711: Hot Dog on an Actuator

All right. As you know, it is very important to me to never guess or BS about anything. So I have some actual data this time. It kind of bothered me last episode that I didn't have good performance numbers for the M6 Mac minis in my transcript machines. So now that I, well, the single Mac mini, the one of 48 is an M6. And I 'm happy to report that now I'm not going to have actual numbers. I'm not going to have

actual numbers. I'm not going to have actual numbers. I'm not going to have actual numbers. I'm not going to have actual numbers. I'm not going to have actual numbers. I'm not going to have actual numbers. I'm not going to have actual numbers. So in this role of being my transcript machine, the M6 over the M4 is about 20 to 30% faster. Wow. So I now have actual numbers to say that it is hovered between those two. Now keep in mind, these are doing more than just transcription. They're also now, thanks to Claude , using two different transcription models. I'm now falling back to Parakeet for languages that Apple's speech transcri bers not support.

So they're, they're doing a lot more. But with that mixed workload over like 12 hours averages, I'm, you know, depending on when I look, it's between 20 and 30% difference. And now here's the question. How does that work out when you divide by price?

Oh, is it in other words, is it still more economical to get more M4s? Well, at the price I paid for them back in the day, yes. But even today's prices, presumably you can get an M4 mini cheaper than an M6, right? I mean, probably, but the difference might not be as big as you think. Like, used Mac minis always cost more than you think they will.

Because there's always a market for used Mac minis, especially at the low end. Like if you're, you know, if you're trying to sell a used Mac mini that's high spec'd, that cost you $2,000 when you bought it new, you're probably going to lose some money on that. Whereas if you just are trying to sell a base model that you got a good price on, you're probably not going to lose that much money.

Because the thing like, you know, because it is so important to so many people to just have a Mac, and the Mac mini is usually in many ways the cheapest way to do that. Although the Neo throws a wrench in that plan. But there's always, this is why used Mac minis, like when you go on eBay and stuff, they're never that much cheaper than the new ones, just because everybody wants them.

So it's probably better for me to just buy M6s at this point, but it would probably be close. And if I compare it to what I was actually paying for these M4s, you know, a year and a half ago or a year ago, like that was a very different situation. Like because almost all of these, like their list price was $600.

I don't think I paid that for a single one. But it was definitely like, you know, around $500 for most of them, maybe $550 at the highest. All right. For the final time for 2026, I am begging you to go to stj ude.org slash ATP and send a little bit of money their way.

So what are we talking about? So September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And this month, September is running at least 32 days because a week from today as we record this, I will be in Memphis, Tennessee on the St. Jude campus. And I will be recording our 12-hour podcast-a-thon that begins at noon Eastern and runs until midnight.

And we are doing this in service of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Why St. Jude? Because they do whatever they can to make sure that no child dies in the dawn of life. They have done absolutely tremendous work. They are astonishingly good people who care.

Everybody there cares. How do I know? Because I've been there many times. And I've spoken to many different employees in many different parts of the organization. And they care. It is astonishing how much everyone cares about their mission. It's really, really, really impressive.

So here's the thing. When St. Jude opened in 1962, childhood cancer was largely considered incurable. Since then, St. Jude has helped push the overall cancer survivor rate in the U.S. at least from 20% to more than 80 %.

And St. Jude won't stop until no child dies from cancer. Curing childhood cancer is an absolutely astonishing undertaking. And St. Jude needs our help to do it. That's you, the listener. You. Yes, in the headphones. You. The generosity of donors like you everywhere supports cutting-edge research that saves lives and ensures that families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing, or food.

Every child deserves a chance to live their best life and celebrate every moment. When you support St. Jude, you can help make cures possible for kids with cancer. And why wouldn't you want to do that? It is really astonishing, the generosity of the ATP and Rel ay community.

I meant to highlight this earlier, and I completely forgot to. And as I vamp for time, I can't find the actual thing I'm looking for. But if I recall correctly, the leading donation, last I looked anyway, a single donation was $20,000.

And I just want to congratulate that person. I've spoken to that person. I am friendly with that person, or at the very least casually acquainted with that person. I don't know if they want to be named, and that's why I'm being cagey about it. But... I hope at that level, everyone's friendly with this person. Right? Exactly right.

You should be, if you're not. You have friends in all of us, for sure. So yeah, so it is absolutely incredible, the generosity of the ATP family and Relay. But here's the thing. What if you don't have $20,000 laying around burning a hole in your pocket? What if you have $2 laying around burning a hole in your pocket? You know what?

We'll take that, too. Don't feel bad. That's freaking great. It really is. You should go to stju.org slash ATP, and you should donate whatever you can. Because I can tell you, I've seen it with my eyes. This money goes to good things. And who doesn't want to try to eliminate the sickness in kids?

I almost said eliminate sick kids. That'd be very bad. Thankfully, I call it myself. We're not going to fix it in post. We're going to leave it in. But anyway, why wouldn't you want to get rid of childhood cancer? So additionally, and I know that October does end on September 32nd this year, but there are some new devices coming in a couple of weeks.

I'm just on a roll. We're just going to keep that all in. Yep. No, it's all staying in, baby. Not going to fix anything in post. It's perfect. But yeah, so October isn't running as long as we maybe could desire it to, because the iPhone Duo isn't shipping until a couple of weeks after the campaign ends.

But you probably have already figured out, if you're a prospective iPhone Duo buyer, you probably have already figured out what you're going to buy. And if you feel guilt about your rampant consumerism, which you probably should, there's a way that you can set yourself right with the universe.

You can erase that bad karma and even it out. You know, it's like a carbon offset for karma. And the way you do that is by listening to my dear friend Marco Arment tell you about his offset. Absolutely. Because, you know, throughout the history of the world, no one has ever had any problems with using money to absol ve you of potential sins or guilt.

So if you want to offset your indulgences, figure out the base price of the indulgence family that you've selected. Whether it's an iPhone, an Apple Watch, maybe an upcoming, you know, foldable iPhone, or maybe some kind of foldable computer in, you know, a month or two or whenever those launch.

You've got to figure out what are you probably going to spend on that or what did you spend on that. Take the base price, whatever you spend on top of that with everything all in, storage upgrades, tiers of different things available, different options, cases, Apple Care, whatever it is, $1,500 say, and the base product is an iPhone Pro.

That's $1,100. So the offset between those two is $400. That is your suggested minimum donation. This will absolve you of all your sins, at least in this particular area. And what I suggest also, if you can, go to level two, which adds on to that, whatever you spent on paid AI plans or API costs this month .

Level three, even above that, is whatever you spent on paid AI plans and API costs this year. I challenge you, try to find a better way to absolve yourself of rampant consumerism guilt and AI usage guilt than this. You won't find one, I assure you. And there's nothing wrong with the system whatsoever of using this to absolve you of this guilt.

So please go today. Consider that as your minimum donation if you can swing it. Thank you very much. John, this is your last opportunity. This is everybody. That's what I was going to say. This is everybody. If you've been hearing this, you know, pledge drive thing, I'm like, oh, yeah, I should probably do that. This is it. This is the last chance.

You're not going to hear us talk about it again, although we may have talked about Casey being on that podcast account. That'll be in the past tense. And keep in mind, you can donate to St. Jude all year long. Obviously, we try to get people to do it during the pledge drive. But if you miss it, it's not like, oh, I can't donate anymore. You can always donate. But please, if you want to do it during our pledge drive, this is it.

This is the time. If you're hearing this, stop the podcast. Go donate. S-T-J-U-D-E dot O-R-G slash ATP. Thank you very much for all of you for listening to us talk about this. It really, truly is important to us. It means a lot to all three of us. It obviously means an incredible amount to Stephen and the Relay community.

So thank you very much for going on this journey with us. St. Jude dot org slash ATP. John, last episode, which as we sit here now is two days ago, but we already have some follow up. Andy writes, which mouse pad does John use? I want that new mouse pad feeling.

Yeah, I was thinking about this. I was showing my daughter my new mouse pad when I was Face Timing with her earlier today and explaining what I did. So I'll put a link in the show as to what I get. I haven't always gotten the same one, but it's usually just like a cheap, generic black sheet of mouse pad.

You know, those big ones that like gamers use to cover like their entire desk. I get that. And then I cut rectangular pieces out of it to fit in the area where I want the mouse pad because it's not like a regular mouse pad shape. And mouse pads come in like what I think it was the 80s size, which is too small.

And now they come in like the 2000 size, which is cover your entire desk. And there's one or two in between sizes that I've toyed with, but they're never quite right. And I have I have a metal keyboard tray that my keyboard and mouse are on. And there's room for the mouse pad part of it.

And I want it to basically be the exact depth of my keyboard tray and then as wide as I want it to be. And so I just, you know, bought this Amazon Basics rolled up mouse pad because I had run out of my previous roll or rather I'd run out of parts that I could cut out of it. And then I just took my old mouse pad, put it on top of it, took a razor blade and cut right angles.

And now I have a nice new piece of mouse pad. And when I was showing to my daughter, I was like, she was like, why don't you cover the whole keyboard tray with it? Like previously I couldn't find a sheet that would fit the dimensions of it. But now my current sheet would fit the dimensions that I was thinking about. And I might do that.

But I kind of like the idea that the keyboard knows where the keyboard area ends. Like I can never accidentally move the keyboard over too far and encroach on my mouse area because the mouse pad will stop it. You know what I mean? So maybe I'll think about that. For five years from now when I'm replacing this mouse pad again, I might think about cutting off a piece that is the size of the entire keyboard tray.

I would definitely do it if my keyboard was sliding around, but it doesn't. The metal grips the little rubber feet pretty well. Now, Goldilocks, how do you make sure that you get exact right angles when you're cutting this? You use a metal, like an L-shaped metal ruler.

You know what I mean? I had a feeling that anything that is not an exact perpendicular cut would be completely intolerable to you. Why would you do that? It's not hard to make right angles. I have a million tools in the house that will, you know, metal squares and stuff that will do that. Yeah. You can use that as the cutting edge, right?

But you can't get the nice rounded corners that mouse pads always have. No. I do have this. The one I cut from the sheet, one of the rounded corners is on it and the other are all sharp, right? And I put the rounded corner in the corner of my keyboard tray because, I don't know, that just feels like the right place to put it.

But I don't want the rounded corners. I want every, I want the whole thing. It's like Tahoe. Rounded corners just cut into space. Oh, my God. Gracious. I was just pointing that out. So we were discussing in another Slack with somebody on a recent post about what makes Mac apps, Mac apps or whatever . I'm like, this is a good companion piece.

Maybe I'll put the link in the notes. I'll give it to Casey in a moment or I'll put it in the chat room, actually. I'm hammering home, like in extreme length, the point that everyone made and we all made on this show back when Tahoe was released, which is that rounded corners cut into the space of content.

And people go, all right, sure, whatever. But like this person's like, no, seriously, think about how dumb it is. And just goes on and on at length to say, look at how this screws up every aspect of the interface for no good reason other than round corners look cute. Still bothers me.

I mean, my mouse pad has round corners and it has never bothered me once. But that's also because like I'm not going near the corner. Yeah. I mean, you're not trying to display content on your mouse pad. At least not yet. I'm sure someone has a mouse pad that has a screen on it. Well, I need to remove my mouse too so that I can really show off the content beneath it.

You just get a translucent mouse and then make your hand translucent and you'll be all set. There you go. Yeah. Problem solved. Refract the image on the display underneath it. Did you see that guy who had the transparent desk with the little charging coil that follows his devices around? Did you see that? No. Oh my God. It was, I saved it for, God, I got to find this.

Yeah. He was riffing on air power of all things, which I feel like is a really obscure clickbait, a way to do clickbait for YouTube. It's like, no one remembers. This is, I don't know if this kid was born when air power existed. You don't have time to watch it now, but it is, I can't tell if it's real.

So there's that. So let's just chalk it up to it. Maybe the whole video is AI. I don't know. I just. It almost doesn't matter with that kind of thing. Like it's just a fun thing to see. Yeah. Yeah. Might all be AI, including the person. Yeah. Right. All right, John, your drive enclosures, you were debating where to put them, if I recall correctly, from a couple of days ago, how you were going to mount them into what.

Can you tell me what is the situation today? They are now mounted. I used Velcro command strips to hold the little brackety things that I got. Like it's like a laptop holder and like these J shaped hooks. Like and I Velcro command stripped them to the back of my desk and I slotted the stuff in and ran the cables to them and they're all set now.

