709: Steel-Cable Insurance

I. I. I. I. whether or not my VIN number for my Volkswagen had been listed online for sale. And it hadn't been, I'd been checking every other day or so because I'm me and I like to know these things. Why are you stalking your ex? Because I'm curious. There is no good, no good can come from this. It's, I just find it interesting and I was curious what they were going to list it for.

And so. But how, okay, there's only one way this can go. Like, they're not going to list it for below what they paid you. Oh, of course. So they're going to list it for some amount of money that is above what they paid you. And the only thing

that can possibly

is a good,

it's done.

I forget what they listed it for, but it was, I don't know, a couple grand more than they paid me, which is what I expected, right? I mean, it was a relatively unremarkable three series and it was relatively high miles and they sold it presumably for a little bit more than they paid me. It makes perfect sense. I get it.

So I went and at the tip of a friend of mine, I went to see, okay, how much are they going to sell my car for? So I, I should tell you that I bought the car car on the 30th of August in 2018.

That is almost exactly eight years ago from when I sold it to CarMax. I sold it on the 14th or 15th of August in 2026. At the end of August in 2018, I paid, I'm looking at the buyer's order right now, I paid a shade less than $40,000, right, for this brand new 10 miles on the odometer as per the buyer's order, brand new Volkswagen Golf R.

I sold it to CarMax. I think I said, what was it, 26 and change. I forget exactly what it was now. I sold it for 26 and change. Other people had offered quite a bit less than that and I felt like I was doing pretty well. And to be honest, I still do. CarMax is listing my car for a shade less than $39,000.

I'm sorry, I lied to you a minute ago. That was the price with taxes. The actual purchase price, my mistake, was $37,500. So, before taxes, $37,500. In 2018, brand new, CarMax has it listed for a shade less than $39,000.

This car appreciated from their point of view since I bought it and I find that astonishing. I'm actually not upset about this because I don't think they're going to sell it for that much, but can you fathom they're selling it for more than my total purchase price in 2018. I am shocked.

Rare cars appreciate I guess, I didn't think it was that rare though. I mean, but it didn't appreciate that much. Not like they're selling it for, you know, $300,000. But yeah, rare cars appreciate. Just ask all your 911 friends. We have a couple things to announce. First of all, there is a new ATP members special, ATP Insider Show Q&A.

John, can you tell us about this please? Sure. One of the eternal potential topics we have for member specials is like, tell us about the history of the show or long running gags or whatever because a lot of people haven't listened to the whole show or maybe if you have, you don't remember everything and we get a lot of people asking, you know, explain this to me about the show.

What's the deal? Why is it called? Accidental? You know, how did you guys meet? That type of, those type of questions and it just so happens that we had a listener write in with a bunch of questions and we just went through those questions because it sort of like focused us on instead of just doing like the entire history of the show and everything you ever need to know about it, we just use those questions as jumping off points with a couple of additions and we ended up talking about the whole history of the show and, you know, how it all got started and where it went and some of the long running gags and we just, you know, it's a little bit of everything.

It's a little bit navel gazing but some people want to know that stuff because we don't really explain it. We just do it in the show and if you listen enough you can pick it up from like context clues but it's nice to sort of hear it from the source and if you're a long time listener and you already know this stuff I think you'll still find stuff in the show that's interesting.

We retell stories that we've told before but greatly expanded and it was a lot of fun to do so I think it's a good member special. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was, cathartic implies that like something bad had happened but it was very cathartic for me to like re, I can't think of a better word but anyway, reconnect with you.

This all sounds terrible. We're going to leave it in because here we go but I'm making it sound like I hate the two of these guys. I don't obviously but it was really nice to kind of take a mirror on the three of us and talk about how did we get here because I'm very proud of the work that the three of us do and I'm very appreciative that you two fellas are continuing to stick it out with me and vice versa and this thing, I don't know what the final run time was but we recorded for something like two hours and I thought it was really interesting and really fun.

Maybe you, the listener, will like it, maybe you won't but you should definitely check it out and I wanted to absolutely call out Joseph Humphrey who sent all these on the 21st of October 2025 to give you a hint as to how long it takes for us to get to things but thank you to Joseph Humphrey for basically giving us an entire member special.

All right, additionally, there's one more thing to announce and I promise we're going to talk follow-up for a real long time. We need to talk about Don't worry, we'll get to the follow-up. Yeah, there's plenty there. We got to talk about St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. So, let me remind you that September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and because of that we are trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital along with all of our friends at Relay.

If you have any money to scrape together, even a dollar, even five dollars, that's great. I shouldn't say even. I should say if you have five dollars or a dollar or whatever, you should go to stjude.org slash ATP S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP and the reason you do that is because we, the three of us, really believe in St. Jude's mission which is that no child should die in the dawn of their life and they predominantly concentrate on childhood cancer but they'll treat all sorts of really awful illnesses.

So as an example, St. Jude has helped deliver free cancer medicines to children in seven countries with more to come and I bring this up because a lot of times people from the UK will understandably be like, well, we don't have this problem because we actually have socialized medicine and we're a civilized country and first of all, I'm jealous, but second of all, you might still have this problem and even if you personally don't, other countries around you may.

So as of April of this year, childhood cancer medicines have been delivered to seven countries, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Ecuador, Nepal, Zambia, Jordan, and Moldova. This effort is a part of the global platform for access to childhood cancer medicines, a collaboration between St. Jude, the World Health Organization, and other global partners.

It aims to reach more than 120,000 children in 50 countries in the next seven years. The second set of countries has already been announced as El Salvador, Ghana, Pakistan, Senegal, and Sri Lanka. So this is an example that St. Jude is trying to reach out to more than just America.

Additionally, we told the story maybe last week, maybe the week before, of one of your fellow listeners who had a child who was stricken with childhood cancer and their child was treated with a regimen that was developed primarily at St. Jude and they were told that even though they were not anywhere geographically close to Memphis.

So you should really think about donating to St. Jude. You can do that by going to stjude.org slash ATP. Marco, if you, I don't know, maybe on Saturday spent a lot of money on a phone that perhaps you didn't need, what could you do to kind of assuage your guilt about your rampant consumerism?

That is such a great question because as you know, in addition to being Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, it's also rampant consumerism season in the Apple enthusiast world. And so, if you just bought a phone to replace a phone that you maybe could have gotten a bit more time out of or maybe an Apple Watch that you could have gotten a little, maybe one more year out of or maybe you're going to wait for the Duo but you know how much the Duo costs and you know, you know, how much you don't need to spend on a phone?

Well, do I have the solution for your guilt? What you have to do is figure out the Marco Offset. Now, as we discussed in previous episodes, you figure out the base price of the family of phone that you were getting and you figure out whatever your total transaction will be including sales tax, storage upgrades, cases, AppleCare, all in price.

and that number, the difference between the base and that number is the level one Marco Offset. That is your recommended minimum donation to St. Jude if you can swing it and we figure if you can tack in all those extras when buying a phone, you probably, that's probably an amount you can swing unless you're really strapped.

Now, also, if you want to go a little bit further, what else might you be guilty about this year? How about using AI? Well, do we have the solution for you? Level two of the Marco Offset is in addition to your iPhone Offset that we just talked about.

And by the way, same thing applies to Apple Watches and even Macs soon, which could be a significant offset if you get any kind of storage or RAM upgrades. Anyway, level two is you also add on to that whatever you spent on a paid AI plan this month.

Level three is you add on to that whatever you spent on a paid AI plan this year. So if you have a lot of guilt to assuage, we will personally use our powers, I guess assigned to us by guilt gods, to absolve you of your consumer guilt for buying needless Apple products and for using AI if you just give those equivalent amounts to St. Jude this month.

Thank you. John, anything to add? I'll just remind everybody that the podcast-a-thon is happening. The Relay podcast-a-thon is happening. It's just happening a little bit later this year instead of overlapping with iPhone announcement week. So stay tuned for that. Like, we'll do these segments for the whole month of September, but I think the podcast-a-thon is about the first week of October?

That's right. It's, I think, the first or second. I forget the day off the top of my head. I'm going to be there so I should know. Casey will be there. If you want to see Casey roped into a bunch of terrible games, this is the show for you. It's really entertaining. It's just like, you can drop in and drop out all day long.

Tons of stuff happening. And that's a great time to pledge. If you can't, like, you hear us talking about it, like, yeah, yeah, get on with the show, whatever. Watch the podcast-a-thon because at some point you'll be like, oh, I guess this is now when I should pledge. Yes, very much so. It is Friday, October 2nd from noon, one true time zone until midnight, one true time zone.

And inevitably, I will do something deeply and woefully embarrassing. And if you want to share in my shame, you should check it out and go to the Relay YouTube channel and you can find it there. But again, one last time, stjude.org slash ATP, s-t-j-u-d-e dot org slash ATP.

Thank you for bearing with us as we get through some administrivia. But now, let's start follow-up and honestly, we're probably not going to finish it, but we're going to see what we can do. And we're going to start with friend of the show, Todd Vaziri, pointing out that there's a lot of James Bond homages. Did I say that right? In the iPhone event video, and Todd writes, the iPhone event video includes references to James Bond films, particularly the opening shot of Skyfall from 2012 when presenting former CEO Tim Cook, Bond walking from left to right in profile when introducing new CEO John Ternus, and James Bond,

the James Bond gun barrel title sequence when referring, or referencing, excuse me, the new variable aperture featured on the iPhone 18 Pro. You can see this detailed in Todd's very brief blog post. He also has a video comparison, which we will also link in the show notes.

Todd continues, back in 2018, I documented, I as in Todd, documented the heavy influence of Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol from 2011 on the 2018 Apple event introduction as well, and we'll link that in the show. I hadn't seen Skyfall in ages, but when you see the side by side, it's not just like inspired by an homage to, it's shot for shot.

Like you got to watch it. It's, you know, really, I mean, I guess maybe they expected it to be more obvious to viewers, but I only saw the movie once and I didn't remember it all. Yep. All right. And then I found this absolutely fascinating, but Techza, T-E-C-H-Z-H-A, pointed this out to us or pointed us to a post from Apple, from the Hey Apple Instagram, not channel, G-E-Z-P-E-Z account, where they have some information about the event video, and they said they filmed in 20 different locations

across 38 filming days, which I found astonishing. There were two astronauts, Nate Roman Soldiers, and Kyandrance was captured in the back lot used for Seinfeld and Friends, which is all interesting. That was all from Apple, back to tech, whatever. And I thought they only filmed for two or three days before the event to keep everything secret, my exploding head emoji.

I agree, Techza. I also thought it was only a few days, and I had no idea it was over a month. Yeah, anyway, the 20 locations, like Apple Park is one of them for like the whole rest of the thing, so maybe it's 37 locations for the intro? I don't know, it could be.

Either way, that is astonishing, and thank you to Techza for pointing that out to us. We've got some preliminary Geekbench scores for the A20 Pro, the M6, and the M5 Ultra. The A20 Pro, which is in the iPhone, of iPhones 18 Pro. I need to give you a preamble.

Oh, please. So, these pre-preliminary scores is always like, oh, someone connected a device and ran Geekbench, and their score got registered. That's how we see them. Like, their devices are not in everyone's hands. Sometimes they aren't even in reviewers' hands yet. But anyway, that's how they get up here.

That's why they're preliminary, because there's a lot of variability when people report scores from their devices, depending on if their device was hot or cold. Was it being overclocked? Was it sitting on an ice pack? You know, like, who knows what else was going on on the device? So, take that with a grain of salt. And the second thing is, Geekbench has recently changed from Geekbench version 6 to Geekbench version 7, and their website makes it really annoying to make sure you're comparing apples to apples.

So, for all of these scores, I always tried to find, if I can't find a Geekbench 7 score for like an old Mac, I want to compare 6 to 6 or 7 to 7. But that means that the absolute values, just ignore them, because you won't know whether it's a 6 or a 7 value. So, all I was doing is like, okay, if I'm comparing this thing and this one has to be a 6 because there's no 7 score for it, I have to find another comparable 6.

And then I can compare the two Geekbench 6 scores and say it's X percent different from each other, but ignore the absolute values. If you hear the absolute values, like, well, that's much lower or higher than I thought. It's just because it's a 6 or a 7 score. I, you know, Geekbench is in a difficult transition period here and it was really annoying to do this. But anyway, the percentage differences are the things that we care about.

All right. So the A20 Pro and the iPhone's 18 Pro, the CPU single core performance is 24% better than the A19 Pro and 11% better than the previous iOS or iPadOS single core champ, which is the M5 iPad Pro.

And it's 260% better than John's Mac Pro, which in the defense of John Syracuse, he himself added to the show notes. I am very proud of you. Yeah, I always want to look that up, you know, but this is pretty impressive. Like it's 11% faster than the previous single core champ, which is the M5.

