712: Mildly Technologically Traumatized

Have either of you ridden in a driverless car yet? No. Nope. I had the opportunity to ride my first Waymo. Oh, interesting. How was that? It was really... So it's exactly what everyone says. It was really weird for, like, the first few minutes.

And then I got bored and looked at my phone. And it was just a taxi. And then on the way home, I'm like, let's book another one. And I booked another one in homes. I'm like, well, as long as Waymo's available, I know, like, mathematically, it's probably safer for me to take a Waymo than a human-driven car.

And so I literally, like, immediately was converted. So one thing to know, like, I was staying at a hotel and the Waymo would not come into the hotel's little, like, loop driveway thing. Oh, interesting. It would only pick me up, like, outside, like, across the street.

So I... And I'm sure there's probably some reason maybe Waymo doesn't go into private property. I don't know. Because I was thinking, like, even, like, where it should pull over to drop you off or pick you up, that is itself a very difficult problem. And I was thinking, like, wow, everything about this is a very difficult problem.

Like, you know, you get past the entire self-driving thing, which is not a small thing. And then you're like, oh, but where do you park? Like, even that is a difficult problem. But it was really nice. Like, it pulled up and, you know, the app is fine.

Like, it's a modern, decently, seemingly well-made app. Price-wise, I compared, like, you know, comparing the Waymo to an Uber or a Lyft at the same time. You know, the prices jump around a lot, but they were all within the same ballpark of each other. So it wasn't significantly cheaper or significantly more expensive.

And Waymo's are everywhere. Like, there are tons of them. And you just don't really, like, you stop noticing after a while. Even, like, you know, like, we had rented our own car, and so we were also, like, driving that around. But, like, when you're a driver on the road, surrounded by Waymo's, it was fine.

And being a passenger in a Waymo was fine. It was unbelievable. Like, because I know, I have said on this show years ago that I think it's going to be a very long time before we have fully self-driving cars on all roads, you know, the way that we think.

Waymo is not that. It is not on all roads. You can't have Waymo pick you up anywhere, and it can't drive you anywhere. But in the places it operates, it seems remarkably good. And, you know, That's super cool.

And there was even, like, I was worried, like, you know, like, there was one time during the Waymo ride where, like, it had to make what seemed like a fairly difficult left turn into, like, you know, pretty moderate volumes of traffic that I was like, how conservative, like, is it going to be really conservative and be sitting here forever?

And nope, it just did it, like, basically the same way humans would do it. You know, it wasn't aggressive. It wasn't overly, like, weirdly conservative. It just did it at a safe time, and it was fine. And that's how the entire ride was.

Like, the reason it was so easy for me to stop paying attention to the fact that it was a Waymo was that it just drove like a human. And I know, like, you know, if you compare to, like, you know, Tesla self-driving, I haven't followed that recently.

I've heard Tesla self-driving has gotten very good, but it's not Waymo good. Like, by the sheer numbers of it all, like, it's not Waymo good. And frankly, I don't trust Tesla and the way they have handled safety and problem incidents and stuff before.

Like, I don't trust them to be as safe as Waymo. Can I jump in here? I don't really disagree, but I don't, to be fair, I don't really know what I'm talking about. I just want to get ahead of all the feedback. I have understood, and actually Marco and I talked either earlier today or yesterday, and we'll talk more about that in the post-show or in the after-show, but I have heard, Marco's heard, we have heard, all three of us have heard, that Tesla self-driving is truly incredible these days.

I get that. We understand that. We hear you. You don't need to write us. But if for no other reason, I feel more comfortable in Waymo because it has a broader array of sensors. Like, it has LiDAR. It has all of these things.

And I'm not saying Marco's right or wrong about which is safer, but I will agree with you, Marco, that I certainly handle the bad times that Waymo has gone through a lot better than I trust the bad times that Tesla's gone through. Yeah, because, like, Waymo's safety record is shockingly good.

And even, I'm sure Tesla, like, compared to person miles for human drivers, they're probably better than human drivers, like, per mile driven. But, you know, it's obviously, there's obviously some degree of, like, you know, irrationality in the same way that people are afraid of flying but not afraid of driving to the airport at the same way, despite the math showing, like, they probably should be more afraid of driving to the airport.

Similarly, like, I think people are more afraid about self-driving cars than they are by human drivers in a way that is mathematically, you know, not supportive of the data. But, yeah, at the Waymo, it just was so remarkably normal. And, like, it was a regular good driver.

I couldn't believe it. To people who live in cities that are served by them all the time, you've probably done this years ago and you're probably like, yeah, what else is new? And literally, I took two of them and now I'm like, yeah, what else is new? That's all it took. But, if Waymo was available in New York, I would take it all the time.

And, certainly, anywhere that I'm going that is, anywhere that I'm going where it would make sense to have an Uber drive me there, if Waymo serves that area, I'm going to use Waymo instead. It's that good. That's super cool. John, no thoughts?

I'm surprised. Not for me. I don't like, just to be clear, I don't like taking human-driven Ubers or Lyfts either. So, I'm an equal opportunity hater of other people driving. All right, I have some follow-up to start the show. I have been hacking on my BMW, or really, my BMW's app.

The short short of this is, I think we covered this in the post-show from last show. I forget exactly when it was. It's been a minute. But I really would like to, for no good reason, to be completely honest, have information about my BMW and home assistant. This is so, if I want to, and I don't currently have this particular desire, but I want to know I can.

If I want to say, oh, if it's less than 40 degrees and over 70 degrees when I know I'm going to leave the house in the morning, go ahead and precondition the car. If it's not in a pretty decent temperature range, go ahead and precondition the car. And I do this for Erin's car because she has a much more reliable schedule for leaving the house.

But I want to be able to do stuff like that. Or, you know, be able to know if the car is charging or whatnot. And, you know, maybe I can put a light on the status board in the kitchen whether or not the BMW is charging. All these sorts of things, right? I want to be able to do that. Do I need to?

No, but I want to. So, there were a bunch of suggestions after last week's show, many of which were very, very good. first of all, a couple of people asked about, you know, my theory about certificate pinning and a couple other things. And I had Claude decompile a copy of the IPA that I extracted with, what was the, oh, shoot, I can't remember the name of the app.

Like, iMazing or something? Yeah, iMazing, I believe it was. So, I was able to copy the app off of one of my phones and I had Claude go through and try to decompile it and just figure out, in a broad sense, like, can you extract useful API information from here?

And the answer is yes and it was bad news because what Claude discovered is the app uses something called Approve, spelled A-P-P-R-O-O-V and I'll put a link in the show notes. And what this is, is an attestation service. So, basically, I don't know much more than the following, but my understanding is there's some sort of communication between the app and, I guess, the Approve servers to verify this is an honest-to-goodness app on an honest-to-goodness phone that's not being tampered with and blah, blah, blah.

And then I think it gives, like a short-lived access token or something along those lines. All this to say, I can't just, like, man in the middle of this thing short of doing some, maybe some wonkiness with, like, with an Android phone where you have a little more access to this sort of thing. But it seemed like it was not likely that this was going to work because there's some attestation that I would never be able to fake.

A lot of people said, hey, you talked about how you do the high, high fidelity, I forget what it's actually called, screen sharing in macOS. Have you tried low fidelity? And what I didn't remember when I was speaking about this last week is that the high fidelity screen sharing, I think, actually makes a virtual display when you do it rather than just re-emitting the regular display or something.

There's some way that virtual displays are involved. I encountered that now that all my machines are up on 27 and I'm using screen sharing. The other downside, I mean, one of the downsides you're about to talk about about the high performance virtual display thing disconnected, but the other downside is you can no longer like, go and sit in front of the computer that is being controlled like that one.

They're within two feet of each other. Sometimes I'm going back and forth, right? If you go over to the computer that is being shared with high performance screen sharing, it just has a black screen. And if you try to press a button or something, have you experienced this? Oh, yeah. I believe that's right. If you are using high fidelity screen sharing, like you said, the physical hardware is blackened or blanked or whatever while you're doing the screen sharing.

but you don't know the next thing that happens. Marco, have you seen this? I don't think so. I think this is the first time that I've seen a Mac do this, maybe in a long time. I'm sure there's some precedent for it, but if you sit down in front of you and you're like, oh, the screen's black, smack the space bar or whatever, or try to touch ID on it or something, you know, I basically say, hey, wake up.

The first time it happened, I just thought the screensaver had come on or something. It talks to you. It speaks out loud and says, this Mac is being controlled by screen sharing. If you want to end the screen sharing session, hit the escape key. And the awesome thing is that it says that over its audio output, but the computer you're screen sharing from also says the audio because, you know, you can hear the audio of the computer you're screen sharing.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. And when they're within two feet of each other, it's like stereo slightly delayed. Really weird. So yeah, that's it because I can't show anything on the screen. It can't put up a dialogue, you know what I mean? So it's like the thing when it says, you know, picking the, Marco, surely he's seen this one.

If you leave it on the, like, pick your language too long on the setup process to talk to you. It starts telling you about voiceover. Yeah, exactly. Voiceover is the blah, blah, I'm sure you've heard it before. But yeah, it talks to you. So yeah, the high performance one is high performance, but it's weird. Yeah, it is weird for sure. But people theorized, hey, maybe if you go to the low fidelity one, maybe that'll work.

And what ended up happening was if I were to configure everything the way you're not supposed to with like leaving the screen on forever, blah, blah, blah. It did work, but it seemed that after a couple of minutes, iPhone mirroring timed out and locked itself, which was a bummer. I also did try using an HDMI dongle.

I don't recall if I said that last week. That didn't make a difference. A few people have suggested an OBD2 dongle. This is a dongle that you plug into your car, but that's read only. And I'd rather be able to affect the car, like I was saying. A few people reached out and talked about, well, what about BMW's car data?

And I think it's BMW's car data. There's also a third-party service with a similar name, Smart Car, I think. The car data service is also read only and not offered in the US. So now I know how all you EU folks feel. And again, read only. Then I forget, forgive me, I'm going to butcher the name here, but Chaos Tian from Mastodon.

You know them from a bunch of very interesting work that they've done with reverse engineering and things like that. At least I'm pretty sure that's right. I hope I'm not lying. Anyway, they pointed out, and they were not the only one, but they were the one I remembered pointing out, hey, what you could do is you could use automations to intercept a push notification and then use, like use shortcuts, I should say, to intercept a push notification and then have the phone do whatever you want it to do using the My BMW app's

intents and shortcut actions or whatever. I didn't try this, but I know it should have worked or it should work, which is a really great solution I didn't try because there were a couple of other things I wanted to try. Number one, I wanted to try, well, could I like tickle the iPhone mirroring app and just have it like refresh itself every couple of minutes to try to prevent that time out?

But as it turns out, Marco was in town literally this morning, yesterday into today. So we hugged it out like 10 hours ago. But anyways, and Marco brought a couple of gifts. One of the things he brought is a 3D printed trinket, which we don't have in the show notes, but we should talk about at some point.

But the other gift he brought is a GLiNet Comet Q, which is the one that works with DisplayPort or whatever it is, capable iPhones. And the iPhone that I was using for these sorts of things was an iPhone 15, I believe, that I was previously using as a webcam.

So I hooked the Comet Q up to the iPhone, did all the instructions you need to do to get mouse and keyboard support working, and then I set Claude off and say, hey, instead of using iPhone mirroring, could we use this? And I sent a screenshot of Safari using their basically web-based VNC in order to affect, you'll read and affect the phone.

And I said, hey, it doesn't have to be Safari. It can be Chrome or Firefox if those APIs are better. And this is one of those times that even as someone who has very mixed emotions about AI, I was blown away because it basically churned for a few minutes and said, in so many words, why are we even f***ing around with a browser?

Why don't we just go directly to the KVM hardware and see if it has an API? Oh, okay, let's see. And it dug. It does. And it turns out that the Comet Q is like a rebranded PyVPN.

Yes. PyKVM. Thank you. PyKVM. Thank you. And so it said, why don't I just do that? And I said, yeah, why don't you just do that? So now I spent the afternoon after I dropped Marco off at the airport saying, okay, let's see if that can work.

And it does. And then I thought to myself, wait a second, this iPhone 15, I think is OLED. I forget where the transition was. I don't like the idea that this thing is going to be on even if dimmed because I am begging for burn-in, right? So I said to her, well, hey, can I give you this iPhone's passcode and can you make the KVM lock it when it's done doing a refresh and then unlock it when it needs to do a refresh?