So it's nice to have all the stuff off my desk. Now I just have a Mac Studio on my desk with cables plugged into every port except for the HDMI port. I even have the headphone port filled with the same thing that was in the headphone jack of my Mac Pro, which is one of those L shaped adapters for headphone jacks.

Right. With nothing plugged into it. Oh, and why is that? So it won't ever play anything over the speaker. Wow. I've done this for years. This is like an old school Mac thing of like if you don't want your Mac to make noise and you have external speakers, if you never want the internal speaker to play like off to the side of your desk, if you have like a tower thing, you put one of the headphones adapters in there and then it always thinks it has headphones in.

So even like all the inputs, all the outputs of audio get messed up and it's like, oh, it's, it's, you know, your speakers are offline or this or that. It's never going to make a noise. Well, is that so maybe, I don't know, maybe 10 ish years ago, Apple changed the way the audio devices and Macs work such that the headphone jack and the speakers are now separate audio devices and you can actually address them separately in the software.

Yeah, I think if you have the bong turned on, which I do still have to turn that off, but you know, the startup bong turned on, that, that will still play even with the headphone jack. So yeah, I think they are separate. All right. Your weird AirPods five issues. Can you reintroduce that before I tell you what Baum Squad has to say about it?

Yeah, I got AirPods five and I was like, I didn't, is this something to do with my new phone or my new AirPods? But when I put them in, first of all, it sounded like a head tracking was on because I would hear the sound like come from my left and then go to my right or whatever. And then they would even out and I didn't know what the deal with that was. And then the second thing was when I took the, uh, the AirPods out, I take out my right one.

Fine. And then when I go to grab my left one, my fingers would brush against the microphone grading on the outside. And the microphone would pick that up as if I'm rubbing my finger on like a lavalier mic or something and would make huge static in my ear. I'm like, what the hell? Like, cause I have, I have everything off, like not, not in any mode.

Just every, all effects are off. So it shouldn't even been using that microphone. But every time I did it, when I took out the left one, cause I take them out one at a time. When I took out the left one, my fingers would hit the little speaker grid and it would make terrible static. And I couldn't figure out why. So Baum Squad writes the AirPods weird sound change when putting in the second AirPod and the microphone being activated.

When you take out one AirPod is almost certainly the same thing. The listening mode, like transparency or noise cancellation setting is discrete between one AirPod and two AirPod use cases. The fix is to only put in one AirPod, then go to your Air Pod setting and control center and switch to the listening mode that you want.

Do the same with two AirPods in. Now they should be fixed. Have you tried this, John? I did this and it worked. And I think Baum Squad has the right idea that essentially there's two sets of settings. There's the settings for when one AirPod is in. It doesn't matter if it's the right or left, I think.

But there's the one AirPod setting and then there's the two AirPod setting. And for whatever reason, the one AirPod setting was default ing to transparency mode. And so when I put the AirPods in, I put them in one at a time. I put one in, it would be in transparency mode. And then I would put the second one in, it would go to my two AirPods mode, which was everything off.

And so that's why I heard the weird difference between left and right, you know, when I was putting them in. And same thing when I take them out. As soon as I take out one AirPod, it's like, oh, you're in one AirPod mode now. And one AirPod mode is configured for transparency. And then I would take out the left one and I would hear the speaker. So many people wrote in to say, oh, this is because when you have one AirPod in, they always default to transparency mode.

And those people are close. But I think that Baum Squad gets it right in that it's not, regardless of what the default is, it's not like, oh, they always do one. They always do transparency with one AirPod. They do whatever you set it to with one AirPod. That may be the default, but they're just simply two sets of settings.

It's not as if they're saying, oh, they always default to transparency mode when you have one. They'll, they'll, one, when you put one in and change the settings, that will be the setting forevermore, I think. So that's the situation. I would not have guessed this. It has solved my problem. All right. With regard to excising all of the Intel apps from your computer, there's a way to do this that I presume John found.

You can go into system settings and then about, and then Intel-based apps. And it will tell you all of the Intel-based apps. There's a sheet that comes up that says support ending for Intel-based apps. Intel-based apps running on Rosetta will not open in macOS 28.

The following apps need to be updated for Apple Silicon. An update may be available on the developer's website. And then there's a learn more link. We will put the learn more link into the show notes. So a couple of things in this. So last episode, I was saying I was going to like what used to be called system profiler. I think it's called system information now. Cause that of course lists all your applications and the, uh, architecture, um, activity monitor also show running applications and their architecture.

There's a bunch of ways to do this, but apparently in macOS 27, uh, they added this like to a much higher level, like in system settings about it's right there on the about screen. There's, there's an Intel-based app setting. And this brings up a second. I'm sorry. Oh, it's in general about.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Did I miss something? Yes. You missed general. That's okay. Yeah. Anyway, but the point is it's, you don't have to launch a separate app. You don't have to click on detail. There's more info. It's, it's much more prominently placed. And the second thing is, as many people have noted, there is this text that you just read. And there's also a notification. If like the system finds like a printer driver or some other, you know, background thing that is Intel only, it'll pop up a notification in macOS and say , you know, this is Rosetta is going away and this won't happen to Mac open in macOS 28 , blah, blah, blah.

Are we still using printer drivers? Yeah. I've found a bunch of them. I'm excising them. But anyway, as many people have pointed out, this is one of the rare occasions when Apple is officially saying there will be a macOS 28, which is so dumb because everybody knows there's going to be another version of macOS, just like there's going to be another version of iOS.

But Apple in its way is always so cagey. If you say like, well, an iOS N plus one, they're like, what are you talking about? There is no iOS N plus one. It's like, okay, but like if you were to make another version of iOS that has the same number as the current one, both one more, like they'll never admit that a future product is going to happen.

But here they are within macOS 27 saying that a thing called macOS 28 exists, which most of the time is, you know, I guess for the number discontinuity, it would have been a spoiler to know that they were going to jump from 15 to 26 or something. But this is a very, very rare and strange occurrence where they're not saying in the next major version of macOS ever.

They're saying macOS 28, that's going to be the name of a product. They might as well have announced it. Very un-Apple-like. I'm surprised they didn't reject it from the App Store for mentioning a future. Yeah, right. So it's supposedly gotten better about that, but I still do because I've been burned too many times. I still do latest version of macOS, future version of macOS .

I never say the name. Oh yeah, me too. It's like, it's like, you know, it's like theater superst itions. It's like never say the name of a future OS. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Like, regardless of whether it's like, oh, it's fine now. They say it's fine. They say a lot of things, first of all. And second of all, the price of getting it wrong could be an extra several days or a week of waiting.

And is it worth it? No. We are sponsored this week by Granola. So I have an odd job, not the bad guy, but a unique job wherein I don't really have meetings, but we wanted to make sure that Granola was the real thing.

And so John and I had a meeting and we talked about ATP membership stuff. And we talked for like something like an hour, hour and a half. And while we were talking, Granola was there listening and capturing meeting notes for us and a transcript as well. And this worked out really well because one of my big fail ings when I had a jobby job was that I would oftentimes record the bare minimum amount of action items, particularly for myself, that I would then look back on later and be like, I have no idea what these words mean.

And I'm the one who wrote them. I lost the context completely. So 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 like I said, action items are pulled out, made easy to find.

So at the bottom of the notes that Granola generated for our meeting, there's next steps. And one of the next steps, I'm reading this verbatim, is approve sponsor product in the doc assigned to Casey, which is exactly right. That is one of the things that I needed to do.

And this is very helpful because not only does it tell me what I need to do, but I can click on that line item and get a transcription summary. And then if I really want to go back to the actual transcript, I can do that as well. This makes it really hard for me to lose context, which is really, really helpful.

So once you try it on a first meeting, it is hard to go without. You can try it totally free. You can head to granola.ai.atp. That's G-R-A-N-O-L-A dot A-I slash A-T-P to get your time back. Go to granola.ai slash A-T-P and try it on your next call.

Thank you to Granola for sponsoring the show. How Lee writes, the M5 Ultra is the first Apple GPU to beat the AMD 6900 XT, a GPU I once owned and that was released in December 2020.

It wasn't even the top of the line at the time. NVIDIA had faster GPUs. So looking at Geekbench, the M3 Ultra with whatever this unit is, 232,267. The Radeon RX 6900 XT, 237,041.

And the M5 Ultra, 350,305. So congratulations to Apple Silicon for finally besting a six-year-old GPU that you could put in a 2019 Mac Pro. I'm excited. All right.

New Mac minis have some issues, caveats, if you will, about their storage. Joe Rosignal at MacRumors writes, NAND storage in the new Mac mini models with the M6 and M5 Pro chips is soldered to the logic board, whereas the previous models with the M4 and M4 Pro chips have removable storage that can be upgraded.

Ahem, Marco. In addition, all new Mac mini configurations with 256 gigs of storage reportedly have a single NAND chip rather than a pair of 128 gig chips. As a result, 256 gig configurations have slower SSD speeds compared to configurations with 512 gigs of storage or more that do have dual NAND chips, according to some person who was doing some testing, with Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test Benchmark tool.

Yeah, it looks like a pure doubling, like the 512 has 6.4 gigs per second compared to 3.2, and the M4 has 2.8. So even with the single chip, the M6 one is still faster than the M4 one with a quote-unquote good two 128s in them or whatever, but it's worth knowing.

It doesn't matter for Marco's case because all he cares about is the SOC, like he's not constrained by disk size or disk speeds or anything like that, but just FYI, they cheaped out a little bit on the lowest- end M5 with 256 gigs, if that matters to you. Yeah, and this is fairly common. Apple does this a lot with their lower-end products.

Like, in almost all of their products, the base storage uses fewer chips and therefore is slower than the upgraded storage. But they did that, and then they reversed it. Remember the first time they did it, everyone made a big stink, and then the next round of computers came back, and they didn't do it. We were like, yay, they've stopped doing that thing, but now they're back.

All right, the OS's 27 have a rejiggered screen time situation, or so we're told. A friend of the show, Stephen Robles, put up a great YouTube video about many things, but the end of it, we'll put a timestamp link in the show notes.

At the end of it, Stephen talks about this. It requires every single device, I think in your family, if I understood him right, to be upgraded, updated to a 27 OS. And if you've just got a new device, stolen device protection won't let you remove old devices from the list without waiting five days first.

In Stephen's case, his mom is in his Apple family, but he doesn't have anything to do with her screen time specifically. However, because she's part of the family, she also has to update to OS 27 before Stephen can use any of the new screen time features for anyone in his family.

And then also, what happens to older devices that can't go to 27? Do you never, ever, ever get the new screen time stuff? Like, I get that you have to draw a line in the sand if you 've completely rejiggered, like, how this data is stored or whatever, but this kind of stinks. And the mystery about it is, like, I mean, if you have old devices, it doesn't stop you from updating to the new screen time features.

But then his question was, can I no longer control screen time on those devices? Like, they just become uncontrolled and only the 27 devices . He was comparing it to, like, HomeKit. Remember when they did the HomeKit architecture change where you had all these prompts for, like, do you want to convert your home to the new HomeKit architecture or whatever?

But that wasn't as restrictive. But this, like, I mean, so the two things are combining. He was, like, he's trying to put out a video, like, day and date of the iOS 27 coming out. And the stolen device protection is, like, hey, you just got this device. You don't have enough time in this device for us to let you start removing devices from an Apple ID.

Like, that's a security thing. If someone snatches your phone in an unlocked state or whatever, like, to stop you, stop them from, like, deleting all the devices off of your Apple ID so you don't have any control anymore. So I get why that protection is there, but he can't remove – that means he's got to wait five days, which is an eternity in YouTube time.

So that was annoying him. And then, like, having to have – you know, his mom is part of his, like, Apple family thing, but he doesn't want to control our screen time. But she has to update. They won't let him – he can't see any of the new features . He can't upgrade anything until everybody – every device that can be upgraded to 27 is updated to 27.

And who knows? Maybe those features, he won't even care or care about them or like them. But this is just this sort of, like – I mean, this is a transient problem. This will go away in a few years when everybody's devices are updated. Like, this will solve itself. It's not a big deal. But it is kind of frustrating for one of the headlining features. Like, it got its own section in the, like, in the WWC keynote all about the screen time things.

They did not emphasize that this is one of those things that you're not going to be able to use unless everybody updates. All right. I was trying to figure out just a day or two back why was my pie hole did not seem to be working, particularly on my iPhone.

I was getting loads of advertisements. And let me tell you, if you haven't done – I swear to God . I swear to God this just happened. I just got a text from Aaron. True story. It literally just happened. It says the following. My phone is inundated with ads with, like, the raised eyebrow emoji.