So the phone chip has better single core. I mean, it makes sense because it's a newer super core and blah, blah, blah, or whatever, but still super impressive. And yes, 260% faster than single core than my Mac Pro. It hurts. And that's in a phone. This is a phone chip that is performing at the same level in single thread performance as a desktop chips and like not just desktop chips three years ago, desktop chips this year, like the newest one, it is matching the newest chip that just came out.

That's incredible. Oh, I should have put an M6 comparison because I do have M6 later, but I don't know whether the M6 was Geekbench 6 or 7, so I can't do the direct comparison now. But yeah, it's good. No, as far as I can see, it is matching the M6. So, you know, there's all these like, you know, preliminary scores on Geekbench from these chips there because it seems as though, you know, all the review units are out and so people are testing them.

And the M6 matches the single threaded performance of the A20 Pro. Or rather, vice versa, the A20 Pro matches the M6, which itself, like the M6, is a nice jump over the M5. So, that's really, it looks like it probably shares the same super core.

Yeah, we'll get to it in a second. But yeah, the M6 is a similar percentage faster than the M5. Yeah, it's incredible for that to be in a phone. Yeah, it's astonishing. So, that was all single core, let's talk multi-core. 25% better than the previous iPhone Champ, which was last year's A19 Pro.

But it's also 25% less than the M5 iPad. Yet, it is still 20% better than John's Mac Pro. So, as we've said in the past years, the phones have been better than my Mac in both single core and multi-core. Remember, I have a 12-core Xeon in here or whatever. Yeah, that continues to be the case.

Although, they can't compete with the M5 just because the M5 is just so much bigger chip. So, when it comes to multi-core, it's, but still, it's only a 25% gap. So, it's within shouting distance of an M5 in multi-core. Astonishing. For GPU stuff, that was all CPU. GPU, the Metal benchmark, almost 40% better than the previous iPhone Champ, the A19 Pro.

Apple's claim, well, so it was 38%. Apple's claim was a 40% increase in gaming performance. Yeah, and that makes me like sanity check the number because Apple's publicity claims is like 40% increase in gaming performance. Like, hmm, really? The Metal score is 38% higher. So, I'm like, all right, that checks out. then, then, with regard to other comparisons, it's 18% less than the M5 iPad Pro and 21% less than John's Mac Pro.

Woo! Woo! Woo, baby! I'm going out, this is my, this is my final, because by the time we record another episode or two, I will have, you know, retired the Mac Pro and switched to my M5 Max Max Studio. So, you know, I used this Intel Mac Pro for as long as I possibly could and obviously, it's been destroyed by phone chips in every possible way except GPU.

The phone chip cannot beat my Mac's 600 watt GPU or whatever the hell is in there. I'm still 21% faster than a phone. Yeah. In this one measure. But I'm just, I'm just glad that I didn't have to see the day where the phone beat my Mac in single core, multi-core, and GPU.

Well, do you have a ship date for your studio? I don't remember. It's coming on 20 seconds, supposedly. Oh, okay. That's not bad at all. Day one. Yeah. All right. So that was all the A20 Pro, right? Now let's move on to the M6. CPU, single core performance is 10% better than the M5.

Multi-core performance, 35% better than the M5. These like year over year improvements are astonishing. I cannot believe we're still seeing this big of a jump every year. Yeah. M5 Ultra, CPU is the only thing we have. You missed the GPU for the M6.

That's what I said. I'm going to do GPU for M6 first. The GPU is 25% better than the M5. So the jump from M5 to M6, a 25% increase. And it's interesting that I don't know. I mean, so Geekbench is the general benchmark disclaimer. We don't know how representative Geekbench is or anything.

It's just a popular benchmark that people use. God only knows if there's some particular benchmark that suddenly fits into some cache and gives this big boost or whatever, right? We'll find out with real world benchmarks how these things actually do. But yeah, GPU, 25% increase and in a year multi-core, 35% increase.

These are pretty big increases for the vanilla no suffix M chips. Yep, really incredible. And then finally, the M5 Ultra, the CPU is roughly the same as the M5 Max for single core, which is to be expected, I think. But multi-core, it's almost 40% better than the M3 Ultra.

So again, M3 to M5 is an almost 40% increase. M5 Max to M5 Ultra, a 60% increase. That is astonishing to me. So again, M3 Ultra to M5 Ultra, a 40% increase, but M5 Max to M5 Ultra, 60, almost 60% increase.

Yeah, I mean, you would, it's tricky, but it's like, hey, isn't it two M5 Maxes put together? Shouldn't it be 100% increase because you double everything? And that's where you get into some of the, obviously there's overhead of the, you know, the way they do the interposer and blah, blah, blah. But also, are these benchmarks, like, what kind of data dependencies are in these benchmarks?

Like, there's a whole bunch of things that limit the exploitable parallelism in CPU stuff. GPUs are usually, as they say, embarrassingly parallel, and there's not a lot of data dependencies slowing things down and stuff. Whereas, finding multi-core CPU benchmarks that really let all the cores go at full speed is difficult.

So, it's hard to say without knowing the details of the benchmark, you know, is this just a, you know, is the over, does the overhead of the two M5 Maxes stuck together continue to just cripple this chip? Or is it actually made a little bit worse by the fact that the benchmark can't actually exploit it? Again, real world benchmarks are what you care about.

You're not going to be running, real world tests are what you care about. You're not going to be running benchmarks all day. You're going to be doing something with your chip. So, I don't know, like, someone who runs a local model, you know, doing local LMs or some kind of thing that actually uses all the CPUs, like a CPU bound rendering thing in like Blender or something that really is embarrassingly parallel.

So, we'll see with real world tests. But, it's so weird for this comparison because you have to compare it to the M3 Ultra which is two generations older but it's the only thing that's close in terms of the amount of silicon in it. Really incredible work by Apple's silicon team. It just, it continues to be just astonishing. All right, let's talk the C2, the cellular modem.

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors writes, Apple says the iPhone 18 Pro has a C2 modem worldwide while the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses the chip in every country except the U.S. Is this American exceptionalism? I don't know if this is good or bad. Anyway, according to a tipster known as It's Pdiffu, iOS 27 code reveals that the iPhone 18 Pro Max is equipped with a Qualcomm modem instead of the C2 chip in the U.S.

In 2023, Qualcomm announced it would supply Apple with smartphone modems through 2026. So, perhaps Apple is equipping the U.S. version of the iPhone 18 Pro Max with a Qualcomm modem in order to honor this agreement in a minimum way. Or maybe they just couldn't manufacture as many C2s. Like, it's the, I've seen the theory in a bunch of places like, oh, Apple has to ship Qualcomm chips because they had a contract or whatever.

I don't know if that's how contracts work, but, you know, I'm glad, I'll put it this way, I'm glad I'm not getting the Pro Max because I want the C2 chip because it presumably, you know, uses less power like all of Apple's modem chips too. and everyone who's tried the C1 and the C1X have said, it's fine, it's good.

Like, so I'm hoping when I get my iPhone 18 Pro with the C2 that I will be happy with the C2 chip and the battery life that it gives me. Yep. Flanker writes, so now there's a fancy heat dissipating plate behind the screen in the iPhone 18 Pro.

How long before this turns into a solar panel to constantly recharge the phone? I don't know if that's feasible, but man, that sounds really slick. It's not. So, the problem with solar charging of small portable devices is that you just don't have a lot of surface area to have a meaningful charge added to modern devices in most real world conditions.

There was an episode of John Chidgey's podcast Pragmatic back in 2014, 12 years ago, called Watch This Time and Space, episode 38 of Pragmatic, we'll link to it in the show notes. where he goes over, like, it was shortly after the Apple Watch had come out, and he goes over the question, like, could the Apple Watch basically be a solar panel like on its face the same way there are other like solar mechanical or solar quartz watches that are able to do that, like the Citizen

EcoDrive series and Seiko has some too, like they're able to keep themselves charged through just the face of the watch having a solar panel kind of under it. But the problem is those watches use very, very little power to drive their mechanisms. Whereas if you compare to a modern, you know, full color screened device, like whatever battery is in it, like you're talking about very different amounts of power.

So I did some quick research before the show to figure out like, and by that, I mean, I asked AI, to figure out like roughly what are we talking about in terms of like, if the entire face of the iPhone 17 Pro was a solar panel, how much energy could it collect and how much would that charge its battery in, you know, reasonable conditions?

And the answer is basically like a few percent per hour, really, like at most. And that's if you are not using the phone at all, and it's just sitting like, you know, on a table flat, like with collecting sun. So it's obviously that varies based on where you are and time of day and sun angle and weather and stuff like that.

But you're talking about a few percent per hour at most, you know, most of the time. So it's not really enough to make a difference. And that's also ignoring things like, you know, would it be the back of the phone? Like, can it then, you know, do you have to make room for the camera plateau?

If it's the front of the phone, it has to obviously go under the screen, which would significantly reduce the amount of light. there's just all sorts of practical problems. But the fundamental problem is that it's just not a big enough surface to make a meaningful difference most of the time in most conditions for the actual amount of power that modern devices use, which is a decent amount of power.

We are sponsored this episode by Claude. I have Claude do so much for me every day now. So just today alone, I had it research a pricing issue with my iOS app and subscription price changes. I had it validate the validity of a Geekbench result that's for the purported new M6 and, you know, look around and see, do various factors of it look right?

Are they plausible based on Apple's marketing? I had it look up the equivalent apertures of all the new iPhone's 18 Pro's lens apertures on the variable aperture lens and convert them to 35mm equivalents. I had it look up what percentage of people around the world sleep on different types of mattress or surface types just for a conversation I was having.

Had it match the DPI of a third-party mouse to match the response rate of a magic mouse and look up various electrolyte products and see what's best for my runs. It's amazing what it can do. Oh, by the way, yesterday it solved a huge bug in Overcast downloader that's taken me months to find.

All that is possible and so much more with Claude. Claude is the AI for problem solvers. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight building a financial model or strategizing your next business move Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.

I get a huge amount of value out of Claude code. This is living right where you already work in your terminal your IDE or the desktop app and the web even GitHub and it can read your code base and take real engineering tasks off your plate. Writing tests I love doing that with Claude because I hate writing tests.

Debugging refactoring they can even watch your pull request and fix CI failures while you're away making coffee. So it's amazing what you can do with Claude code and so much more. This is just scratching the surface. For problems worth solving get started with Claude at Claude.ai slash ATP that's Claude.ai slash ATP and check out Claude Pro which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode.

Claude.ai slash ATP Thank you so much to Claude for sponsoring our show. Let's talk cameras specifically the aperture blades on the iPhone's 18 Pro. MKBHD says apparently third-party apps will be able to do infinite aperture values not just the four preset aperture values that Apple exposes in the camera app.

That is news to me. I have not watched his review yet so that's exciting. Petapixel said the same thing. I think Apple has told everybody that essentially all the reviewers that even though we expose for aperture sizes it's adjustable so third-party apps can pick whichever sizes they want and apparently even during video you can smoothly change from one aperture to another without any stepping in between so I'm assuming they're getting this info for Apple now that I've seen it in two review videos.

Yeah and I recommend the MKBHD review because he actually goes and shows like the difference in aperture values and how it affects the photos which I thought was very good to see. I've also seen in Petapixel's review they noted that if you actually open it up to the widest open aperture the new f1.48 which lets in more light you do give a little bit in sharpness and not just in the focal plane being shallower but in the actual

sharpness of the lens that it is less sharp especially outside of the center of the frame. That's true that's true of all cameras. Yeah it's true it's very like any kind of camera or lens review you're going to see them measure that and the better the lens the sharper the corners but there's still always a trade off and it's never quite the same across the whole frame.

