John Siracusa
Appearances
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I am back on the beach today, and I'm so happy. The beach in September is beautiful, because it's still pretty warm, some of the restaurants are still open, and there's no one here. Because as soon as the school year starts, everyone stops coming here. The workers who work locally here call it Tumbleweed Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, because...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
uh yeah i've got it back the issue has not recurred it's been fine i actually heard from a couple of listeners who wrote in uh who said that they actually had similar problems with like you know some high voltage error message with their bmw ix on its first day and then they got it fixed and they never saw it again so i'm hoping that's going to happen to me uh otherwise still loving the car it's still really great there's nothing more to report there is it's now gonna i hope it's now gonna be just a boring car ownership story for the next three years
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And then I'll pick something else or the same thing again or buy this one. Who knows? But I look forward to going back to my car not being a point of flux. I've had various neck and shoulder tension issues over the last couple of years. I've been working through some weird little issues. During all the Rivian drama, I couldn't even turn my head all the way to one side. It was really bad.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
My whole shoulder blade was all tense. I went to a physical therapist and fixed it a little bit, but I had to go back the next week to fix it more. As soon as I got the new car... It was like a light switch turned off there, too. It's like it was just all that stress was just melted away as it just started working.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
We are sponsored this episode by 1Password Extended Access Management. So quick question. Do your end users always, and I mean always without exception, work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps? Yeah, I didn't think so. So next question. How do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? 1Password has the answer to this question.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Extended Access Management. 1Password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device because it solves the problems that traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. So check it out at 1Password.com slash ATP. That's 1Password.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to 1Password Extended Access Management for sponsoring our show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And it just like didn't it wasn't causing all this problem and distraction in my life.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
it's just it literally is like a light switch like labor day weekend massive you know crowded everything and then literally like tuesday just tumbleweeds blow through the town like it's no one is here um so it is uh you know we're not able to spend a ton of time here because we also are bound now by the mainland school year but uh wow it's it's so it's so nice here it's like walking through like one of those like deserted video game levels fewer zombies
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
it's a system that doesn't scale very well like it it seems really great like probably most of the year probably most days most of the time it's fine like i still honestly like i don't love the apple store triage system because like yeah i don't love that you know you have to walk in you know okay hey hey hey hey you want to check in with me right at the front door here um oh you want to go that oh go stand over at that table over there it's like okay well
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So there is a queue. You're just... It's just confusing and you can't really tell what it is. And the queue is, I would say, kind of sloppily enforced enough that I feel like a lot of times it is serviced out of order. Because it's like... who's waiting at this table?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Oh, you gotta go see so-and-so in the blue shirt, but oh, and then, you know, you're put into the system as, like, you know, a person with a red-striped shirt, and, you know, there could be someone else with a red-striped shirt get served first, and, like, am I sitting at this table or the one next to it? Like, it's such a vague system that you as the customer feel all the time, like,
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
have I been lost? And even when you haven't been, but, and oftentimes you have been, but even when you haven't been, you can't see that. Like you, you have no feedback as the customer of like, is, is a system working as intended? Are they, am I still in the queue?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Because the thing is like, even, even the now quote, small phone is a big phone. Like, and it got bigger. Like, It got even bigger. And this is just going to keep happening. Obviously, that's the pattern of the market. It's like the market pushes phone sizes up. People buy them. And it drives the small phone people nuts because they're like, you're going further away from our needs, which is true.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But also, the problem is the market just keeps buying bigger and bigger phones also. So the small phone people are kind of being outvoted by most of the buyers in the market. And so...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
this is going to keep happening like even a lot of max people are like switching back with this one because like they just keep because the max got bigger too yes they keep making it bigger like eventually you're like okay this is actually beyond what i actually want and i actually have a i have a story with this for a little bit for later we'll we'll get to that
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I did the thing in the Apple Store app on the phone where I say replace this phone on my plan. And it was simple. Now, granted, I use AT&T. So everything is, you know, mediocre, but it worked better than yours. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I mean, I will say for whatever it's worth, my Apple Watch cellular transfers never work. The only way I ever get the watch to work is to cancel the plan from AT&T's website for the old watch and then have the new watch start over again. And even then, usually it's like it tries to activate, it fails a couple times, the plan shows up in the Apple Watch cellular section as not in use.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I gotta reboot sometimes a couple times. I gotta do some dances to get that to work.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
No, it's not getting better. But the phone transfer, by the way, just before we leave this, the phone transfer for me was perfectly fine. Like the eSIM moved over, like it activated just fine in a reasonable amount of time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, I used a cable and I used both. I used two of my like fan Peltier element fans that are the active cooling mag safe.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I think it's the only way. No, it'll offer to move it for you. It just doesn't usually work with cellular for some reason.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
We are sponsored this episode by Trade Coffee. Now, if you make coffee at home, get ready to discover how much better it can be with Trade. As America's number one specialty coffee marketplace, Trade doesn't actually make any of its own coffees.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
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Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
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Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
They partner with all these roasters across the country, and they have made over 435,000 perfect coffee matches to date. And if you're not satisfied with your first one, they'll replace it for free. So it is a great service. I've used it myself for a long time because it's just, you know, not only are the recommendations great, but you just get such a variety with Trade.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Like, I would never have found all these different roasters individually before.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
and it's you know it can be different every week if you want or if you want to you know kind of repeat some stuff you can tell them what you like you'll get more of that but like i just love letting them go off and find good stuff for me and they always do a great job so it is a wonderful service check it out today you can get your coffee at home made better with trade
