their sound, Like they are getting more experimental than they were. But Goose is generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, it stays closer to the rails. You know, you can, it maybe doesn't stay on the rails,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can you can still see the train as you walk away. Fish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like has gone, you know, to the next town over and then will find their way back to the train tracks. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they, they, they really go a much further direction away but um, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like the, in this, the middle of this 41-minute song and kind of the surrounding you know, bits, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really went off the deep end in a few ways. And I kept looking over at Casey, like, is he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still having an okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey time? Like he's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like this is, this is the more challenging part of the show maybe for him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then they brought it back and, you know, and kind of went back on the rails for the rest of the show. But I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, you know, from my point of view as as a fish fan, this was, i I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very happy with this show. I think it was the best one I've seen since the the the sphere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows that I saw two years ago. um I really enjoyed this show. It was very, very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so And I told him, like, listen, like, as we were coming out, I'm like this was this is a very good representation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's not like if he had a terrible time, I wouldn't be like, well, this was a bad show. Try it again. Like, no, this was a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show, and this was a good representation of a fish show. And so if you like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, you like fish. If you don't like this, you don't like fish. And it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you liked it OK.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think I liked it OK, is reasonable. Again, I would not I would not bristle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you said, you know, let's do it again. I would probably even be enthusiastic. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that being said, I don't foresee myself saying, you know, let me put on some fish right now. Or,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, where's fish coming nearby? Maybe I'll go without Marco. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't mean that I don't mean that in a turdy way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was good. It was enjoyable. Um, As I've said to Marco and some local friends of mine as well, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm a pretty big sucker for almost any kind of live music. So almost anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm going to end up saying, you know, that was pretty good. Um, And I think this was an example of that. A couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of other quick notes that are, one is one is related, one is not. um, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brought with me, and I can't remember the last time I've done this, and I don't know what possessed me to do it, but I brought with me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a foam, what do you call them? Earplugs for the first time in years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I've gone to a concert, because as it turns out, I've been to more concerts recently than I have in a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I didn't wear them for the first, or use them or whatever for the first song. And for the most part, I didn't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find it to be that uncomfortable, but there are definitely moments that I was like, woof. And then I think it was after the first song I put them in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you know what was weird about the experience was that at the end of the show, my ears
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn't hurt. They weren't ringing. And I felt pretty good. Imagine that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to potentially introduce this thought technology into future shows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, it's nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having hearing protection during concerts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It turns out the Fidelity was not near as good with them in, of course. And these were not like bespoke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concert earplugs or anything like that. They were just crappy foam ear plugs. I don't even know what the provenance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them was. But it did feel pretty nice not to have you know, ringing ears and not to feel like I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a fish tank afterwards. But wildly unrelated to that, very, very briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco brought two gifts to me when he came down, which is wholly unnecessary, but very kind of him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco brought the aforementioned KVM, but Marco also brought something else. Marco, would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you like to tell me what you brought me?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will. But first of all, let me just say one more time. I have tried so many concert earplugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in fact, since our last recording, I've actually been to two concerts. We also went as a family to go see Weezer
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah. I've seen Weezer Live, you know where?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John WWDC. WWDC. Yeah, Yeah, they played the beer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bash. That was so sad. The WWDC Beer Bash is a terrible gig for bands because you're playing through the backs of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of nerds who are trying to talk.
⏹️ ▶️ John There were some Weezer fans who were into it, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I was shocked how good of a show Weezer put on Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I saw them many, many years ago, like right after college. Cause I've always been a huge Weezer fan. Like, and Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the nineties, I was a huge Weezer fan. I haven't honestly kept up with them recently, but I was shocked how good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a show they put on because they they used to be a much lower energy concert performing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco band. And their concerts, I don't think, were very good in in the past years, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have grown and expanded. And they put on a really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. And I, And as an old Weezer nerd, I was incredibly pleased with some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco songs I heard. They played most of Pinkerton, some of the Blue Album, a bunch of the new stuff, some of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew, some of which I didn't. And even they played Longtime Sunshine, which is a B-side from a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco million years ago that I never thought I would see live. It was a great show, great set, great performance. So I highly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommend Weezer. Anyway, so in these two concerts in a week, I got some new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audiophile earplugs to try out again. And I had a bunch of extras for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my family in case they wanted them and stuff. And I have once again come back to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best concert earplugs by far are the AirPods Pro in transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode, but with loud sound reduction enabled. I've said this before in the show a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while ago. The settings and defaults have changed over time. By default, when I got the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro 3s, loud sound reduction was off. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to jump through a weird part of the accessibility settings to turn it on. Like, It shows up as a table row in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain areas of the settings, but tapping it does nothing. And it's just like, it's like, it's like macOS permissions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, You just have to know to go somewhere else to go turn it on. Like, I don't know why you can't just turn it on and off there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that is by far the best concert earplugs, both in fidelity of what you're hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and honestly, to me, in comfort. However, there is a difference between the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3 and 2 that I think is pretty important. The AirPods Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Two is the better concert earplug for most people because it doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually seal as well. And I think the way it is reducing loud sounds might be a little bit simpler.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me just quickly go over this. I swear this won't take too long. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what loud sound reduction appears to be doing is what I would, in my limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understanding, call a multiband compressor. When something loud is detected above a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threshold, if it doesn't want to pass it through in transparency mode to your ears at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that same loudness, which could hurt your ears, it basically ducks down the volume, seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of just those frequencies that it's detecting are peaking past the limit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, at a concert, those frequencies are usually the lead instrument,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lead guitar and the vocals. With the AirPods Pro 3, it seems to be doing a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more surgical job of that filter. And so at a concert with the AirPods Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3 in this mode, the reduce loud sounds feature seems to cut out the vocals and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guitars more than everything else, which makes it honestly a little hard to enjoy a concert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that's the part that really gets you going. What you want, what I want, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any kind of tweak or setting or mode that in that case where it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ducking a loud sound, duck everything, duck the entire volume of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything equally. That would be so much better for a concert.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason the AirPods Pro 2 are better, in my opinion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, I do think they're more comfortable still, but also they don't seal as well as the threes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe that, or a combination of like that, and maybe the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they're doing simpler or less processing on the loud sound filter, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever reason, the Pro 2s let more of the guitar and vocals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more evenly through. It's still not doing like a totally dumb sound reduction like what I want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it's closer to that. So I have found in even like an ab testing them both, like I'll do like, you know, half the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concert with one hat and then switch to the other. It's very clear to me the AirPod Pros are still better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the best earplugs out there. And I have I have like the minuendo ones that are like almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same price as the AirPod Pros. Highly recommended. I have the Sennheiser ones. I have all like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loop and the Eros and all the different ones that are recommended by like Wirecutter and all the NPR tests and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of them sound like anything good at all. The Minuendos come the closest, but they cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost as much as AirPod Pros 2 and are still not the same audible quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But AirPod Pros definitely still the best, but I wish Apple would give me a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode or a tweak to that loud sound reduction that would reduce all sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equally and not just try to notch out the filter that is triggering it. Okay, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I brought Casey, the other gift I brought Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. We were in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 41 minute sidebar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, going back to the melody here, I also brought Casey a 3D printed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model of the iPhone Duo. I made one, like when that one floated around the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco internet maybe three or four months ago, I printed that one out and we talked about it and playing with it. Well, since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the introduction video of the iPhone Duo and the release of its actual specs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have made better models of it that more accurately represent its actual dimensions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual screen size and shape and everything else. So I printed out one for myself and I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, this is actually really useful as a developer because as I'm working on my duo adaptations for my apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm like, I kind of want to see how big is it? How does it feel in the hand? What can you reach? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printed one out for myself and I'm like, oh, I'm going to see Casey tomorrow. I'll make one for him too. So I printed one out for him too. And that's, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the second thing I brought him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I got to tell you, this thing is, well, first of all, as a, as a trinket, as a 3D
⏹️ ▶️ Casey printed trinket, extremely cool. Very great fidget device, which means I'm screwed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when my actual phone gets here Someone want to fidget with it constantly. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get the Apple Care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For you, I mean, you need it for multiple reasons. You're going to drop it on the first day, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, No, this thing, the fidelity, I'll ask you to link the, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can find it, if you can link the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The model. Thank you. Link it in the show notes. But the fidelity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this model is incredibly impressive. Like it has a protruded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lock button. It has what you could, if you squint, you could say is a USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port. And actually, I just plugged in a USB-C cable into the Faux USB-C port. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John perfectly, come to think
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That's awesome. Is it taking a charge?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking a charge. It has the volume buttons on the top. It has grills on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the top and the bottom. It has the camera plateau and the flash and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever. Oh, instead of microphone, I forget what else is back there. But anyways, it is an astonishingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good facsimile of the real thing. It has the Apple logo, which is inset a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, But the point, the reason i'm bringing this up is because now I've been able to like hold this thing and fiddle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it. And I feel like it's I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like this is the right form factor from what I can tell. But in, in so far as like the book style and approximately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this size and blah, blah, blah. Um, Because it's a fair bit wider than what I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to. Maybe not a fair bit. That's a bit of an exaggeration. It's like 10 to 15% wider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than my current phone, I'd say. um and granted, this doesn't have like real bezels on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So maybe I'm not seeing the screen for what it actually is. But it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels like reachability is not perfect. Like I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco have thought something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's quite a bit squatter would make the far upper left corner more reachable. And I wouldn't say it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that different than the phone I have now. But the interior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display, like well first the outside display is a touch bigger than I thought it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be, actually. And the inside one, I feel like, is a touch smaller than what I expected. I think that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Casey issue. I don't think that Apple's misled us. I don't think that the marketing is bad or wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything like that. I think it's just my mental model of it was a little askew. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside does feel like it will be a two-handed device, first of all. But secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this feels like it's a really good compromise. The big problem I have with this is Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when he handed it to me after a couple of minutes, said, put it in your pocket. And I didn't pick up what you were putting down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at first, but I put it in my pocket. I was like, oh, yeah, it feels good. Now, granted, as you pointed out, this is considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lighter than the real thing will be. But in terms of physical shape and size, felt pretty good in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pocket. But then you blew my mind with the next thing you said.