And when you make the aperture smaller the corners sharpen up more. Yeah but you can tell and based on some other reviews so far it seems like Apple software is preferring the f1.8 aperture much of the time unless it really needs that extra light like in low light scenes and that's and they even mentioned in the in the video they said that they had like optimized the f1.8 aperture for most use and so it seems like in most of the time you're not going to get the benefit of that wider open aperture

unless you manually set it but you might not want to but in low light it will be very nice. Although my one complaint about the MKVHD video is when he was trying to demonstrate aperture on his bazillion dollar like red video camera that he's being recorded on he just adjusted the aperture without like changing like the you know the shutter speed effectively or whatever like the equivalent is on a video camera so they were just when he made the aperture bigger everything got really bright and we made the aperture smaller everything got really dark and it's like well that's not how you actually use those things other things adjust as well I wish he had shown

the depth of field changing because it probably in the giant lens and sensor he has he could have demonstrated that inside a little room but whatever it's not he's not doing a photography tutorial but it just made I think it made people seem like oh that aperture thing just makes your pictures too bright or too dark it's like well no that's anyway it's fine also like to get to get an idea of what these apertures are if you're used to other cameras I did the conversion and the the widest open aperture f1.48 on the iPhone is equivalent to f5.2

on a full frame sensor oh wow and then the narrowest one f4 on the iPhone is equivalent to f14 so it's f5.2 to f14 equivalent so this is not terrible but it's certainly like if you're if you are thinking it's going to be anything like you know a full frame 50 you know nifty 50 prime lens that you got like it's it's not it's not going to be near that it is nice relative to iPhone lenses but you're still in iPhone lens land

that's better than I thought f5 is honestly better than I thought the widest open thing would be so all right Orlando writes a note about the benefits of the new adjustable aperture in the iPhone 18 Pro physically stopping down the aperture in bright environments with mixed artificial lighting helps avoid fast shutter speeds that cause banding or flickering in those sources of those sources especially in video yeah because I mean like all iPhone cameras ever it has a quote unquote electronic shutter in that there's not something mechanical moving in front of the sensor

it is all just reading out the sensor in various strips and if you have lighting that flickers real fast like when you read one row the light could be the LED light could be off and you read the next row the light could be on or a little bit of overlapping so you get this weird striping in your pictures and if you read out more slowly then the LED lights will flicker 17 times during each row and so it'll all even out and that's what they're talking about stopping down means making the hole that the light gets in smaller that means changing the aperture to be a high stopping down means changing the aperture to be a higher value I know

it's confusing terminology but anyway there's another possible benefit of you know using manual control if you take a picture and you get those weird bands you don't know where they're coming from increase your aperture value which will make the hole smaller Chris Marquardt writes I think a big reason why the aperture blades are straight and not round is to make good looking starbursts from point light sources to aperture photographers this shouts pro and these starbursts are easiest to create with straight aperture blades he included a picture from one of Apple's like samples that they showed in the keynote

which sure enough someone has an earring and there's a specular highlight in it and you get little starburst lines on the specular highlight Pai Gersa it's SLR Lounge writes as light passes into your camera through a small opening i.e. a small aperture at a low focal length it bends around the edges of the blades and creates the star look the number of rays from each starburst is related to the number of aperture blades in your lens the reason I looked up all this stuff is because I had thought and was confirmed as I looked up this stuff that there is still some debate

about the thing that Marco said last time which is like straight aperture blades versus rounded and how many blades and how much and how much that specifically affects starburst not like the the bokeh bubbles which I think is much easier to just show but the starburst like okay but like the number of blades being the number of rays sure but if the blades are curved versus straight how much difference does that make so that's you know I pulled the SLR lounge one of just saying here's someone straight up saying the thing that Orlando or no that Chris was saying which is like yeah

number of blades straight edges make more starburst things than rounded edges then we have effortless easy in reddits r photography who made a quick comparison image between two aperture types and the effect on starburst nine straight blades versus seven rounded blades there is a link in the show notes where you can check out the image of like a cruise ship I think it is and there's a very bright light on the front of the cruise ship and you can see the straight versus rounded starburst and the rounded

one still has a starburst but it's a little bit different starburst I didn't count the little rays around it but yeah the final thing we'll link here is a thread from the DP reviews forum where it's just a bunch of foreign people debating this topic does it matter they're straight does it matter that around it does it matter how many there are it's again specifically related to starburst which is the thing that some people are kind of obsessed about and most like lens reviews and camera reviews and stuff like do a thing on starburst I've never found myself being particularly interested in them I wish they could be eliminated entirely but if you're going for

something artsy it's good to know what the starburst performance characteristics are and if you want starburst starburst with your iPhone camera I guess make that hole a little smaller yeah in both of these cases it appears as that the number of rays from the starburst is just twice the number of aperture blades which might have something to do with it but also like yeah a I would consider these both flaws but I understand like you know sometimes you can use flaws for artistic effect but B I think the rounded one unquestionably looks better if you're going to have

one like the rounded one looks like more of like the dreamy look that I think most people be going for well those are big like real cameras like look at the Apple one I think Apple the Apple one is a great use of starburst they're extremely thin and extremely sharp because again the actual like equivalent aperture of the tiny iPhone thing is such that they're going to look a lot more like the nine straight blades and the seven rounded ones or whatever but I think it is artful in this picture little sparkle on the person's earring I think that looks nice whereas the cruise ship ones look terrible

yeah the other thing I pointed out is that you know if you are using this to capture like point light sources there's a pretty good chance you're capturing this in low light because that's when you would most often see point light sources is in low light and if you're stepping down the iPhone lens to the equivalent of f14 in low light you're going to have some serious noise to deal with hold it real still yeah yeah yeah yeah all right also from mkbhd's video review we'll put a timestamp link

in the show notes but there's some interesting comparisons between the section of the screen that has face ID behind it and the section that does not again I didn't watch this yet I apologize I didn't have a chance but John can you tell me about what's going on here yeah last episode I talked about how I could see the little spot on the iPhone duo where there was the camera thing behind the screen because like they they omit some pixels that are in front of it so the camera can actually see and of course the iPhone 18 Pro and Macs do the same thing but with

not with the camera but with the face ID IR sprayer so I think it's a little bit less noticeable and you can kind of see why in these pictures they were directly from the review we got like a microscope or something especially if you look at the like the bottom picture in our notes here again we'll have a time sampling so you look at it but the super zoomed in one you can see the pattern of sub pixels on the phone and their weird pentile pattern of the R the G and the B and these little diamond shapes and then when you get over into the region where the FaceTime IR sprayer is up in the corner

of the phone you can see they just omit like these zigzagging strips where there's no sub pixels there's nothing there that's where the IR is coming out of it's in between all these things if you look at the area where the IR camera is not there's no place for the IR rays to come out but where they are it's like it's like a little zigzag pattern and the zoomed out one like okay now that I know that's there and I look can you see it like around the 12 on this clock thing oh yeah there's a little circle that's a little bit darker I would assume that they would drive the pixels a little bit harder

within that circle but maybe they're not like maybe that's too hard to do like in other words if you have fewer sub pixels drive them a little bit brighter so the overall appearance is that there's not a dim circle but once I get my phone I'll definitely be looking for this but anyway I guess I think it is less noticeable than the camera in the duo because the camera in the duo is a visible light camera and I think that just needs more holes in the pixels for the light to go in than an IR one needs for the IR to go out yeah makes sense all right let's

talk iPhone duo I don't I had an epiphany just before I sat down to record I was trying to do something on my phone with iPhone mirroring and I was trying to monitor something that was going on and it occurred to me what is going to happen for iPhone mirroring with the duo like will you be able to switch between the exterior and interior screens will you only get one or the other I'm I don't think we can solve this problem right now but I'm just very curious to know how is that going to work I think they'd let you switch between them

what they should really do is make it a 3d model that you can like open and close I bet it'll just be like a switch where you you know you hit the switch and it does a little opening animation and you see the inner screen or you have it closed but we'll see are you excited to get iPhone mirroring when you finally have an Apple Silicon Mac no I have iPhone mirroring now don't I don't think you do yeah I never use it but I'm pretty sure I have it yeah do you Casey do you use it a lot I wouldn't say a lot I use it probably a few times a week generally speaking my phone is on my person so if I'm using it on

my computer I could grab my phone in this case I was trying to monitor something that has an app but doesn't have like a website or anything and so I was going to leave it up on one of my screens to just kind of glance at from time to time as it turns out something was going on where it kept timing out and so I'm not sure what was going on there but I use it from time to time I definitely would miss it if it was gone but it wouldn't like shatter my world or anything like that I'm guessing you barely use it Marco yeah so the problem is I will occasionally like you know get a notification forward to my Mac and

I'll click it and it'll try to open iPhone mirroring and the problem is I use iPhone mirroring infrequently enough that every time it has to authenticate itself again yeah don't don't get John started on that sort of issue yeah and I'm just like I forget it like every time like it's like okay I have to go unlock the phone or type on it's like forget it I'll just take my phone out of my pocket and do this so it's just it's it's one of those areas where like Apple's over security around this feature makes it so that I just never use it yep I hear you anyways moving on there

is no action button on the iPhone duo and we couldn't remember if we actually called that out as an as an item on the last episode but we're saying it now that bums me out my action button is the flashlight which I'm pretty darn sure I stole that idea from Marco which I might have even made fun of you for when I initially heard it and let me tell you once I did it it was amazing it's a really good idea so so I'm sad about that now I am glad that it does continue to have the camera control less because I almost never use camera control for the like slidey action

but I love using it not only to launch the camera app but also sometimes to actually snap a photo so I'm glad that it still has camera control but I am bummed about no action button it's so weird because the action button is so small I know room is tight on the duo and they don't have a lot of room for stuff and the sides are shorter like I understand why it's like let's let's economize on buttons but I almost kind of think that like they could just made the camera control smaller and use the room use the room that they say it because the action button is so tiny I mean maybe is it bigger on the 17 on

my 16 the action button is the tiniest button ever like find a place for that but we'll see if the next version well that's the problem it's like on on what edge like if it's on the top edge it's competing with volume which I guess it doesn't I know it like put it somewhere yeah like like there's that's the problem with the folding phones is like well you have to pick an edge and whatever edge you pick is going to be inconvenient for somebody in some situation like the volume buttons being on the top and bottom which I think we also didn't mention you just have to pick an edge and you know people will make it but that's the that's the beauty of the action button is like well what if there's some function that there's a button

for but the way I use the phone it's not convenient for me to get to that button the action button would be like okay well I'll just I'll just configure the action button to do that thing even though there's already a button that does that like having the action button be the camera shutter because the way you hold your duo it's more convenient for you to hit that than the camera button so that's why I think it would have been useful just kind of like a another option for people because we don't I don't think even Apple knows like how are people are going to hold this and use it and what's going to be convenient and not like they made their best guess where they put the buttons now but you know

once this thing gets out into the wider world we'll see yeah I think we were trying to theorize what was going to happen with keyboards on the duo particularly when you're on the internal screen I can never keep their official terminology straight I apologize but anyway the duo does indeed have a split keyboard when you have it open so you are using the internal screen John where do you remember where the screenshot came from yeah I wish I would have been able to find a source for it I just I screenshotted it it was probably from a video but I think it's this is an I think an official Apple video but there's a bunch of things in

official Apple media that show yes it does indeed have an iPad style split keyboard although not the iPad style iPad used to actually have like a like a gap between the split where you could see the screen in some iterations but this is a straight across the bottom of the screen but the it's split because like half of the keys are close to your left thumb and half of the keys are close to your right thumb and then there's just a big alley around the crease where there's nothing yeah this is one of the parts I'm most curious about like having the duo in use how weird is it that the keyboard can

basically be three different sizes like I think just gut feeling wise I would think that would really bother me and that this is like I've never used the touch keyboard very much on iPads for this reason like because it's always like a different size than my phone like not what I'm used to so this though I mean this is a smart way to do it in that they can probably keep the keys like the same sizes and distances apart in both orientations of the inner screen but then it would be different on

the outer screen so I don't yeah I mean it's like timing on an iPad it's weird yeah and like and I suspect I mean because I guess this is part of what we'll see like when we have these devices and actually have time to use them but like are you gonna want to type much on the outer screen given that it's so short and you're probably not gonna have a lot of space above the keyboard to see what you're typing into I don't I don't know it all remains to be seen how this device will actually be used by everybody and and I think I think everyone's gonna be

forced to kind of like like relearn how to physically use a phone in a bunch of different ways while getting used to it it's so funny to me because I'm going to get one of these we talked about that before I waffle a lot between being sad about the camera and you know the now the action button but when I get past that when I allow myself to actually be enthusiastic I am really excited to try this and I am really excited for something

that is genuinely new in the world of iPhones yes Android people we hear you we know but in the world of iPhones I'm genuinely excited to try something new and even if this isn't for me which who knows but even if this isn't for me I think it's going to be super neat to have something just wildly different to play with for a while and I'm getting ever more excited for it as time goes on now remind me of this when I try to take a zoomed in shot of my children and can't but I am I genuinely getting really really excited

for this and I think it's going to be a really really interesting time there's a lot of gotchas there's a lot of compromises as we talked about there's a lot of yeah but but I I feel like to offset some of my fetching and complaining from last episode I genuinely am really excited for this I don't know Marco you're in for one you had said are you feeling the same are you just dreading it I know from the developer point of view it sucks we're going to put that aside for now but from a user point of view I'm getting really really amped for it you know we we got we got a piece of feedback sometime that

was basically like why are we so negative on the duo and I thought were we that negative on the duo but I but I think like I really am speaking from two different parts of my but I guess I don't know like from from the developer side I'm really irked at how Apple is handling this but from the user side I am really excited about this new device like I think I think it's gonna have a bit of a slow start on

the software side from for as I said last time like for everybody for Apple software and for our software it's gonna be a year of safe area inset bugs and betas and non-updated apps but from a physical device perspective like imagine what this opens up no pun intended nice there's so like first of all even just the basics of like taking a selfie you can now use the best camera on your phone to take a