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Head to drinktrade.com slash ATP and you'll receive your first bag of coffee for free. And it's super easy to control this. You know, if you've got to go away for a while or you want to pause or cancel or suspend or resume or increase or decrease, it's all super easy. Don't worry about that. Check it out today. Make your coffee at home better. Go to drinktrade.com slash ATP.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Once again, you get your first bag free with that link. Thank you so much to Trade for sponsoring our show. All right, camera control. I've used it a decent amount. I think it's a good idea. The actual usage of it, I think they're going to need to tweak a little bit here and there with some of the timings and settings and tolerances and things like that. But I think overall, I like it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
It is extremely useful for me just as a camera launch button. I know a lot of people have been using the action button for that over the past year.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And that's totally fine, and there are some benefits and drawbacks to that. As I mentioned in previous episodes, I use the action button for flashlight, which I actually use a decent amount, although I actually – I am happy to report that as I progress through my denial of –
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
that i really should be wearing progressive reading glasses all the time because my close-up reading distance is not great anymore and so but my my distance distance viewing is fine um and so what i really should be doing is wearing progressive reading glasses that have no correction on top and reading correction on the bottom um i have yet to find any that i don't hate so instead what i'm doing is mostly not wearing reading glasses and just holding stuff out really far to see it um but
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But occasionally this system is not sufficient for something, and the phone has a magnifier feature built in. It has for a very long time where it just basically is like a quick little view that uses the camera to show you a magnified view of whatever you're looking at.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
It's great especially when you have the modern ultra-wide lenses that have autofocus, and so they can actually get very close with macro distances to view things like that camera. Tiny little print on Apple's power adapters and stuff. One of the things I tried to view recently was they have the new MagSafe pucks that charge at 25 watts, and they look almost identical to the old ones.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Apparently, I heard from John Gruber, actually, that apparently they are slightly different.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
uh narrower like which is going to be really annoying when i try to fit it into anything that's made to like you bring your magsafe adapter into this 3d mount or whatever like that's going to be annoying i gotta verify that the radius is smaller yeah like apparently the actual size of the circle is slightly smaller so it's not going to fit in you know docks and stuff that are made to you know build an apple's magsafe pucks but i gotta verify that there's some tiny light gray text on a slightly darker gray background that you could also right
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
so what i was trying to do is like okay how do how do i tell if i'm holding one of these in my hand how do i tell which one it is because they now you know the the modern magsafe pucks now with the you know the faster charging i believe they're 10 bucks more they're 40 bucks instead of 30 bucks and they have a different entire model number but if you're just looking at it it's not obvious like and they do have a tiny
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
little bit of text printed on the metal right next to where the cable goes into the metal ring and I could not see this for the life of me so anyway all this is to say the magnifiers you could feature and what I've actually done since I have the action button as the flashlight now with iOS 18 you can replace the two circular 3d touch buttons on the bottom of the lock screen the ones that used to be flashlight and camera and
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
um so i've actually replaced the flashlight one with the magnifier i'm happy to announce i have reached that point in aging where i'm going to be using the magnifier frequently enough on my phone i've already i just did this like the other day and i've already i've already used it like three times you can change it to a triple tap too that's the one that that's the real old person move you change magnifier to triple tap with accessibility you just tap the back of the phone three times
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I don't need that yet. But certainly having it on the lock screen on a button I was not using anymore is very useful. And then, you know, and so similarly, like you can have the camera, you know, if you if you don't want to use Apple's camera app anymore or if you only want to launch it from.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
the camera control then you can reassign the camera circle button on the lock screen too to something else like this is a whole new area of customization that i actually find quite quite nice but anyway all that is to say uh the camera control therefore being my camera launch button will free up one of those spots for me and so using it as that so far over the last couple days i have enjoyed it it has proven useful to me the only thing is that so far um
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I had a very hard time figuring out how to navigate the little tools menu inside of it. Yep, same.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, I think there's going to be quite a learning curve there. And I think maybe Apple could tweak some of the timings and gestures and things on that to make that a little bit easier over time. Because I have found that the actual pushing of the button to open the camera and to take pictures, that works great.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But I keep finding myself accidentally in some of the little menu modes to the point where I might just turn them off. And the second thing is that as soon as you start using those menu modes, or even I think even just using it for Capture, like just pushing the button to take the picture, it dims or hides all of the camera UI on screen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, and it keeps it hidden for a few seconds after you hit the picture. And so even if you want to just review the picture you just took, you have to wait two or three seconds for it to fade those controls back in. It's kind of annoying. I see what they're going for. It just becomes a camera with this control. Okay, that's a nice idea. That's very precious.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
In real life, I want those controls back immediately. So, like, as soon as I'm done taking the picture, I want those controls. Or even if I'm just stuck in the weird, you know, camera control menu thingy and I can't figure out how to zoom back out or whatever, just keep the controls on screen at all times. Because, yeah, it's great to have them in the camera control.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
It's also great to have them on the screen. And a lot of times you're going to want to switch back and forth between them. So that's something that, like... I think until Apple makes better balances and more usable defaults or more usable behaviors with the camera control, I don't see myself using it for any of those little menu features other than just launching the camera and taking a picture.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I think for those, it's great. It's convenient. The actual implementation of all those little menus and things and the way it hides all the controls in the main screen, that I think needs some iteration to really be useful.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
yeah a few well i mean you know the few people who were left you know we're certainly an eccentric crowd certainly some characters walking around we don't get sent a lot of side quests though but but it is certainly uh certainly some some eccentrics that's that's part of part of one of the one of the best things i love about being here in this weird beach town is that