I could not have planned that better. Perfect. I planned on heart. That literally just came in as I was trying to talk. Did somebody shut your pie hole? You could say that. Exactly. Oh, my God. I'm shook that this just happened.

I'm, like, completely blue screen now. So, anyway. So, sorry. Let me try that. We're going to leave it in. We're going to leave it in, Marco. It's fine. We're going to leave it in. So, yeah. I was trying to figure out why the pie hole was not really working. Now Aaron is asking the same question. It wasn't working, particularly on my phone.

And the most obvious place I saw this is, well, if you ever go to any news-related website where you have an advertisement to every other paragraph. Or any website. Oh, really? Any website. Just go to any website to do anything. But I noticed this most especially. It was most concrete when I did Wordle in the morning.

Because typically, you know, I will say play Wordle and it 'll show you an interstitial. And with the pie hole, you'll see advertisement. And you wait a couple of seconds and then you can click continue. Then you would just go and play your Wordle. But in this case, I'm seeing, like, video advertisements.

Like, what is happening right now? This is driving me batty. And I was going to bring it up on the show at some point. But I hadn't gotten around to it. I've been very busy recently. We all have been very busy recently. And all of a sudden, I got copied on a tweet or a tweet or whatever, which originated with Daz Fuller.

D-A-Z-F-U-L-L-E-R. And it reads as follows. In the latest version of iOS, there's something called connectivity assist. We're going to come back to that in a second. If you're running a pie hole or similar, then this seems to be bypassing it by routing the rejected requests over mobile data instead. Even the text below the settings says you should probably turn it off if you're running an ad blocker.

So connectivity assist, I was all in for before I knew this . And what connectivity assist says is, well, if the phone is trying to cling to Wi-Fi, but it ain't working, go ahead and just go to mobile data. And they tried this like 10 years ago or something like that under a different name.

I forget what it was called. It never really worked right. And this was one of the kind of headline features of iOS 27 was your phone is going to do better about releasing Wi-Fi. And I guess this is the primary way in which it does that. Well, as it turns out, what I think is happening is when it 's getting no good response from DNS for a lot of these queries, because the way pie hole works is it'll give you like nothing better.

I think it responds with like a, I don't know what that is, when your device does a DNS request for something that it knows is an advertiser. Well, apparently the iPhone or whatever iOS device is saying, hey, all right, I'll go to mobile data instead, which is not at all what you want. And I'll give you one guess what happened when I turned it off.

Then all of a sudden it all started working again, just like it had been before iOS 27. Now, a friend of the show, Aaron Vey, who writes, is one of the authors of Indigo, which is my preferred Blue Sky and Macedon client. Aaron writes, this is not a new feature.

It's the Wi-Fi assist from previous versions renamed and turned on by default. I run pie hole in my home network and started seeing ads on my devices. This is why. Think about this. Apple enabled a feature that sees a block while downloading ad stuff, then reaches out through the cellular network to get it. I understand to a degree how Apple landed here.

Don't love it, though. And let me tell you, I was in a much better spot once I turned this off. And now Aaron will be, too, after I can tell her about it. Yeah, I think I would still leave this feature on. I mean, obviously, the alternative is like pie holes, like solve the problem once for everybody in your house, because all the DNS will go through the pie hole and problem solved .

But the other alternative is run ad blockers on your individual devices, which is more annoying, but also doesn 't run afoul of this situation. And I think I want this because very often, like if I'm leaving the house to walk the dog, I have seen my various past iPhones struggle to decide should I cling to the Wi-Fi that I can still get through the wall of the house as I walk down the block?

Or should I switch to cellular? So if I'm doing like a FaceTime call or I'm like a regular, you know, doing anything where I'm like talking to somebody or videoing with somebody while I walk the dog, you can see the part where it's like, I don't know, should I be trying to get that one little bar of Wi-Fi from the house or should I give up and use cellular?

And like, just give up and use cellular. We're going for a walk. But it struggles. So I like that feature. I like this previously named Wi-Fi assist now called connectivity assist. And if it was interfering with my ad blocking, which is not because I don't have a pie hole, I would just switch to using something on device. Like that's how much I want that feature more than the hassle of having to run an ad blocker as an individual device, which for me is not much of a big thing.

Because if you use like one blocker, it's on Mac, it's on iPad, it's on iOS. If you're an all Apple house, you can get one app and it'll take you pretty far. Yeah, I mean, I totally get why that juice may be worth a squeeze for you. But for me, absolutely turned it off and immediately was so much happier when I did it.

All right. This is a little bit of a journey, just like that last topic ended up being, actually. But there was some news about GM and CarPlay. I didn't put this in the show notes. I presume John did. But I'm going to tell you something that I wrote on my blog a couple of days ago.

I wrote, just shy of a year ago, GM CEO Mary Barra extended this lunacy edict to that they will never do any more Car Play in their cars. To include all future internal combustion vehicles as well. Unsurprisingly, this did not end well. The backlash was immediate. And the data was brutal.

Surveys at the time found 79% of new car buyers would only consider a vehicle that offered CarPlay and that it was available on 98% of new cars sold. Dealers warned buyers would simply walk to a rival showroom . Forgive me, that was a quote from somewhere. I don't have my own blog post in front of me at the moment. I'm going off our show notes. Anyway, coming back to my blog post.

Well, look who did an about face after realizing they scored a tremendous own goal. And again, from whatever source I quoted, this week GM unveiled a new infotainment interface debuting on the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups that fold smartphone integration back into the dashboard and runs alongside GM's native system.

Well, look at us. Look at us. We knew it. We called it. We told you you were idiots. The internet was aflame in the happy way for once about how exciting this was that GM was finally getting a frigging grip. That was whatever day the 21st was.

That was Monday. Then later that same day, after I posted my blog post later on Monday, reading from Joe Rossignol at MacRumors, GM wants you to know it still plans to ditch Apple CarPlay and future EVs. Joe says, recent reports claiming that General Motors is reversing course on its controversial plans to ditch Car Play and its future EVs appear to be incorrect.

As noted by Joanna Stern in her New Things YouTube channel, a GM spokesperson has confirmed that its new software interface that shows CarPlay or Android Auto alongside its own native system in 2027 models of pickups is specific to the gas-powered versions of those pickup trucks. GM previously stated that CarPlay and Android Auto would continue to be offered in its new gas-powered vehicles for the foreseeable future.

So the 2027 models of those trucks still supporting these platforms is not a change of course. Boo this man. Not Joe. I guess I should say boo Mary. Boo that person. So I did post a Mia Culpa on my website earlier today. But I really, really hate this.

And just to be clear, on my Mia Culpa, I have been keeping track of the sorts of devices that you can get CarPlay on. So you can get it on most new cars, as we talked about, at all kinds of different price points. I'd forgotten to note, and this has been true for years now , but I'd forgotten to note that several motorcycles have them.

I picked out, like, the Honda Goldwing and the Harley Road Glide as two examples. Those are larger, more luxury bikes, but it's not just them . You can get it on boats. I think it's MasterCraft. Yes, MasterCraft has announced that they will do it on some of their boats. And you can have CarPlay in your freaking shower.

That is not a joke. Upbeat Sound Company at UpbeatSound.co, not a sponsor, makes, like, one of those dinguses that you would put in, I don't know, maybe a Rivian, that you stick to your shower wall, and it has speakers on it. And you get a CarPlay interface, like a waterproof, or water-resistant CarPlay interface, in your shower.

This is 100% a true story. That's kind of awesome. Oh, it's incredible. I think I might get that. I kind of want one. I kind of want one, but... I want to be able to text for my shower, though. I don't want to be like, keep your eyes on the road. I'm like, I'm not going anywhere. Like, I should be able to text. Does it work with wet hands? Like, because normally... I would assume.

Normally, touchscreens don't. You know what I know, but the point is... If it has, like, a resistive touchscreen, it could. Yeah, it's pressure-sensitive. Yeah. Whatever the case may be. And by the way, there's this entire family out there of, like, hundred-ish dollar little tablets that run CarPlay that are made to be stuck in a car, or like a Rivian.

And, like, that's what I use now for testing Overcast Car Play stuff, because it's easy and it's on my desk. And they're fine, and they're cheap, and they work just fine. Yeah, it's bananas. So, just to recap, almost every new car, a bunch of new motorcycles, boats, and showers, but not Rivian and not GM EVs.

Great work, guys. Just stellar work. Really proud of you. Yeah. When everyone was getting all excited about this, I'm like, don't you guys remember? This is not a change. But, like I said, the follow-up story came, like, moments later. So, it's like, okay, everyone will be corrected. So, I couldn't save you, Casey, but I could have told you if you were telling me you're riding that, I would have said, this is not a change.

This is just them continuing what they said they were going to do. You know, and I thought this, but everyone was so excited. I read a few things, and I was like, oh, I guess I'm wrong, or I've forgotten. Well, so here's the thing about it. All right, so those are the facts as you've read them. But, reading between the lines, as you noted, I think this experiment is currently not going well for GM.

So, start your timers, right? At a certain point, there'll be a change in leadership, or they'll have a change of heart. Like, I think this does, I think the longer this goes on, the more likely they are to eventually reverse, especially if Tesla ever actually goes through with their supposed plans to add CarPlay.

Like, I don't, just because this is still the status quo, does not mean that every day that passes makes everyone realize inside and outside of GM what a stupid home this was. So, I think, you know, despite the fact that this is not an actual change, it's not going well for them.

No. And the thing that blows my mind is that if you're Rivian, if your primary competitor, at least in people's minds, maybe not like literal competitor, but I feel like almost everyone I know that's even vaguely interested in Rivian is at least considering cross-shopping Tesla.

If you're Rivian, why wouldn't you use this as a differenti ator? And one of my earlier blog posts on this subject, because I 've been banging this drum for a while now, is that Wasim Ben Saeed, I think is his name, who is like the CTO at Riv ian, was on, I want to say it was Decoder, it was one of the great Verge podcasts, and said, well, it takes over your screen.

That's why we can't do it. It doesn't, though. Like CarPlay Ultra does, but regular CarPlay doesn't. In my BMW now, it uses most of the screen, but not all of it. In Erin's Volvo, in her old Volvo, it used like half the screen.

Now it uses the majority of the screen, but not all of it. And so, if you're Rivian, why would you not use this as a differentiator? It's frigging additive. If your infotainment is so freaking great, then no one will use it, and it's fine. What does it hurt you?

Why would you not use that as a differentiator? It blows my mind. And so, there's been rumblings, as John said, there's been at least a moderate amount of smoke, which makes you think there's fire, that Tesla is potentially going to juice their, as far as I understand, pretty bad sales these days. Because, hey, guess what?

The CEO is a freaking maniac. But anyway, they're trying to juice their sales, potentially, by adding CarPlay. And then, I think John is exactly right. The second that happens, Rivian is going to suddenly discover that all of their issues with CarPlay just magically disappear.

And I think GM will also do the same thing. But why would you not differentiate? Why would you not do it now? It drives me batty. This is on the long list of things that I get very worked up about that I really shouldn't. But I just don't understand what they're doing.

And again, it's additive. If your infotainment is so freaking spectacular, then maybe your owners won't use it. Maybe what will happen is all these people, like, I don't know, me, who refuse to buy a car without CarPlay, will buy the Rivian and then see, you know what?

Maybe I don't need this after all. But at least now I've gotten in the door. Like, I just don't get what they're doing here. For such an admirable company, it's in so many ways, Rivian , to me anyway, seems like Tesla, but not evil. So why wouldn't you do this?

I just don't understand. It drives me batty. Yeah, and I think once Tesla does it, like, you know, there 's I think there's enough smoke behind that, like that it's probably going to happen. And you start you see like Apple made a few changes in the latest couple iOS versions that seem like they're aimed at getting Tesla on board with CarPlay.

Like, it looks like it's probably going to happen. The only question is when. But once Tesla caves, first of all, I think it will be a big deal. I think it will be a big deal to their sales. I think Apple will want to brag about it. And I think that is a huge thing that buyers look for in new cars.

And so once Tesla caves, it's only a matter of time before Rivian does. But I think it will take that. Like, I don't think Rivian is going to change their mind until and unless Tesla caves. Oh, I agree. Which is so dumb. It's so dumb. And I honestly, I love the idea of going back to Rivian in the future.

Like, you know, because the only reason I got rid of my Riv ian was because it was a service nightmare because it was such a young company. And it had a lot of little bugs that couldn't be fixed for 12 weeks or whatever it was. But I would love to go back to Rivian in the future. Like, I still miss things about it.