selfie because you can see yourself on the on the outer screen like there's there's so many assumptions or as I was saying earlier patterns about using phones that that this changes or at least gives you the opportunity to change not to mention like you know as you you know as you open it up you have a way bigger screen than any other phone has ever or than any other iPhone has ever offered I know andrew people are like on fire they didn't invent any of this like set that

aside any other iPhone has ever offered so that that opens up lots of potential for software for different use cases I'm actually very excited about the Apple pencil support oh tell me more well first of all just from an app development perspective I want to make my note-taking app for it at some point oh breaking news you didn't tell us this I think I did as I've said recently you did when was where was I when that

happened I do not remember you saying that I'm sorry I mean nothing was stopping you from making that up for the iPad except for your hatred of the iPad iPad because like you'll be on your couch and you know people who like iPads are like oh when I sit on my couch and read through my news for the day I like to do it on my iPad and you're like iPad iPad it's in the drawer I don't care but you'll have your phone and maybe when you're there you're like you know I'm gonna read a long article and actually it's nicer to read this long article if I open up my phone into you know the open mode and put

it in portrait orientation and now I can make the text bigger and it's I can read more at once so maybe you'll end up as like a an accidental iPad mini user after doing this but we'll see yeah I mean but you know a lot of people like I've heard a lot of people say that they that you know why don't you just get an iPhone pro and an iPad mini and you know it's it's like the similar price to just get both of those things and it's because I don't want two different devices the whole appeal of this is that it's one device that is always with you in

your pocket now you know I do think obviously there's downsides you know there's the camera systems are are worse in a lot of ways there's you know I'm sure the speakers are going to be worse thicker and heavier yeah it's obviously significantly thicker and heavier which I will not like at all in the summertime and you know in short it's going to be ridiculous bouncing around in my pocket but there is a lot opened up by this like there are so many tasks you know because I am over the

age of 35 I don't there are some tasks that I'm just like I'll just wait till I get to my computer for this because the phone screen is too small to do this comfortably or maybe you know I want to open up multiple tabs and go back and forth or have bounce between different things and like yeah some of that won't change you know if I'm researching a major purchase I'm still probably going to be doing that like mostly on a computer but there are a lot of tasks that I attempt to do on my phone that would just be a lot easier if I

had you know something else you know with a bigger screen and this the duo will be able to bridge that gap not for all tasks but for many tasks even something simple as like you know there are some times where I want to bring a laptop somewhere because you know if I'm going to be if I'm going somewhere like overnight but I don't know like is my server going to explode in the middle of the night and I'm going to have to like SSH into something and fix it these days I just bring a

Mac I bring I bring my travel laptop because oh well no big deal but there are some situations where I could just bring this and I might be okay especially if I get one of those dumb little pocket keyboard things that like folds up you know like you know there's all sorts of of ways to make this work as like a little mini workstation and people have been doing this with iPads for years but I just don't like the iPad I want to like the iPad but I don't but there

are parts of the iPad I like and I wish I like the rest of the iPad enough to always have one with me but I don't and one of those parts is the Apple Pencil I love using the Apple Pencil even though I'm not an artist at all and I hardly ever handwrite any notes but when I do I like having that I like you know earlier today I like I was having a conversation and I wanted to quickly doodle some graphs like just some basic like you know shapes of like okay you know a linear curve an exponential curve and I

grabbed my remarkable tablet powered it on and you know took it out like it was great for that purpose but like if I had this I could just take that out and I could even I mean it's big enough I could just do it with my finger even like that's step one is like you don't even need the Apple Pencil for like Sharpie on a post-it note type granularity you know you could do that with your finger but with you know with this size screen like if you have an Apple Pencil on this size screen that's about

the that's almost as big as a lot of like pocket notebooks that people use or it's actually bigger it's bigger than a Moleskine it's bigger than the field notes like so that becomes like a potentially interesting digital notebook before that you know so there are things like that that I'm interested in and that I think could be could be you know good markets to get into or at least good tools for you know for me to use myself so there's all sorts of stuff like that like part of what is daunting from a developer

point of view is that it's not just a bigger iPhone it's a smaller iPhone that becomes a much bigger iPhone that can also be a laptop sort of clamshell mode or a tent and all these different other like shapes that it can be in all of those both open up possibilities as a user and a developer and also create burdens as a developer to very very quickly make your app not suck in all these different positions and stuff that it

might end up in and we have you know no time to do it and literally still no tools to do it so it is totally I think a consistent view to say both this sucks as developers right now and also as users this is very exciting and I can't wait to get my hands on one and I'm trying my hardest to you know do whatever it takes to get one on day one as soon as we can but between now and then it's going to be absolute hell as a

developer I mean the two things are related the reason it sucks as a developer is also the exact same reason why it's exciting as a user because in theory you're going to get to try all sorts of new things and apps unfortunately you're a developer apps and you have to make all those new things yeah and I see a lot of commentary going around with people basically trying to rationalize why this sucks and that's a very healthy human response because the response is first of all it's really expensive so you don't you don't you're trying to just disregard it so that you don't have to

consider buying it because it's really expensive or you don't have to feel bad that you can't or won't buy it because it's expensive so their typical response disregard it find some way to say ah it's not it's I don't that's that thing sucks secondly there will be parts of it that suck because it's the first version like I'm sure there's always going to be like visible crease lines after a relatively short time I'm sure there's gonna you know you're gonna be able to notice some of those under screen camera you know dim areas and stuff like that there it is going to be

physically odd in certain ways it is going to suck for left handers at least for a little while I'm sure there's eventually gonna be software toggles but like there will there will be parts of it that do suck but there's also a lot of promise here and it doesn't all suck and at some point down the road they'll make one with better cameras and they'll make one that adds an action button somewhere for John's like at some point down the road many of these things will you know be improved and you know in

future versions but this first version like it's there's a lot of reasons for people to love this thing I bet and the reactions from people who have tried folding phones of this size are very very good and so I think it's gonna be a hit it's just gonna be a hit that's gonna be pretty small relative to the rest of the iPhones like you know people are saying it's like a like a 2% global industry for foldables so far or global market share for

foldables and so if this if this ends up being 2% of all iPhones sold first of all I think it'll probably more than that but I don't think it's gonna be a ton more than that and that's that would still be a lot of units but if you want to say it sucks you'll still find ways that that you can say that because it's gonna be a low percentage of market share but I think every single person who buys this thing is gonna have a very very good chance of loving it because that's what typically happens in foldables like people who get into foldables tend to

love them and I think this is way better than the Android ones in almost every way so I think it's gonna be a big hit I think they're gonna be back-ordered for months and it's gonna be very difficult to get and that's because it's gonna be a big hit I'm very very curious and excited to see how this lands from a from you know a market share perspective because I think it is likely it's going to be one of two extremes it will either be a

general a giant hit like you said or it'll be an iPhone air there is no way that this ends up selling as little as the iPhone air I'm telling you it's not even gonna it's gonna blow the iPhone air out of the water I think you're right granted that's like blowing like you know a little toy bathtub tugboat out of the water like it's it's a pretty small target but the iPhone air as I mentioned I don't want to be too cruel to it but the iPhone air has very little reason for almost anyone to choose it over the other iPhones

whereas the iPhone duo has substantial reasons for people to choose it so I think it's gonna do great yeah we'll see but I just wanted to say because irrespective of feedback I feel like I was so shell-shocked by the developer story which as of today is still not getting better there's a new version of Xcode not including the simulator for the iPhone duo but that was amazing so the news drops today Xcode 26.2 beta release like wait what we were waiting

for 26.1 what happened and then we go and look and at least Apple had the courtesy on the download page to have a big gray box that basically says this is not the one you're looking for if you're looking for duo development it's like okay so we have 26.0 we have 26.2 beta 26.1 beta still to come sometime later this month well 27 right 27 yes yeah still to come so we still don't

don't even have a simulator to try this with let alone you know be able to adjust our apps to actually try any of this stuff so yeah the developer story for this is incredibly fumbled like it's gonna be a mess and I'm still substantially irked as a result of what they're because like honestly I think I think if they're never going to do this but I think a fair thing for Apple to do

would be to not allow app store reviews from the iPhone duo for the first three months years ago they changed the policy for betas they used to allow reviews from betas they and years ago they realized like what was happening was people would install the developer beta one on their phone on day one some app would not work on beta one because the developer hadn't had access to the beta until that day and the person would go one star in the app store so Apple realized okay this is

unfair to developers so you can't you can no longer leave app store reviews or ratings on beta versions of iOS well I think for a similar reason and again they're never going to do this but I think for a similar reason they shouldn't allow people to review apps on the iPhone duo when developers have had almost no time to adopt to it either and again they're not going to do this but it would be great if they like just disallow those reviews for a few months yeah we'll see I'm sure it

won't happen there's no chance we are sponsored this week by granola maybe you're like me and you are perhaps a little bit overconfident about your memory and maybe you think oh surely I'll remember that important action item from that meeting with my boss and my boss's boss or maybe what really happens is it goes in one ear and out the other I'm not proud of that but let's be honest that's how I am well what you can do is have something on your side to help you with this and

that something could be granola granola is an AI powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful it captures what happens in your meetings and turns it into clean structured notes with decisions and action items pulled out and made easy to find so I did the unthinkable not only did I have a meeting just for y'all but I did the unthinkable unthinkable and I solicited John Syracuse that have meeting with me and we did and we had this meeting on Google meet we had it with granola and what we talked about was ATP member specials what we think we should do what we think we

shouldn't do how we can improve ideas and to be honest with you was actually very productive but I'm here to tell you that having granola in the room was really nice because not only did it capture a full-on transcript but at the end of the meeting it came up with notes about what it thought we should do or take and take note of and it did a really really good job so it came up with headings such as secret weird thing and I don't want to spoil anymore but we did talk about a secret weird thing and it doesn't just have like a single

list of bullets it even has bullets and sub bullets it has markdown style headings with you know the hash mark at the front it did a really good job and at the very end it calls out next steps and assigns them to each of us it's really really slick and really well done so once you try granola on a first meeting it's hard to go without you can try it totally free head to granola.ai slash atp that's g-r-a-n-o-l-a.ai slash atp to get your

time back go to granola.ai slash atp and try it on your next call thank you to granola for sponsoring the show all right let's talk of some other videos Tom's guides Mark Spoonhour and TechRadar's Lance Ulanoff interviewed Ternus and Jaws in two parts like one of them was on the Tom Scott YouTube one of them was on TechRadar's Utah YouTube and

Thomas Ricker at the Verge quoted Jaws from that interview we'll put a link to both parts in the show notes I believe this is from part one Jaws said people knew through leaks that we were working on a foldable said Jaws unfortunately they got the aspect ratio and a lot of coincidental instances instances of people finding that an interesting aspect ratio by P and now I'm sorry reading from Thomas Ricker by people Jaws mean Samsung Huawei and Xiaomi all who all announced foldables with similar apps

aspect ratios ahead of Apple what did remain a secret in the is the folding nanotexture display unique to the iPhone duo now quoting Jaws again what I'm super proud of we kept it secret we put the extra security on it we didn't talk about it to anybody we had a very funny code name which I won't repeat which had nothing to do with it first of all Mark Gurman get on that we gotta we gotta know what this code name was right poor poor Jaws he's out there being like look every millimeter of this phone

hardware leaked but was one piece of the hardware that we kept secret and we're so proud that we kept the matte coating on the screen secret like okay by all accounts it's a great coating like people who have seen it take your victory where you can get them but like you know it's so thoroughly leaked that as as the as Thomas noted the competitors had enough time to make their own copycat phones and release them before Apple's phone was out I mean they showed what they should be proud of and they did talk about it in the interview was like we kept the

software secret so they did do that obviously the supply chain for software is considerably narrower than the supply chain required to make a hardware product like the iPhone do which is why all these things leak like crazy but I just like seeing Jaws out there saying yeah we put extra secrecy on it's like okay well if you had put that extra secrecy on on the phone hardware do you think that would have helped the answer is no there's no stopping it like unless you're gonna make all the phones yourself at Apple Park every every phone you make it's gonna leak down to the millimeter now and

forever sorry Jaws I will say broadly I really enjoyed this interview for two reasons number one I have the same shirt as Jaws you would I was proud of myself for spotting it number two and it's a great it's a great shirt number number two it was really great seeing John Ternus in this interview like now now being CEO of Apple you have you have a CEO doing interviews about the

products where he shows personality and opinions and deep knowledge of the details of the product this these are things we never got from Tim Cook and yes everyone's being very kind to Tim who is not the kind not the kind of leader and that's true he wasn't he was what we needed at the time and blah blah blah yes that's true it's really great and refreshing to have somebody now in that position who is showing personality and points of view

and explaining product decisions in ways that Tim Cook never did and probably never could because again that wasn't the kind of person he was it's great it's refreshing and you know we're only seeing the very very first couple of moments of Ternus's tenure here and again we we don't know how he's going to feel on issues that might be more controversial to us but at least this part really shows this is a product