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, and I think it almost gives me the feeling of when I've designed an interface in Xcode for my iPhone app, and I've been using the simulator for most of the design, and then I run it on the device for the first time. And I pick it up and I try to use it and I instantly feel like, oh, this is all wrong. Like this, this is either too small, too big. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't work right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I've never heard of that before. No, actually, it's something I came up with. So you look at your purchases this fall of your new tech devices that you might have...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
You can tell as soon as you try to use it on the device. Oh, this is wrong. That's kind of how I feel with the camera control. Like, you know, what I was expecting based on how they were describing it, I was kind of expecting this to work a certain way. And then as soon as I get it and I try it, I'm like, oh, this is wrong.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Like, I would actually call it maybe fiddly or, like, you know, oversensitive. And, like, it's not – I don't think I'm, you know, lacking appropriate dexterity in my index finger to be able to use it. And there are some case considerations, which we'll get to in a moment. But I think, like, it's just very finicky to get that right. And what you don't want with your camera controls is imprecision.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Right, and you don't want to accidentally switch modes or overshoot the setting that you were trying to adjust or whatever. It's very sensitive and finicky in the way it operates. And so, again, I think it's a good idea I like how it launches the camera and then takes pictures. Everything else about it, I really don't like.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
frivolously to some degree purchase maybe you could have gone without these tech devices but you you got you have your tech devices and you have the baseline price for the device family so you know if it's the iphone pro that's 9.99 or whatever uh and then you add up whatever you actually spent at checkout or will spend over time with apple care subscriptions or whatever so it's going to include things like sales tax storage upgrades size upgrades cases any kind of accessories you bought when you bought your new your new phone or whatever
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I'll tell you what. So there are settings for camera control. Not many of them. Right now there are three settings. There's what app does it open, launch camera with a single click or double click, which you actually might want, John, if you're having a lot of accidental input.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So the third setting is called, for some reason, it's called clean preview. Clean preview on or off. And it says, light press camera control to quickly make adjustments. Oh, that leaves the menus up when you activate it. Yeah, you're right. It does. Okay. Well, honestly, that solves one of my problems, but not.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
All right. We made it slightly better. All right. I like it better this mode. We'll see if I can actually stick with the other controls. But that is good. Anyway, so let's move on to talk about cases and the camera control. Poor Peak Design.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I love this case. I've been using it now for, I think, three phones in a row now. I don't use it all year, but I use it some of the year, as mentioned. It is my kind of summer case. It's great for if I don't want to use leather because it might get wet in the summer or anyway. So I love the Peak Design case.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
They had drama last year with the action button where, like, they didn't really know it was coming, but they knew something was coming, so they left a cutout. And it turns out the cutout was... It was just... It made it too hard to use it because it was, like, a deep hole and the action button's small, and so it made it too hard to use. So they had this whole thing where they...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Over a few months, they remade the case. They gave free replacements to people who bought the first one. It was a whole thing. I'm sure they lost a ton of money on it, but they're a good company, and they wanted to serve their customers well. I like Peak Design a lot. Anyway, so this year...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I got their case, and it has a cutout, not of the entire case edge, but just like a camera control-shaped valley with sloped sides going into it from the other edges of the phone. You can see it. They have a 360 view on their page. And I tried this on my phone immediately.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
and within two hours i was like this this isn't gonna work no now there's there's there's two problems number one the deep valley it creates does indeed make it difficult to use the camera control like that's it just it makes it much harder to use because it is not a cover but they can't just do a simple cover because you know you can see like the way apple did theirs with like the sapphire cover with the conductive layer like you got to make it work with all those the camera control sensors and
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Um, so, you know, instead of doing some kind of complicated button that they probably didn't even know was possible until Apple released their cases, they just made a hole with like, you know, ramps going into it basically from all sides. Well, those ramps also hurt my finger. Like they form kind of a sharp edge and with, you know, I'm a left-hand phone user.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Add those up. Subtract the base price for the family. That is your Marco Offset. So, you know, for a $1,000 phone, it might be a few hundred bucks. And that is my suggested minimum donation that you consider putting into St. Jude. You know, if you can swing it, that's great. If you can swing more, that's great, too. If you can't swing that, but you can swing $10, $20, good. That's great, too.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And so one of my fingers is like basically resting right there all the time and it's just sharp. Like it just feels bad. Um, So I feel terrible. Like, I got to say, like, Peak Design, like, this is also not good. And I feel so bad for them because I know they're going to have other people saying the same thing. And again, like this, I mean, two years in a row to really screw case makers by Apple.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Like, it's got to be rough for the case makers because, you know, they got to design cases with a bunch of guesses and speculation. And, you know, they got to, like, basically, like,
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
follow the rumor mill and get whatever info they can get and just make a bunch and take a big risk like oh well we think the dimensions of the phone will be this and we think it's going to have a button here and we think the button will work like other buttons but we don't know like and so it's it's a big risk risky business to be in um and and i gotta say i'm i'm again i'm not a fan of the p design case this year and maybe maybe they'll do another one sometime that has like you know a proper cover over it that works with the weird sensors of the button and and maybe that'll be better so i'll keep that in mind but
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
What I did was so as soon as I use this case, I thought, well, I have to go to the Apple store. This this is not going to do like I'm going to get one of Apple's cases today.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
number one i didn't buy apple care and i don't really want to because i keep saying apple care is my case and then i just buy cases anyway and so and i'm spending like that's totally hundreds of dollars on apple care over the years never to use it um so i figure okay you know if i just stop buying it now you know i'll maybe if i if i end up having to have an expensive repair then i'll weigh that against all the savings that i'll have with apple care over the years and decide then whether to start changing my policy or not but anyway um so that's that's the reason