And it said, yeah, fam, I got you. and now it's doing that. So this is hot off the presses like 10 minutes ago, but I think I've got it. I think I've got it. So I use the Comet Q, which just lives attached to the phone. Then the Comet Q, so the Comet Q is going into the iPhone's USB-C port.

Comet Q is plugged into power and it passes the power onto the iPhone and my Mac Mini will every like minute or two wake up the phone, unlock it, check it and see what the state of the world is and then relock it. Or if I'd like to lock my car, start climatization, whatever, whatever, it will unlock the phone, it will do whatever it needs to do and relock it.

And I turned off the always on display so the display is completely blank. This is very early news. I'm reserving the right to change my mind on this, but I think I've got it. And it was all thanks to Marco giving me the Comet Q. So thank you, Marco. Thank you everyone for your suggestions, but I think Claude and I have gotten there.

And let me tell you, I'm not asking you to love AI. I'm not asking you to think this is the coolest thing in the world. I don't think, I think it's the coolest thing in the world, but it's really freaking cool that I was able to make this work. And I was, in the same way that Lex Friedman has talked about, I'll try to remember to put his post in the show notes, was talking about how he's kind of an author.

I think that was the word he used. I might be misrepresenting him. But he was saying, I do a lot of, almost all my games and apps and whatnot are LLM coded, but says Lex, I'm the author. I'm the producer, if you will. I'm the one who's directing them. And if you don't have me, these apps would be trash.

And this app is trash because I don't care. I just needed to get stuff into MQTT so Home Assistant can read it. But the point is, I was able to direct Claude to do exactly what I wanted it to do. And in some cases, like saying, stop messing about with the browser, you idiot.

Just go direct to the source. it was even better than what I could have come up with. So I'm not asking you to love AI. I'm not asking you to think it's the greatest thing. I'm not saying it's the greatest thing, but damned if it isn't really freaking cool. Oh my God. Okay. I have so much to say. All right. So first. Yes. Sorry. Carry on. First. So the GLINET Comic Q.

GLINET actually sent me a Comic Q and one of the other POE ones as freebies. So thank you for that. Yeah. They sent me a couple of these sorts of devices as well. And what happened was, I had one Comic Q and one the power of Ethernet one. Which is great, by the way. I really love that one a lot.

And the Comic Q, I'm like, this is so amazing. And you know, you said it was a rebranded Pi KVM. It's more like in the way that macOS is rebranded Unix. It's like, it is based on Pi KVM, but they did a really nice job around it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fair. And it's a very, it's like a much more, you know, polished finished product than any of the Pi KVM stuff out there.

Of course, you know, what you'd expect. So anyway, I love the Comic Q so much. I plug it into my data center hardware and I'm like, oh my God, I want one of these on every one of my Mac Mini locations. Like right now, I keep Mac Minis in three different locations. Like I want one of these, at least one in each location. Plus, these would have made it so much easier to set them up.

So I want one that I can like bounce around to. So I go and of course, they're backordered because like when they first launched earlier, I think like August, they launched, they were backordered forever. I'm like, oh God. So I'm like, I really want another one. Let me see what eBay is doing. I go on eBay and they're selling, you know, their retail price is like 140 bucks or so.

They're on eBay for like 170, 175. And I'm like, oh, I do, I really could use one more at least so I can like move it around my servers. Like, let me get one more on eBay and I'm bidding and I bid all the way up and at the last minute somebody sniped my bid for like 175.

I'm like, oh, geez. The next day, they're in stock at Amazon for regular price. So I ordered five. I'm just like, just go. I just want so many of these. And as it turns out, I don't quite need five.

That's why I gave one to Casey. But I will mention they are at this moment still in stock on Amazon, actually on sale for only $119. And if you are a nerd who needs a KVM of any kind, like a remote KVM, because the other thing too is like all the Comet series of KVMs, they are themselves able to run tailscale clients.

So you're able to connect it to your tailnet and then you can from anywhere log into this KVM and you know, whatever the machine that it's controlling is, which is very useful because the KVM itself is a tailscale node. So once you're in like the tailscale ecosystem, if you manage any computer remotely, especially if you're doing like, you know, like a Mac mini in a closet kind of situation or, you know, or somebody else's house or a data center, something like this can be awesome to save your butt if something breaks screen sharing.

Or if you don't want to leave screen sharing open for maybe Mac OS security hole reasons, you can, you cannot, you can just not even have screen sharing enabled and just use this as the KVM. You know, obviously you do your own security research and stuff, but like it's such a fun little product.

So I can strongly recommend like if you're nerdy enough to listen to our show, the odds that you are nerdy enough to want one of these, I think is pretty, are pretty high. So I would, I would snag one while you can. Anyway, so yeah, thank you to GLI net for sending the original freebie and I bought five more and gave one to Casey.

All right. Now, you were, you just were disclaiming your AI coding work and I know, look, I'm going to piss off everybody. First, the Tesla people. Now, I'm sure they're all, they're already writing in and now everyone else who doesn't like Tesla, you know, they tend to hate AI.

So now I'm going to piss them off. Sorry about that. I'll do my best. But, you know, you said that, you know, like Lex was saying that like, you know, like being the director of the AI is where the value is now. And the more I use AI coding tools, the more I see like, it is obviously not the same thing as like, you know, compare it, like making it, making an analogy to assembly language versus higher level languages.

It's, it's not quite that. It's, it's a, it's a larger and more profound jump than that. But the reality is that AI generally is not very good at figuring out what to do on its own. It is, however, very good at executing on your ideas.

And it's also not very good at doing a lot of polished, nice behaviors. It's not very good at coming up with thoughtful features. It's not very clever. It's not very good at like making nice designs. And these are all things that you as the human can be responsible for making and directing and coming up with.

What AI is really good at is kind of the worst parts of programming to a lot of people like, oh, I have to, I have to build this stupid form and I have to debug this really tricky thing. Like, it's really great at that. And that's the parts that we kind of suck at.

It's really bad at the parts that we are good at of like, hey, what if I had an app that did this? Like the idea parts. And as like, first of all, as, you know, good idea people, but also as experienced programmers, we bring skill to using AI that the average person does not have.

And that skill is still valuable and I don't think we need to be sorry about using AI. I think using AI is helping us deliver great software, but we are the ones still coming up with the ideas, figuring out what's even good to do, and then figuring out all the things to ask it to do, everything to ask for.

And then when it gives you the results, we are the ones that are like, this button should not be here. And this is, hey, this feature kind of sucks. Why don't you move it into this kind of navigation or this should really be redesigned to, you know, fit this other pattern here. Like, we are the ones who know what to ask it to do.

And if you look at the AI assisted coding output, like as a product, what you or I are able to have AI make with us is so much better than what a random person who has no experience developing software is able to make because we know what to ask it to do and we know what kind of standards to hold it to.

People who are like, oh, it's useless, like anybody could make that. Like, it's almost like when, like in the abstract art world, you know, like somebody can make abstract art and a casual observer can, you know, look at some, you know, some painting of some really cool looking circles and be like, well, I could have done that.

that sold for $20,000. Oh, anyway, I could have done that. It's like, yeah, but you didn't do that. And the person who did that, their artistic contribution was not that they were the first people to ever think of putting circles on paper. They put those circles on paper in that way.

They had that idea to do it at that time with those details and those methods and with that kind of story around it and that kind of marketing. And all of that, those are all really important parts of app development and product making. There's a lot of people out there who just keep one-starring everything I make.

He said he made it with AI, so it's useless. How dare he charge money? And these people, look, I'm probably going to be dealing with people for the rest of my career. We all will. But the reality is what people want is good products that are thoughtfully made, that work well, and that solve their problems or delight them in some way.

it doesn't matter who's writing the code. Whether it's some AI model churning out the actual code behind that doesn't matter at all to the customers. All that matters is do we make something good and does it work for them or make them happy or both? And if AI helps us do that better, that's great for everybody.

I honestly, I am past the point of apologizing for using AI. I don't think any of us should really be apologizing anymore if it helps us achieve those goals. and I know that's going to be a little unpopular but the goals speak for themselves because what almost all those people also want is for us to fix bugs in our software or to not ship them in the first place or to work on their pet features or like they want us to have the skill and bandwidth that AI gives us

but they just, you know, they're uncomfortable with some of the realities of that and I think look, there's only so much we can do to keep those people on board. I'm sure I've already lost them so sorry. And I don't mean to be, you know, flippant about this. I mean this really seriously that like the skill of making software is now involving using AI agents to help you and that results in more, better software.

So that's great and I don't think we need to be apologizing for that. I mean, I hear you and certainly it's been a real help for me in CallSheet and I think that, you know, in talking to my peers and talking to Marco over the last 24 hours and talking to like Underscore and talking to other people, it sure seems like not all of my peers but a lot of my peers are actually further along in their AI journey than I am and I am a couple of two to four months behind them

but I can tell you that a lot of great stuff has been delivered in CallSheet that would not have been, just straight up, would not have happened were it not for Claude and Claude Code. And they are, actually a lot of things we've talked about in this segment are former and potentially future sponsors. Tailscale, I think it's coming up next week.

Claude is sponsored in the past and I think is sponsoring the future. GLI Net has sent us free stuff and never asked for anything, it's just, it ended up that we legitimately like it. So, I mean, consider that when you, you know, listen to this segment but genuinely, there's a lot of great stuff that I've shipped specifically because of Claude and I'm struggling, I'm finding it harder to feel sorry for that, you know, I don't know.

John, any thoughts before we move on? I do not. Okay. John is like walking away slowly at the Homer in the bushes like just, I'm out. No, I'm not, I don't disagree with anything. If I disagreed, I would have something to say. But, you know, I'm more or less on the same page. I mean, if and when I eventually ship the app that I'm working on now, I'll have more to say about it then, but, this might be a while.

All right. Last week, we talked about an air power desk video that was very, very cool and there was some doubt, I think, from certainly John and me that maybe this was AI. We didn't think it was, but maybe. And Elijah Yap writes in, in episode 711, John mentioned the Chinese YouTuber HTX Studio and his air power inspired desk and Elijah also provided, I think it was Elijah, provided a long form link to the, I think we had had one of those like YouTube shorts in the show notes.

I found the real link. Oh, thank you. All right. One John Syracuse found the real link. Anyways, Elijah continues, I confirm he's real and not AI. He even interviewed Tim Cook in 2021 and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Additionally, Adiko writes, the air power table is real. The video is actually four years old.

It was, it originally debuted on Billy Billy, I think, which is apparently Chinese YouTube. HTX recently started posting their Billy Billy videos translated to English. The original video has 40 million views. We'll put a link in the show notes to that. And John also found another video. Can you tell us about this one, please?

Yeah. I mean, so I'm looking at this channel now and by the way, Elijah sent a picture of himself with the person from the video. So he was firsthand real person. And then, you know, I'm pretty sure Tim Cook was talking to a real person too. Anyway, and that was from 2021. So pre AI-ish. But yeah, I was looking at other, everyone's been sending like here's their latest video on the channel and similar to when I watched this video, I didn't know the story about that other video being four years old, but that makes sense with the air power reference as well.

But similar to the other video, it's like they make these videos for Chinese language YouTube and then HTX Studio, like other people might even make them, but then HTX Studio takes them and says, hey, we'll translate them to English, right? and so and narrate them and do all that stuff.

So at the beginning of this video, we're going to link in the show notes, they say this video is by such and such and we're translating it to English. Anyway, this is a video about high bandwidth memory and seeing the style of like, I watch a lot of like science technology explainer videos on YouTube.

The style of this video definitely seems different than the ones I normally watch. I'm not, you know, I don't know enough to say this is a Chinese style tech video because it's one video I've seen, I have no idea, right? But it definitely is a slightly different style and the production value is very high and it looks really cool and I think they do a good job of explaining it and so I'm putting it in the notes just to say, hey, if you want to know about high bandwidth memory, you've heard us talking about it a lot and you know about it because of the rampocalypse

and that's where all the, all the manufacturers are making high bandwidth memory for AI things. What is that memory and how is it different than the regular memory that we have in our computers? And also, some of the technology behind fabrication. I know we talked a while back about the ASML machines and how they produce the light source they use for masking chips and how insane that process is.

This process isn't as ridiculous but it does give you an appreciation for what goes into something as simple as making a memory chip and sticking it on a big GPU in a data set somewhere and why those things cost $300,000 each, right? How could it cost that much money? That doesn't make any sense.