person he knows about the products he has that very deep knowledge in a similar way like I've always been very impressed in interviews by of Craig Federighi because Federighi also you know despite being like a high-level executive Federighi knows very deep details about a lot of the software and a lot of the like the the algorithms and the decision-making and and the like he he knows deep stuff because Federighi is a nerd first like he's an engineer who

happened to rise into the rise through the ranks and John Ternus is also like he is that engineering mind he knows the hardware details like the little thing he said about like the the moving parts about the iPhone aperture blades like you can tell he knows deeply what's going on in these products and for a company that the products are everything except the services but the products are the main

thing that's really great and I'm so happy to see this and I'm not I'm not that surprised because we've seen Ternus do interviews actually even with jaws to these same people like last year like so it's it's not like not like we've never seen him before but to know that this is the CEO of Apple now and and I think he's also he's gaining confidence and he's he's kind of letting loose a little bit more and you're able to see

like more of his personality and so far I really like what I see yeah I agree wholeheartedly I mean I don't have any particular complaints about Tim Cook particularly from a personality well let me try that again what I'm saying Tim was always going to be guarded that I feel like that's just who Tim is based on no facts but that's just the vibe I get and Tim I think has taken his media training very seriously as we spoke about last episode the way he delivered his one or two lines in the in the intro

keynote I thought were more personality that that we got out of Tim than we did in the 15 years prior there's been a couple of flashes of exception I think one of you cited the you know get out of the stock or I forget exactly what he said but like you know if you don't believe in environmental stuff the stock isn't for you or something like that but I feel like Ternus is way more a human than Tim is and that is so refreshing and exciting and and I am really here for you

know who is this person I feel like Tim as much as we snark and joke about our idiot president who called him Tim Apple I kind of get it because he kind of is Tim Apple you know like there's so little Tim outside of his you know relationship with Apple and I feel like we're already getting a sense that Ternus while clearly media trained is willing to by comparison anyway wear his heart on his sleeve and be more of a human being than Tim ever was and I'm really here for it

yeah I feel like in this interview Ternus was very similar to how he was when he wasn't CEO so in other words having two days into the job or whatever being CEO has not changed him because he totally did this interview not as I am the Apple CEO but just as the same John Ternus you've seen do the interviews for years and which means he was relaxed and he was casual and you did see his personality because you always saw that from him so it's nice to see first of all that he didn't like oh now that I'm the CEO I have to act differently he didn't feel that at all he didn't act differently but I will say speaking of Federighi one of the

things I will miss from I know this was never really in the cards but like let's say Federighi had become CEO Federighi remains the only senior executive from Apple maybe with the possible exception of Schiller occasionally who's kind of on his way out the door and sometimes jobs but but Federighi the most he does the thing that back in the day only Steve Jobs would do in that Steve Jobs would offer up information to the press because

he felt like it inside information that he would have like fired other employees for revealing if he felt like talking about it he would because he's Steve Jobs he's like who's gonna tell him no and so he did it all the time you know it'd be some interview and jobs would go off on some tangent and he would say yeah when we did X we did Y and Z and Q and like if anybody else had said that instant firing but jobs could say because what the hell Federighi does that when he tells stories about software he always reveals infos that has never been revealed anywhere else and it's mostly just of interest to nerds or whatever

but like he's not pre-clearing all that with people he just he's just like yeah when we did this we thought of this and we did that and we tried this and it's like that's not that's not the media playbook like Craig don't we don't tell them anything about our process or what we did or whatever he's always doing that and he gets away with it because it's always like details that only nerds care about right Ternus is not like that Ternus in all his past interviews and presentations usually does not accidentally or intentionally tell you

some detail about their process I feel like everything Ternus ever says about a product is something that has already been cleared as a talking point and that is not going to change when he's CEO of anything you would think it would go in the other direction but it seems to be just the same but that is one of the things I really enjoy about Federighi is that he for whatever reason he feels like he has the authority to reveal you know minor internal details of their process of creating software because he's the head of software guy and I

guess no one ever yells at him so he's like I'll just keep doing that so I do enjoy that about him I agree all right moving right along let's talk iPhone side dock friend of the show Stephen Robles points out that you know people are saying that this is the first time the iPhone dock is on the right but they're forgetting the iPhone 6 plus which would in landscape put the dock on the right I mean it kept the dock where it was but it would rotate all the all the icons I totally forgotten about this because I obviously never had one of these big phones that this was I guess this was their notion of how to do big phones in the iPhone 6

plus what does it do now on the max is when you rotate it just it just doesn't rotate right the springboard doesn't rotate I understand the question and I don't have one within arm's reach to try it but I'm not sure yeah I believe springboard only rotated like on that first version and but but now you still on the on the plus phones you and I believe on the air too you still have like if you rotate things like Apple mail you'll get the sidebar yeah yeah yeah right but like I think the reason they don't do it in springboard is because basically it moves everyone's icons I will once again point out that all the people

who are like railing in spatial interfaces guess what the iPhone home screen is man spatial interface and if you move those icons like if you rotate them and all of a sudden they rearrange like they do on the iPad it is extremely jarring because people remember where they are by their position and appearance all right you feel better John also from Stephen Robles he put together a short video showing how yes the duo does support

MagSafe that we know that's been stated after the keynote but that may not be as great as we think it will be and so his comparison was a couple of things first of all the iPhone air in the way the camera plateau interacted where where it was in relation to the MagSafe thing but more importantly Stephen got a pre-release version of I forget who it was but somebody's case for the duo so this is a reasonable stand-in for what the duo will be like and was pointing out that a lot of MagSafe accessories for example

batteries or wallets are going to be just too darn tall for the duo and so anything that's bigger than like a pop socket you might need to replace or not use at all because there's just not enough surface area on the back of the duo to support something as big as a wallet or a battery or something like it's not so much that they can support it's just that they like the circle where the magnets are fine line up the circle where the magnets are maybe that will fit if you're unlucky when you line up the two circles with the magnets it won't lay flat because you'll be sitting on top of the camera plateau because it's

so short and squat but let's say you know it does lay flat on the circle is the rest of that magnetic device within the borders of the phone or some part of it sticking out it's kind of like this comparison was to the the Apple MagSafe battery pack that was only for the air because if you took it and put it on another phone and like hung off the bottom of the thing or whatever yeah that's just a fact of life like MagSafe compatible it was easy to say that and make that a reality when the phones were more or less the same proportion and there was just like a big one and a small one you could make like

for example a wallet accessory that worked on any iPhone with MagSafe but the duo is just such a different aspect ratio and size that I think there's just gonna have to be duo specific accessories you know like don't don't just buy a MagSafe accessory assuming it will fit on the back of your duo like either measure it or you know have a good return policy right with regard to face ID Pedro Fernandez writes I don't think I've heard you mention it but the iPhone duo if for the iPhone do it to have face ID besides challenge of fitting the hardware in such a thin device it would

require twice the hardware in an already expensive device only if you want it to be able to work open and close which there are there are features of the phone that only work open and only work close so yeah but yeah that's it's gonna be a challenge hopefully they they make this a surmountable challenge unlike the apparently unsurmountable challenge of putting face ID on a Mac we just don't have enough room in the desktop Mac monitors to put a face ID scanner sorry can't fit it's impossible but maybe on this incredibly thin phone in

version 3 or 4 they'll have face ID and if they only put it in one spot that's better than nothing and honestly like I feel like most of the time you're unlocking the phone wouldn't it start in a folded state so don't you want to unlock on the folded one I guess people want to take another pocket open it up and start using it it's like but wait you didn't face ID yet so yeah twice the hardware would be great but we'll see yeah this is one of those things like in thinking about why doesn't I have face ID this never crossed my mind I never even realized like oh yeah they would need two of them like or would they like I said maybe they just put it in one place

right nah they wouldn't do that they would they would they would either put it both places or in either place oh speaking of the interview and speaking of the duo there was a segment of that I think it was the the turn is jaws interview where the the interviewers asked about like what about left-handed people isn't it gonna be awkward like the stuff that Marco talked about last episode people who use their phone with the left hand to be clear Marco is not left-handed he just uses his phone with his left hand and the duo is ill-suited to that and everyone's like you know like we said last week why don't they flip it like the Apple watch or whatever there are problems with that as well but right now Apple doesn't support it so that was the question posed to

them and I forget the analogy but it was something like you know look we don't make like left-handed cars right like I mean it's sitting aside right-hand drive and stuff like within the country we just put the steering wheel on one side and whether you're lefty or righty back in the days of stick shift you're using the stick shift with your right hand with left-hand drive or whatever the gas pedal is always on the right it doesn't matter if you're righty or lefty right and the brake is always to the left of the gas pedal even on right-hand drive the brake is the left of the gas pedal so they had other examples too I forget what they were I'm just

remembering a car one but like that there are products that are just they're just made the way they're made and your handedness is you know you have to you just have to pick and this is just the way this product works and that's easy to say the hegemony of the right handed people right but I mean I guess that's I guess that's their their answer for now until and unless they have the version of iOS that allows you to flip it and mirror it but as a lot of people pointed out when you do flip and mirror it lots of controls are in really weird places including things like the cameras and stuff

they're like now on the bottom instead of the top and the volume buttons are in weird places so I think I think Margaret was more right in that people will essentially adapt to this I wish I could remember their other analogy but they were giving analogies of like devices that are directional that people just get used to I guess you know get cars is the only one I could think of but I'm sure they're more all right let's talk Apple pencil support I know we talked about this a little bit just a moment ago but let's talk some more Julie Clover over at Mac rumors writes it's likely the iPhone duo

doesn't support the Apple pencil pro because there's no magnetic surface for the for charging the pencil the Apple pencil pro charges magnetically when connected to a compatible iPad while the Apple pencil with USB C charges with a USB C port hidden behind a sliding cap then Gruber points out charging is the least of the problems because the duo doesn't have a magnetic have the magnetic attachment for the pencil pro there's no way to even pair a pencil pro yep and Steve Trout and Smith also adds in they also let's not forget that the

USB C Apple pencil doesn't have pressure sensitivity so the artists are likely posting their already excuse me posting their disappointed reactions I feel like this backs up the German report that they were planning to create a bespoke Apple pencil for the iPhone duo that later got canceled and perhaps USB C version is the fallback I think they should just make a standalone universal pairing or charging dock for the Apple pencil pro and be done with all of this nonsense nonsense just like the airpods case to which Gruber also

added the bottom line is that Apple's entire pencil compatibility story remains a mess true that when they do a teardown of this thing we'll probably be able to see if this rumor about oh they planned a special pencil is true because there's probably like the little places for where the magnets would go I forget where there was some recent device where you could see where they meant to put the magnets or things for a pencil or whatever where they just weren't there but if that's not there was that the 16e with the MagSafe magnets maybe I thought maybe it was an iPad but I don't remember anyway

like if you know if it's not a decision that was made four years ago we'll be able to see evidence of it but you know the third parties will surely make stubby little pencils that are a better fit for the iPhone duo I do wonder if there's a way to attach them to it I'm sure third parties will come up with something clever but if there actually are a little magnets in the edges that would be great but yeah Apple's pencil strategy is just so so weird like the feature sets are different the way they pair is different they made that pencils like look it doesn't have like no silly cap no plug it's

just magic and it goes in the other side of your iPad it's like yeah but if you're if you don't have an iPad and you want to use that pencil you've got a problem I mean I don't even think that thing would fit on the side of like where the where like the magnets are would even fit on the side of the duo so maybe they'll sort this out depending on how popular the pencil actually turns out to be with the duo but right now it just kind of feels like they punted by saying it supports the cheap kind of pencils that don't have pressure sensitivity we sell you one of those good luck yeah I

think what we'll see is third party one I mean the funny thing is like the the very first Apple pencil with the happy to see you slash you know popsicle stick charging method that actually would work very well today with USB-C because like I mean obviously you know you could engineer one that doesn't have a cap that comes off and gets lost or that rolls away but thanks Johnny but yeah I'm sure third party because I as I mentioned last time like third party

pencils exist on Amazon for like 25 bucks and they're they're all just USB-C but if they had the USB-C I guess plug instead of the socket they could theoretically like plug into the bottom of the iPhone and charge up a little bit to be usable and you know same thing with the iPad like it would have all the same problems as the the original pencil you know with the exception of the cap loss but you could have it with you and have nothing

else with you and you could charge it with your phone and so this is this seems like an obvious third-party opportunity for now and then maybe down the road like you know they did a lot in this version one of the iPhone duo I suspect that there's there's a lot that can be added later in subsequent versions I mentioned earlier like yeah they're probably going to add better cameras at some point you know they're probably going to figure out if they want to do face ID at some point but yeah it wouldn't surprise me if there's like an iPhone duo you know two or three