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Um, and so I'm like, all right, I gotta go to the Apple store. I got, I gotta try their cases. Um, so I went to the Apple store and there was another reason I'll mention it in a little bit. Um, but I went to the Apple store and I immediately like, you know, went over to the case while I got, you know, they told me, Oh, go stand over by so-and-so. And I'm like, okay.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And I directly walked to the opposite direction, go over to over the, go over the case walks. I'm like, there's a huge cluster of people waiting over there. Like, I know I'm not going to be the first in line. I have some time and I did. So anyway, everyone's seen these new Beats cases that they have, which are basically just like shiny plastic cases. They are decent.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I would say they come in zero good colors. They do feel very cheap. The outside has not much grip because it's not like a TPU kind of plastic. It's like a shiny shell kind of plastic. So there's no grip to it whatsoever. And I was like, oh, that's kind of not great. I almost bought one because the Beats cases are very light and very thin, which is nice.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But it just it's just like I think it's like a peel case like you can get that for cheaper in better colors from other manufacturers very easily.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Every little bit helps. So, please. And you can actually, as Casey, I believe, mentioned, you can go to the MarcoOffset.com to actually compute...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I noticed that in the store. Actually, that's one of the reasons I didn't buy it because I noticed that when I was just handling the sample ones.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
this amount based on the iPhone purchase for this year but yeah basically look at look at what you tack on to your tech purchases as you know kind of extra money that you don't you know scrutinize too much maybe and that's a pretty good barometer for what you can probably afford to give if you can so help out if you can please it helps a lot and we appreciate it very much so now John I'd mentioned earlier that I was recording or I was I was I was doing a telethon for 12 straight hours did you know anything about that by chance
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, my plan if I bought it, which I didn't, but my plan was to take a magic eraser to the Beats logo on the side and see if I could get rid of it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Anyway, so I ended up, for at least the moment, I ended up with the Apple silicone case. Which is funny. I got it in Lake Green, which is not at all green. Like, it is blue. It is absolutely blue.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But, like, there's nothing about this that is green. But anyway, it's a nice, like, weird middle blue. It's not green. But it's a nice color. Anyway, I ended up with silicone case for now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
When you see it in person, you're like, oh, that's that color? Like, I had to check. I had to, like, pull out the little drawer in the Apple store that it was on and, like, read the boxes to see, like, is this really that color? Yeah. Anyway.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, the reason I always shied away from it in the past was I didn't like that it was so tacky that it was actually difficult to get in and out of pants pockets. That is still the case. I think it might be a little bit less annoying, but maybe I'm just giving up. But it is still annoying to get in and out of pants pockets.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So it's not terrible, but it's not graceful in that way. Also, it does have a bottom lip, and it's fairly thick. So like to do edge gestures, you are running into the silicone a lot. So it is a very protective case in the sense that like, you know, for if you're worried about a case like for actually protecting your phone against drops and stuff, it's probably a pretty good choice for that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And the camera control implementation on all of Apple's cases is, is just great. It just feels like the button got extended. It is still flush with the case, just like it is flush with the phone. The button feels well. It feels right. It works right. It feels and works pretty much exactly the way it does on the bare phone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah. And I mean, geez, I would have loved to have some kind of like Apple premium fabric of some kind to case this year, like something that is not plastic and not silicone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
something that doesn't have a bottom lip apple yeah i mean and so you know the clear case like maybe i might go with that in the future i don't know yet um i i i mean i'm gonna try the silicon case for a while but it is jeans season and it does suck to get it in and out of jeans pockets and i do that many times a day so it's a little annoying try the clear one try try the beats one they are very similar in feel and i think the beats one feels a little bit nicer
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
ah the beats one though like it well i i noticed those fingerprints when i was playing with in the store and i'm like if i made it look that bad in two minutes they're on the clear one too they're just a little bit harder to see well yeah but they but like the silicone you don't see it at all yeah so i don't know i probably stick with silicone for a while until i mean maybe the bull strap won't be really good i don't know but i don't i don't think so like you got that but you haven't opened it yet
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, I think this is going to be similar to last year with the action button. I think this is going to be like a lot of people realizing, oh, no, I've made the wrong case decision. And a lot of case makers realizing, oh, no, we've made the wrong cases. And I think this is going to be a big shakeup year for that. And another good year for Apple cases.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Cynically, you can maybe think maybe that's why they're doing it. But no, I don't think that's the reason. But I do wish that... And, you know, gotta give Apple credit. The Beats cases are new. That's something that kind of came out of nowhere. The way Apple uses the Beats brand, to me, is... sometimes a little bit puzzling, especially in recent years, but hey, some good stuff comes out of it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And so they did add more cases than before. They took away the final moving, okay. They added the Beats ones, okay. Which has no bottom, which shows they still know that's a thing. Yeah, it's fine. I do wonder, are they ever going to try some kind of premium fabric again? I hope they do, because honestly, Apple's work with
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
fabrics and textiles in general on on the watch side has been great they do amazing things over there and part of the reason i like the peak design cases is that they have like the the the rim the edge around the sides is some kind of like plasticky rubbery thing but then the back of the case is really nice fabric and it just it makes a very good feeling in fact when i was at the apple store checking out um the the apple store uh employee who was who was ringing me up
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I was showing it because she was asking about the cases, and I was showing her the Peak Design one, and I let her handle it, and she's like, oh, this feels really nice. Peak Design does very, very good fabric work. So does Apple. They just don't make fabric cases right now. I hope that they revisit that. Obviously, fine woven wasn't it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
um but they make lots of other great fabrics they have over time with the watch bands and everything so i know they can do it uh so i hopefully over time their case lineup continues to evolve and expand because even you know before before the final woven thing it was usually the case that like apples if you wanted like a nice leather case for your iphone apple's leather case was usually either the nicest one you could get or one of the nicest ones you can get yeah
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
um and that's why everyone bought them because like oh well we know they're going to do a good job we you know we we knew it was consistent we knew like you know the buttons would line up it would be good quality it would it would not have weird branding or anything like it would be it would be just a good basic leather case and yeah you know sometimes the corners wouldn't wear out wear as well as you wanted them to or whatever but you know you get the black one and it's pretty safe and you know you kind of knew how to do it it was always a good safe bet if you wanted like a guaranteed pretty good case that you could buy on day one and be pretty sure it'd be the right choice it was the apple leather case