They're hard to manufacture. So anyway, check out the video. The link will be in the notes. Yep, very good stuff. We got some feedback with regard to Ubiquiti home Wi-Fi versus Eero. We talked about this in episode 710's Overtime with regard to Ubiquiti's new Wi-Fi thinger. Anyways, Roland LeBron writes, I got the Ubiquiti home Wi-Fi thing right when it was announced.

I was looking at converting my home to Ubiquiti gear for a while but I couldn't figure out what to get from their website. So this was perfect for me. It's a good starting point in the Ubiquiti system. I've been adding various PoE switches in the house since and it's glorious. Installation was easier than my old TP-Link mesh setup. And yeah, I mean, it's been really great for me especially once I've solved my Sonos issues which we talked about in the past but short, short version I turned off SonosNet and everything got great.

However, in contrast to that, Miles writes, I switched from Eero to Ubiquiti and I miss Eero greatly. So much constant tweaking and fiddling is necessary and it doesn't feel as solid even with an all-wired backhaul. I also got the travel router everyone loves and it conks out constantly. I don't know if I'm unlucky or people just like the amount of control and info they give you and let the fragility and fickleness slide.

I understand to a point what Miles is saying. That has not been my experience though. I traveled last week to the podcast-a-thon which, oh, by the way, I meant to put this in the show notes. Thank you to everyone who donated. I don't have the numbers in front of me because I completely forgot to put it in the show notes but it was something to the effect of like $756,000 for the year or for the campaign.

We're like just so short, it's so close to 5.6 million lifetime, I believe and I really, really, really want to thank all of the ATP listeners who have even considered donating. It's very kind of you and I really appreciate it. Anyways, when I was in Memphis, I used both my UTR and UTR-LR which we'll talk about in a pre-show in 10 weeks when I finally get there and they all worked great.

So I'm not saying Miles is wrong. I'm not saying that's not what their experience was but for me, it's been great and I haven't heard any other crummy experiences. Certainly, or excuse me, Ubiquity is way more fiddly but I don't actively fiddle with things unless I desire to.

Like I wouldn't say I'm doing maintenance or anything like that. Yeah, I think Ubiquity gives you a lot of fiddling that you can do but you don't need to. You used to need to. It used to be a lot harder to set up a Ubiquity system. It was much harder to know what to buy. It was much harder to set it up because it was much less polished.

Now, it's really, like the app is super easy. It's really well done. Like, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't like, you know, send a router to totally non-technical people to set up but honestly, I don't think I'd do that for any brand of router. It's just, Ubiquity stuff is really good now and it's way nicer to use than it used to be.

I put these two in there. There were a couple of other feedbacks on both sides of this just to show that the same product can get such different reactions from people and I mean, I'm not, since I don't have personal experience with this, I can't say who's closer to being right but I, one theory that seems plausible to me is that because there are a lot of things to fiddle, sometimes people will go fiddle with things that they shouldn't be fiddling with and that causes a problem and then future fiddling to fix the fiddling, you know what I mean?

like enough rope to hang yourself kind of thing where, I mean, I'm not sure if that's what's going on or whether things really are flaky. I mean, things like the travel router, there's not much to fiddle with anyway so I don't understand why that would be flaky but anyway, I do hear both sides of this and people say, I mean, these are totally, totally opposite experiences and of course, you two are both in favor as well but I still hold up Casey's situation as an example of sort of a Miles type of thing and you're like, oh, I just turned off Sonos and it was fine but here's the thing, you didn't have to turn off Sonos now when you had Eero.

Why? Like, is Eero working around the crappiness whereas Ubiquiti is just sticking to the straight and narrow? Like, I don't know the answer to those questions but I do know that the two first people I knew who dealt with Ubiquiti, one had this weird experience where it wasn't as good as Eero in a way that really mattered to them until they figured out a workaround and that doesn't fill me with confidence but, you know, anyway, I'm not in the market for one but I will still definitely keep my eye on this because I like the tech specs and I, you know, I don't mind a little bit of fiddling so I will consider this

for four years from now when I replace my Wi-Fi setup again. Yeah, if I recall correctly, shoot, I can't remember the acronym, I believe it starts with an S, but basically, there's some sort of thing that lets you kind of cross between networks and assign priorities to different network nodes where Eero was...

It's called hell. Yeah, yeah, right. Eero was way more forgiving and Sonos' implementation was straight up incorrect and Eero would roll with it I think in part because it just didn't really care about that sort of thing because it wasn't, it wasn't, not smart enough, but I can't think of a better turn of phrase, but it wasn't smart enough to care about these sorts of things whereas Ubiquity does care about those sorts of things and because Sonos' implementation was unequivocally wrong, it caused problems.

and so what ended up happening was when I told the Sonos to stop trying to make your own faux network within the actual network, everything worked great and so I understand why Sonos was acting the way it was. I'm sad that it took them this long to finally do the switch or provide a switch to turn off SonosNet but once they did, it's been bulletproof ever since but I hear what you're saying, John and...

Yeah, like there's something a consumer thing of like some product is doing something wrong but you've just got to deal with it like because you're a consumer product and people are going to complain they're Sonos crap doesn't work so fix it and Ubiquity is more of like well they're the ones that are wrong why don't they just fix their stuff? You know what I mean? Yeah, they're the no talent ass clown. Why should I change? He's the one who's... Yeah, there it is.

That's a different mindset but you know, who knows? Maybe Ubiquity is coming over to the other side and they're going to start doing weird workarounds for broken consumer products too. Yeah, you never know. All right, continuing on as we try to speed run the rest of this because I can tell John is very upset with me. One AirPod versus two AirPod audio settings.

We've been talking about this with regards to some funky noises when you go mono. Is that right, John? Remind me what the situation was here. Yeah, like when you only had one AirPod and it was in transparency mode and my finger would touch the microphone or make a fuzzy noise. We talked about this last week and it seemed like I had solved my problem but then everyone was writing in saying, hey, I did the thing that you said where there's like one AirPod mode and two AirPod mode but it turns out in one AirPod mode I have very limited options.

Well, there's a setting for that too and I forgot to mention it. All right. So if you go into settings, accessibility, AirPods and then choose your AirPods, there's a noise control section and within that section there is noise cancellation with one AirPod on or off. Yeah, and if you don't turn, it's off by default and if you don't turn it on, you don't even get the option to do noise canceling with one AirPod.

The only options you get are off and transparency which is another reason people thought, oh, one AirPod is always transparency. It's not. That's just the default and it is a fairly constrained default because your only other choice is off but if you turn on this accessibility option, then you have all the options. Yeah, I had no idea that, like I knew that it was, by default, it would always go transparency like when you took one of your butt out and I knew that there was an option to turn that off but I did not know that detail that like, well, if you want this other behavior, like yeah, it's kind of a mess.

Yeah, and of course, this is spread in like seven different places and they're not explained anywhere or whatever but just that's what this podcast is for. So just so you know, it seems to me from what I've been able to tell, there are in fact two different settings. There's the one AirPod setting and the two AirPod setting and then the one AirPod setting is artificially constrained by having an extra option into accessibility that you have to turn on to get more options there.

Fun. All right, John, you have done the unthinkable and you've beaten me to it and I am in my own head, I'm playing taps as we speak. What have you done? Yeah, well, so for reasons that listen to us to rec diffs now, I've been spending a lot of time on phone with customer support and that continues and I guess I just kind of get, you know, you know when you're like cleaning, you're like, well, I'm cleaning, I might as well clean all the things.

If I'm going to be stuck on the phone listening to hold music and dealing with customer support, shouldn't I also do the thing where I call Verizon and deal with my cable card? Discontinuation. Like, November 5th is the cutoff date, isn't it, I think? I don't remember off. Anyway, to catch everyone up, Verizon is my ISP and they are dropping support for cable card, which is how my TiVo gets its television signal.

they're dropping support because the law that required them to support it lapsed and was not renewed and so they don't have to support it anymore and so they're not. So they basically said, hey, we were forced to give you this cable card and you enjoyed a decade or two of amazing third-party products that made our TV product better, but that time is over.

Your cable card will no longer be supported. If you want to keep getting television from us, you're finally going to have to let us put a stupid box in your house, which is essentially just a much worse, you know, TCP IP-based video streaming box branded by Verizon and I don't want to do that so my plan was, all right, I'll just, you know, before November 5th, I'll call them up and I'll try to get rid of my TV service.

I tried on the website before that, you know, can I just see if I drop down to like the cheapest TV service they have or something and it kept telling me my bill would go up and not down so I'm like, I'm going to have to call but you know, you don't want to call Verizon so my plan was to wait sometime between when they gave us the November 5th date and the date itself somewhere in the middle because I didn't want to be doing it on November 4th when everyone else is scrambling and they're all messed up and I didn't want to do it when they sent the email to everybody so here we are kind of in the middle.

I called them a nice person at Verizon after penetrating their various systems to get to a human being told me that I could save money by not having TV because that's what I asked I said, can you just get rid of the TV? Am I allowed to do that? I said, yeah, sure.

they noted that I had some ancient plan and they noted I had been a customer forever and stuff like that I'm like, yeah, I know. They said what everyone else what the email said and what everyone else who has done this said which is normally we want your equipment back don't even bother just keep the cable cards they're yours.

We don't even want them recycle them do whatever you want you can't even return them to us we don't want them back so thanks for that. that's how much they hate the cable cards that's right what are they going to do with them though? It's useless it's just recycling yeah, so they and I at first I said is there there's not a way that I could have like a really cheap TV plan without having any Verizon equipment in my house and they said no there's that's not a thing that you can do anymore so I'm like all right fine just kill the TV entirely

we used to call that cutting the cord which never made a lot of sense and has made increasingly less sense as time has gone on because obviously no cords are being severed although it is funny when I first moved into this house the people who owned this house before me had a RCN internet I don't even know if they still exist or somebody bought them but they had RCN cable based internet and they had cancelled that service apparently and I know this because outside the house where the RCN coaxial cables came in

they were literally cut like cut ends of the cable were sticking up I saw where they had cut them like wow someone really did cut the cord but anyway the fiber optic cable that comes into my house that is currently or was providing television telephone and internet has not been cut thankfully and still exists only now it just provides internet and telephone and yes I still have a quote unquote landline telephone don't add me as they say it's fine I have a cool number I want to keep it keep it that's

you know you can transfer those anywhere you can transfer that to voice over IP but honestly the voice over IP things weren't any cheaper than what Verizon is giving you know like I could transfer one and it would be a big hassle and it would cost me the same amount per month so I looked into it I didn't see a lot of savings there anyway so yeah now I have no more TV and my bill was reduced my monthly bill will or will be reduced once the new monthly bill comes from 250 per month to drumroll 100 per month not bad

pretty good pretty pretty good and they also said and by the way we have a new 5 gigabits Fios option oh and I said how much more per month is that and they said it's $10 more per month beep you John oh I'm so mad at you right now because you know they're doing to the credit of the person who I talked to at Verizon they did not try to convince me not to cancel my TV service they didn't try to do anything but they did try one upsell and I was receptive to that potential upsell of the 10 you know

try to sell this person more faster internet access but here's the thing two things one they have to come into your house and change the equipment I'm like really I just got the equipment changed for the 1 gigabit upgrade didn't seem that long ago this equipment can't handle 5 they said yeah we need to go in and change the little box with probably an even smaller box and two I can't use 5 gigabit ethernet my whole home network is 1 gigabit I don't have any switches I don't even have 2.5 gig switches I have everything is 1 gigabit in my house

so I just tuck that one into my back pockets okay see I do not actually have 5 gigabit per second in Fios for both of those reasons one it's required someone to come to house and change equipment but two I would need to change all my switches and it's not that many like I maybe have three switches that I would have to upgrade I could probably leave like the the TV entertainment center as a 1 gigabit switch because who cares but the computer room and the Synology and like you know I might need to fish out all the cable I don't know if the cable can handle 5 gigabits I don't remember if it's cat 6 or cat 5e

but yeah wait before everybody writes in we know cat 5e can do faster over shorter distances go ahead well it's a pretty long distance I'm 100 feet it's a long like and it's not coiled up somewhere it's 100 legit 100 feet because of course the fiber optic cable comes into my house at the far opposite corner of where I'm sitting right now so there is significant amount of routing through the basement to get to where I am so anyway the main barrier is like I haven't really found any even 2.5 gig