down the road that supports a new pressure-sensitive smaller Apple pencil at that moment like that they would launch you know coincident with it until then this will be a third party opportunity that I think will be very popular yeah I don't think the pencil will be that popular but if it turned out to be insanely popular they could always do the palm slash handspring thing and have the little pencil slot right into the device in a hole though that's so anti-Apple they would never do that but it would be funny what was amazing about that is that it was always with

you like yeah you're right they would they would never in a million years do it would just be such a waste of space people don't use it enough it's so awkward it's like there's a million reasons why it's a bad idea but what I having used those devices it was convenient it was you always had the pencil and it wasn't magnetically stuck to the side or put through a loop in the case you had to put on it yeah exactly and like it's funny you know all the devices now that use like all the e-ink tablets that use styluses all the time like as their primary or only input method you know they follow modern design principles of like the

device should be super thin and so none of them have the pen in a slot but they all have to then have some kind of ridiculous contraption to keep it held on to it somehow and so some of them do the magnetic thing like the iPads which of course it falls off constantly and then they have to have a case that like has a strap that wraps around it to keep it on there or some of them will have like a loop that you have to put it like none of them have solved this problem well but nobody wants a device

that's super thick and and also like you know the the styluses that would go into your palm pilot were very skinny incredibly uncomfortable like there's good reasons not to do it yeah and I mean they were only like probably about five inches long but they were also like just super skinny part of that was to fit in the body whereas now everybody wants their styluses to be the same width as a pen or a pencil and this and you know nice and long so the weight feels right and everything so there's lots of reasons why this is a difficult and generally unsolved problem

but there there is no graceful solution and certainly for Apple to have a pencil with the duo there's going to be no graceful solution there either but I think it'll be high value enough that many people who like the same kind of people who would carry around a field notes notebook today you're carrying a pen somewhere you know it may be a little pocket pen or you know something I think they're just going to carry a separate pen in their pocket for this we'll see there was something

spotted by Benjamin Mayo over at nine to five Mac blogger Nicholas Lelouch went digging in the iPhone duo settings during his hands-on time with the device he found a curious new option in the display settings called shift left edge when enabled the setting adds a bit of black border to the left side essentially adding a fake bezel on the outside screen pushing content away from the folding edge the description for this setting and the iPhone duo software says that it quote moves content when you are using a case that partially covers the left edge of the outer

display of your iPhone hello all screen 20th anniversary iPhone everyone's getting used to safe area insets at non-zero values and they're left and right how are they going to put cases on a phone that has a wraparound screen ding ding ding ding ding I hope they I mean if they don't do this they totally should which is like I've always wished it is on it like they get like no bezels that the screen goes edge to edge now the screen even wraps around a little bit but what if I want a case now the screen is hidden under the case well good news there should be something in settings that you can hit that takes the picture and just

squishes it in so it's not under your case anymore because look if the screen begins exactly where the case ends that's an edge to edge screen like I'm great with that so I know they did it on this one because it's like look what's it's folding and it's like kind of like at a sharp angle on the hinge side and it's almost impossible to put a case on it without it blocking some pixels so they built it and everyone's got to deal with safe area insets on the left and right on this phone anyway so they put this option in there to move it and it just basically shoves the

screen in cuts off some pixels and because that's where the case goes I hope I hope Apple doesn't think this is just a hack we had to do for the first generation iPhone duo I hope they also decide like a much smaller version of this would be incredibly beneficial to our edge to edge all screen 20th anniversary phone that kind of sort of goes over the edges a little tiny bit it's a good thing I didn't just design a brand new app that has edge to edge table cells oh crap yeah you and I are not gonna have a

fun few weeks well once you're doing safe area insets on all four sides the only thing you have to worry about next is safe area regions where it's not just insets and this is like rectangles cutting into your app don't give them any ideas John oh no speaking of that I'm speaking of my app that I'm working on like you know how the in macOS things avoid the dock right like the windows operating system and mission control and everything knows where the dock is so they don't put stuff behind it most of the time I'm like private API babies

can I do that unfortunately the answer is that macOS supports one dock like region like that and it's for the dock I'm like oh if only this API gave multiple regions you know what I mean like a bunch of rectangles but it's got essentially one safe area inset and it is only where the official macOS dock is there is no way to give it multiple rectangles or regions or anything like so hopefully that isn't coming for you folks over on the iOS side anytime soon but yeah once they have safe area

insets everywhere and you adjust your apps for it Apple is free to do this with any of their phones we are sponsored this episode by ZocDoc it is so easy to put off making doctor's appointments I'm an expert at procrastination in life in general and this is one of those things like I've gone like you know a couple years sometimes without getting my annual physical or I'll wait too long you know if I get prescribed something I won't follow up because it's such a pain to book up a doctor's appointment and everything so ZocDoc fixes this

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all right let's talk iOS 27 omissions as noted in Stephen Robles's iOS 27 review the automatic agentic password changing feature is not in the initial 27 release Stephen also noted that the suggested action mini bubbles and messages also aren't in 27.0 yeah the agentic password thing we talked about that on a past show of like people who had tried it and said it had like a low single single digit percentage success

rate so that feature I guess was not ready for prime time I do wonder if it will ever come out like what is it going to change between now and 26.2 that's going to bring it from a 6% success rate to something that people would actually want to use we'll see I think it's going to be air powered yeah I mean like it always seemed really aggressive and optimistic that it was going to work because and Apple had all those papers and everything about like how they have research on training models to understand user interfaces and stuff

which is essentially what's required to like navigate a website and use it like a human would to find where you can go in and change your password and stuff it's a hard problem it's just ambitious is the word I was looking for it just always seemed like a very ambitious feature so I'm not shocked that it didn't make it into 27.0 all right photo libraries and external drives Mike Brogan writes for what it's worth I'm working with someone that has their photos library on an external drive they see that message in preferences about the library not being searchable in spotlight I wish Apple was clearer on

what this means is searching the library in the photos app for objects places people etc all works fine I can search for quote-unquote mountains and boom I get all sorts of results and then Jason apparently has some other information Jason Snell I'm sorry he's got the answer he's got the answer for Mike because Mike was wondering what the whole deal is there Jason's got the definitive answer as he pointed out to me over messages he does write a how to use Apple photos book every year so he knows this stuff Jason writes spotlight and photos search are not the same searching for stuff inside

photos is not spotlight it certainly has been the case that searching photos is fine on an external drive until they broke it my main library has been on the next not until excuse me unless they broke it that's a very important difference thank you for catching that my main library has been on an external drive for ages says Jason this is good news for me because that like the whole like oh your library is not searchable because X Y and Z they're talking about spotlight search like command F and finder find images blah blah blah whatever which I never use to look through my photos so I'm this is good

news for me that like on an external drive yes you will see this message but all it means is that your photos won't come up in spotlight but I don't care I'm never I don't even want my photos in spotlight results if I ever want to find my photos I'm going to launch the photos app and then I'm going to type mountains pictures of fences whatever like whatever and as long as that works I'm good so I'm happy with this all right let's also talk optimized storage again Jason Snell writes the way that optimized storage works is it fills your drive until there's only 10% free I got to stop Jason

right there 10% I'm not saying Jason's wrong I'm sure he's right but 10% that feels really aggressive to me I don't want to tell you what percentage full my drive has been for the past like four years I don't want to be like on my laptop there be a hundred gigs like that's not that bad I mean the problem is that for whatever reason you know all the new indexing stuff or something in 27 seems to not have that problem and so it'll just fill it right up like I

I have had macOS 27 fill my laptop all the way to full and to the point where apps start throwing errors at my disk is full you know numerous times throughout the summer so I don't know if that's fixed in the final version but possibly not we'll see yeah I don't know I just I feel like 10% is way too aggressive but nevertheless continuing from Jason so after it's 10% free then it will start opportunistically evicting files but it is so slow that other apps and

xcode can write to the drive so fast that it runs out of room before the files get evicted Febreze Newman writes I've been using the following terminal command to force fill the disk with zeros we're not going to share that command because this is a terrible idea generally speaking but when the disk Febreze continues when the disk is chock-full and you get a message from macOS you stop the command if I understand correctly the disk as the disk is getting fuller the system proceeds to delete caches and other

temporary files when the cat and mouse game is finished because the disk is really full then you wait a couple of minutes to make sure the system purged everything it could and then delete the large file you just created and Bob's your uncle you reclaimed lots of space well it worked for me is it a good solution look I get it but I don't love it yeah this is really playing chicken with your computer so he's using dd to make a giant file and again I'm not putting this command because you can really hose yourself by using dd in a variety of ways do not use dd unless you really know what you're doing and you probably don't so

don't use it I don't use it because I don't that says a lot this is this is like I'm just gonna fill the disk and once I filled the disk that whole thing that Jason just talked about the optimized storage because we were complaining like if you put optimized storage in a photos library it's like yeah whatever it just ignores you and you just gets full it just takes it so it takes so long for it to notice that needs to delete stuff and then it's so slow to delete stuff because it's like a low priority background thread that your disk just gets full so it's like why don't I just force the issue I'll just fill my disk with this big file full of

nothing and then once macOS notices oh the disk is full it will start evicting stuff I was gonna say evicting stuff like crazy but let's be honest it will start evicting stuff at its leisure at slow pace that it feels like doing and the whole idea is like you stop it like the problem is if you ever do 100% fill your disk bad things start to happen in macOS things will break things won't work the way you expect them various demons start getting no space left on device errors and bad things happen it's not

unrecoverable but it's really pushing your luck on making something bad happen that you didn't want to happen so the idea is you almost fill it and then you just sit around with a disk pretty much almost entirely full and watching macOS evict stuff over I don't know hours or days and then you say now finally I'm convinced that it has deleted a bunch of stuff then you delete your big empty file I do not recommend this approach but this all this is to say that this Apple system of optimizing storage is not good and doesn't work well which was our point last time and I think all

the feedback we've got about it has supported that even Jason telling us how it works with the 10% threshold yeah that's great and all but it's too slow to evict files and it's very easy to outrun it by creating files and so you're back to the same situation which is my disk is full and I don't know how to solve the problem yeah like every part of this is it's it's like me with the magazine not wanting a setting screen it's like in order to avoid Apple having to add a setting to say how much disk space to use for for

your photos library they are trying to do all of these like oh just magical automatic don't think about it kind of features and in this context it just doesn't work well enough it you need some kind of like adjustable limit or just a much lower limit or a big button that says delete stuff that you can delete now right and tell me when you're done and how much you deleted like how much is available to purge how much do you want me to purge purge at

all like just something anything yeah instead of just sitting there with your fingers crossed going boy I hope something's happening yeah and or I hope something might happen soon someday like and we've seen you know like there's like in the photos app there's been over the years like you'll you just have to like wait for syncing sometimes and sometimes it just wouldn't sync and you would have no idea that it wasn't syncing and no idea how to analysis all the all the stuff of like launch the app but then don't use it but then quit it but then don't let the computer go to sleep and then maybe at some point it will decide to start doing face

analysis right and like you know eventually over time they have very occasionally added like a button or a label telling you what's happening or allowing you to say sync now or whatever and the reason they've had to add those is because like it's just a complex problem you can't just hand wave it all away with magic and I think the amount of space that this opportunistic space thing uses on the Mac it's obviously the same class of problem of like it's just too

difficult to do something magical all the time that will work for everybody so some kind of control is needed John tell me about your s3 setup a lot of people had questions about this I talked about it I think in an after show another episode about how I was saving money I got rid of b2 which is backblazes like s3 like storage where I was you know backing up my synology to b2 and I decided to back it up to s3 in order to save money and it took me three months to get it all sorted out but I

eventually did and everyone wanted to know so what's the secret what's your setup and I sent this to a bunch of other people who asked about it directly but we'll link it in the show notes some statistics on what I'm backing up I'm backing up a very small number of files in the grand scheme of things it's only 86,000 files which sounds like a lot but it's about five terabytes so 86,000 files making up five terabytes tells you that a lot of those files are big so it's pretty easy so if you have different data that's a different shape you have many smaller

files or whatever like your numbers won't be the same as mine and nearly all of the that five terabytes that I'm backing up there are in glacier deep archive which is the cheapest slowest storage tier where you can't even get the file out without like sending a letter by carrier pigeon saying hey I'm gonna want these files so tell me in 24 hours when they're ready for me to pull and then you pay money to pull them like it is very much send the files in and we'll keep them safe but if you ever want them out it's going to be a time-consuming and expensive proposition which is exactly

what I want the trade-off I want for a backup of last resort that I've never had to use I want it to be there when I do have to use it but the the chances are that it's going to spend year after year of me never getting it and so I want it to be cheap in the steady state while they're storing it and I will gladly pay whatever they will charge for me to get the data back out if it is an emergency and I need it okay so everything is in glacier glacier deep archive except the files that are less than 10 kilobytes because it would be more expensive to put them in glacier deep archive because of the weird

pricing so it's cheaper to store the 10 kilobyte files in s3 standard not in s3 infrequent access or one of the other tiers because it's only have minimum storage things and if it's small file it might get deleted and so if I put them in anyway this this is how it works out and my configuration which we will link in the show notes you can see my s3 lifecycle JSON file that I send up with the AWS command line which is an AWS is inscrutable format it's probably a nicer or at least

better documented cloud formation thing that you could use for this the only thing you can't put on that JSON file is the transition default minimum object size which is set to varies by storage class and that can be put into one big command and hopefully Casey put this giant command into the the show notes which is an AWS command line thing where it says you know AWS s3 API put bucket lifestyle configuration you tell it the bucket name you tell it the the lifecycle configuration file in an

insane format where you can't just give the file path but you have to do a file colon slash slash slash URL because AWS and then there's another option that says transition default minimum object size set to varies by storage class that's my setup is it the best most optimal setup I don't know but I do know that it cost me like four bucks last month as compared to 36 dollars which is what b2 was asking me and I was shocked at how many people wanted to know all these nitty-gritty details so I guess there's a lot of other people out

there who are paying too much for their cloud storage and heard that I had saved a lot of money yeah I can't again I can't guarantee this setup will work for you because do you have 86,000 files for five terabytes like if your average file size is wildly different or if your access pattern is different than mine this might not work again my access pattern is send stuff up and literally never request it again unless something disastrous happens so I'm optimizing for that your mileage may vary all right we

were talking earlier about iPhone air sales and market penetration whatnot and underscore David Smith dear friend of the show put together his chart over or of what Widget Smith usage looks like and Widget Smith is so widely used that it's a pretty good stand-in for what the whole market probably looks like I'm sure it's not exactly right but it's probably at least in spirit correct so underscore rights here's the iPhone 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for