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And I feel like right now we don't have that unless you love silicone, in which case it's the Apple silicone case. But then I don't know what else to say after that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But then the phone just slides off the flat surfaces.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
That's part of the reason I use a case now, because as I mentioned a couple episodes ago, like I tried without a case, I'm on the 15 Pro at the end there, and I kept causing accidental input on the screen. And I'm actually, honestly, I'm finding that problem a little bit with the new watch too. I'll get to that when we get to talk about that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But like, you know, as the screens get pushed out further and further to the edges, that's what happens. You have less space to hold the phone with your fingers without causing input. And it's, it's something that you can get used to, but like, I don't know. Like, I feel like I wasn't really asking for the bezels to get, to get narrower.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Well, I mean, I might argue that, like, since most people appear to use cases, including, yes, we all saw the Johnny Ive picture in the New York Times where there was some article in the New York Times that had a picture of Johnny Ive at some dinner, and it showed him holding up an iPhone in an Apple silicone case.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And everyone's like, oh, my God, look, even Johnny Ive uses a case on his iPhone now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
it was was johnny i wasn't on stage for that though was no i believe it was jobs uh tim cook and eddie q i think yeah and they were all like no they took out their phones they were all naked well guess what uh i've uses a case apparently now in his old age anyway yeah anyway um but yeah like i i would argue that you know since since so many people like i i would assume it's probably a pretty sizable majority of the iphone user base uses a case and
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
then that is what you should be designing for. Like if people are going to use cases anyway, why design for the fraction of the audience who's not going to use them? You actually should optimize the phone for the much more common case of case usage. So it does actually make sense.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
the people who are here for long enough i don't know if it makes you eccentric or if only eccentric people can tolerate being here for that long but whatever it is it selects for eccentricity and so everyone here is weird like i fit in great because i'm weird too i'm just and i'm weird in different ways than some of the other ones but like everyone here is just so gloriously weird i'm
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So what I suggest is in the settings, you can actually remove some of those modes from the rotation. So I remove off. And I remove adaptive. So my only two modes, the reasoning of the sounds, are transparency or noise cancellation. Adaptive, that's the one where it tries to use conversational awareness to try to cancel noise sometimes, but bring in things.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And I haven't tried it recently, so maybe it's better now. When it first came out, I tried it for a day and just hated the choices it was making. And so I instantly – after one day, I'm like, all right, I'm out. So I went back to manually controlling noise cancellation versus transparency.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
That's it, yeah. I'm in transparency the vast majority of the time unless I happen to be either on a plane or on a subway platform where it's super loud. Then I'll turn on noise cancellation.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Well, yeah, because it's... So typically, like back when I was using AfterShokz for my dog walks before AirPods Pro existed, the big benefit of the bone conduction style of headphones is your ears are just unblocked. Like you have no... You know, obstruction whatsoever for noise coming in. You're just using the, you know, the bone conduction headphones to add your music or podcast to it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
That's what transparency mode does on the AirPods Pro. So now granted, I haven't tried these AirPods yet. So I don't know if transparency is as good. They don't actually block your ear holes like the Pros do. But I assume it's probably close or as good. And the AirPods Pro transparency is just incredible. As I said, it's way better than even the AirPods Max transparency.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I don't know why, but for whatever reason it is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Maybe. But anyway, so whatever the reason, the transparency in the AirPods Pro is perfect. It really is like you're wearing nothing. If you have the AirPods in and you're not playing anything, and you take them out. The outside world is the same loudness as it was when you had them in. It's as if you're wearing nothing, and then you're adding selectively to it with your podcast. So it is great.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
fair but i i would i would experiment with it uh give i would give transparency as much of a shot as you can i will i will try to get adaptive out of it out of the uh the rotation do you happen to know where in settings that is buried i find it by going into the bluetooth menu and and like go go to blue go to the airpods hit the little i button it's in there yeah that's that's annoying thing that you can't do unless they're currently pair yeah it's
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Do you have one? You have one, Casey. What do you think of it?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So I took out my series 10. And I had the natural titanium, and I had a number of initial impressions. Number one, the titanium feels great. It is so light. It feels amazing. Because not only did they reduce the weight of the watch in general, like in all of the watches this year, all the Series 10s are lighter in all the metals compared to their previous version metal counterparts. But...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So you have the weight savings there, and then they also have replaced steel with titanium. So the titanium models are almost as light as the aluminum models. They're very, very light. They feel fantastic. They did get bigger, and I got the big one, and I put it on my wrist. And I thought, like Casey just said, it looks like a billboard on my wrist.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I also, it seemed, and I don't know, I don't have my old one here to measure, but it seemed almost like it looked like a more, a closer to square aspect ratio than the outgoing one. Yeah, they did make it wider. They widened it more than they tallened it. Right. And I think that actually I don't honestly like that look. I think it looks even more like a billboard on your wrist.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I also find that the natural color of the titanium, I expect it to be a little bit brighter. It actually is like a pretty medium gray to the point where I think it loses a bit of contrast.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Part of the reason why I haven't bought the black watches in the past or all the various forms of black that they've been is that I actually like seeing some contrast between the watch body case and the black crystal above it. and when you have a black or dark gray watch, you lose a lot of that contrast. And so if you're going for kind of like a unified blob look, then that's what you want.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
What I want is the contrast between the case metal and the top. And so I actually find I don't like the natural color as much. And the reason I went to the Apple store was like I thought after a half day of wearing it, I think I made a mistake.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
with the size oh interesting really they made it you know one millimeter bigger or whatever like they made it a little bit bigger and kind of like the way some people have switched from the max phone down to the pro phone casey you're gonna kill me i switched to the smaller one really you let me out you let me out to convince casey to get the big watch and they're like but for me small watch