or 5 gig switches that are inexpensive and not hot and don't have fans and are reliable and blah blah blah so I'm just going to let this sit for a while but it's good to know that if and when I decide that 1 gigabit internet is not fast enough for me this is out there waiting for me and I'm excited about that I'm very jealous that the 5 gig is there I looked like a month or two ago and we couldn't even get 2 gig internet here so I am jealous but I can tell you that my ubiquity equipment a small small amount of it

is 10 gig capable so I have 10 gigabit not internet but intranet between my computer and my Synology and that's it and I think I have one more port available that can go more than 1 gigabit I believe I have to figure over time that the you know that type of speed will come down in price to more consumer things that we use you know chips will be fab done a better process someday you know the things won't be as hot they won't need as many fans or ideally any fans

and just like gigabit switches used to be expensive way back in the day and now they're just commodity junk you can find anywhere that'll happen with 2.5 gig and 5 gig and 10 gig eventually so maybe I will upgrade eventually I'm just keeping that one in my back pocket for now yeah it's funny like I honestly I cannot think of any reason why I would need faster than gigabit like I don't I don't want to like boogate myself here like I don't think I need that for anything I wouldn't say ever but like I'm never limited

by my gigabit speed however it's always the server on the other end that's the problem right it's very difficult to max out my connection during normal work you really need to do some sort of like peer-to-peer bit torrent or steam download or something to really actually saturate my gigabit and it's not you know so if I had a faster connection it would just be even harder for me to find things on the other on the wider internet that can fill that pipe yeah but however of course I want it like there's there's no reason for $10 a month yeah if I had the routers I would have

immediately upgraded right I would like I would definitely pay the $10 a month and just start like you know buying hundreds of dollars worth of new switches to like upgrade that's the second part that I'm a little wary about right yeah like I would definitely like that would definitely trigger like an upgrade of all the switch infrastructure of it like and I really don't need it and that's that's a thing but boy would that be cool yeah no I I feel like I mostly agree with you but the one thing that consistently consistently maxes out my downstream bandwidth

downloading a new Xcode every time oh yeah I don't have great luck with Apple's stupid Akamai CDN whatever thing they're using every time I don't get the best speeds from them you know what this means Casey we need this for our work we need it for our work that's exactly right unlike the other consumer products that you can buy you can't just actually choose to have 5 gigabit fios you gotta wish Verizon or some other ISP to offer it in your area yeah the only other choice we have around here is Comcast and it's never gonna be that fast or at least not symmetric

anyway sigh that's alright alright so speaking of TiVo they're getting a little desperate John I wonder why you got an interesting email recently can you tell me about this yeah I'm not gonna read the whole email but it was like kind of coincident with me deciding to make this call they sent out an email to all their existing customer or their remaining customers let's say and said hey you know that feature where you can skip commercials by hitting a button we're gonna charge money for that now which is hilarious like the whole you know not to rewind all of DVR history

but like replay TV came out and let you skip commercials and they got sued out of existence and TiVo was like we don't let you skip commercials we just let you skip forward 30 seconds it just so happens that most commercials come in multiples of 30 seconds so hit the buttons as many times as you want right eventually late late in the life of TiVo TiVo said you know what let's just give them a button to skip commercials we know what the commercials are let's just let's just give them a button and so they made one button on their remote skip all the commercials so what used to be knowing how many times you had to hit 30 seconds skip and often was also like enter the secret code to enable 30 seconds skip anyway

they just gave you one button on their remote that would skip all the commercials and that was pretty cool and yeah now that they're taking their remaining customers to say hey do you happen to live somewhere they can still use TiVo maybe using TiVo over the air because they can use over the air as well so if you're using TiVo with an antenna but you still have commercials we know where the commercials are and we were giving you a button to skip them but now we're going to charge you a fee so instead of you watching commercials and like people making money by showing you ads we're going to charge you money to skip those commercials and if TiVo was in any

way relevant in the world they would be sued out of existence but no one cares about them anymore so they'll probably get away with this right before they die we are sponsored this week by Coax so imagine you're a child of the 80s and 90s like I don't know me and you really reflect fondly at least in part about going through the TV guide the cable guide that was on the TV for children you would go to a particular channel and it would scroll through the list of all the things that were on all the other channels

and almost all the time what ended up happening was 99% of it was trash and there were like one or two good options well imagine that but what if all of the options were good options because all of the options come from your own media that's kind of what Coax does so Coax is a zero config zero hassle way to watch your home media server and like Plex or Jellyfin or Envy like it's streaming into your house over good old-fashioned coaxial cable hence the name so this is really clever and what's really great about Coax is sometimes you sit down you know

you want

that because of a streaming service or particularly if you're like me because of all the stuff you've amassed at home well Coax to a degree removes the element of choice because it's pulling from your own library but it also adds a tiny bit of time pressure because it effectively treats these things as though they are on right now so that means that you can browse and watch all kind of in one and it's really really clever additionally Coax has a custom built video engine for handling direct playback of MKV files and despite that the app store

bundle is under 60 megs and it supports all four major platforms macOS iOS tvOS of course and even vision OS that's how you know that we ain't messing around here so it is really really clever and really really fun and if you're interested and you should go to coax coax the app dot com and check out coax again coax the app dot com check it out and give it a whirl it is zero config zero setup you can go from hey that

sounds interesting to wow I'm using it in just a few minutes we thank coax the app for sponsoring the show all right so we have a bunch of details about the m6 and a20 and I could take a stab at this but I think it's probably best served for John why don't you just take us through this please yeah this is from the high yield and semi analysis YouTube channels and YouTube is this weird thing where you like okay what channel is this from so I put

the show it will also include timestamp links to the sections we're going to talk about but suffice to say I think one of these channels is the place that gets the chips and cuts them open and the other channel is someone who gives commentary and analysis and I'm not sure which is which but they got the chips and cut them open which is what we want to do let's see what the heck is in there and obviously once they do that they're using informed I'm going to say speculation but educated guesses about what everything is and some things are very sure but this is definitely

this this is definitely that and other parts of the chip they say in the video is like we don't know what this is and we're not going to guess so there is a large amount of unlabeled area

uses the same super cores as the A20 Pro and also the same e-cores as the A20 Pro with only small changes likely due to chipped area optimizations rather than core differences according to the video so that answers the question we kept speculating about and has changed over time it used to be that the M chips would have the big power cores from the previous phone chip and then when the new phone chip comes out it would be one core generation ahead of the M chips but since then the scheduling

of everything happening to do with silicon from Apple has just been all over the map and right now the M6 and the A20 Pro are in sync they've got the same super cores and the same e-cores question and again we'll put a link to a stamp stamp you know that because they look exactly the same when you cut the chips open and you look at them like there's a very sort of telltale you can just eyeball and go yeah that's the same I see that's the same core second the A20 pros e-cores have 8 megabytes

of L2 cache and they go through this in the video trying to label the cache levels as L1 L2

the A20 Pro cores have 8 megabytes of L2 cache and that is the L2 cache in the phone chip has been on quite a journey the A18 Pro 4 megabytes the A19 Pro 6 megabytes the A20 Pro 8 megabytes that is not a normal progression for the amount of cache in it let me just tell you because cache on chip takes space and it costs a lot of

the core itself didn't get that much better in non-cache workloads and often times it is during a process shrink like this we have more real estate to spend now because the process shrink we can throw more cash at it and that makes the speed difference even better for most workloads yeah and the tricky bit with cash is Apple has less of this problem how much is the right amount of cash for what level cash for what cores for blah blah blah what

is the right amount and that's why you end up with something like 18 with 4 and they're like you know I didn't look up what the 17 was but then they go to A19 and be like we think the E cores can benefit for more cash so they go to A19 and they go to 6 and what they're looking for is we can't

this huge amount of cash and turns out they use like 1 eighth of it it's just a waste of space a waste of power it's a waste of everything so you're cautious like let's go from 4 to 6 but then they said actually 6 wasn't even enough we should give them more like how much does it benefit but what are real workloads that are running on our phone chips do

so they've decided from the A18 to the A20 that the e-cores need double the amount of cash and in comparison if you look at the shared S slash P core L2 cache that has stayed at 16 megabytes that entire time so the e-cores got went from 4 to 6 to 8 and the S&P cores 16 that seems to be the right amount for them keep an eye in the caches lets you know where Apple feels like they've been underperforming in the past and where it's worth spending diary on in the future and speaking of memory let's

go on to memory bandwidth I forget if this was in the specs when we looked it up but I don't recall it being there but just in case it wasn't when we were looking at the chips when Apple released

only the 24 gigabyte and 32 gigabyte M6 have the increased memory bandwidth length to the faster 10667 megabits DRAM and they have 170.7 gigabytes per second and so if we didn't say that before it's worth knowing your RAM speed depends on how much RAM you get your Mac with if it doesn't matter to you it doesn't matter but if you're doing AI workloads and you are

16 gigabytes of RAM but who knows maybe using a small model but keep in mind the 24 gigabyte and 32 gigabyte M6 have faster memory bandwidth than the 16 because they just use faster RAM chips that's the choice that Apple made moving on to the GPU the core counts for the base no suffix M chips the M1 had 8 cores the M2 M3 M4 M5 had 10

M6 says you know what it's a shrink we think maybe more cores would be worthwhile especially now that they have this AI neural accelerator or whatever things in them so that's worth noting as well we've finally moved beyond 10 cores in the GPU and speaking of cores the M6 chip is the first M chip to come with all three kinds of cores it's got S P and E and I didn't realize this when we were talking about it but it's oh I didn't either right because it's

stupid naming you're like what the hell but anyway the M5 only has S and E cores the M5 Pro Max and Ultra only have S and P cores and remember P is the medium now so we've got the one that has really big and little that's the M5 and the Pro Max and Ultra have really big and medium they don't have any of the E cores but the M6 traded two of its S cores for four P cores so they traded two big cores for four mediums and they share the same cluster with the S cores and most

of the cache so if you look at the chip layout like the what used to be the power core cluster like the big cores they have their own set aside bunch of cache that is only shared by however many S cores there are and when the M6 traded out S for P cores those P cores share that same cache with the S cores the E cores have their own cluster and they've got their own cache that we just talked about and there there's the system level cache above that there's

but in exchange you get four of the medium cores and apparently that trade-off on the M6 has been beneficial for the workloads that chip sees as evidenced by Marco doing his benchmarks and other people benchmarks and chips so but yeah it's the only one with all three sizes because it's got the biggest ones a bunch of mediums and a bunch of littles as well and it'll be interesting to see for like the future generations the M7 and so on do they keep this thing where the pro max and ultra only have big and medium and the littles are only for the no suffix one or do they mix it up in all of them yeah

we'll put timestamp links to a bunch of essentially frames from the video that show all these different cores and you can see what they look like you can see the actual relative sizes of a small medium and large core and how much bigger the large cores are than anything else and then you can see for yourself that the cores are the same core there is a rumored October event it is the 7th of October as we sit here recording and there is a rumor that there was going to be an event I think on the