Widget Smith the iPhone air really struggled to find market share for comparison the iPhone 16 plus ended its first year at about 1.4 percent the air 0.3 percent then Gruber took it upon himself to look at underscores numbers and wrote amongst all Widget Smith users if we only consider the 19.7 percent of Widget Smith users using one of the 17 generation iPhones the percentages look like this iPhone 17 37 percent iPhone 17

pro max 30 percent iPhone 17 pro 29 percent iPhone 17 e 2 percent in iPhone air 2 percent I'm rounding a bit but you get the idea I don't know why you're rounding but yes you are rounding all right John 36.5 29.9 29.4 2.5 and 1.5 you go I'm so happy I did that but yeah the real the real convincer because like you're reading numbers it's like well I don't know numbers numbers whatever he posted a chart underscore

posted a chart and in the chart you will see the iPhone 17 17 pro and 17 pro max and you'll think this chart only contains those three phones like where are the other phones that you were talking about I don't see them they're about one pixel wide that's that's why you're not seeing them the 17 e in the air look like they're not on the chart because when you visualize the numbers the case you just read both with and without rounding those products disappear now I'm always

saying that every phone can't be your best-selling phone and I think they are rumors are sticking with the air but yeah the air just didn't get a lot of penetration it kind of surprised me that 17 e didn't get enough penetration this is the example we talked about in the past about like why don't they do the the MacBook Neo but for phones it's really hard to do that like they you would have to get the phone cheap enough that it would be attractive to more than 2.5 percent of customers like it's not just like oh well everyone who buys the

iPhone has lots of money and so they all just want the expensive ones the 17 e just isn't cheap enough I don't think it's a bad phone I think it's a good phone I think it looks great and it is cheaper than the other phones but it is not cheaper in the same way that the Neo is cheaper like that it makes people think oh I wasn't even considering a Mac laptop because they all cost a thousand dollars but you're telling me there's one that I can get for 600 bucks or you know like something that's considerably less than a thousand again studying beside RAM again to kind of mess this up but before that

happened the the Neo made people sit up and notice because it was like they moved the Mac laptop into a different price class and the 17 e is not doing that especially as compared to used iPhones and the other stuff that it's probably competing with and the iPhone Air is like I'm a brand new quote unquote flagship phone that got a lot of press in a keynote and I'm selling substantially less than the 17 e that apparently nobody wants to buy so it is not found an audience although I

will say 1.5 percent this is 1.5 percent of iPhone 17 sales but Margaret was saying like the foldables are at 2% overall like worldwide share and from what I've read a substantial portion of that is in China so the folding phone market in the US is probably a fraction of a fraction of that but if the iPhone air was 1.5 percent and the duo doubles it at 3% of new iPhone sales that's a success but it is also still invisible on this chart so I don't I don't know

how the duo sales are going to shake out but like I think a lot of it depends on how many they can make because everything we hear about the manufacturing is that it's going slower than expected and they're having quality problems and blah blah blah so it could be that they just can't make like however many they make they sell and we don't know what the actual demand was but yeah the air is just I look at these numbers I think maybe the air is only selling enough to make it stick around for two generations and it'll end up in the other bucket with all of the failed as far as Apple

concerned experiments and underscore I'm sure has done these graphs in years past but I would love to see like the marketed them with his numbers but like the mini numbers the mini numbers potentially being substantially larger than the air and yet Apple stopped making the mini didn't they that wasn't enough to keep the mini alive so if the air is doing substantially worse presumably Apple's gonna think that's not enough to keep the air alive but there is new management in the house so maybe Terrence has a different idea about how long to keep iterating on a phone that is that has not found a big

audience obviously the percentage market share numbers for the Mac Pro must have been worse than this despite that rumor that we heard where they were ridiculously large that was probably just BS yeah that was yeah so the Mac Pro was canned but you know Terrence didn't make that decision so maybe he'll just look at my shirt one day and be like you know what I'm CEO now I should bring that back but that's always the question how much does something need to sell for Apple to continue making it and in the realm of the iPhone numbers like the air is having put it below that

threshold or put it in the like the mini category of like we'll make it for a few years we'll see how it does but it doesn't prove that has legs the duo is going to be in the same situation it's going to have to fight for its life it will have to you know they make the first one the second one maybe they make the third one and they'll see what the numbers are but yeah this this graph makes it so clear that most of the world is buying the quote-unquote normal phones when Apple releases a new crop of phones and then there are the other phones that are also available

and they're basically a rounding error yeah I think it's also worth pointing out to like the iPhone 17e has only been out for six months whereas the iPhone air has been out for a year yeah it has got that going against it as well yeah so like the iPhone the iPhone 17e has you know you know nearly double the micro chair of the air in half the time that's a good point I mean it's essentially cheaper so again you would expect the cheaper phone to sell more but like it is it is nothing like you think oh the bargain phone won't people rush to that one it's not cheap

enough it when you compare it to cheap Android phones like it's still it's still an expensive phone especially around the world like you know if you look at different also since slacking on the air we've heard from a few people that apparently especially outside of the US I've heard a lot of Europeans saying that the air has apparently been heavily discounted for the last you know six months or so like by hundreds of dollars equivalent so that also might be helping like dump

the air inventory a little bit we heard from somebody who had gotten a new iPhone air very recently and the manufacture date was 2025 oh yeah like it seemed like it might have been from like the first batch like the home pod phenomenon where they basically made one batch of home pods four years ago and they just kept selling them yes and like and I looked you know in overcast stats you know comparing the ease I do have the 17e at about you know maybe about two-thirds of the air so the 17e is

worse in the air for me but the 16e is substantially ahead of the air for me it has like 25 percent more than the air so granted the 16e has been out you know a year and a half instead of a year but it does kind of show like even in overcast customers which skew higher end and nerdier and and certainly American because overcast is not localized even among overcast customers like the air is is not doing well and that's like that's who you would expect to you know for it to do well with it yeah on the one hand

you could argue for the continued life of the air and being like look this is a high-end exclusive luxury product it's very expensive it's very fancy and those are always going to have tiny market share right you know that how many cars does Lamborghini sell versus Volkswagen they're the same company but the numbers are very different because Lamborghini is more expensive and it's fancy and also thinner so then you could that you'd say for the air it's like look we never expected to sell a lot it's always going to be the weird luxury thing that we sell a small amount of and it's

like our halo car it's like a sexy cool thin thing so we should keep making it on the flip side of that you would say well the minis already sell better than it and what what they're the niche they're filling is we don't have any small phones the air is not a small phone it's just like in between two other phones that we have it is not substantially different than those other phones other than the thinness and fanciness whereas the mini is getting customers that might never consider an iPhone because they just don't want a phone that big but then of course the mini has terrible

battery life because it's really small and part of the reason the air is the size it is so they can fit all the battery behind it so I've in the past made strong arguments that they should keep making the mini because as I said not every phone can be your best-selling phone and like the mini fills a role that it like there's nothing in the lineup like the mini all of the phones are big and getting bigger all the time and the mini is like here's my selling proposition I'm small the air selling proposition is a little bit thinner but basically the same size and actually I'm kind of big

right maybe I always how many times am I gonna mention silicon carbon batteries like like they're not a miracle but let's say solid state batteries at some point in the future when we can get decent battery life out of a mini size phone Apple better bring it back for another try who knows what experiments they'll have in flight then because they've done the plus phone experiments they've got the e-phone experiments that are ongoing they've done the air they're gonna do another air they got the duo like I hope they keep trying these things but they should go back to the mini well when they can make one of those that

has battery life that is acceptable all right thank you to our sponsors this episode Claude Zocdoc and granola and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join one of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime our weekly bonus topic this week in overtime we're gonna be talking about the rumored changes and I think real changes to the Apple store including the triumphant return of the genius bar we're gonna be talking about that and over time you

can join or listen atp.fm slash join thanks everybody we'll talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental it was accidental it was

accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into Mastodon you can follow them at C A S E Y L I S S so that's Casey Liss M A R C O A R M N T Marco So R, men, S-I-R, A-C, U-S-A Syracuse.

It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. So my new computer is coming soon.

Let me look at the calendar. Will it be here by next episode? It will be. In theory, it will be here by next episode, although my desk may be in chaos as I try to set it up the day before recording a podcast. But, you know, we'll see what happens. At the very least, it might be in the house in a box on the floor next to me. So I'm preparing the way, as I do, for my new computer.

Wait, I want to hear more about that. So you're preparing the way to convert from a giant Mac Pro tower to a Mac Studio, which obviously is much smaller. And now remind me, is the Mac Pro tower on your desk or is it on the floor?

It's on its own specially sized desk next to my desk. It's like a little table. So it's up off the ground because my last Mac Pro got d ented by the vacuum cleaner, not by me. And so this one, I'm like, there's no way in hell I'm putting this on the floor. It's too nice and too expensive to be on the floor.

So it's up on a little pedestal. Okay. Like how far off the floor are we talking? I don't know. It's like maybe a foot lower than my desk. Okay. All right. So that's, first of all, that's adorable. That's like, you get those little purse chairs and really fancy restaurants. I did.

Well, this actually ties into the story because I think I talked about this in the show. When I got my Mac Pro, I knew I wanted to put it there and I knew I didn't want it on the floor. But I also didn't want it like, like I put it on my desk next to my computer, the monitor when I first got it. And I was like, that's not, it's too, it's too imposing.

Like I used to have my towers on my desk, but it's too much . So I needed to be a little bit lower. So I had to find a table that exactly fit in the space between the end of my desk and the baseboard heater that is against the wall. Like it's, so I had to find a table exactly the right depth , exactly the right width, with legs that straddled my UPS.

Like it was very specific. So I had to go on this search for a table and you just find out how many of the search, these search sites. Like, can't you just let me search by dimensions? Like, no, no one searches by these many dimensions with this level of precision. So I did find probably the one and only table in the entire world that matches the materials and dimensions that I needed.

And that is what my Mac Pro is on. All right. So to prepare the way for a Mac Studio, do you temporarily run them both at the same time for a little while? Like, do you just like, where does the Mac, where does the Mac Pro go? Does it leave this giant gaping hole behind that?

Like, what are you going to put like a potted plant there? Like what goes anywhere? My current plan is the Mac Pro does not move because I have plenty of space on my desk for the Mac Studio. So I will put the Mac Studio on the corner of my desk and the Mac Pro will stay there.

I may, if I can find a KVM that works, I'll use it. But honestly, I'll probably just take the cable and yank it out of the studio and stick it into the Mac Pro when I want to switch. Oh, so you're going to actually keep using the Pro? Not going to keep using it, but it's going to, first of all , it's going to stay there. Whether it's on or off, it's going to stay there as kind of a piece of sculpture or whatever.

Oh my gosh. But in the short term, it's there because like, oh, I forgot that one thing on the computer or whatever. Like it is a form of backup and it is also for my Mac OS 15 testing for my apps. It becomes my Mac OS 15 test machine. You know what I mean? So it will stay there for the foreseeable future.

You know that VNC is a thing that exists. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know. That's what I'll probably do, screen sharing. But the thing that I have to do for preparing the way is, okay, so I have this Mac Studio, but Mac Studio has no internal expansion. And I have stuff inside my Mac Pro that I want to take out of my Mac Pro and continue to use.