And I still really respect what they're doing as a company. And their vehicles are very capable and very appealing to me. But one thing I don't miss is having to put my phone in a stupid dock next to the dashboard. And, you know, having to operate little tiny phone apps manually with my hands because there's no CarPlay.

And their maps sucked. And, you know, there's no overcast. And there's no, like, everything about the infotainment thing was terrible. And I know, I've heard that they have better maps now, which that's great. But what you don't have is any maps.

Like, you don't give me the ability to use any map app I want. What if I like Waze better than Google Maps or Apple Maps better than Google Maps? Whatever it is, like, if what I want is not exactly the one app that you've selected to build a half-assed version of in your infotainment system, then it's a bad experience for me.

And what are the odds that you're going to guess right on everyone's preferences? I said it before, never bet against the smartphone. And the good thing is you don't have to. You can, like, and every other car company has figured this out. Like, just show the phone thing in the window.

And it's fine. And no other car company has had any problems just doing that. And the customers love it. So it's only a matter of time before Tesla, you know, needs that, needs to juice their sales that way. Because they, you know, as you mentioned, they're always looking for something.

Because they're always getting themselves into trouble. And, yeah. And the thing is, I so hope that, you know, like, I have one more year on my lease. Next year, next summer, I'm picking a new car. I don't think Rivian's going to come around by then.

But maybe the one after that. I would love to go back to Rivian, like, three years after that. Maybe by then they'll have a nice big service network. The R3 and the R3X will be out. And they'll be super fun. And maybe they'll have CarPlay. One can dream. Yep. No, I agree with you completely.

And here's the thing. Let's take it as writ that both Tesla and or Rivian infot ainment is without equal. I don't care if it's both of them, one of them. It doesn't matter. Let's just say Rivian is without equal. Let's say it's better than Tesla. I don't care if that's true or not. Let's say it's the best infotainment in any automobile.

Let's say that's the case. Do they have overcast support, Marco? No, of course not. Right. And they never will. And they never will. Because it is never going to be worth either Tesla or me building that. Or Rivian, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Or Rivian. We're saying the same thing.

And there's so many. When I plug in my phone to CarPlay, I don't just see three apps. There's like 40 apps on there. Right. Audible has an app. There's so many. Every map app has one.

Like Instapaper has an app that will read articles to you. There's stuff you would never even think about. The AI providers are now having CarPlay apps. WhatsApp has a CarPlay app. There's so many. There's no way any car maker is ever going to cover them all.

And they don't need to. So it's just a self-created problem. Right. That's the thing is that even if Rivian's infotainment is miles better than everything else out there, let's say it's better than CarPlay. But the problem is if I want to go and switch what podcast I'm listening to in Overcast while connected to a Rivian, maybe I'm ignorant.

Maybe I'm missing the point here. But as far as I know, I would need to pick up my phone and use Overcast. Or if they supported CarPlay, I could pop over to CarPlay for a moment if it's not already up, do what I need to do in Overcast, and then pop back to Rivian's infotainment.

Like, I just, I don't understand what they're thinking. And as you said, Marco, and it's exactly on the nose. Every one of us has a different array of apps that we want to use in the car. I want to use Overcast. I don't typically use Waze, and I don't typically use Google Maps.

So that doesn't bother me. But I want to use Overcast. Marco, presumably you want to use Overcast, but you also use Waze. And that's fine. That's the beauty of CarPlay is that we don't have to all agree, as you said, on the same six friggin' apps. It's just, I don't get it.

And it drives me so batty. It's just such, I guess, hubris, for lack of a better word. I don't know. It's just, it's deciding in Rivian's headquarters that they know better than you. And that's so frustrating. And you know what I've heard a very smart man say from time to time? In fact, as recently as like five minutes ago, don't bet against the smartphone.

I love how fired up you get about this. It makes me so angry because it's so dumb. It's so dumb. And the Rivian guy, you know, he's very calm and soft-sp oken. He's like, well, we believe this is a better experience. And I don't get all fired up like Casey about this.

I can very calmly address it, and I say, I believe it's not . And therefore, I believe I'll buy a different car. And that's exactly it. Like, I genuinely, I think I've said this a couple times on the show. I genuinely, even though I just got a car, I will probably put a deposit down on an R3 because I want the R3X specifically, because I just think that would be such an amazing car.

It's like a little hatchback-y thing that's supposed to be like a little hot rod hatchback, like my Golf R. It looks so cool. It looks so freaking cool. And having driven a couple of R1s, or I've driven one or two R1ss and an R1t, and I love the whole vibe of Rivian.

Like, everything about it, I love. Like, the concrete things and the not-so-concrete things. And I can absolutely see myself driving a Rivian, but I will not freaking do it without CarPlay. So I will probably put a deposit down when they're willing to take them. And if they don't cave on this, which I think Marco's right , it's at least a year or two away, then I will ask for my money back, or maybe I will just sacrifice, you know, whatever that money is, because I will not buy a car without CarPlay.

I just won't do it. John, am I crazy? Yes, but not for this reason. Fair. Very fair. My car doesn't have CarPlay either, you know. Yeah, well, it's time for you to get a new car. All right. We are in an in-between-ish area where you could squint and say, this is follow-up, maybe this is a topic.

I don't know. We'll see what I end up deciding in the show notes. But we're in that kind of gray zone. And what we're going to talk about is the Apple Watch and it listening to you. And we're going to start with some feedback from Steve Rigg ins, who writes, I'm not sure why Marco is so concerned over the new Siri audio features when voice memos have been sitting there for years.

It only automatically records the last 15 seconds, this new feature. Only automatically records the last 15 seconds. Otherwise, it's not as bad as voice memos, which just records audio flat out basically forever. So the main difference between the announced Siri replay and Siri rewind features is that they're always recording.

Voice memos requires the user to explicitly decide, I'm going to open up the voice memos app and hit record. And I'm recording. That is a different level of thing than something that is always recording, than a product that just always records all the time without you initiating the recording.

Now, there's all sorts of, you know, there's all sorts of opinions and laws about whether it is right to record people around you, possibly without their knowledge, or whether somebody can record, can like leave a recording device somewhere and record the people around it with none of their knowledge.

There's lots of laws and opinions about that. But I think for this particular question, that distinction almost doesn't matter. It's when you are deciding, I'm taking out my phone and I'm hitting record on this app and I'm making a recording, that is a very different degree of surveillance and recording than a product that is always doing it in the background.

So my follow-up to this, to Steve's question, was, so let's think about, hey Siri, sorry, I just did it, hey Dingus, whatever, which has existed for years and years on phones, right? That technically works in a very similar manner in that you may be wondering, especially when they first rolled this out, how does it know when I say, hey Dingus, is it always listening?

And the answer is yes, it's always listening. And it technically, you know, setting aside the secure X-Clave or whatever, it's a similar type of thing where there's some very low power corner of the logic board or potentially chip that has a tiny little buffer that's constantly recording audio through the microphone in a very low power state.

And the hey Dingus one is saying, I'm just going to be constantly recording a couple seconds of audio and I'm just going to be looking at it saying, did they say, hey Siri? Did they say, hey Siri? Sorry, I can't do it. Did they say, hey Siri? That's all it's doing all the time. And they change it to eventually look for just, just the word without the hey, but that's all it's doing.

It's just, it's constantly quote unquote recording as in taking in digital audio, taking in audio, analog audio, converting it to digital, and it has some buffer of, you know, the past one or two or three seconds of audio. And it's analyzing that buffer to see, is it anywhere in this buffer?

Did anybody say, hey Dingus at any point? And if it did, it says, oh, I'm going to wake up the whole rest of the phone and say, oh, they said the thing. So, and by the way, here's like, you know, the beginning of the audio that they said after that and then piece it all together and blah, blah, blah. That feature has existed for a really long time.

Most people have not worried about it because they don't think about it. They're just like, oh, like a human, you just say, hey, whatever. Like, I mean, people do this all the time where someone, you know, says something and then says your name at the end of it. You have this phenomenon where they shout something and they say your name at the end to realize that they were addressing you.

And suddenly you hear all the stuff they said before that, whereas if they didn't say your name at the end of it, you would have ignored it as background noise, right? Yep. And so they think, oh, the phone's just like a little person. When I say, hey, dingus, it wakes up and it's like, well, how? How does it wake up? How does it know you say that, said that? How does it know you're addressing you?

It doesn't know your intention. It's not reading your mind. It is always recording a tiny bit of audio. But what it does with that audio is it's just looking for the wake word, okay? Enter the watch, which is always recording audio, but it's not just looking for, hey, dingus anymore.

First of all, the buffer seems bigger. I don't know how long, how big the hey Siri buffer is or whatever, but this buffer we know is at least 15 seconds. Second, it's not just constantly scanning that buffer looking for a wake word. Instead, it's got that buffer all ready to go.

And, you know, it's a rolling buffer. So it's just throwing away the data that's, you know, it's keeping a 15 second window. It's just letting it kind of sit there. I mean, it's probably also scanning it for the wake word, but it's making it sit there, waiting for you to double tap the crown on your watch. And then it goes, oh, they want to know what was said in the last 15 seconds.

Well, luckily I've been recording audio all day and I have the last 15 seconds of audio, as a matter of fact, in this buffer right here. Now that they've tapped that, instead of me just scanning that buffer for the wake word, I am going to run it through a speech to text thing. I'm going to get some text out of it.

I'm going to summarize it and I'm going to put it up on the screen in a bubble. That's what this feature does. And well, hold on. That's, there's a final distinction here. This feature does not summarize it. Oh yeah. The 15 second. Yeah. The 15 second one just transcribed exactly what was said.

Does not do any summarization. I think it does. It doesn't do some sort of like anonymization or something in it. I think it might do some processing on it. I don't think. So there's, that's replay, not rewind, right? Yeah, no, I know what you're talking about. There's, there's the distinction between the one that summarizes versus transcribes.

And 15 seconds is the transcript. But I thought they had also said that in the 15 second transcript, they'll try to like blank out people's names or something. But either way, what it's doing with the audio is not just scanning it to find something and say, have I been triggered? Yes, no. And then feeding the audio to the system to like do a command or whatever, but they're making text out of it.

Okay. Whether it is literal transcription or summary, either way, I don't think it actually makes that much of a difference other than like trying to make it digestible because 15 seconds you can transcribe. And that's, it's a lot of text, but it's not too much. Whereas if you've been an hour long meeting, the transcript of that is going to be much longer than the summary.

But yeah, so that, that distinction, I think it's mostly because people think of a wake word as being just, again, they, they think of the phones, you know, they conceptualize the phones the way, the way we conceptualize living things as in that it's just responding to its name.

It's not recording me, it's not listening to me, but of course it is listening. Like in the same way that you're not listening until someone yells your name. When you hear your name, your brain wakes up and says, Oh, I was just, I was just, you know, blocking out all that background noise of people chattering behind me. But when I hear my name, I'm like, Oh, I suddenly pay attention.

That's all the phone is doing. Right. So that's fine. Versus, Oh, you didn't know I've been listening to you, but now that you see that, that I transcribed the last 15 seconds of speech, you're like, wow, you've really been listening to this whole time because here I see the things that were just said in the last 15 seconds, including what the people at the next table were saying.

And they didn't even realize they were being recorded. So anyway, I don't want to belabor this, but that's, I wanted to bring up, uh, Hey Siri at this point, because technologically, Oh, sorry. Both of my phones lit up. Technologically speaking. You brought this on yourself. Yeah. I have, I have, my other phone is going to the Pokemon mines.

It's got a new, as in actually I found a new, uh, not used orange apple silicone case. It's just what I've wanted to put my phone in to embarrass it while it goes to the Pokemon line. So they both lit up. Um, yeah, we should continue with the feedback because there is more.

All right. So Carlo writes, my basic position is simple. If I legitimately hear something, I don't think another person has a privacy right over how well I'm allowed to remember it. If you tell me something, I might remember it perfectly. I might write it down afterward. I might dictate myself a note. None of those things are normally considered privacy violations.

So if my watch privately creates a summary to help me remember the same conversation, what exactly changed? Information reached the same person. It wasn't disclosed to anyone else. Technology just made that person's memory more reliable. This feels much closer to augmented memory than surveillance. I get this a lot, but I don't know.

It just feels really different. Well, there's a difference between surveillance and eavesdropping . Eavesdropping, some etymologists will let us know where that comes from or whatever, but eavesdropping is like, you're around the corner from someone having a conversation and you're listening. That's generally frowned upon too.