13th something like that we don't plan to do a full preview or anything like that this episode but there were a couple of tidbits we wanted to talk about so on the 4th of October German

are you scared this is not new information I believe when the OLED touchscreen MacBook Pros were first rumored more than a year ago maybe two years ago this is going to be a new case design and also the case is going to be thinner and lighter but this is like late breaking

and I didn't add these italics in there significantly lighter which I have to say as I mean I'm not really as a MacBook pro fan I'm not I'm not a laptop fan but as someone who cares about pro level Macs anytime I see something about the pro level laptops getting thinner and lighter I worry yep me too that's an interesting point that's your desktop yeah because their track record is not amazing in this area because last time they made the MacBook Pros

thinner and lighter that was the wonderful 2016 generation that we all hated and it made them significantly worse as MacBook Pros and when they finally redesigned them in the M generation to be better they made them a little bit thicker and heavier and that allowed them to give them a better keyboard all the ports we needed great battery life and great cooling so what I'm wondering here is what is at stake here so to make them significantly

lighter you don't need to change the keyboard for that at least for that reason the keyboard is safe you do need to change the keyboard to make it super thin but maybe they don't maybe let's hope that's not on the table right now weight comes mostly from the metal and the battery now maybe if they have different ways to design the frame to save weight sure but wouldn't they

have done that already if it was that easy that's what I think I'm the most likely answer is that it comes from making less battery in there and that is not something that I want so I you shouldn't care that much about if you're using it on your desk all time it's plugged in that one yeah but the one that I travel with my wonderful little m4 14 inch I worry about that the 14 inch one is where I'm concerned about the battery life

the 16 inch because I use it plugged in most of the time and because it has great battery life it'll probably be okay if Apple had to thin it down a little bit and maybe cut the 100% I'd be willing to give that up but probably not more than that because you know the other thing is what they used to do with their thinning efforts to the laptops back when battery life was pretty rough a lot of the time

is they would figure out some benchmark and they would say okay the laptop when doing this benchmark now it has you know 27 hours battery life or whatever so we have excess battery that we can get rid of and all we need is quote all day battery life the definition of which shifts around constantly but what they do is like they'll optimize the battery life for that benchmark and they'll say okay well if you're doing this you know web mix workflow whatever your laptop only needs to last 8

hours or 12 hours so we have too much we can shed it but what happened in the past was the power consumption of the chips in the laptop had a pretty big range between relatively idle and when it's working at full blast and when it was working at full blast you would get nowhere near the battery life they would claim because they were optimizing for that idle time and as the chips got more efficient at being idle I know that's a weird thing

to say the problem is a lot of things that people did all the time with pro machines like developing software editing video things that push the machine a lot of that that's what pro people buy their pro computers for and whatever benchmark apple

tested the battery on it would be nowhere near reflective of that kind of use and that kind of use you'd get like two hours and whereas the mixed web you might get 12 hours or you know whatever this is that most of that problem was a long time ago chips now are different computers now are different but I do worry a little bit if they are going to save significant weight they almost certainly have to do it by cutting the battery life or at least by cutting the battery capacity I should say but do we

really want that is that a really good trade-off for people on the pro like it makes total sense on the lower end stuff on the air or if they're going to have like you know if they're going to have a mid level where they currently have the 14 inch with the M4 do they cut that down a little bit who knows but I really worry if they cut this are they cutting into the battery life significantly

of actual pro workflows on their pro hardware and if they don't cut the battery life are they cutting into the cooling because what's also heavy are things like heat pipes and heat sinks those are also heavy and the better the cooling usually it comes from either larger heat sinks with more fins and stuff and or different materials like copper that are I think copper is heavier than aluminum I could be wrong but are they going to also make the cooling worse am I going to hear

the fan more on my pro desktop laptop that I'm using here as it's under load because when it was new I never heard the fan at all now that it's three years old I'm starting to hear the fan sometimes I'm sure it's filled with dust but are going to do this in a way that doesn't compromise factors that are really important to a pro machine and I'm a little skeptical of that I'm more than a little scared

of what this means you know I think I'm with you almost all the way there but the thing that I keep wondering and maybe I'm too optimistic but if these new computers come with the two nanometer chips with a process shrink or what have you if these new chips are considerably more efficient then maybe the net change is nothing and you can make a strong argument I could make a strong argument well

then let's have more battery life instead of removing battery let's have more battery life I think for me I'd actually prefer lighter because I'm so infrequently in a position where I need a lot of battery life but that's not the same trade-off everyone else would make well but also like but like you know I think what you like you said that like you know if they shrink the process you know that that makes the chips save power it does at idle

but what usually happens is whatever the total full blast wattage that they engineer the chips and the thermal envelopes around them for usually that ceiling that thermal ceiling stays the same having the smaller process saves them on idle power and it usually allows them to just cram more in there as we said earlier more cash more cores that they can maybe ramp the clock speeds up a little bit like whatever it is they the top of the power budget they usually

keep in the same range for a given computer family because it's designed around the thermals and the enclosure and everything else so

it's getting great battery life but what if we push it is it still getting great battery life if we push it and if we actually do the things that Apple demonstrates their machines doing in their marketing videos that's the question that's totally fair the other thing I'm thinking about is as John has had us just comparing phone chips with Mac chips we haven't or Apple hasn't explored the thermocouple thing

vapor chamber thank you we haven't explored that in laptops have we because we have fans but would that help I don't know and would that reduce power usage reduce thermals reduce power usage reduce battery draw I don't know I'm not a hardware engineer and now that's obvious but maybe that would be helpful I'm not sure I don't know if they can scale up like that maybe they should put a thermal pad on the MacBook Air first they're so they're so behind and not behind but they're so not particularly caring

about thermals on the on some of their consumer laptops but I do think that Intel and Johnny I've really screwed us all up on this front because we just have this this past trauma of the MacBooks that Marco just mentioned like the 2016 models that whole era of taking the ports off the computers and making them thin and coinciding with Intel being crappy and it was just bad all around and I think this is making all of us understandably worried about what is otherwise just

the normal progression of laptop advancement if you just look at the history of the laptop period from the PowerBook 100 series up today it is that exact tension that

it on increasing your battery life or are you going to spend some of it on making things thinner and lighter and it's always a trade-off like if you just spent it on battery life we'd have laptops the last seven days and they'd be as thick as a powerbook 100 and no one wants to it always cracks me up whenever I see these in my I can just pick one of them up I'm like holy cow these things are big you don't remember how big they were compared to today until you see one of them you're like is this a joke they were so big and I'm not talking about the 16 pound Mac portable which I

have in my attic I'm talking about the thin and light powerbooks which were a revelation they're so huge right so we spend some of our technological dividend on making them thinner and we balance that with how much more battery life that we want and the same thing is true of shrinks you know we do how much do you spend on increasing the clock speed like we have we can dissipate 15 watts why should we ever not dissipate 15 watts let's just crank up the clock speed so that yeah it's lower power

I'm done with the job sooner so even though my peak is still 15 watts I'm at 15 watts for 5 seconds instead of 10 so it actually does save battery life and how do we want to spend that dividend and we have so little faith now in Apple ever wanting to go in the other direction we're like Apple you are not allowed to spend the dividend on making it thinner and lighter because last time you did that you way over spent on thin and light and gave us a laptop that was out of balance so I'm not particularly opposed you know I'm not saying

laptop progress must stop and they can never get any thinner and lighter and all future gains must be spent on battery life but that's not a tenable position we're just worried that Apple will make the wrong choice because they very recently did and it sucked for a long time given how long it takes Apple to rev these like we've been on this case design since they basically fixed the laptops since they ditched the old one put the ports back on made them a little bit thicker and heavier and so it makes sense that after many years of using this design which people generally like

that maybe we are at the point where we can make a new case that is thinner and lighter because that's part of where the lightness comes in it's like some people are saying batteries aren't that heavy what happens when you make the case smaller is there's less room for battery so even if you're save money on the case make less case once you make less case there's less room in the case for battery and then you lose battery there too as well so you know I'm not sure what they're going to do here now Casey's point about two nanometer remember that the rumor is and I've seen nothing contradicting this the

plain old no suffix M6 is it and so if any of these OLED touch screen MacBooks are going to have any chip

they don't get a shrink they're the same chips we've had which is fine but like there's not really a two nanometer dividend to spend in that case it could be that only the plain no suffix M6 MacBook Pro will be the one that is significantly thinner and lighter because it's got the two nanometer chip and it is the low end MacBook Pro it is you know it's the regular M4 and for that purpose I've actually been very happy

with it it is a little slower to build than my big one is but it was a lot less expensive and it has very good battery life and I do actually use the battery life of my laptop so that's why I'm a little nervous about them possibly shrinking it down because this is I love the balance of this machine currently if it could get lighter yeah that'd be nice but again when these things are in

contention I'd rather keep the battery than make it a little bit lighter on the plain M6 one it has the potential market advantage of the fact that Apple is not rumored to roll out the M6 based MacBook air anytime soon but also what differentiates an M6 based MacBook air from M6 no suffix M6 MacBook Pro in this case OLED and touchscreen OLED is another potential power savings especially if you've got a lot of black pixels on your screen I guess and you know

I don't know what the power differences with the tandem OLEDs versus an LCD so maybe it's a wash but that is another potential thing out there and obviously the touchscreen that's another feature that is going to differentiate presumably the plain no suffix M6 MacBook OLED MacBook Pro from an M6 MacBook Air at some point in the future remains to be seen if the redesign does actually make a thinner chassis for the M5 Pro and Max models maybe it will have a thinner chassis and these will be crappy ones because that chassis is made for

the next four years and it will come into its own when the M7 Pro and Max come out because they will be on 2 nanometer a lot of open questions here but yeah just you know with a late breaking German rumor like again we're not going through every product they're going to announce by next episode they will in theory have announced all these and we'll be talking about the product so there's no point but with him reemphasizing the significantly lighter thing it is it is something to watch for because we're all traumatized that's what it comes down to mildly technologically traumatized additionally on the

6th of October so this was yesterday as we record two days after the other report German writes Apple's upcoming push into smart home devices will include a doorbell thermostat and other accessories developed through an unusual partnership with LG Electronics Inc the products

will include a smart deadbolt lock indoor security camera outdoor security camera and floodlight camera though the two companies work together to develop the accessories the products will carry the LG brand LG is handling manufacturing and product support this is another late breaking rumor of home stuff that's going to be announced again we're not going through all the products but it's all the stuff that you remember for months and months but this wasn't in the rumors right up until

now because they're not really Apple products they partner with Belkin to make a bunch of stuff they don't want to make they shuffle a lot of stuff off to Beats I think they do stuff with Logitech as well there's always lots of rumors about how much of this product that is not Apple branded was actually designed by Apple a lot of people writing about the story said hey remember when Apple partnered with LG to make a 5k display back when they didn't make any displays I hope Apple wasn't particularly involved with

that product because it wasn't a great product it wasn't particularly reliable and it had a lot of problems and it was ugly and the stand sucked although Apple is really great at sucky sands so they have a hand in it and other products like you look at the Belkin one it's like oh this is you know again the rumors are this Belkin product is literally Apple designed this product but they don't want to deal with it so they say Belkin it's your thing you brand it you support it you manufacture it we just gave you the design go and we'll put you in our store these LG products I'm not getting particularly excited

about because it's just like another one of those partnership deals but it really does make it seem like Apple you know Apple always wants to encourage HomeKit stuff and but they're pushing to the home with the home pod with the screen and blah blah blah we'll talk about that next week it it it it Apple does feel some responsibility especially with the supposedly new HomeKit architecture so we want good devices and all the

important product categories but we don't want them so much that we want to make them it's kind of like them with the Wi-Fi hubs presumably Mac users need to have Wi-Fi in their home but we don't care enough to actually make it so you're on your own and here it's like well I hear people like smart locks and thermostats but we don't care enough about that to even bother how we can barely get ourselves to make smart speakers but we do want them to exist and we want to show them on stage so

who's willing to partner with us to do this and as a couple of commenters pointed out kind of like home Wi-Fi stuff it's like Apple some of these devices are the type of thing where maybe people would want to buy from a brand with the that they trust and believe and especially when it comes to privacy like a lock you know or like a security camera and the fact that they chose LG which is currently going through a scandal where their TVs are listening to you even when they're turned off maybe not

great from a privacy perspective but like that's that's the problem with Apple I mean we have this topic keeps getting pushed down and it will surely not be probably not be next week because it'll be an event the week after that the push Apple releases products and how often and so on and so forth there's just kind of like this really old tired looking elephant in the room which is like why doesn't Apple make Wi-Fi things everybody needs Wi-Fi and it's so annoying picking from third party

products people were sad when they gave up printers a little Apple really was just rebranding other people's printers but yeah home security cameras locks if ever there was a product where Apple's privacy focus design and reputation would be a marketing advantage for those products that would be great candidates and it seems clear that Apple wants to make sure that they have good products in those categories available but again they don't care enough to do it themselves so they're outsourcing it so I'm currently wondering based

on this rumor I'm wondering if any of this will be mentioned at all in any significant way in the presentation or whether it will just be a slide and say lots of third party manufacturers are making products as well I can't imagine Apple actually featuring these it's not like they feature the Belkin products they just mention oh and also these are available if you can buy this in our store and it's made

are important enough to have but not important enough for them to make and do a good job on it maybe I shouldn't be complaining because if we look at Casey what good job they're doing on streaming boxes and smart speakers all those categories Apple sometimes takes a little bit longer than we would like to make significant updates to them so maybe I'm wishing for them to come and do the same thing to these products and maybe to be better in the hands of LG but from a privacy perspective probably not well and their track record in this area is really mediocre

you know they have as you mentioned like you know they've done those with Belkin and LG before and those products have usually been pretty mediocre and it is Apple kind of half assing an initiative like yeah we want all these smart home devices well we're not going to like make an ecosystem that actually attracts people to make these products on their own and also we're not going to make our own versions so we will co-develop or you know whatever it is