Like my Time Machine backup drive. Like my SuperDuper clone drive. I want to pull all that stuff out. And plus also have my external photos drive that we talked about. It was, you know, all the issues of like, what do I care about how photos behaves on external drives? Because I had to buy a 4TB Mac Studio and I'm going to take my photos library and put it on a 4TB external for a total of 8TB storage split up into two pieces.

So right away, I have three drives that I'm going to connect to a Mac Studio. Time Machine backup, SuperDuper clone, photo library. Where do I put those? I'm picturing like the Mac Pro as the base and then the Mac Studio centered on top of the Mac Pro.

And then like a pile of drives centered, almost like the Empire State Building. Just drives like stacked on top of that. I would never do that. I would never put anything on top of it. Just a big spire. But I do have the problem of where do I put those drives? Because I will tell you that the Time Machine and SuperD uper drives, those were really, really inexpensive SATA SSDs .

Because they're connected to the SATA, internal SATA connectors inside my Mac Pro. Right? So they were bought a long time ago. Incredibly slow. SATA interface is incredibly slow. But like what do I care for? Like Time Machine or whatever. Like I don't care that it's slow. They're SSDs. So there's no noise and, you know, so on and so forth. But they're incredibly slow.

So it's easy for me to find enclosures for them because like who cares? Like bus speed doesn't mean anything. Like they're just, they're fine. Obviously, I got the expensive fancy Thunderbolt 5 enclosure for my photos library because that's like live storage that I'll actually be using. Maybe I did a little overkill there, but that's what I got. But physically speaking, where do I put three SSDs, two of which are in 2.5 inch SSD, like the little plastic cases, like that are shaped like old 2.5 inch drives with the SATA connectors.

So if two of those, they have SATA connectors on them. I can't even like plug them directly in. So I have to get like enclosures or something for those to go in. And then I have my OWC metal heatsink Thunderbolt 5 4 ter abyte, you know, very fast SSD thing. I don't want them sitting on my desk.

They're all ugly. So what do I do with them? You're going to put them under your desk like you did Tina 's studio is what you're going to do. Well, they're a problem. So first of all, the Mac studio might end up under the desk . If it's noisy, I might banish it because I have done that with Tina's. But I am so glad that I don't have all of your idiosyncras ies because.

I know you have so many fans going in your room. You don't care. You have a fan in your ceiling. I have a fan in my ceiling. Oftentimes I have a fan sitting under my main display blowing on me because this room gets so hot because of all the aforementioned fans within it. And it's fine. It doesn't matter. So anyway, I don't want them on my desk.

The first thing I had to do was find somewhere to put the 2 .5 inch drives. And I had the idea of like, you know, these things are slow . I should be able to find something cheap to narrow this problem. Can I find an enclosure that fits two 2.5 inch SATA drives?

And yes, I can. So I got an enclosure that fits two 2.5 inch SATA drives and connects through whatever piddly USB connection they need for their like five gigabits per second or whatever the hell. Like the enclosure does 10 gigabits and each of the drives does five gigabits, right? So I have an enclosure that just fits.

It's bus powered. A bus powered enclosure that fits two 2.5 inch SATA drives. And since these are SSDs, instead of spinning disks, the bus power will be adequate, right? Although it does have external power supply if I need it. But so I've got that. And that is literally size the size of two 2.5 inch SATA drives.

Then I have my little OWC thing, which is kind of the size of one of those M.2 SSD sticks of my, you know, Samsung 990 , whatever the hell it is. All right. So that's where I need to stash. I need to stash a rectangular thing as big as two 2.5 inch drives and a narrow rectangular thing.

It's kind of like a heat sink with my big drive-in. I can't put them under the desk easily because the back of my desk has a metal sheet that extends from the top of the desk down the back. You ever see those like office? This is an ancient desk.

Yeah, they're called modesty shield or something. Yeah. Like if you're using it in an office so that like people can't see your legs under the desk. It's a metal thing. It doesn't go down to the floor, but it goes like halfway down to the floor. And that has no holes in it and is like up against the top edge. I could cut holes in it, but like I'm not going to be cutting holes in metal in my desk or whatever.

I, you know, I don't. The one way I do this is there are holes in top of the desk . That's how old this desk is where I take my keyboard like cable and stuff like that that goes under the desk. It's stapled to the top of the desk or whatever. Not stable, but you know what I mean? Velcroed or hooked to the top of the desk and it comes up through the hole.

You know what I mean? I can do that and so I probably could make the cables go from the Mac studio into the hole and then find someplace under the desk to stick them. But that's not particularly convenient and especially since I want to put the Mac studio on the corner of the desk, it would be covering the hole that the cables go through.

So it had to fish the cables under the Mac studio, which is where it's supposed to be getting the cool air from. And it's just so my idea was because my desk is against the wall. Why don't I do the, you know, the time tested thing that you used to do with laptops where you just Velcro drive to the back of the lid, right?

Yeah. I was like, why don't, can't I just stick these drives to the back of my desk like the Millennium Falcon on the back of the Star Destroyer and Empire Strikes Back? I'm like, that would be great because like then the cables would leave the Mac studio, go down the back of my desk and plug into drives that are essentially stuck to the back of my desk where nobody can see them because it's against the wall.

I can't see them from the front because the metal modesty shield thing hides them. That's what I need to do. Yeah. I solve this problem when I have my time machine drives. I just have, like all my desks have some kind of like big like cable holding gutter thing like under on the underside of them.

I just put them there. It's fine. Yeah. Modern desks have that, but this is really old desk. It does not have anything like that underneath it. And so someone in the chat room says, too bad John doesn't know someone with a 3D printer. Well, as Marco already knows from looking at the show notes , this after show item is labeled as John needed Marco's 3D printer because I'm looking at this.

I'm like, OK, so how do I stick these drives to the back of my desk? I'm like, oh, this is a job for a 3D printer because you make a little brackets or something. You'd make them exactly size to your drives. You'd put them wherever you wanted them to be. You know, you could have them clip over the edge of the desk or you could stick them with stuff or whatever.

Like 3D printer. I finally have a reason in my life that I would need a 3D printer. But of course, I don't have one. I'm not particularly interested in buying one. But I'm like, like if I was Marco, I would 3D print brackets for this and I would be done and they would be exactly suited to me. Like your little things you made for your little Yolink stuff.

Exactly size for this specific purpose. That's what you use it for. Literally right now, my 3D printer is printing a like you ever see like if you have a shelf and you have you want to have like a divider that goes vertically from the shelf and they have like, you know, different ones you can like clip on that just like, you know, clip on the end of the shelf and just have like a thing that sticks up.

Well, in my closet, like the shelves in my closet that we like put clothes on are pretty shallow because it's like built into like this weird like diagonal roof Eve thing. And so like none of the ones on Amazon fit. So I just custom modeled my own divider and my 3D printer is right now printing some dividers that will perfectly fit my shelf.

Yeah. And the other advantage this has is especially if you don't have a good 3D printer, which I'm sure Marco has a good one . But if you don't have a good one, you're like, oh, you can see the lines or I don't want to wait for like a print where it's all smooth and I don't want to sand it after. No one's going to see this. Again, it's behind the desk, between the desk and a wall.

It's totally invisible. Kind of like my 3D printed bracket that is holding my wife 's Mac Studio under her desk. It's very ugly and you can see all the lines on it, but no one sees it. It's under a desk. That's the whole point. But I don't have a 3D printer. So what I had to do was employ the exact same skill that I used when I found that perfectly sized little table for my Mac Pro, which is I'm going to go online and I'm going to find a thing that can fit these rectangles and stick them to the back of my desk.

And the question is, what kind of thing are you getting? Like, I don't know. I just know the dimensions. You know, it has to be this big, have this much surface area for me to use a sticky 3M thing because these things are not particularly heavy. So just some sticky like 3M stick them thingies from like the, you know, little, I have plenty of that from setting up people's dorm rooms in college.

You know what I'm talking about. So that's, I was going to ask about that because like the way I solve this problem is I just use command strips like the. Yeah, that's what it is. Name brand. I couldn't remember it. Not like the regular ones. They have the command strips that makes a version of it that is basically two sided with Velcro between them.

Yep. Yep. And those I find tend to hold the, like the most weight if you're just like sticking something under a desk. Yeah, they're way overkill. They hold like 50 pounds or something. We use, again, I use them to setting up kids dorms rooms. They like hang tons of stuff off them. Right. And I have, I have a bunch of them, although honestly, a lot of them are with my daughter now because we just moved her in.

Right. So the mountain. So if you, so why don't you just stick the drives directly with like the command strips to the desk? Oh, I don't want to put stickers on, even command strips. I don't want to stick them on the back of my drives. I mean, it may come to that, but I don't think it will because I use my skills and found things that hold my devices that will let me mount them.

And the first thing I found was, I don't know what you would even call these. I spent so long looking for like bracket, clip, mount, whatever. Like, but apparently there's a thing where if you want to have a laptop so that it is like mounted under a desk in a slot, but it's not actually a slot instead of just two rails that the laptop goes into.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you're thinking of. There's a million of those. And I found one of them that is exactly the right width for my two SATA bay thing. And it comes in two pieces, the left rail and the right rail. So I can put them at any distance from each other that I want to exactly fit my thing.

And it's padded on the inside because you're supposed to put laptops in there. And what it means is that if I ever need to like take that thing out or mess with it, I don't need to unvelcro it. I don't need to unstick it. I can just pull it out of the slot like it's like a vertical slot. So that solves that one. And then for my little metal thingy, I found two tiny little L-shaped brackets that come with their own sticky thing, which I might use instead of command strips because they're just little L-shaped, not L-shaped, like, I don't know, like J-shaped brackets.

That the drive sits in. And again, if I ever want to mess with it, I just reach behind the desk and pull it out from the little thing that it's sitting in. And so that is my plan for my solution for where I'm going to put external drives. They're going to be in their own little custom non-3D printed plastic and metal bracket thingies.

I don't even know what the J-shaped brackets are made for. I just know they are correctly sized and have plenty of surface area for a sticky thing to go on the back of my desk. Getting them in there will be me laying on my back, reaching up behind the thing to try to get them, you know, with a headlight on my head or whatever.

But that's my current plan. We'll see how it works out. If it turns out that the Mac mini, the Mac studio itself gets banished onto the desk, I may have to rejigger things a little bit, but one thing at a time. John, it's adorable you thought that this was going to be quick. Marco made it longer. Oh, yeah.

It's all Marco's. He did. He had questions. He asked me about my Mac Pro, what my plans are, the little table. It happened to be relevant. Yes. I could have raced through that without Marco asking me for more. I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. That's true. He asked questions that were relevant to the topic and extended it substantially.

All right. So, Marco, please feel free to tell me what portion of that episode was, or that post show, was you speaking versus what portion? Not him speaking. He asked me questions and then I had to answer them. The only thing that I would add is I did take a quick look.

Now that I know more about 3D printing, I took a quick look at the under desk mounts for Mac studios that everybody was buying a couple years ago. I had one question in my head. What direction did they run the layer lines? Because I was afraid that they would run them horizontally, which is the weakest layer bond for something that would be mounted under a desk pulling downward.

And sure enough, every single one of them on Etsy that I can see the layer lines are horizontal. This is the easiest to print it that way, probably. Yes, it is. But I would never in a million years trust that to hold up a $6,000 plus, you know, heavy metal computer under my desk for a few years, especially one that's constantly producing heat.

Well, so I think I described this when I got Tina's under desk mount for her Mac studio, but it is in fact a, you know, layer line visible. I think they are horizontal. And I also didn't trust it from day zero. So that, that 3D printed mount that her Mac studio is in is screwed into the bottom of the desk and the Mac studio is in it.

But then I bought steel cables with screws in the ends. I like to go under it. And looped the steel cables under it so that basically the steel cables alone would hold it. And they, those steel cables are screwed at both ends. So if that, if, if that, uh, 3D printed case blinked out of existence, the Mac studio would fall one half a centimeter and be suspended by three steel cables.

That's, yeah, that's smart. Yeah. Cause like basically like layers come apart from each other much more easily than like the plastic breaks in the other dimensions. Um, like layer separation is the weakest point. So you would want this to be aligned the other way.

You, you, you want the layer lines to be vertical or at worst diagonal. And you could design the part to print that way. It's, you know, it's a harder thing to design, uh, but you could do it. Uh, but they didn't do that here. So that's terrifying. And they sell commercial products that are actually like injected and molded or metal or whatever.

So you don't have to buy 3D printed ones anymore. Like if I, if I did under desk mount, I would probably just shop for commercial products and not a 3D printed thing from Etsy like I got for her. But remember she got the M1 Macs, Mac studio was brand new. There was no under desk mounts except for the Etsy people. But I'd say it's been in there since day one of the M1 Mac studio.

And so far the 3D printing has held up. Oh, good. Plus your steel cable support. I've got, I've got steel cable insurance. It's not going anywhere.

Thank you.