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
i yeah like i i wore it for a few hours and i'm and i'm like i can't like it's it looked too big on me i'm here i'll send you comparison photos and in the slack do you have an ultra marco um not with me i i had an ultra i wore it for a little while like when the first one came out because this is very similarly sized in width and height not obviously thickness because the ultra is way thicker but in width and height this the large is actually pretty close to the ultra if you can pull off the ultra why not this one
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I can pull it off. I just don't like it. Do you like the Ultra? No. That's why I don't wear the Ultra.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
No, I bought the Ultra mostly as a test device because the screen felt and looked so different from the previous ones because it didn't have the curvature and it was so big that I felt like as a developer of an app for the watch, I needed one to test. And that did prove useful. But yeah, so when I got this one, I'm like, the big one, they made it too big. It does not...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
fit me well like if again i can pull it off but like what i was thinking was like first of all how much of a role do i want this to play in my life like part of the reason to get the ultra before is if you really want a computer on your wrist and you want to use it like a computer like that's then you you want the biggest screen you want the one that can show the most text you want you know the most interface elements on screen at once like you want that but
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I don't want it to play quite that big of a role in my person, like on my actual person. I'm happy to take the phone out to do computing tasks. I hardly ever read or write anything on the watch itself. It is mostly a sensor and a brief display for me. So I actually realized, like, I think I actually want the smaller one. And also, I've started doing sleep tracking with this one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I decided I wanted to start doing that. And the smaller, the better, honestly, when you're doing that. And so the small one, I actually tried the gold one, too.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
um so i have the the the 42 millimeter uh gold titanium which honestly is not that gold it's it's a very it's the same way apple does like their pro phone colors like it's a little gold um it's it's it's gold enough to look a little bit different in certain lighting most of the time it just looks like the steel the polished state the polished silver steel But that's fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I have it on the black sport band, and that gold and black I think is a very nice look, and I'm very pleased with it right now. It also works well on white. You've got to be a little careful with some of the colors if you try color straps to see if they go with the gold, but black and white look great with it. So I think I'm pretty well covered.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Even by going with the smaller watch, it is even lighter than the bigger one. So it feels like I'm wearing nothing. I think the band weighs more than the watch at this point. So it's a very, very good overall fit for me. Surprisingly so. I really did not think I'd go back to the smaller one. But... They push the big one a little bit too far. And I actually did measure the two of them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
If you measure the aspect ratios of them, the bigger one is more square than the smaller one. Like, it actually has a different aspect ratio. And so the smaller one, I think, looks better on me in part because it is a little bit smaller and in part because it has more rectangular shape. So overall, I like the small one a lot. It is not as much screen space as my big series eight.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Like they didn't make that or my big series nine. They didn't make that big of a jump. But it is more. And I bumped the font size up a couple of notches on it to accommodate my reading glasses need that I'm not satisfying. And so far, I'm liking it. I like the gold for a nice change of pace, even though, again, it's not that gold. But it's subtle enough. It's a nice change of pace.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Again, titanium is so nice to be back. And yeah, so I'm going to rock this look for the year and see how it goes. But it's been honestly very comfortable on me. It's been great.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Like I would say that looks big, but it doesn't look bad. It does look big.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And again, like smartwatch fashion is big as in like people like big watches, big smartwatches these days. That's why the ultra has been so popular. It's not because all those people are going diving. It's because they like big watches. That's what's in fashion. and big screens are very useful, and big batteries are very useful.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And so there's lots of reasons why people choose bigger watches, even if they do look big on their wrists. For me, most of those things were... And for me, it's less about the superficial look. It's more about just the way it fits. It...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Even just, like, that little bit extra, like, one of the things I've mentioned in the past is, like, if a watch is too big on my wrist, I don't like what, if, like, if I flex my wrist up, if I'm, like, you know, in certain exercises or something, like, if you're, like, you know, doing, picture yourself doing a push-up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
If you're doing a push-up, like, your hand is bent upwards compared to your wrist. And like, you know, you kind of just have to like, like when you're, when your skin like crushes into the watch, like it's, it's, it's less comfortable. So for me, like in, in my general lifestyle, having a slightly smaller watch is more comfortable and the, the outgoing models are,
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
the big one was, yeah, it was bigger, but it was not that big. It was, it was like, I think this is a, a noticeable jump in, in, in a way that I didn't expect it to be. Like when I, I took a picture of it, like sitting on top of my series nine and like, you see the size gain. It is not subtle. Like you absolutely see it. Like it is, it is like the big one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
The big series 10 compared to the big series nine is like, it's not just like imperceptibly bigger. You can, you can clearly see which one is which it is obvious. Like, Oh, that's the bigger one. It's cause it's, it's a decent amount bigger.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Thanks to our sponsors this episode, 1Password Extended Access Management and Trade Coffee. Thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is our ATP Overtime segment every week. This is a bonus topic that we do after every episode. This week's ATP Overtime is... Meta kicking Apple when it's down.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
It's the way Meta has recently been engaging with Apple and changing some of their own plans around their mixed reality efforts and kind of how that interacts with Apple and the Vision Pro line. That's going to be in overtime this episode. Join to listen, atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental. John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause 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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So that's K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
i feel so at home here like long island long island has its weirdos for sure uh but it's it's more like regular suburban america you know you don't see a lot of that coming out in the beach town everyone lets their weirdness fly and it is just glorious to be here and and you could you feel like the most normal person even when you are as weird as i am oh my uh do you have your car back
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