with LG or Belkin or whatever but then what you get at the end is products that neither company really gives that much of a crap about and it shows you know I've had many of these products I've bought like the random Belkin things in the past I had the LG ultrafine monitors that are now somewhere in Casey's house and I've had the LG home kit cameras I think I had four of them they all sucked and broke after

reasonably short times and this is exactly what we're doing again it sounds like why it's all gonna work that's the thing like the entire path of home kit so far has been like Apple kind of half assing stuff that they occasionally care about for two seconds to put it in some you know event video and then they never touch it for you know months or years after that and the products all kind of suck or don't really ever pan out

or only work briefly but like or like the ecosystem itself doesn't pan out and all the things that are promised like no one ever makes them or one company makes them and then stops making them like this is how this is gone for years why would this time be any different it sounds like they're basically running the same playbook so like what why would it work this time when it hasn't worked before there's a couple things in favor of it now is first being that Siri is no longer embarrassingly terrible it is

merely slightly behind the competition but like that I mean that's the whole reason the home pod but the screen whatever they end up calling it has been delayed as long as it has because the rumors are this hardware has been done forever but the software wasn't but now Siri AI is here and you can talk to it in a more sane manner although recently today I set two

in theory there's a software story here that makes it so that the products like we'll see when they present the whatever their smart home hub thing is how they presented it is it presented like a weird off to the side hobby like Apple TV is it presented like a new big thing but the fact that they have a voice assistant that could conceivably power a non sucky product of that type does mean that there are some things that are different now does that help at all with smart locks and cameras no not at all it's totally unrelated

but it does mean that maybe Apple will be more interested in HomeKit now that they have more of the pieces to provide a successful solution I mean the HomePods are still a problem there's still a rumor they're going to make

here's our new approach this presumably has the smarts to run Siri AI in a reasonable way it is much more capable it has a screen on it and it potentially could be the hub for your home to talk to these other devices which are admittedly lesser and maybe just featured on a slide somewhere but yeah like the actual products themselves like it all depends on how good the HomeKit

it's literally the same dongle that Apple would sell it just got a Belkin stamp on it somewhere and the color of the plastic is different I don't think anyone cares too much about that it's when they do it for things like monitors where you're like Apple we would kind of prefer that you make a good one of these instead of something where the USB port flakes out after two

I'm actually interested in the I don't even I haven't even kept up with the rumors what they're going to call us I keep calling it home part of the screen have you heard rumors about what the supposed name is or is that still everyone just guessing like home pad or whatever god I hope it's not speaking of names Microsoft announced the Surface Pro Microsoft Surface Ultra today ish like their next line of laptops

and that means the MacBooks won't be called Ultra I mean maybe but maybe Apple doesn't care so just keep that in mind Apple absolutely would not care in that case it is funny if they are called Ultra it is funny that Microsoft is preempting them by a week with its own Ultra it's not like other companies aren't also doing Pro and Max and Ultra Apple for good or

Ultra we don't know what's going on Ultra all the things just to be safe anyway tune in next week we'll find out what they actually announced and if LG is featured at all anywhere all right so I apologize that we're probably going to end on a maybe not stupendously happy segment but we really need to talk about it before it becomes stale and before we forget about it so sometime in the last week

Apple put up a fairly vague post on their developer website and I would like to read to you the entirety of that post because it's not that long it reads yeah yeah yeah full disk access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function properly on the Mac some developers are using full disk

access in ways that could put users at risk exposing everything on their systems including files mail messages and even browsing history without users full knowledge and understanding for communication apps this could also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with going forward we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with explicit user action addressing this is critical as AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially we are committed

to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy thus ends their entire post so the adjective I would use to describe this post is ominous yes like first I don't really understand what possessed them to do this other than as a PR move because it's clear that they're not ready to tell us what they're going to do but they're like we're going to do something I mean it is obviously I think it is spurred on

by the AI agents that you know like meta released theirs I know there was an article where the guy said it read his messages although that's kind of disputed I don't think it's disputed that he read his messages just disputed what his story is but yeah there's a public relations angle to this which is there's been a series of stories recently from people using Macs with AI agents and being surprised that the AI agents were able to access things on their Macs that they thought they shouldn't have been able to access even though from a technical perspective I'm sure they could

and so they make this announcement which is like basically saying we know about this and we're going to do something about it or we're not ready to tell you what we're going to

recording or screen the thing where it lets Mac apps see other pixels on the screen and I think it was in Sequoia or something they changed that to make it more onerous whereas before you could grant something screen recording permissions like say you have an app that takes screenshots for you it's kind of important for your screenshot app to be able to see the screen to make pictures of it because it's a screenshot app and it used to be you'd get the app

you'd install it you'd run it and it would be like hey I need screen recording permission because I'm a screenshot app and you'd be like fine and then Apple said but we don't like that because lots of apps can trick people into giving it screen recording permissions and people won't realize that they did

next week we'll go hey you gave that screen recording permission you sure about that you sure you want to keep doing that and the user will say yes and then we'll say all right we'll ask you about it again anytime you restart your computer or once a week whichever comes first and from the perspective of a user who bought a screen screenshotting app and just wants to use it multiply that you are constantly being barraged with hey we know you gave this screen recording but are you sure you want to give it stop

asking me yes yes the app needs to have it it it's okay the flip side of this is something similar which is like I don't know if you know this but the whatever app has precise tracking on your location and you've given it that and it's

on the Mac there's just too many apps that need too many permissions that if the policy is we can't ask you once because we ask you once like they'll social engineer you into saying yes and you'll forget and so we need to say I know you said yes but maybe you didn't really think about it so here's another dialogue for you to not mindlessly click okay on and

that is maddening to Mac users are just like let me just use my computer let me just use it but on the other hand it probably saves some people from social engineering and security things so that's the bind Apple is in here at least the bind that it seems to think it's in which is we have full disk access it is one of the permissions to give already like to be clear what full disk access does if you're a sandbox Mac app you can't just read any file in the file system you can read your own files only but you cannot read

any other files you know how does any app work then that doesn't have full disk access are you telling me text that it needs full disk access because I can open a text file for my desktop no what they did was fairly cleverly I think made it so that sandbox Mac apps can't read anything except for their own stuff unless the user does something that makes mac OS think that the user is saying it's okay so for example if you go file open and text edit and you open a file that is you as a

user giving the app permission to read that file it gets targeted access just to the file that you picked if you drag a file onto the text edit icon in the doc that also grants text edit permission to read the file that you dragged on because user action caused that to happen in that way you can have applications that seem like well surely this has full disk access but they don't example is my app hyperspace which reclaims

nope I've never needed it I don't the app doesn't need it and doesn't even benefit from it because what hyperspace asks you to do is say what do you want to scan and then it shows you an open dialog box or drag a folder onto the window all of those actions give hyperspace permission to read the thing that you told it to read it still has no ability to read anything else doesn't need it because there's always a user initiated action so you're like why would

anybody want full disk access well obviously backup programs do but sometimes there is no user initiated action sometimes like for example if you're going to make a finder replacement there's no user initiated action to let you it needs to read the hard drive because it's a file browser so it's like a screenshot app screenshots have to have screen recording permission and a file browser you kind of need to have unless every time it launches you say show up an open dialogue box and tell it to pick the top level of your hard drive which would be ridiculous right so

let's say you

or try to orchestrate some other windows and say you have to go into system settings you have to find where this thing is you have to add us we can't do it we can't show you a dialogue we can't ask you a yes no question you have to do this outside of our app and then come back here the second thing is Mac apps can't even tell whether they've

don't have full disk access but the APIs are what I assume is intentionally sparse and they're going to make this harder harder how like that they'll have to like put a drop of blood into system settings before they'll let full disk access like how could this be harder and the only thing I can think of is they'll do with screen recording which yeah you can grant it but we're going to nag the user about it forever and we're just going to say you know this you know super duper still has full disk access and it's had it for six months you sure you want to

continue having it stop like I just wish there was a big off button on this type of thing so it's worth worrying about what any specifics but everything I

definitely make the point here full disk access and giving the muse Facebook AI agent full disk access and it reads your messages database and says I noticed you were talking with whatever and you were freaked out or whatever because you didn't realize you gave full disk access that's part of the PR disaster that we're dealing with here right and everyone is like if it's a Mac and you get

why is that data unencrypted at rest on your Mac good question and that's mostly just a legacy of these things these programs and apps exist for a long time so to define some terms encrypted at rest means when it's sitting in a file on your disk is that file just have your messages in it like in text that you can read or is that file encrypted setting aside when you're logged into your account and your disk is unlocked even though your disk is technically encrypted

that's for like when someone takes your computer and unplugs it from the wall and runs away with it the bits on the disk are encrypted so that unless they can decrypt the disk to boot from it or log in with it they can't get those bits set that aside once they are logged in on your computer and the disk is unlocked and the operating system is booted and they're in your account then there are files on the disk which may or may not be encrypted if you look inside those files are your messages just there and readable or is that file itself filled

with essentially gibberish because it's encrypted you want the data to be encrypted at rest which means the file even if I give you my messages database you can't read it because it's all encrypted and who can read it the messages app can read it by getting keychain entries that only belong to the messages app that no other app can see and there's no permission for that there's no permission I believe for let me see keychain entries that belong to other apps that would be bad like only the messages

database file that's probably less to be honest a SQLite file somewhere on the Mac they should be encrypted at rest it should be in little encrypted disk images or whatever solution they want to do for this if that stuff was encrypted at rest an AI agent with full disk access would have the privilege of reading a gibberish file that it cannot decrypt and then it would have to find a way to find a security flaw to get the keychain access to decrypt or whatever so I'm not saying it's a solution but that might be better

than making full disk access harder for everybody to use harder for developers to deal with harder for AI agents to deal with but what if they couldn't get at

the

and approve and blah blah blah yeah I mean that's the it goes unsaid but we should mention it again dialogue fatigue the more people just go leave me alone go it is self defeating because you're like what will make it secure we just need a few more dialogues bro and it's counterproductive and this is a known anti-pattern of security it's like you know like when you hear it you're like it does make

me next week it's like but yeah but once you have decided no that screenshot app it's fine I want it to keep it forever you have no mechanism to make that happen you're going to get bugged about like the second you go from oh I'm glad this reminded me to please stop reminding me it's just forever please stop reminding me you know so they definitely need better controls of this and on the AI agent front like what if I want to dedicate a Mac mini to an AI agent and have it do stuff for me or whatever it's a huge headache because the security system on

macOS is made for human beings every part of it like when I mentioned before like oh when the user drags

click on accessibility except it's been renamed in macOS 27 it's called something else now and then find the app and if it's not there hit the plus button and go the open save dialog box and find the app and drag it into all that stuff that's for humans to do so much so that a lot of the dialogues you

except by trying to do a thing that requires it and then it throws up a dialogue and you as the user have to say okay and by the way those dialogues are not visible to AI agents running on the system they're only visible to humans that they like they're they're masks from the accessibility structure of things in such a way that the agents can't see and click those like

things that appear on the screen that you have to say okay to cannot be seen and therefore cannot be acted upon by AI agents which means that if you want to run like a headless Mac mini that's doing stuff very often that headless Mac mini will not be able to progress because there's something up on the screen that it can't see that requires you to connect through screen sharing and click on it does this sound familiar Marco a little bit this gets into the second thing which is like what if you're managing a bunch of headless Mac mini servers now

you're like why is this computer not doing stuff oh what was your thing it wanted you to click okay to say yes you've upgraded to Mac iOS 27 software update complete it was that and granted an AI agent could see that and click through it but like this is all part of the same thing which is the needs to run a Mac without a person in front of it in specific scenarios where you want that to work mac OS is very

hostile to that it doesn't lend itself to that easily out of the box it is almost impossible there's lots of blockers where it's like you

imagine if that thing throws up a dialogue that AI agents can't see every seven days that you have to click okay to you'd have to have some automation that goes through all your mac and say yes I know this app has full disk access yes it's fine every seven days and if you miss it the app is blocked until you go through and click the dialogue and it's very much like MDM of how do I set up all these computers and have them install the OS or whatever and I know this is probably better for follow up or whatever but I wanted to make any comments on the various bits of

advice from the people who are MDM experts have been sending his way based on his experience with MDM no I mean not really I think what I've mostly seen is people saying A why didn't I join the giant like I think it's a reddit community like the Mac admins like there's some there's a giant community of people why didn't I join that and post there and I have no good answer except I didn't feel like going through all of that when AI could just