Like it's kind of, you know, like you're being sneaky. You're listening in a conversation. You shouldn't be listening. And sometimes you're not around the corner. Maybe you're just like at a restaurant in a booth and you can hear the people in the booth next to you and you're listening to their conversation. That's also kind of frowned upon socially speaking, but you're right that you can do it. But surveillance is different from that in that you don't have have to be there or do anything or participate.

You can continue ignoring them, having your conversation confident in the fact that your watch is recording everything and will summarize everything. The next booth said without you having to concentrate on it or appear to be eavesdropping or anything like that. And that is a violation of the social contract much more so than eavesdropping.

Eavesdropping is rude. It's like, you shouldn't be listening to our conversation, but at least people can see that you're listening because you're not, if you're having your own conversation or whatever, they're like, Oh, they're someone would see you and say, they're clearly being polite and not listening to the conversation on the next table. But no, you're not being polite. you put a tape recorder down the table and you're recording it.

And later you're going to listen back to it. And I know it's not the same thing as summarized or whatever, but that's the point. Surveillance is a machine doing a thing that would be too socially unacceptable for you to do, but you just set the machine to do it. And so you can appear not to be violating that social norm when you totally are, which is why it is usually considered more invasive to, for example, plant cameras in your neighbor's house than it is for you to look out your window in through their window.

Both of them are bad. You shouldn't be peeping in their windows, but if you went into their house and planted cameras and tape recorders, that would be more of a violation of you looking out your window at their house. There's also, there's a lot of differences in, in degree and situation here. Like if, first of all, if, you know, if for a product like this, it is creating an artifact, that you can refer to and, and that might have some kind of authority.

So for instance, if, if there's some dispute over what was said, you know, you can, you can point to this, you can go open up your app, you know, your Siri app or wherever these, these recordings land, and you can say, no, no, no, look, this is what you said. And that, that's a different type.

That's a different, a different nature than, you know, you just, just trying to argue that you remember something. Although I feel like you could be that pretty easily in court, given how poorly these things, things summarize. Well, sure. But, but also, but, but again, you are, you're creating an artifact that maybe somebody else could have access to.

Like, you know, when we first discussed this, I brought up the example of like, you know, a lot of spouses or partners have access to each other's Apple IDs or know each other's passcodes to their devices. And so, you could plausibly, you could plausibly, like, if you, if you're, if you had like a partner or an ex maybe who knew your pass code to your phone and could open it up and read these notes , it is plausible that they could maybe see an action item or a summary of a conversation that could give away something

that you would rather they not know. So, so for instance, what if you are planning to move out and they see in your Siri app when they're spying on you that you met with like an apartment listing agent that they, even if it says something like met with Michelle, what if they know that your friend Michelle is an apartment listing agent?

And like, there's, there's so many ways this, this can be a privacy violation unintentionally or, or in this case, you know, intentionally, but like when you, when you're creating these records of everything around you , it does change things dramatically because, you know, also in that situation, you as the wearer of this recording device, you, again, you, like we were saying earlier, you might forget that this is a feature.

You might not even know this is, or you might've turned it on once months ago, forgotten about it. And it's been, it's been recording your conversations for months and, or rather it's been taking notes on your conversations for months. So even though it is not creating an audio recording that persists, it is still creating artifacts automatically all the time that could have major privacy implications and could back fire on you and the people around you in ways that you would rather they not.

Again, think about law enforcement. Like, so, you know, suppose that this becomes one of those things that the TSA agents make you check when you enter the country or that, you know, the customs agents, like they want to see what you've been talking about with your friends. Have you been saying anything maybe against the president? This sounds ridiculous to only some people out there now, because most of us, you could, you hear an example like that and you're like, oh yeah, that could happen.

That probably will happen. These kinds of scenarios are not ridiculous. So meanwhile, why are they creating this? It does seem like if what you want is something to take notes on your meetings, there's lots of other solutions for that that will do a better job and will be like, you know, there'll be more thorough.

They'll actually have things like searchable transcripts and more recordings. in those kind of contexts, that makes a lot more sense. It is more defensible and they'll probably do a better job. So Apple's going to be here with this kind of very limited, possibly very mediocre version and bring on all this, all this baggage for what?

And then finally, I would also say that if you consider it a memory aug mentation, that is an interesting approach. That is an interesting theory that you're saying, I'm not recording conversations. I'm just automatically taking durable, you know, automated notes on everything around me all the time.

Okay. Isn't that a similar argument to LLMs are just reading things like humans read them and just learning them and then just, it can repeat them back perfectly, but that's not a copyright violation. It read it just like, just like you or I would read it.

And if I can read a news article and recite it perfectly back to you, I'm, that's not a copyright violation. Well, it might be a public performance, but you know, there's, you can see like when you change the degree or the nature of something by this much, it does change a lot of the legal questions around it.

And there's a lot of precedent for that throughout all of technology and history. Like when you change something this dramatically, the law and the perception and the judgments around it often change. In this case, something that takes constant, persistent, automatic notes of everything is a difference in degree versus, me having the right to remember what you said to me.

A couple of things on what you said first. I hate that LLM analogy because LLMs aren't people, but I'm setting that aside. The, I think what, another thing I want to push back again, so that you keep bringing up as an example to help people understand it, which makes sense from an emotional perspective, but technically speaking, and I feel like from like the principle of all this, it doesn't actually matter if anything that has been recorded is sensitive in any way.

Like this is not bad because you might say a thing that you don't want people to know. It's bad. Even if you never say anything, it's the whole like, well, if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't have to worry about it. No surveillance is surveillance. Even if you never say anything, if nothing is ever recorded, that is harmful in any way.

Okay. It's still just as bad. It doesn't change the badness of it based on whether you had said something that is potentially sensitive because that, that way leads you to, okay, well, it's fine. As long as you have nothing to hide, we'll just record everything. And if you object to the recording, then obviously you have something to hide. And your argument is like, well, everybody has something to hide, but really it doesn't matter if I have anything to hide.

The principle is I should not constantly be recorded. And I think this is getting to the heart of the difference, which is what is surveillance versus taking notes or, you know, memorizing or eavesdropping or whatever. Surveillance is constant ambient and back referenceable as in it's just running all the time.

You just have the camera pointed at your garage and it's just there all the time. It's just recording 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Maybe once in a blue moon, someone will come and try to break into your garage, but it's recording all the time. That is surveillance. You don't have to do anything to make it. It's not an intentional move where every morning you wake up and say, well, time to record the garage in case someone skills.

It's just running all the time. That's what surveillance is. It's the difference between sitting down at a meeting at work and starting your note taking thing. And then you have the meeting and then it summarizes your notes as one of our sponsors does, you know, I think for this episode, and then you're done. That is an intentional act in a particular context where I think everyone is socially acceptable to take notes during meetings, whether you're taking them with a pad and a pencil on your computer or with a note taking app.

It is an intentional act that everyone is aware of that's going on a particular context versus my watch is recording everything all the time. Oh, I can geofence it, but like just because it is ambient, because it is surveillance. Once it is off and running, it's just filling up your Siri app with like summaries of things that have happened all around you all day because surveillance is not an intentional time limited act where you say record now, stop recording.

It is just, I've set a camera up pointing at my garage and that's going to be there forever. And I might only look at it when someone breaks into my garage, but it's recording all the time. And surveillance, you know, video surveillance, audio surveillance, there are laws around that because of the nature of surveillance is not as simple as, you know, an intentional recording act.

Although we have laws about that as well. It is like, it is, it is different in kind. And again, it doesn't matter if anything ever happens that is important in that video. the act of surveillance is still the act of surveillance, even if nothing ever happens. The thing you pointed the camera at certain scenarios, you can't point your camera.

You can't play again. You can't plant cameras in your neighbor's house and say, well, it's not a problem unless something sensitive happens in their house. Like, no, it's problem that the camera is there at all recording all the time. Again, without their, without their knowledge or whatever. So Carlos point is like, well, they don't know that I'm listening to them and I'm memor izing everything they say.

And now I'm recording everything they say. And it's like, yeah, you've just crept right up to probably existing laws on, on eavesdropping and surveillance. And this is turning a thing that was previously, a thing on your wrist that would tell you time and do stuff into, Hey, you may not know it, but we're constantly recording and summarizing every conversation that happens around you.

Nick here writes, Apple swears up and down. It's doing all it can to make this private and secure. And I have no reason to believe otherwise. The audio is not actually saved and is instead merely trans cribed. That text is automatically deleted unless the user takes an action to save it too.

But good luck explaining that to anyone around you after you read back an exact transcript of what they just said. I think normal people will continue to react negatively when you tell them that you've been passively recording them because outside Silicon Valley, that is considered gross and invasive. Let me just, uh, plus one, the very last thing there that Nick said, I have not spent inordinate amounts of time in Silicon Valley, but I've spent more time than most East coasters.

I like to think, and I don't think reality as the rest of the country, I'm not saying the East coast. I don't think the reality is the rest of the country and perhaps the world sees it really exists in Silicon Valley.

It's, it's very different there. in some ways that's good. In a lot of ways, I don't think it's great. And I think Nick hit the nail on the head that this is considered absolutely gross and invasive everywhere, except maybe in the Valley.

And it is, again, it is confusing. I'll emphasize again, there's the 15 second transcript. And then there's the thing with it summarizes conversations that have happened. And the 15 second transcript is a small time window, throws it away. If you don't keep it, blah, blah, blah. You have to double tap the crown, blah, that's business. But the recap thing is like, it's just constantly listening to everything and it's not transcribing everything, but it is summarizing the conversations.

It is just a condensed, compressed version of constant surveillance. And that's the most dangerous one because you're just living your life, going through your day and somewhere on your phone, it is filling it up with, paragraph long summaries of conversations that you had. And that is just a different form of surveillance. It's the old school kind.

Like if you've been watching, um, star city on Apple TV, there's, it's like a seventies era Soviet, you know, type of thing. And they have, they have, they have actual audio listening devices spying on people. Right. But it's just too much content. So they have a room full of people who listen to the audio tapes and then summarize them.

They're basically doing what the recap feature does. And they, it's too long to listen. You know, they didn't, they're not transcribing them word for word, right? They're just being like, okay, they listen for 15 minutes and they say, this person talked with that person. And they argued about shopping. Right. it's just a summary, but it's still, you watch the show and you're supposed to believe this is oppressive surveillance.

He's like, oh no, no, it's not surveillance. The tapes, they throw away the audio tapes. They just have these people summarizing it. So you just get a summary. It's like, yeah, that's still surveillance. And also like, everyone thinks their phone is listening to them. That's true. Everyone.

Right. I mean, it is. It's listening for, it's listening for Hey Dingus. Right. But like, you, you've had, you as the nerd in your life, you've had everybody tell you, you know, your phone's listening to you. Cause this one time I can run ads. Yeah. Cause I, there's one time I mentioned this water filter and then the next day I was seeing ads for water filters all over my phone.

They was listening to what I didn't, I didn't type in anything. It heard me. Everyone has stories like that. And you know, even, and it's already been hard enough as the nerd to try to explain like, well, actually that's not, you know, they don't need to be listening to you for that. You know, this is now, now it's just out the window.

It's like, no, yeah, your phone's listening to you. It is. Well, so here's the thing about that. The reason people would freak out about that is because they, like if you explain how it's actually working, like, you know, based on their IP address and other things and all sorts of like, they're like, oh, well that's boring and I'm not interested. But as soon as you say, but no, but imagine it didn't work that way, which is actually probably the better way.

But imagine instead it was literally listening to you. That bothers them so much more because it is more, more connected to the human experience of eavesdropping, right? That is more a violation of the human social norm of don't, hey, don't listen in other people's conversations that it's the phone being rude.

Whereas when it does, the computer way with IP addresses and cookies and stuff like that, they're like, oh, that's computer junk. I don't care what it doesn't like. There's no social norm around like persistent tracking cookies and stuff like the actual tech, the actual ad tech that does this thing that gives you the ads that are based on the stuff you've been doing online.

that ad tech doesn't bother people because it doesn't have an analog in human society. But listening on conversations that you shouldn't be listening to does. And that's why they latch on to the idea that it's listening. And now that literally is listening, of course, it's going to bother them.

It just like, it's, it's a fact of human nature that just like things that are outside our lived experience seem alien and not as interesting to us. But now that the phones are doing things that are analogous to our own sense experience of living in the world, it makes people angry, which is exactly why they were angry when they thought phones were doing this.

And then when you explain what they're actually doing, they're like, oh, that doesn't bother me. But if it's listening, that does bother me. Well, now it's listening. And like, and I think what this also, what we've seen is like people don't like, you know, as Nick here was saying, like good luck explaining these minor differences or these minor technical things to anybody.