⏹️ ▶️ John Told you to sit down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, sit down before you drop it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you put it in a left pocket, which is where I've always kept my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the corners, the sharp, you know, it has two soft corners and two sharp corners. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two sharp corners, as long as you put your phone screen in, like, cause you're not a monster, of course, um, the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharp corners then are are your front corners of the phone. It's going to rip your jeans. Like, And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you remember, like, remember like back in the day, you would have like the iPhone four shaped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imprint in your jeans pocket, like where it wore away the edges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann And you could always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell, like, oh, those were the pants that I, I bought those pants during the iPhone 4 generation. And then, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you, your, your later pants that were more recent, you could say, oh, the phone imprint on these is a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit bigger. That must have been from the iPhone 6 generation. You could age your pants based on what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shape and size the phone imprint in the pocket was. Well, the Duo is going to have its version of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sure, because not only is it thick and a very noticeably different shape,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it has two significantly pointier corners than the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two corners. So I think this is, for me, like it actually feels really weird in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pocket as a result. And I think it looks really weird. And I think if I'm going to spend any time with the duo as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my daily driver, for multiple reasons, you know, I think I'm going to have to switch to a right-side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone person, like change the change the pocket it's in, change the hand I use to operate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because it is so much a right-handed phone device that I think there's multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are going to drive that conversion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think you're probably right. And I feel for lefties, I'm sure that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be frustrating. Now, I think if the role, if I if this was a left hand device, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure I could make it work. And I do use my phone in my left-hand. Probably, I would say I'm like 60-40
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be my guess with my dominant hand, my right-hand being 60. Maybe it's more than maybe 70-30. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't know. But I think I could handle it. But yes, I agree with you. This is definitely a right handed device,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, for better or worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But it is, honestly, like it's very, it's very useful to handle this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model. You know, obviously the real one is, it might be a little bit different, but this is this is damn close.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It allows you to feel the form factor. It allows you to see the screen and, you know, the screen size and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, And it is, it is like really a tricky size for reachability. But I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on the reports of everyone who has used phones of this dimension, like the like the, the Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ripoff of this, like everyone loves it when they actually use it. And that's broadly what I've heard about foldables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally is like once people use foldables, they tend to love them, but it is you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big expense and you know, it's not for everybody. But like, I think this feels, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excited about it. It feels really good. It feels really weird in a bunch of ways, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it's going to be, I think people are going to like it. And I think, I think I do want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give it a shot as a daily driver, even if it means changing the entire way that I've ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco held my phone. Yeah. Yeah. I totally hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but all told, oh, I forgot one important thing that we did this morning. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slept in. I was very jealous. I had family that I was helping get off to school, whatever. But eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we had a late breakfast together and we went to probably my preferred of the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey local bagel places I really like. This is not the one that was award-winning that we spoke about, I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, three or four months ago. But we went to Cupertino's, which is closer to my side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of town, don't be creepy, and had uh some breakfast. And Marco seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to think in the same way that I thought fish was not a waste. Pretty decent. uh i
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like the the report I got from you was not a waste, pretty decent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. um This is like, as we were going to the bagel place, we were we were we were like kind of joking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like how how much John would hate anything that was out of Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don't realize I'm i'm here in Massachusetts where the bagel situation is grim, so I can't imagine it'll be worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I would say that it was better than I expected. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that bagel was not baked today.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Brueggers gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. I'm a bagel expert, and I can tell you. And Brueggers and Panera,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the kind of Midwest bagel chains, they can be really good. And I used to work at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Brugger's in high school. Like I've had a lot of Brugger's. I think Brugger's makes New York-style bagels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much. And when they're fresh, they're great. And I have no problem with those bagels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don't think you need to be in New York to make New York bagels. It's not like you need the water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything like that. Those are mostly disproven. You just need to make it the New York style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with New York quality standards. And this place, they mostly got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. But even in New York, there's occasionally a bagel place that does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bake fresh every morning. And if you go there early in the morning enough, you'll get a bagel from yesterday. And They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won't tell you, but you can tell. It's obvious when you get a bagel from yesterday. It should
⏹️ ▶️ John be against the law.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It should. You're right. And that's what this was. It was not fresh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was fresh, but I can't prove that by any. means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was not. I 100% guarantee you that bagel was not baked today. But if it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would have been really good. And so this is the kind of place where, like, if you happen to show up after they've baked a whole bunch of bagels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you get a fresh one, I bet it's pretty good. But that's not what I got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can't win them all, but you know what? I still consider it a victory that you weren't like, oh.