By the way, real time follow up. It's not it's only five thousand dollars per headlight. If I get the laser lights option, which I do not have. So the non-laser BMW iX headlight, it's only $2,100 per light. And that's on sale. That's 20% off the official price of $2,600. Gracious.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's kind of disappointing. I mean, they did make the stems shorter, but I think the batteries are not in the stems anymore on these. The AirPods 3 and the AirPods 4 both have like a button cell battery, I think, in the body of it, but the body also looks smaller. So just forget about all the fancy features.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Just the listening time, if you don't have any of the fancy features enabled, goes from six hours down to five. Kind of disappointing, but, you know, we'll see. I mean, improved sound quality and noise cancellation should probably be a net win.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, we talked about cases, obviously, in overtime on the last episode. But now I realized part of the problem with that is everyone is sending me messages telling me that I should try the Beats iPhone 16 Pro case because it has an open bottom. Guess what? I ordered the Beats iPhone 16 Pro case. I will be getting that to try it out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And then the bull strap case that we mentioned that in overtime that does have an open bottom. Ryan London also has one. I preordered the since the last we recorded last episode, I preordered the bull strap case because it's shipping time seemed to be better than Ryan London. Ryan London was like promising it in like November or something. I was like, and bull strap was promising in September.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So I paid way too much money to try out the bull strap.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah. It's one of the, one of the nice things about, uh, whether it's going to be difficult to reproduce, like I said, um, a few times in the past, I used the Ryan London one for the first year of my phone and then the bull strap for the second. And the reason I swapped is because I do drop my phone occasionally. And the Ryan London one had taken lots of abuse on like the corners.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But one of the the nature of like leather is that when you get like a nick or a scuff or whatever, It's not that it's self-healing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's just that unlike, say, an Apple silicone case, where when a piece flakes off, that piece is never coming back, leather kind of scuffs, but then if you just kind of rub it back down in the opposite direction that it got scuffed, it kind of lays back down on itself. It wears better. When it wears, it's not immediately like, oh, this is broken.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I feel like the silicone cases or a plastic case, if you get a chip off of the corner or a piece falls off or whatever, that is forever going to look and feel damaged, and there's no sort of smoothing that over, whereas...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
uh leather uh tends to smooth over a little bit it still felt scuffed and i still wanted to trade it up for the the bulls drop one which is unscuffed but uh that's something that's nice so yeah i keep hoping apple will attempt to make essentially an imitation leather that has the good qualities leather that i like but that is not actually leather but so far they haven't made a run at that they did fine woven which was not tempting to be imitation leather at all and then like this year i'm trying the beats one which is just plain plastic
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, for me, like I said last episode, it's the 5x camera or the 3x camera or the 2x camera, like that third camera option. And also the top quality 1x camera, which is what I'm mostly taking pictures with. In general, the Profones tend to have better cameras. This year, it's not that big of a difference, but it does have the 2x faster readout.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And I do take RAWs and I do notice the lag sometimes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
uh and then the second thing for me is probably just like the just having the top end hardware and everything especially when we're coming into a year like apple intelligence where every little bit of cpu gpu neural engine whatever has got to help because i feel like we're pushing the limits of the thing so yeah i mean i have a mac pro and i'm going to go for the pro phones but yeah the main the main factors for me are cameras and secondarily the uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
the cpu stuff the the 120 hertz i hadn't really thought about that but i prefer that as well that's another thing pushing me in that direction when you pile up all these things it's definitely uh a no-brainer for me even though i also like the colors better on the 16 and i like the fact that it is both lighter and also slightly smaller i feel like the size of the 16 is more to my liking but i gotta go pro
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's like 25 watts now or something instead of 15. But we didn't mention the wired charging last time. This is exactly why I put this item in here. Fast charging, being able to charge faster over wire is great. But I do worry. I mean, Apple doesn't do this. They don't even ship a brick with their phone anymore. I do worry about people who are like, this is great. I love my phone charges fast.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And then on their bedside table or wherever they charge their phone overnight, they put a fast charger. you're just beating up your battery for no reason. Like if you're about to go to sleep and you're going to plug in your phone, plug it into the slowest charger you have, right? Charging your battery very quickly hurts the battery, right? Sometimes you need it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Sometimes you're like, I'm going to be home for two seconds or I'm in an airport or whatever. Use the fast charger. That's what it's for. But for your every day, I plug it in here before I go to sleep or whatever. use a slower charger. Because first of all, it's not even going to charge all the way.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
If you have the optimization on, it's going to go to like 80 and then wait until an hour before I think you wake up and go off. But during that time when it goes from like, you know, 10% to 80, you don't want to go as fast as possible. So yes, the iPhone 16 can charge faster.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
This does not mean you should change all of your chargers in your house to charge at the maximum possible wattage of your phone. Don't do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And second of all, I think actually on the wire thing, I think you have to have iOS 18 on both phones. Is that true? Oh, maybe. I don't know. I mean, just to be safe, I would say maybe before attempting the migration, upgrade your old phone to iOS 18 to make sure that's not a limiting factor. I can not confirm this, but it's a good idea.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
If they're connected to each other, you might have to manage the battery situation. Yeah, that's part of the problem of connecting them with a wire is you better have sufficient battery charge to do the migration. You probably should. If they're both fully charged, you should be fine. But be aware that unless you have some weird Y connector type thing, you're not going to be powering them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yes, because we just come off the question of like, why are we getting the 16 Pro and not the 16? And it's interesting to see, supposedly, how the rest of the world is reacting, at least in week one, according to Ming-Chi Kuo.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
those colors well but look at the so here this is interesting like basically that the pro phones are down i think makes sense because it's a testament to how good the non-pro phones are this year like even regular people who don't care about the specs or whatever can see that the non-pro and the pro have all the same buttons on them like oh have you heard of the new camera control that's on the non-pro action button that's on the non-pro like the things you can see yes everyone can see that there's one fewer camera right but like the non-pro phones the
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
look good this year and second is remember they were talking about like the plus phone like oh no one buys the plus phone it's not cheap enough compared to the pro max people just buy the pro max the plus phone being up 48 again according to these estimates based on supply chain yada yada yada is pretty amazing because it shows that people who want a big phone are looking at the pro max and going plus pro max like they're not what does the pro max have however it has all those pro features with the pro res video everything no one cares about it's got the extra camera