Like, do you think anyone is going to sit through an explanation about, well, it's not actually storing a recording. It's only 15 seconds or whatever. You read back what they just said. They're like, they hate you now. It's only transcribing. It's like, it's like, it's taking, notes for you. And it's super secure.

And it's, it streams the audio from this part of the chip to this part of the phone chip. And no one cares. Everyone will just say, oh yeah, so it's recording everything we're saying. Okay, great. None of those technical distinctions matter to any regular people. It's just, okay, yeah, now every Apple watch is a recording device.

Anonymous writes, I'm a lawyer and I live in Washington state. Although I'm not a privacy expert, I do think it's interesting to consider the implications of this kind of recording under various state laws. In Washington, for example, we have a statute that expressly makes it against the law to record any quote, private conversation by any device, electronic or otherwise designed to record or transmit such conversation, regardless how the device is powered or actuated without first obtaining the consent of all the persons engaged in the conversation.

Quote, on its face then, I can't see how anyone wearing an Apple watch constantly recording others without them knowing wouldn't be violating Washington law. Well, it depends on the definition of record. It depends on the definition of conversation. That's how laws like this are tested.

It's like you evaluate all the words. Well, is this a recording? What is a recording of a conversation? does it does a, you know, a loosely transcribed like series of notes about facts in it? Does that count as a recording? If, if you talk to me and I take notes on the conversation, is that a recording?

Apple, I'm sure their lawyers reviewed all this and I'm sure their lawyers determined. No, it's not. We are not lawyers. So we are not really qualified to meet that kind of determination. But even if it is technically skating by the law, it almost doesn't matter because again, it's, it's going to, it's a, it's a PR problem.

It's a, it's a perception problem that is going to do far more damage to Apple than, you know, if, if some state sues them for violating some edge of a law that they can talk their way out of. The 15 second one would be pretty easy to, to, you know, win on in court because that is straight up, you know, transcription of what was said maybe with a little misogy.

Is, is a transcription a recording is, I don't know. It, yeah, it's a, yeah, I think they would say it is like, they say electronic device. If you had an electronic device that, that recorded audio and immediately turned it into speech, I think that would be pretty, pretty easy to win. But anyway, someone will try it, I guess. The summaries are maybe a little bit harder, but that's just like there, I'm sure there's existing laws in the book with, with particular wording.

But if people rebel against this and if, especially with state laws where there's actually a chance of passing laws, unlike the federal level, you can just have laws that say, yeah, whatever the Apple watch is doing, that's now against the law. Another anonymous, a different anonymous writes, on the topic of audio intelligence, it seems Apple is following a very similar strategy at the Genius Bar.

If you have a Genius Bar appointment, you're asked to agree that they are not responsible for data loss, followed by an additional agreement page that asks about audio collection for note-taking during the appointment. This happens right at the beginning of every appointment. The audio consent agreement covers the fact that audio is transcribed on the iPad they use, and that transcript is sent to the cloud for processing.

This is an example of a social norm that I think we've pretty well established. For decades, I guess, you call a customer support number, and they say this call will be recording for training and quality purposes, and blah, blah, blah. That's an example of a confined scenario, like a meeting at work, where everyone agrees, all right, fine, like, I understand why it's being recorded.

In fact, it might actually benefit me here. It's like similar to if you're having a meeting, you might want it to be recorded, so both sides, you know, you can't argue about what took place, or like literal audio recording. There are limited contexts where you say, fine, if you don't agree, hang up with the phone, but if you do agree, we're both here, this is being recorded, and both parties have an interest in it being recorded, because you don't want, like, the customer service person lying about what you said, and you want to be able to prove what they said.

Obviously, they have the recording and you don't, and so it's not quite fair, but in some states, you can record your end too, and blah, blah, blah. But yeah, like, essentially, AI note-taking technologies uses the Genius Bar. That's a great idea, because people, there's a lot of conversation happening in the Genius Bar, and it's hard to keep track of what everyone is saying, and people are trying to take notes in real time, but also pay attention to the customer.

If the customer and the Genius Bar person agree that we're okay with this, I think, again, it benefits both of them to have additional data about their interaction so that they get the best service possible. That's so different than, by the way, on your walk from the parking lot, we were recording you, and we heard your conversation, and we already know what you are.

We already know what you're coming here to talk to us about, and it's like, I'm not okay with that. That is surveillance. Finally, you, I believe, John, noted that MKBHD has a segment in his watch review that discusses exactly this. All right, so here, one of the things that, when we first discussed this, I'm like, well, this from a technical perspective and a principled ethical perspective is very, very bad, but it's the type of thing where, depending on what the defaults are, again, this hasn't actually shipped yet,

so we don't know how this will be configured out of the box, if it ever ships. We'll see. But like, depending on how this is deployed, maybe this stuff is off by default, right? And it's the type of thing where, if it doesn't occur to you, I would love to just record, get summaries of every conversation that happens to me all day, and you seek out this feature and turn it on, and if it's off by default, it's so obscure that, like, I don't think it's a need that people will be seeking out, and basically what it would mean is the, you know, the tyranny of the defaults.

Most people will have no interaction with this feature, and it won't even rise to the level that people know about it and won't become a PR problem. But then MKBHD made a video about it. It's like, well, that ship has sailed, because now millions and millions and millions of casual tech enthusiasts know about these features, and his take on it was very similar to ours, which is, this is a bad idea, Apple.

Why are you doing this? And so now, any hope that Apple could weather this storm with smart defaults and obscurity, I feel like is out the window. Not that, like, MKBHD is talking to the public, but he's talking to the broadest possible swath of people who care about tech stuff, like, literally millions of people.

So, and he's not the only one who has talked about this, but, yeah, Apple really, I mean, it's great that this didn't ship in 27.0, because Apple now has a chance to think better of it and do something different and maybe say, oh, we're going to delay this feature while we think about it, but we'll see how this goes.

But, yeah, he, MKBHD, is on it. I just, I can't imagine this providing enough utility to be worth all of the reputational damage and downsides. Because, like we were saying earlier, the products that do this, like, our sponsor, the products that do this, like, for business meetings are much more thorough and much more specialized and, you know, intentionally don't strip out a whole bunch of information because that's not the point of them.

And they have a long history. Like, when I was in my jobby job, every meeting we had was recorded, whether it was in WebEx or Zoom or Teams or all the different, like, every meeting was recorded. Full audio, both ends of every meeting. And it was beneficial to everybody. We didn't have any AI note-taking or whatever, but it was, if you couldn't, if you missed the meeting, for example, you couldn't attend it, you could go and play back the recording of the meeting.

Incredibly beneficial. Like, no one was like, you're recording meetings? Like, that's just, that's just the way things work in this office. It's fine, not surveillance. If I had to guess, honestly, I bet this feature never ships. I bet it kind of gets, you know, delayed, you know, very similar to the CSAM scanning thing from a few years back.

Like, I bet it kind of gets like, you know, delayed, rethought, and then, oh, actually, never mind. Like, you know, in some form. Yeah, and the thing is, this, a lot of the same tech has been used in Apple devices and could be used in the future in Apple devices as an assistive technology for people who can't hear what's being said and basically getting closed captions on people.

Like, it's a potential thing of glasses. Like, if you can't hear what people are saying, if you just looked at them and can see subtitles as they speak, that's an incredibly valuable assistive technology. Most people would not consider that surveillance because it is just someone using an assistive device to live through the world.

It's not recording those transcripts. It's just putting the words under their face so you can understand what they're saying when they're talking to you without being able to hear them. And obviously, they have actual hearing aids for people who just need the sound boosted or whatever. Like, as an assistive technology, I think it does have value. And that's why I feel like the one that could reasonably survive with some tweaks is the 15-second rewind thing.

I'm not sure of the utility of that, but, like, that is less, that is much more like Hey Dingus, right? It's like, it's just a rolling buffer and if you never listen to the rolling buffer, it all just disappears. just like the rolling buffer that was listening to Hey Dingus, all that audio is gone like deers in rain, right?

Lost, sorry. Will be lost. Anyway, and so those 15-second buffers, if you never double tap the crown, it never shows up. When you do double tap it, arguably, you could say I'm using it as an assistive technology, especially if you can't actually save that 15 seconds and it's just on your watch briefly. But the recap one, that's surveillance.

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Thank you so much to Claude for sponsoring our show. All right. We have been very busy and I apologize we haven't had more time for Ask ATP but this is the benefit of having two shows 48 hours apart is that we can do some Ask ATP.

So Elliot writes, what is the highest mileage you have ever got to in a single car? What do you think is the highest mileage that you should go? For me, when I had a 1994 Saturn SL2, I believe that got to like 120,000 miles or thereabouts.

before or after the wheels fell off? That one, first of all, excellent memory. Second of all, it was one wheel. Thank you very much. And third of all, it was after. Really, if any of the wheels fall off, that's bad by the way. That can't confirm. Even if it's just one, I don't feel like it's not much of a defense. That was not great. So to be fair, that was dad's commuter car until it was eventually handed down to me.

That car bombed up and down the Sawmill River Parkway at truly heinous speeds at like four o'clock in the morning when dad would go to work. It was astonishing. He was like the Sabine Schmitz of the Sawmill. It was really Sawmills. And that reference probably made sense to six people, but that's okay.

Anyways, that car got to like 120,000 miles on one clutch, I should add. and then the Nissan 300ZX that we bought with something like 70 or 80,000 miles on it from a co-worker of my dad's. And I think that had like 110-ish when we got rid of it, when I got rid of it because at that point it was mine.

But nothing since then has been anywhere close to that mileage. I think the original BMW was like 70,000, 80,000 miles. I could look it up, but I'm not going to do that while we're on the air. The Volkswagen had 35-ish thousand. I'm starting life with this BMW at 23,000 or something like that.

So we'll see. But I have a feeling that Marco will probably be on par with me and John will shame us both. But let's see. Marco, let's start with you because I think you're going to be close. What is your world record holder? Well, your Maxima probably had a bunch of miles, didn't it? Yeah.

So growing up, you know, my family cars, we would go past 100,000 miles. Not that far past, but, you know, maybe 110,000, 120,000. My personally owned ones, my Nissan Maxima was the highest at 94,000.

So you never crossed 100,000. Wow. Honestly, I would have loved to, but at that point, there were a whole bunch of repairs the car needed that were not related to the engine. Like a whole, there was like, that car, I don't know what happened to it before I owned it, but the weirdest stuff would break on that car.

I had to replace like the windshield washer fluid tank. Why? I don't know. Like there's, I had to replace like thousands of dollars worth of really minor little crap all around the car. Yeah. What year was it?

I'm sorry. 96. Oh, see. So the 300ZX was 91 and it was very much the same at the end of life. It just started falling apart. Yeah. And like, and I wish like, cause you know, it was a, you know, 90s Japanese car. It should have been able to go significantly longer than 94,000 miles.

And it could have if I, you know, if I actually like kept up with all these repairs, but I honestly, at that point, it was costing so much in minor repairs. I was like, you know what? I'm just going to get a new, and that's when I replaced it with a new Accord. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that step in your journey. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, there was a gap between where I didn't have a car for a few months, but that didn't last very long. Was the Maxima, the Maxima was not a stick. Is that right? No, no, it was. It was a 96 Nissan Maxima SE. Four-door sports car. Yup. It was all leather inside with the Bose stereo.

It had like, every other option you could get on a Maxima SE was all there, but with a stick. That car, I loved that car. It was so good. Oh man, those were so hot. I swear to you, if you think of like, well, I don't think they make the Maxima anymore and haven't for several years, but the most recent Maxima that I can think of was like- It's probably a crossover now.

Yeah, right? The most recent Maxima I can think of was like very bulbous and gross. It had like a vertical sunroof that didn't open or something like that. They really have not been good for a long time, but like the mid to late 90s and the early aughts, they were so hot and you could get them with decent power with a five speed, maybe even a six speed toward the end of this being an option.

God, they were so hot. Oh my God, I wanted one so bad. And honestly, I would greatly prefer the climate control in this car to the car I have now. Look at all those buttons. Physical controls, yeah. Yeah. Imagine that. And like high fan speeds, strong AC. I love the iX in lots of ways.

The climate control sucks. Like it's not good. I hear that. We'll come back to the highest mileage we think you should go. But first, John, how high have you been? I mean, I think it's different for cars that I've owned versus cars that I've driven. So I put in, I was trying to find pictures of this.