tell me answers that I needed and the second most common feedback was oh and by the way and just a little bit more on that I don't have an amazing history of posting to a new community and getting helpful responses sorry internet you have a bad track record in that area so that's another reason why the idea didn't even cross my mind to go join some giant community and post a newbie question because historically the internet and its communities have not been kind in that kind

of situation so yeah sorry but then also it was a lot of like well why don't you use a real MDM because all the things you complained about the real MDMs can do it okay not helpful when you know why don't you use something different as opposed to like well I was using Apple's built in business thing because it's built in and my needs are pretty small and it's free and all of the other ones that maybe have like a little bit more intricate settings and everything those cost a lot of money

and that wasn't worth it for this use case so that's why but the responses I got some of them were very nice in tone and very helpful many of them were not so it kind of reinforces that that first point so that's that's all yeah so I saw the ATP feedback I saw it as well and I think like part of the part of the frustration is like oh Macs are not made for automation or whatever and they're like oh I automate Macs all day you're just using the wrong automation

it doesn't necessarily negate the point that Macs aren't designed for automation because I do feel like the good products that do this are incredibly complex having been subject to these products when I worked my jobby jobs because they were all running on my Mac various different brands of them some of which are even sponsored ATP in the past some of them do amazing things but I always feel for those companies because the amount of support they get from Apple doing those amazing things always

we'll really just battling against an OS and a vendor that wants to support them but not that much and then sometimes there'll be a major new version of macOS that will have some horrendous bug that totally breaks their ability to automate some part that's essential and they have to figure out how to do it because their customers want to upgrade eventually to the new version of

macOS for a variety of reasons and the MDM vendor is like you can't upgrade yes because Apple broke x y and z and we have to figure out a way to hack around I mean that's just part of working on any platform but they're in a very difficult situation because the things they're doing like when you have to work around like there's a layout bug and some new control like there's lots of options

figure out a way to do that it's not just a matter of I have to make a custom control it's like I'm stuck I have no way to do this like just like super duper with like when Apple breaks stuff having to do with it's it's one piece of software that's allowed to make bootable systems now when they break that super duper has no recourse they just have to like beg and plead with Apple or try to do something heroic so I do feel for these companies but yeah like those products are complicated and extremely powerful and it takes heroic efforts to make them and as you pointed out last time we talked about this Marco

expensive often much more expensive than the free Apple thing that you're using and yeah you get what you pay for but like they're made for companies where paying a couple bucks per computer per month is not that big a deal compared to the other expenses but for a single person operation with no employees and a significant number of Macs that they have to manage it does start to add up especially if you need none of the features except for please set up this Mac with Mac OS so I don't have to in a

non automated way like it's amazing that it's possible and these products are great and powerful and I think a lot of people heard when Marco was complaining about this was like you can't automate Macs which if your job is modern Macs you're like what the hell of course you can automate Macs I can't automate

if Apple supported this better it would be better for these big companies too because I'm sure they wish they had better vendor support from Apple as well I'm sure they wish Apple gave them more capabilities and broke fewer things and generally catered to their needs more like every developer thinks right so yeah and maybe this is you know it feels so long ago that we were talking about the AI RAM dividend

to refresh everyone's memory Apple added RAM to their Macs and you know they do that periodically anyway but it was long overdue and everyone was like they're adding this because you can't run Apple intelligence with two little RAM so they put more RAM on all their phones and all their Macs and yay it's the Apple intelligence RAM dividend that was short lived now we have AI doing the opposite of making ram really expensive uh but in a similar

vein there are certain parts of the software ecosystem including involving apple where people were like there's a thing i've always wanted and the vendor apple whoever was never doing it but now all of a sudden ai agents want it and the vendor did it immediately to empower the agents to do the thing and sometimes it's a thing like i don't care if ai agents use this whether it's like a new api or a new service or a new whatever i'm just glad they added it because now i get to use it and i am wondering

if apple eventually gets a clue in this area that the fact that ai agents are stymied by apple's stupid security may cause apple to rethink its approach and that will benefit not just ai agents but actual humans who are also annoyed by the lack of options um and we don't have time to go into more of them but like imagine if you had control over how your mac behaved and how granular the stuff was and if you could say stop reminding me and stuff like that like it's not a consumer facing feature

but kind of like the uh mdm stuff the ability to do this the ability to say you are a headless mac running ai agents and i'm going to turn off all the controls and no i don't mean turning off system integrity protection like more granular controls where you can say what it can and can't do and that it wouldn't bother you after you made those decisions that would be amazing so watch for that in three to five years all right thank you to our sponsor this episode coax and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join one of the

many perks of membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic this week on overtime we'll be talking about app zapper 3000 the new app and the delicious generation that it references uh join to listen atp.fm slash join 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 oh it was accidental oh it was

accidental john didn't do any research marco and casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental oh it was accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into mastodon you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss

M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E Ante Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long So as Casey breezed by earlier I woke up in Virginia this afternoon Or this morning rather

Yeah Yeah so I forced Casey To go to another concert This time It was a fish concert Twas indeed You know my recollection which we have long since established Is garbage But I feel like I said to you at some point Hey you know fish is coming

You know- I'm not a good-A-S

Barbecue spot in the

I'm not a

This venue This is the Allions I don't know how to pronounce it I don't know how you say it The travel insurance people As it turns out Travel insurance You know one of life's extended warranties Is very profitable So they can build stadiums Amphitheaters rather There we go So they The way it's arranged Is there's like the general admission pit In front of you And then Right behind the pit Is the first row of like regular seats But it's elevated up above the pit Such that If you have one of those seats

Your feet are like near the pit people's backs Or shoulders who were standing there So you are sitting like almost a full person above the pit So that if you have that front row of seats Not only do you have a perfectly clear view Because you're like a whole person above everyone there You could even sit down And have a perfectly clear view And you are a great distance away from the stage So that you're not like right on top of them But you're close enough still

That you can still enjoy like the whole light show And you're still close enough to see everybody It is I think it might be my favorite concert venue That I've ever been to Because if you can get that front row It's just the best seats you'll ever have And that's what we had for Goose And because I found those seats on StubHub To get for this FISH show I was like oh my god We have to go Because look at these seats I found them again Yeah and when Marco said a minute ago A great distance

What he meant by that was an excellent distance Yes Not a large distance And so yeah I was looking As I was watching the show last night I feel like when we were standing We were approximately Vertically speaking eye to eye With the band You know maybe they were a little bit above us Maybe a little bit above them But roughly eye to eye And like Marco said Above the entire pit It's really an incredible place To watch a show Because not only if you're old Like we are Not only can you sit down if you'd like But there's that rail right there

That you can lean on And so you can kind of put a lot of your weight On your hands Instead of on your feet For three straight hours It was So my review of Fish Is basically as follows It's pretty good Hey Alright That's what I got I'll take it I don't think that this is something I would seek doing Like if Fish was here And Marco was not like Hey guess what we're going I don't think I would go But if Marco said to me Hey Fish is here And we're going I would say Okay Sounds good

So it was good There There was The first set It was the same situation as Goose Which really I should say Goose is the same situation as Fish Where there was a set A set break Of like 20-30 minutes Another set And then An astonishingly short Encore break It was like 60 seconds I think probably Because they were bumping up Against curfew And then Like a 10-15 minute encore And then that was that And the first set I thought was pretty good The second set Opened with a song

Whose name I've heard 10 times In the last 12 hours And they've already lost Life-saving gun Thank you Life-saving gun Is that right? Yep Okay Life-saving gun That song Went for like 41 minutes We'll put the set list In the show notes I am not opposed To a long song In fact Some of my favorite Goose tracks Or performances I should say Are 30-ish minutes That one kind of lost me For a little bit If I'm honest But the funny thing is You know I asked Marco On the way Well obviously Marco asked me What I thought

And I asked him On the way out And I would like To hear your expanded version But the short short version Of what Marco said On the way out Of the concert Was that was really Really good And by pure circumstance As we were almost At the car I heard my name Shouted at me Which was fairly unusual And it's dark And my eyes are tired And dry And I couldn't see Who the heck Was shouting at me Happy shouting Not angry shouting I couldn't see Who was shouting at me And as it turns out As I realized Who it was That was looking at me

And gesturing Or whatever I walked a few paces That way And I realized It's my friends Matt and Jade Who I hadn't seen In years And I knew Were really into fish Well I bring all this Up to say You know We introduced Marco And blah blah blah And I knew That the two of them Could speak the language And Marco Obviously could speak The language And within seconds What I heard was Womp womp womp womp Womp womp womp womp Womp womp womp But it was the effusive Version of that Because they were all Like Oh my god Did you see this And what about that

It was adorable And I very much enjoyed Being a fly on the wall When that was happening But what did you think Of the show I do think As you mentioned The 41 minute long Lifesaving gun Before the show Casey was asking me Like you know Kind of what to expect And I was telling him I'm like Well you already know What Goose is like live Goose is basically Following Fish's format For their shows Very closely So yeah You have The first set 20 minute break Second set Brief break Encore And he's like

Are the songs really long And I'm like Well It's generally similar To Goose songs You know Most songs Maybe you get 10 minutes out of them Some of them Are a little shorter Some of them Go a little longer Some of them They will occasionally Maybe once per tour They'll expand one out Into like a half hour Well Literally like you know Two hours after I tell him that We get We get the 41 minute song This is the longest song I've ever seen them play live Like I haven't gone to That many shows But it's definitely The longest one

I've seen live And I was like And by the time They you know Bring it back around At the end of Whatever that was And they start You know Playing like the You know The main riff Of Lifesaving Gun again To end it I was like Oh yeah We're still in that Like they have I like forgot Where we were Basically Like in You know After that long And I'm like And I kept looking over Casey I'm like Because you know The first set The first half of the show

It was much more like High energy jams Like just really going at Like very Everything very melodic And I had told him I'm like You know Kind of like The way I describe Fish versus Goose I mean They're not Their actual musical style Is more different Than you might think But the way I kind of Describe them in short Is you know Fish like The highs are higher And the lows are lower They go a lot more directions It can get a lot

A lot more experimental In a way And Goose You know As Goose develops And gets more experience And gets more You know Just kind of develops Their sound Like they are Getting more experimental Than they were But Goose is generally like It stays closer to the rails You know You can It maybe doesn't stay On the rails But you can You can still see The train As you walk away You know Fish like Has gone You know To the next town over And then will find Their way back To the train tracks Like they They really go

A much further direction But This was like The In this The middle of this 41 minute song And kind of The surrounding You know Bits They really went Off the deep end In a few ways And I kept looking Over at Casey Like is he still Having an okay time Is he still awake Yeah like this is This is the more Challenging part Of the show Maybe for him And then they brought it back And you know And kind of went back On the rails For the rest of the show But I would say You know From my point of view As a Fish fan

This was I was very happy With this show I think it was The best one I've seen Since the The Sphere shows That I saw Two years ago I really enjoyed this show It was very very good And I told him Like listen Like as we were coming out I'm like this was This is a very good Representation It's not like If he had a terrible time I wouldn't be like Well this was a bad show Try it again Like no This was a good show And this was a good Representation of A Fish show And so If you like this You like Fish

If you don't like this You don't like Fish And it sounds like You liked it okay Yeah I think I liked it okay Is reasonable Again I would not I would not bristle If you said You know Let's do it again I would probably Even be enthusiastic But that being said I don't foresee myself Saying you know Let me put on some fish Right now Or you know Where's Fish coming nearby Maybe I'll go without Marco And I don't mean that I don't mean that In a turdy way No no

It was good It was enjoyable As I've said to Marco And some local friends Of mine as well Like I'm a pretty big sucker For almost any kind Of live music So almost anything I'm going to end up saying You know that was pretty good And I think this was An example of that A couple of other quick notes That are One is related One is not I brought with me And I can't remember The last time I've done this And I don't know What possessed me to do it But I brought with me Foam What do you call them Earplugs

For the first time in years When I've gone to a concert Because as it turns out I've been to more concerts Recently than I have In a while And I didn't wear them For the first Or use them or whatever For the first song And for the most part I didn't find it To be that uncomfortable But there are definitely Moments that I was like Woof And then I think It was after the first song I put them in And you know what was weird About the experience Was that at the end of the show My ears didn't hurt They weren't ringing And I felt pretty good Imagine that So I got to potentially Introduce this

Thought technology Into future shows Yeah it's nice Having hearing protection During concerts It turns out The fidelity was not near as good With them in of course And these were not Like bespoke concert Ear plugs Or anything like that They were just Crappy foam ear plugs I don't even know What the provenance of them was But it did feel pretty nice Not to have You know ringing ears And not to feel like I'm in a In a In a fish tank afterwards But wildly unrelated to that Very very briefly Marco brought two gifts to me When he came down

Which is wholly unnecessary But very kind of him Marco brought the Affirmation And KVM But Marco also brought Something else Marco would you like to Tell me what you brought me I will But first of all Let me just say One more time I have tried So many concert ear plugs And in fact Since our last recording I've actually been to Two concerts We also went as a family To go see Weezer Last week I forgot about that Yeah yeah I've seen Weezer live You know where At WWDC WWDC Yeah they played the Beer Bash That was so sad The WWDC Beer Bash

Is a terrible gig for bands Because you're playing Through the backs Of a bunch of nerds Who are trying to talk There were some Weezer fans Who were into it though Yeah but I was shocked How good of a show Weezer put on Because I saw them Many many years ago Like right after college Because I've always been A huge Weezer fan And well In the 90s I was a huge Weezer fan I haven't honestly Kept up with them recently But I was shocked How good of a show They put on Because they used to be A much lower energy Concert performing band And their concerts I don't think Were very good

In the past years But they have Grown And expanded And they put on A really good show And as an old Weezer nerd I was incredibly pleased With some of the songs I heard Like they played Most of Pinkerton Some of the Blue album A bunch of the new stuff Some of which I knew Some of which I didn't And even like They played long time Sunshine Which is a B-side From a million years ago That I never thought I would see live Like it was a great show Great set Great performance So I highly recommend Weezer Anyway

So in these two concerts In a week I got some new Like audiophile earplugs To try out again And I had a bunch of extras For my family In case they wanted them And stuff And I have once again Come back to The best concert earplugs By far Are the AirPods Pro In transparency mode But with loud sound Reduction enabled I've said this before In the show A while ago The settings and defaults Have changed over time By default

When I got the AirPods Pro 3s Loud sound reduction Was off And they have to You have to jump through A weird part of the Accessibility settings To turn it on Like it shows up As a table row In certain areas of the settings But tapping it Does nothing And it's just like It's like It's like macOS permissions Like you just have to know To go somewhere else To go turn it on Like I don't know Why you can't just Turn it on and off there But that is by far The best concert earplugs Both in fidelity Of what you're hearing And honestly To me In comfort

However There is a difference Between the AirPods 3 and 2 That I think is pretty important The AirPods Pro 2 Is the better concert earplug For most people Because It doesn't actually seal as well And I think the way It is reducing loud sounds Might be a little bit simpler Let me just quickly go over this I swear this won't take too long So The What loud sound reduction Appears to be doing Is What I would In my You know Limited understanding

Call a multiband compressor When something loud Is detected Above a certain threshold Without If it doesn't want to Pass it through In transparency mode To your ears At that same loudness Which should hurt your ears It basically Ducks down the volume Seemingly of just Those frequencies That it's detecting Are peaking past the limit Now Now in a concert Those frequencies Are usually The lead instrument The lead guitar And the vocals With the AirPods Pro 3

It seems to be doing A more surgical job Of that filter And so At a concert With the AirPods Pro 3 In this mode The reduced loud sounds feature Seems to Cut out The vocals and guitars More than everything else Which makes it honestly A little hard To enjoy a concert Because that's the part That really gets you going What you want What I want Is For any kind of Tweak or setting Or mode That in that case Where it's Ducking a loud sound

Duck everything Duck the entire volume Of everything Equally That would be so Much better For a concert And the The reason the AirPods Pro 2 Are better In my opinion First of all I do think They're more comfortable Still But also They don't seal As well as the 3's And maybe That Or a combination Of like that And maybe the fact That they're doing Simpler or less Processing On like the Loud sound filter

For whatever reason The Pro 2's Let more of the Guitar and vocals More evenly through It's still not doing Like a totally dumb Sound reduction Like what I want But it's closer to that So I have found In even like An A B testing Them both Like I'll do like You know Half the concert With one And switch to the other It's very clear to me The AirPod Pros Are still better Than all the best Earplugs out there And I have I have like the Minuendo ones That are like Almost the same price As the AirPod Pros Highly recommended

I have the Sennheiser ones I have all like the The Loop And the Eros And all the different ones That are recommended By like Wirecutter And all the NPR tests And everything None of them sound Like anything good at all The Minuendos Come the closest But they cost almost As much as the AirPod Pros 2 And are still not The same audible quality But AirPod Pros Definitely still the best But I wish Apple would give me A mode Or a tweak To that loud sound reduction That would reduce All sounds equally

And not just try to Notch out the filter That is triggering it Okay What I brought Casey The other gift I brought Casey Oh yeah We were in a 41 minute Sidebar Yes Going back to the To the melody here I also brought Casey A 3D printed model Of the iPhone Duo I made one Like when that one Floated around the internet Maybe three or four months ago I printed that one out And we talked about it And playing with it Well Since the introduction video Of the iPhone Duo And the release of

Like its actual specs People have made Better models of it That more accurately Represent its actual dimensions The actual screen size And shape And everything else So I printed out one for myself And I'm like This is actually really useful As a developer Because you know As I'm working on my Duo adaptations for my apps I'm like I kind of want to see Like how big is it Like does it How does it feel in the hand What can you reach I printed one out for myself And I'm like Oh I'm going to see Casey tomorrow I'll make one for him too So I printed one out for him too And that's That is the second thing I brought in And I got to tell you

This thing is Well first of all As a trinket As a 3D printed trinket Extremely cool Very great fidget device Which means I'm screwed When my actual phone gets here Because I'm going to want to Fidget with it constantly Get the AppleCare Yeah exactly For you I mean you need it For multiple reasons You're going to drop it On the first day But Don't even get me started No this thing The Fidelity I'll ask you to link The If you can find it If you can link The Yeah the model The model Thank you Yeah

Link it in the show notes But the fidelity Of this model Is incredibly impressive Like it has a Protruded Like lock button It has What you could If you squint You could say Is a USB-C port And actually I just plugged in A USB-C cable Into the faux USB-C port It fits perfectly Come to think of it That's awesome Is it taking a charge?

It is not taking a charge It has the volume buttons On the top It has grills On the top And the bottom Like it has the camera Plateau And the flash And whatever Oh I get Instead of microphone I forget what else Is back there But anyways It is a Astonishingly good Facsimile Of the real thing It has the Apple logo Which is inset A little bit But the point The reason I bring this up Is because now I've been able to like Hold this thing And fiddle with it And I feel like

It's I feel like This is the right Form factor From what I can tell But insofar as Like the book style And approximately This size And blah blah blah Because it's A fair bit wider Than what I'm used to Maybe not a fair bit That's a bit of an exaggeration It's like 10 to 15% wider Than my current phone I'd say And granted This doesn't have Like real bezels on it So maybe I'm Not seeing the screen For what it actually Is But it feels like

Reachability Is not Perfect Like I would have Thought something That's quite a bit Squatter Would make the Far upper left Corner more reachable And I wouldn't say It's that different Than the Phone I have now But The interior display Like well First The outside display Is a touch bigger Than I thought It would be actually And the inside one I feel like Is a touch smaller Than what I expected I think that's a Casey issue I don't think That Apple's misled us I don't think That the marketing

Is bad or wrong Or anything like that I think this is My mental model Of it was a little Askew But the inside Does feel like It will be a Two-handed device First of all But secondly This feels like It's a really good Compromise The big problem I have with this Is Marco When he handed it To me After a couple Of minutes Said put it In your pocket And I didn't Pick up what You were putting Down at first But I put it In my pocket I was like Oh yeah It feels good Now granted As you pointed Out this is Considerably lighter Than the real Thing will be But in terms

Of you know Physical shape And size Felt pretty good In the pocket But then you Blew my mind With the next Thing you said I told you to Sit down Yeah sit down Before you drop it So if you put it In a left pocket Which is where I've always kept My phone The corners The sharp You know It has two Soft corners And two sharp Corners And the two Sharp corners As long as you Put your phone Screen in Like because You're not a Monster of course The two sharp Corners then are Your front corners Of the phone It's going to Rip your jeans Like and if You remember

Like remember Like back in The day You would have Like the iPhone 4 Shaped imprint In your jeans Pocket Like where It wore away The edges And you could Always tell Like oh Those were the Pants that I I bought those Pants during The iPhone 4 Generation And then you Know your Later pants That were more Recent you Could say oh The phone Imprint on these Is a little bit Bigger that Must have been From the iPhone 6 Generation Like you Could tell You could Age your Pants based On what Shape and size The phone Imprint in The pocket Was Well the Duo is Going to Have its Version of That for Sure

Because not Only is it Thick And a Very noticeably Different shape But it Has like Two Significantly Pointier Corners Than the Other two Corners So I Think this Is for Me like It actually Feels really Weird in the Pocket as a Result I Think it Looks really Weird and And I Think if I'm Going to Spend any Time with The Duo As my Daily Driver For Multiple Reasons You know I think I'm Going to Have to Switch to A right Side Phone Person Like Change the Pocket It's In Change the Hand I

Use to Operate It Because it Is so Much a Right Handed Phone Device That There's Multiple Things That are Going to Drive That Conversion I Think You're Probably Right And I Feel For Lefties I'm Sure That's Going to Be Frustrating Now I Think If The Roll If I If This Was A Left Hand Device I'm Sure I Could Make It Work I Do Use My My Phone In My Left Hand Probably I Would Say I'm Like 60 40 Would Be My Guess With My Dominant Hand My Right Hand Being 60 Maybe 70 30 I Don't Know But I Think I

Could Handle It But Yes I Agree With You This Is Definitely A Right Handed Device For Better Or Worse Yeah But It Is Very It's Very Useful To Handle This Model Obviously The Real One Is It Might Be A Little Bit Different But This Is Damn Close Yeah Yeah It Allows You To Feel The Form Factor It Allows You To See The Screen And The Screen Size And Everything And And And It Is It Is Really A Tricky Size For Reachability But I Do Think Based On The Reports Of Everyone Who Has

Used Phones Of This Dimension Like The Samsung Ripoff Of This Everyone Loves It When They Use It And That's Probably What I've Heard About Foldables Generally Is Once People Use Foldables They Tend To Love Them But It Is A Big Expense And It's Not For Everybody But Like I Think This Feels I'm Excited About It It Feels Really Good It Feels Really Weird In A Bunch Of Ways But I Think It's Going To Be I Think People Are Going To Like It And I Think I Think I Do Want To

Give It A Shot As A Daily Driver Even If It Means changing The The I've Ever I Totally hear That No But All All Told Oh I Forgot One Important Thing That We Did This Morning Marco Slept In I Was Very Jealous I Had Family That I Was Helping Get Off To School Whatever But Eventually We Had A Late Breakfast Together And We Went To Probably My Preferred Of The Two Local Big Old Places I Really Like This Is Not The One That Was Award Winning That We Spoke About I Don't Know Three Or Four

Months Ago But We Went To Cupertino's Which Is Closer To My Side Of Town Don't Be Creepy And Had Some Breakfast And Marco Seemed To Think In The Same Way That I Thought Fish Was Not A Waste Pretty Decent I Feel

How Much John Would Hate Anything That Was Out Of Long Island Correct You Don't Realize I'm Here Massachusetts Where The Bagel Situation Is Grim So I Can't Imagine It It Will Be Worse Yeah But I Would Say That It Was Better Than I Expected However That Bagel Was Not Baked Today Even Brugger's Gets That Part Right I Know I I'm A Bagel Expert And I

They Can Be Really Good And I Used To Work At Brugger's In High School I Think Brugger's Makes New York Style Bagels Pretty Much And When They're Fresh They're Great And I Have No Problem With Those Bagels And I Don't Think You Need To Be In New York To Make New York Bagels It's Not Like You Need The Water Those Are Mostly Disproven You Just Need To Make It You Know The New York Style And With New York Quality Standards And And This Place They Mostly Got It But Even

In New York There's Occasionally A Bagel Place That Does Not Bake Fresh Every Morning And If You Go There Early In The Morning Enough You'll Get A Bagel From Yesterday And They Won't Tell You But You Can Tell You It's Obvious When You Get A Bagel From Yesterday It Should Be Against The Law It Should You're Right And That's What This Was It Was Fresh I Think It Was Fresh But I Can't I Can't Prove That By Any It Was Not I 100% Guarantee You That Bagel Was Not Baked Today But If It Would Have Been Really Good

Still Considered A Victory That You Weren't Like Oh I'll Go With That