It's always frustrating to me when I can't find any pictures of the exact car. But anyway, you can see on our Slack channel. 1980 something, I think ours was 1981, Volvo 240 wagon. That's what I learned to drive stick on. Oh, these were hot in the like, they're actually hideously boxy and gross, but I still love them way.

Yeah, very ungainly, very awkward looking, very hard clutch to press because it needed to be stiff for that 80 horsepower engine in there. no pickup whatsoever. It had, the stick shift was four gears in an H pattern and with a button on the top of the shifter to go into the fifth overdrive gear, like an electronically actuated overdrive.

There wasn't actually like a shift position for it and reverse was like a ring to pull up to get into reverse. Anyway, really weird. I was driving this car when it crossed 100K because I would drive this around, you know, as a teenager with my friends and stuff. We were all in the car. We saw that we were going to get close to 100K.

so we drove around the neighborhood and I watched the physical odometer roll over to 100K while going up the steepest hill in the neighborhood at a very high speed. So we timed it out just so we would be going up the big hill on a grassy pond, if you know where that is, but you probably know it.

Very steep hill. I used to go down on my bicycle and go like 40 miles an hour down the hill on my bicycle. Incredibly dangerous. I don't know why I did this. It's amazing that I'm still alive. The same hill, by the way, where the bunch of teenagers who were a couple years younger than me, died by going too fast and losing control of their car going over the crest of that hill and hitting a tree.

Oh, lovely. So I was in this car when it crossed 100K, but that wasn't the end for this car. This car continued to live on and I believe it crossed 140, 150 before we got rid of it. By that point, it was so rusted through that we had a plus sign shaped tire iron like wrench thing in the back and that fell out of the back of the car through a hole in the bottom of the car when someone was driving because it had rusted.

The bottom of the car had rusted out so much and that just went and it made a lot of noise and yeah. So I think that is the highest mileage car I've ever driven. And I'm sorry, you said that was a Volvo 200 series? Is that right? 240, I believe it was. Okay, yeah. But 200 series though.

Yeah, yeah. Wagon. And it was beige but it wasn't the color beige. You see a white one in the slack and you see this beige one but our beige one was not that dark. This is the right headlights. So in like the 85, 86 one they did like the headlights where they wrapped all this around but ours was the one with the little squares like this.

So I don't know the exact year but that was not my car. That was my parents' car. For my cars, usually what would happen is once they got around 90 or 100 we'd start thinking about getting a different car. So I think, well, my first car, yeah.

So I should do that. I forgot all about that. My 1992 Civic, my very first car which my parents quote unquote sold to me for like a dollar. When they gave it to me I think it was pushing up around 70 or 80 and then I drove that well into the hundreds.

I don't remember what mileage it was at when it was dying. I think it was maybe 120, 130 and I sold it to a private citizen and the clutch was going and they test drove it and I'm like, please don't slip. please don't like and I was just like the whole test drive I'm like, just need them to give me the money and leave with this car because I knew the clutch was going like 120, 130,000 miles in the first clutch.

That'll do it. It needs a new clutch. Okay. And I could feel that it needed a new clutch but I didn't want to pay for a new clutch and somebody did buy it from me and they probably immediately had to buy a new clutch. Sorry to that person. Although they didn't give me much money for it. So that is probably the highest mileage champ and then all the other ones I had, all the Civics and Accords I had, usually once they cross around 100 117 Accord we have is around 86, 87 now and I bet we're going to keep that a while longer.

Maybe we'll sell it to quote unquote sell it to a kid at some point. So yeah, I don't have exact numbers but I've never been past 150 I think. I think the Volvo around 150 is the highest I've gone and then that wasn't my car and my 1992 Civic was around 120, 130 before we sold it.

So how high do you think one should go? It sounds like John you're in the 100,000 range. No, that's not. My answer to that is different. How high should you go? Okay. Keep driving it until you don't want to own the car anymore. Like that's always my policy, right? Mileage shouldn't matter because if you still keep wanting to have the car just keep paying for parts for it and if paying for parts makes you not want the car well then you don't want the car anymore.

Like that's what it comes down to. So for example my 2014 Accord which granted is very low mileage my current strategy is if anything breaks in that car I'm going to pay to fix it why would you pay for that? It's you paying for that is more than the car is worth and I'm going to pay it because I want to keep driving that car.

Like that happens to a lot of people though. The car is worth 1500 bucks and it's going to cost you five grand to fix this engine. You sure you want to fix this engine? Some people say hell no. I don't want this car anymore but for this specific car I would say yes fix it because I still want to drive this car. That's the decision.

Like you see all these like Lexus things that go for like a million miles or Volos that have a million 1.2 million miles on the same engine or whatever. If people keep wanting to drive the car they just keep putting money into it and you just you know it's the car of Theseus you're replacing the water pump you're replacing the head gaskets then you're replacing the head you're replacing all the pulleys you're you know like the distributor all new wires like you just so many parts that are being replaced over time and of course all the wear items are replaced many times over and you get new shocks and you get new struts and you know

but if you want to keep driving the car I'd say there there is no limit if the car continues to run and you can get parts for it and you want to keep driving that car keep driving it you could say the limit does not exist John that's a reference Marco any thoughts on highest you should go I think it's like replacing your iPhone if you want to rationalize a new purchase you can at any time like in some way like well it's going to keep costing more to maintain gas is getting expensive you know

you can always find some reason to rationalize replacing it but usually just repairing an old car is usually the cheapest way to keep going especially like if you average it out over the years repairing an old car is almost always cheaper than replacing it for a very long time but it also depends on the car like sometimes you can get a lot of miles out of a car before it needs the entire engine to be rebuilt like John was saying like sometimes you can go well past 100

sometimes you don't even get to 50 sometimes a pebble creates some bad luck like there's there's all sorts of ways that your car ownership can end but if if something is reasonably repairable for reasonable prices and you still like the car and it still serves your needs repair it that's one of the things you learn from watching car rebuilding channels is any modern engine in a commodity car should easily go hundreds of thousands of miles if you just continue to replace the wear parts the parts that are always

going to wear out certain parts are always going to wear out you do have to replace belts and you know hoses and stuff that just you know rots out but like the heart of the engine should easily last hundreds of thousands of miles the exception to that remember I said commodity cars what if you don't have a commodity car what if you have a fancy car those unfortunately many of them are lucky to make it to a hundred thousand because they have some fatal flaw where the rod bearings wear out or the timing chain guard has a problem and needs to be replaced and if you don't do whatever like

the engine potentially will not make it to a hundred thousand which is so not true of like a four cylinder naturally aspirated honda engine like you just like don't have to do anything to that and it will easily make it to a hundred k as long as you know again something catastrophic doesn't happen like damage or whatever but temperamental cars you've got your fancy bmwm car so many of them have something that everyone knows oh these all have this problem so if you don't get these things replaced at this number of miles this engine is toast like catastrophic things that will cause you know

interference in the engine and just destroy it entirely that won't happen with a stupid simple honda engine because there's nothing in there to go wrong but performance engines they're trying to you know they're they're not made to be like we have to make sure this last hundred thousand miles if no one ever pays attention to it they're like no we want maximum power and you know

exotic or exciting the engine the less likely it is to cruise easily to hundreds of thousands of miles the canonical example of this to me is the Porsche IMS bearings which I forget the specifics about what the IMS bearing is or where it sits or whatever but it was on I think Boxster's and especially 911's for like five or so years and it's one of those things that you don't really know when it's going to go but if it goes it's a catastrophic failure like John was saying like you have to

throw away the engine and start anew which is just astonishing JJ in the chat said the engine of fancy cars are wear items yeah I mean there's always such weird things like a particular Porsche engine speaking of them where there's like the little finger followers that actuate the valves from the camshafts or whatever and the little finger

there's so many BMW engines like these are great but at 50,000 miles you better replace the rod bearings because the ones they come with are just going to be toast pretty soon and the whole engine is going to seize up that doesn't happen with stupid commodity car engine because they're not made fancy they don't have the silicon graphite impregnated rod bearings for extra low friction it's just no it's just like the cheapest most reliable thing so yeah modern cars should last easily hundreds of thousands of miles if something doesn't go wrong unless you have a fancy car in which case all bets are off and you better know

the lore about the particular model year of the fancy car that you bought or just be willing to constantly take it in for service and pay gobs of money

little things is temperamental that's very gentle of you I'm I'm very impressed I think they also had the the the the timing chain guards that shatter into a million pieces that was also not what you wanted to happen yeah tell Aaron's first Volvo that was that was the pebble did that one but it broke through the timing chain guard and took out the timing chain the timing chain guard just keeping the timing chain from like you know like it's wrapping around some pulleys and the

guard like pushes it out a little bit and that guard made a plastic that eventually becomes brittle and breaks and now you have pieces of plastic being caught between the gears of the timing chain and it's bad news anyway Mark Bramhill writes Google recently announced the end of support for third party email addresses sending and receiving mail through Gmail starting in January I remember John uses this for routing all of his different accounts into one Gmail account do you have a plan for what to do when the new year arrives my email setup depends on this and I don't want to lose my custom domain make my account a Google

workspace account or lose my bajillion Gmail filter rules what do we say for our friend Mark I didn't know about this until this was sent in probably several months ago based on how long things stay in SKTP so I looked into it and sure enough there's like some little Google announcement that says yeah by the way you may have been enjoying the fact that you can be in the Gmail web interface and send mail from any of your email addresses that you own in other words it will go through like the SMTP server of whatever your domain

is but you can do that from the Gmail web interface so for example one of the domains I own is hypercritical.co which is where my website is and I have email addresses at hypercritical.co like switchglass at hypercritical.co for like switchglass support for one of my apps I have email addresses for all my app names okay and if someone sends an email to that address and says hey I'm having a problem with switchglass when I reply my reply comes from switchglass

hey when you're replying as switchglass at hypercritical.co what should I use for the SMTP server and I point it to the now these days the fastmail server that is my you know SMTP server and you know anything blah blah blah this is separate from receiving email which is very easier again I've moved everything to fastmail a while back I receive email for all my various addresses at hypercritical.co and they go to fastmail but fastmail makes it easy to send a rule that says oh do you want me also to send a copy of this to your gmail address and I say yes

so that's still going to work you can still receive emails that were really sent to a different address because all that is is forwarding just fastmail saying oh just forward this to this gmail address and I receive it and I see it there it's the responding as a different address I don't know why google is getting rid of this other than just being punitive and mean trying to get you to upgrade to some paid thing or whatever which by the way I would do I wasn't terrified of it destroying my entire life because I don't trust any ability to upgrade this type of stuff and I hear all these horror stories about how free gmail is better than workspace until they lock your account forever and you

lose access to everything which I know is a problem anyway just fingers you have a chance of getting someone on the phone but if google locks your free gmail ocount you're never getting it back anyway yeah so what am I going to do for sending here's what I'm personally planning to do first of all when people send email to like you know switch glass at hypercritical co half the time I don't even bother responding I just respond for my gmail address like I don't pay that much attention like they know it's me it's not like I'm not pretending to be a big company they send email they

know it's getting to me when I respond I respond for my personal email address it comes from my gmail who cares okay I may probably do that but if I decide that oh for whatever reason it's important for me to send an email as switchglass at hypercritical.co I'll just go to the fastmail web interface and do it from there like that's what I'm gonna do like it's not going to affect my life too much because it was just kind of like a nice convenience that I can send email as my different addresses from the gmail web interface but if I can't most of the time I just won't do it and if I do want to do it I'll

go to the fastmail web interface. Ben Cooper writes if Apple ever makes a new Mac Pro one day probably with some or one of their AI super servers chips that will roll out in the next three to five years will it reuse the 2019 design or have a new one? I kind of feel like it depends on how long it is like I've always said when they made this case design in 2019 that they were going to try to get mileage out of it because it was so expensive to develop.

And it turns out they did get many years out of it mostly by just never updating the machines that they sell in that case. So they sold the Intel one and they sold the M2 one and that's it. Just been, you know, it was the Intel, it was for the Intel's, maybe they was, I forget if they had a Zeon Rev in this case, maybe not.

But yeah, and the M2 was the only Apple Silicon one to do it, but they sold that stupid M2 thing for way longer than they should have. They did get a lot of years out of it. Maybe they feel like they recouped their costs on developing and maybe they feel like they didn't, which is why the whole thing is canned.

If they came out with an Mac Pro next year, they would reuse the case. If they come out with a Mac Pro 10 years from now, I think they'd have a new case. Yeah, I think they would do something new. It may look very similar to what you just left behind, but I think it would be new.

Marco, any thoughts? I mean, besides my standard disclaimer that I think the Mac Studio is the Mac Pro now, and I think if they wanted to call something else the Mac Pro, it would probably just be like the Mac Studio in Space Grave, or maybe it would be a little bit bigger.

They would call it the Mac Ultra. That's what they would call it. Oh, maybe. Because I mean, we'll see how they go with the rumored. It didn't work out for the phone so far, right? So the phone was the Duo and not the Ultra, and maybe the 20th anniversary would be the Ultra, but the rumor still is that the touch-based OLED MacBook Pro will be the MacBook Ultra.

If they do the MacBook Ultra, clearly in three to five years, if they're going to make something that is bigger and hotter than the Mac Studio, I feel like they would call it Mac Ultra. Or, I mean, they're on their kick for like three-letter names ending in O. We got Neo, we got Duo. Is there anything like Mac Bow?

Quadro. They already did Quadra. That's Quadra, not Quadro. Quadro is different. That's something isn't Quadro an Nvidia trademark? What was that? Wasn't that their professional GPUs? Yeah, weren't those the ones that were like, for CAD, not games?

Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Claude and Granola, and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm. join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.

This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking a little more about John Ternus' intelligent personal hub remarks during that keynote, and Apple's home AI hub that's rumored. We'll be talking about that. In Overtime, you can join and listen to atp.fm. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin, because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research.

Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, because it was accidental. Accidental. It was accidental. 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- And T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-

S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A- Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast.

So long. I have a problem. An AI hasn't solved it. Is it a cowbell joke? What are we doing? No. I wish a cowbell would be the answer, but was that a fever anyway? I think it was a fever. But anyhow.

I bought my BMW a month or so ago, a month and a half ago. And like six-ish months ago, BMW in America cut off the API that some third-party individual, like open source, wrote a home assistant integration for.

So with Aaron's car, there's a non-supported, or not Volvo-supported, integration and home assistant that'll let me tell it to like start cooling itself or unlock or lock or whatever the case may be. And this is completely unnecessary.

Let me start by saying completely unnecessary. I recognize that. I get it. But it's actually kind of nice. So as an example, instead of having the Volvo always start preconditioning itself every morning when Aaron is about to do the school run, I can use home assistant to make an automation that says if it's over such and such degrees or below such and such degrees, precondition.

If you're in that sweet spot in the middle, don't bother. Again, for this entire conversation, I've just taken it as writ. I understand none of this is necessary. It's a hobby. I think it's neat and I like doing it. I don't think I need any of this for my BMW. I don't have repeatable common uses like that.

But it's still nice to have and it's still nice to be able to see that, oh, the BMW is charged at 80% or 20% or whatever the case may be. It's nice to have that in home assistant. You have to make a new LED for that. I could make a new LED for that. You're exactly right. And I absolutely would. 100%. Now I'm frustrated again because I remember that that was part of the plan and I can't do it.

And so to cut to the end of the story, I have not solved this problem. But there is a read-only API that BMW had to make, I think because of EU rules, in the EU where you can get information about your car. You cannot influence your car.

So you couldn't lock it or unlock it. You couldn't start it to precondition or whatever. but you could at least know how charged it is, among other things. This API does not exist in the United States. There is a home assistant integration that does work with that API, but when you go to register for it in the US, it just kind of hangs.

So I figured, I'd like to think of myself as reasonably smart. I should be able to figure this out. So my first, well, how would you two start to try to get access in home assistant to the BMW APIs?

What would be your first step? I'd go right to an LLM for this. Do you have an example of a product that does this that you can reverse engineer? Like something that exists that you have access to that uses the API? Sure. My iOS app. Oh, yeah.

Well, then just wire sniff that sucker. That is exactly what I did. Unfortunately, and now I'm talking a little bit out of my comfort zone, but unfortunately, it appears that BMW did the thing that they should do and their certificate pinning. So I can't sniff that traffic.

It rejects everything. Like I have Charles installed on my phone. Now, it could be that it's user error. Maybe I misunderstood how to do this with Charles, but I've done this with other things with Charles that aren't as sophisticated and it's worked great. And I tried to do this with Charles on the phone. Charles is a wire sniffer and I couldn't get anything useful out of it.

I don't know how the certificate pinning works. Does this totally stop you from man in the middle in it with like a proxy? Again, I'm talking outside my comfort zone, but my limited understanding, very limited and probably incorrect understanding of certificate pinning, it's probably all wrong. so consider your source here.

But my understanding is it basically says the other end has to match this exact certificate. It can't be a good certificate. And maybe Marco, you might know about this, but it has to match a particular certificate or something along those lines. I forget the details. So when, because I do the same thing on Overcast, I've done it since day one.

And so, you know, using the, you know, the standard stock iOS APIs as ways to basically like intercept the negotiation of the secure connection before it's actually made. And you can be presented with the certificate chain of trust and you can inspect it and you can, you return like, yes or no, do I trust this or not?

Or you can, you know, you can block it, you can cancel it, whatever else. But anyway, you can inspect, you know, is it signed by one of the keys that you, that you approve of? Or you can say, is it signed by one of the, is it an exact certificate that you, that you approve of? Or is it signed by an intermediate certificate that you trust?

So, and that's, you know, usually like you can, you can get very, very, you know, picky and low level with this. But the most common approach, I think is to pin one of the intermediates. That way you can reissue your certificate in, you know, as long as it's still signed by the same CA or, you know, something like that, then, you know, you can, you don't have to issue an update to your app for it to work.

Thank you. That is, that is my, a much better explanation than I could have given. But yes, that, that matches what I, what I was experiencing, which is basically, it was trying to man in the middle. And I was, I think I might've said Wireshark, but I, I meant Charles. I used Charles proxy to, I used Charles proxy to attempt to man in the middle it.

And even though I told Charles, you know, I told my phone to trust Charles' certificate, the BMW app rejected it. So my next step would be, okay, decompile the app and see what the source code is doing. Because if you can't see what's happening over the wire, you can see the code that produces the content that goes over the wire. That is what I should have done, but I didn't.

And, and, and I should try that. I don't know if it'll matter, but I agree with you. That is the next step. I did not, that did not occur to me and it should have. Now, in my defense, I was doing this a month or so ago or shortly after getting the car. And I forget when you were talking about reverse engineering something, but I think it was subsequent to that.

But anyway, it doesn't really matter. I should have thought of it and I didn't. So what I thought was, all right, well, I know the app works. What if I, what if I used iPhone mirroring? Oh no. I have. Does this, does this end with like a hot dog on an actuator?

pretty close to the water drinking part from the Simpsons. Exactly it. Exactly it. I thought, you know what? I'll have Claude write me and Claude is a past and potentially future sponsor. Current this episode. Oh, this episode. Oh yeah, it is this episode.

I'm sorry. I didn't even think about that. Yes. Current sponsor. But anyways, I thought, let me have Claude write a Mac OS app that will tickle iPhone mirroring and do what I want it to do in the BMW app via iPhone mirroring.

This took a long time. There's a lot of back and forth, but I'll be damned. Fellas, it worked perfectly. Oh, that's awesome. Which is incredible. I could get information on my Mac about what was happening on my phone via iPhone mirroring via, via the, my BMW app, right?

it's the same app, presumably you're using for your car, Marco. And it would look at the, it would do screen. It would take a picture, you know, look at the iPhone mirroring screens, which is my iPhone screen. It would figure out what was the state of charge, you know, is it locked? Is it unlocked? Et cetera. Then it got to the point that it would lock or unlock the car if I asked it to, like it was interactive.

It was incredible. This is all well and good. I feel like you're, you're using the past tense a lot in this, in this last sentence. I was going to say, instead of using your phone, I was like, you need like a sacrificial phone whose only function in life is to be that phone that you are.

Exactly. Exactly right, John. And I am lucky enough to buy an iPhone every year like a frigging idiot. I have old phones laying around and so I thought, you know what I'll do? I'll sacrifice my webcam phone which is like an iPhone 15, maybe 14.

I forget exactly what this is. I'll sacrifice that and no longer use it as a webcam for, you know, a handful of FaceTime, social FaceTime calls I do every month. I'll just use my actual phone for those. I'll sacrifice this and I'll put this bad boy attached to my M1 Mac Mini. Job done.

This is going to be freaking great. I start that process. Everything's going great. I log into my BMW on this sacrificial phone and I connect it to the Mac Mini. I install my little, I don't even remember what Claude ended up calling it but it was probably just as bad a name as I would have come up with or maybe I told it.

But anyways, I had Claude, you know, I had Claude help me put it on the Mac Mini. Everything is going great. This is working perfectly and the next step was going to be, all right, now let's put this bad boy in Home Assistant which honestly, what I did was I had it dump everything into my MQTT server which is basically like a generic bus that a bunch of different things can talk to.

It's not really that important to the story here but it would dump everything on MQTT and then it's very easy for Home Assistant to pick up stuff on MQTT. So, I have it in MQTT. My next step was going to be to start integrating into Home Assistant using this bus and I noticed that it was working great until I disconnected via screen sharing.

This is a headless Mac Mini. I do everything via Apple screen sharing. The second I disconnect it locks the Mac Mini. Okay, fine. I'll tell it to have an infinite screen saver. Never ever auto lock yourself. It'll be great.

I have some scripts to set that up for you if you want. That's exactly how all of mine run. Right? The second you disconnect the screen sharing it locks the Mac Mini. Alright, fine. I'm talking with Claude about this. Why don't you purchase an HDMI dongle so it thinks there's a physical connection to an actual monitor connected to the device?

Well, you know what, Claude? I happen to have one laying around. I plug that in. No good. The second you disconnect screen sharing it locks the computer when it locks the computer it locks the iPhone mirroring. That is where I ended up getting stuck.

Ooh, the GLI net Comet Q. That is interesting. I wonder. But the problem though is that if I use the Mac Mini for normal stuff like with screen sharing then as soon as I disconnect it's going to relock everything.

Right? So the solution I could choose is to disavow screen sharing for the purposes of this one computer and only ever log into it via like the GLI net or use like a more vanilla VNC thing or something like that. And that is a solution but I don't want this that badly that I want to rejigger how I access this Mac Mini because I do that more frequently than you would think.

So I ended up throwing up the white flag but the fact that I was this close I was so close I almost got it and if it wasn't for the fact that there's no way I can figure out to prevent the Mac Mini from locking itself the second I disconnect if it wasn't for that I think I would have had it and that to me is absolutely astonishing.

So it was a really fun journey I'm glad I tried it but ultimately it didn't work out. I think what's interesting about part of the great loss that we've had as we've moved away from a lot of web browser apps and a lot of more open APIs into now everything has its own custom app and they're all super locked down and no one has public APIs anymore and those are all locked down

and everything is through API keys and pinning and stuff like that and of course my own app does exactly this and so I can't really talk but I think one of the things that we've lost in this world is like the ability for power users and tinkerers and programmers to hack around stuff and make cool stuff and I think one of the great enabling things about AI is that it basically is like a complete almost like the world's best brute force solution

it's like okay well what if we just have this intelligent automated agent just operate a computer and just click through all your BS you want to have it log into your BS okay it'll do that you want to have it read the screen and scrape things because you don't have an API okay it'll do that and you know nerds like us can start rigging up things like you know remote KVMs or screen shares or iPhone mirroring to actually start doing the same thing to iOS apps too or just have the iOS app

run on your Mac if it can do that like I feel like we now are in we're in an era now where like one of the fun things about AI is that it helps break down those walls that everyone else has put up yep I couldn't agree more I'll have to take a stab at having it like decompile the app I really should have thought about that I'm really frustrated that I didn't but I bring this up both because I want to fuss and moan about the fact that I can't that I can't seemingly do this although

it also didn't occur to me to just run the app natively which it looks like I might be able to do which presumably might get me what I want so you both have saved me potentially potentially save me so instead of running it in an iPhone mirroring I might be able to just run it natively on my Apple Silicon Mac Mini but it's it's both fascinating to me that this is a potential like Rube Goldberg solution which I would I felt pretty proud that I came up with this in that Claude was able to

basically get it working it was no fault of Claude that it failed but it's also a bummer that all of this like you said Marco is locked in and there's nothing we can do to get at it and as much as I have very mixed feelings about the EU's regulatory landscape it's stuff like this when it's executed right which the EU doesn't always do this is when it's when this is the EU at its best right at the very least I could have gotten read only info out of the BMW if I lived in in I almost said Britain but if I lived in

mainland Europe too soon but too soon but yeah no I I'm bummed that it didn't work but I thought it was a really fun experiment in Rube Goldberg machine to try to get it to work Beep, beep, beep.