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And what people are saying is actually, I'm going to take the plus this year, right? If these things are to be believed, but these are really weird numbers for like week one, you know what I mean? Like week one, you would expect it's all the early adopters or whatever. And I'm kind of surprised to see the plus phone. So again, these are not Apple's numbers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
These are estimates based on supply chains, yada, yada, who knows how accurate they are, but it's
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
interesting to see the breakdown this year and unfortunately this is when we see this we're like oh it's great it shows how good the 16 the plain 16s are this year when apple sees this they're like we should make sure the plain 16s are a little bit the plain phones are a little bit worse than the pro phones because apple likes to see that differentiation they like to push people up market to get the more expensive phones but in the years when the pro and non-pro phones are closer to each other i bet apple's margins go down because fewer people buy the pro phones that's a good point
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And by the way, this 20X thing, this is a stat that Apple actually puts on their website, which is rare. Obviously, they put it on the pro specs to try to show like this is how much better the pro is. But 20X. I know we mentioned this last episode when we were talking about the phones, but I just want to reiterate again.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I always said last time, I was like, oh, you get the faster USB, the slower USB. And you may be hearing that and thinking, I don't care how fast the USB is. Like, whatever. It'll be like just a little bit slower. 20 times slower.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
it's a lot it's not that the pro phone is so fast it's that the non-pro phone is so so slow and usually it doesn't matter like usually because if you have a non-pro phone again you're probably not trying to pull off like video files onto your external ssd or do all sorts of big usually it doesn't matter at all right but on this one day when we were all transferring our data from our old phones be aware that if you have a non-pro phone even if you're transferring it to a pro phone
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
you're going to be it's probably going to be slower than doing it over wi-fi depending on how good your wi-fi is so this is a shame they should probably change it eventually but just be aware 20x slower on the non-pro phones
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, this is I think it's been out for a year or two now. I highly recommend people do this because it's a no brainer. You're getting free storage for the purposes of doing your phone transfer. Take it. Take the free storage for this transfer. I would also encourage you to actually pay for the storage to have this backup permanently. But even if you can't or don't want to. It's free.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's not like they take your credit card and sign you up and you have to remember to cancel or anything like that. Nothing like that. It's just free, temporary storage for the purpose of transferring your stuff. It'll let you do an iCloud backup. It will keep that backup there for some period of time, and then they will just chuck it away.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
There's nothing you need to remember to do or cancel or whatever. So take advantage of it. We will link to the Apple document that describes this in the show notes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Not sure how to make EXR files, but the demo file, one of the demo files shows like a gradient that just goes from like, you know, black to various shades of gray down to white. But the white is like super max HDR white. If you want to blow your eyeballs out on your screen and see just how bright it will go, open that image and then look down at the bottom.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's tough for Apple that relying on the government to hit the deadlines or whatever, because Apple would have loved in the presentation to say it was FDA approved, but they missed it for like two days. So they just have to say, we think approval is coming very soon. And yeah, there you go.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Did they never sell the 24-hour carrot gold?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, it was just showing the setup screen. It's the blinking 12 on the VCR of celebrity watches. Yeah, exactly.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
revisit yeah so the apple case did what i thought uh all the cases should do which is put a little opening for the two cameras on the plain old iphone 16 so slim just a little capsule and then just put a little hole for the flash that's hanging out near it i was afraid what cases would do is ah we have to we have to have a hole for the two cameras and the flash let's just make one big hole that covers them all and i was afraid they would make it like triangular
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Apple's cases didn't do that. They're great. But here's a link we'll put in the show notes to at least one case that got lazy and said, you know what, we're going to make a capsule opening for the cameras and just a little separate capsule opening for the, you know, flash. And I just think it's clumsier to do it this way. It looks kind of like a three leaf clover instead of a capsule.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So, you know, results vary. Be careful when you're buying a case and consider one of the advantages of your non-pro phone is that you can have a smaller camera thing sticking out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
there's no no reason to have like the for example look at this one it's got like the ridge that prevents like the cameras from touching the the surface if you put it face down the ridge is also around the flash no need for that the flash is flush you don't need to have that ridge around it it just makes for a bigger thing on the back of your case so i don't like that and some people are doing it surprise surprise
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
right yeah that's what i'm saying see that's so the summary is attempting to summarize three separate notifications and the three separate notifications include a username that is at museum shuffle that's the person's username do you think they only post about museums is it the only thing that is on that entire thing nothing in the body text of these three notifications mentions museums at all the only thing that is museum related is one of the people's usernames
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
This is an example of some of the limitations of Apple intelligence features when attempting to summarize things. It just gets fed a bunch of text, but apparently it doesn't understand which part of this text are just at mentions of people who are in the conversation, like the fact that that's a username, and which parts are the body text, which is what you're supposed to be summarizing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And it's just like, it's all text to me. So if someone's username has a museum in it, I'm like, this must be a conversation about museums. I mean, maybe, but also maybe not. This is definitely an area of improvement. And, you know, I do think that we had a couple items about this already, and we're going to have another one in a second.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I do think that when Apple intelligence actually ships to people with 18.1 or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
stuff like this may end up being kind of like a you know a meme topic of like let's all make fun of the dumb things our phones say when attempting to help us by doing something simple as like summarizing a bunch of text you got three text messages it's up to the little computer in there to summarize them to give you a single placeholder item so you don't have to read all three in theory that's a useful feature feature but in practice if you see that summary and
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
like should you trust it or do you have to expand the things anyway like because you could see this and say maybe someone's giving me uk-based museum recommendations oh it's just museum shuffle was that mentioned in one of the things that's messed up
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
intelligence representation of this so maybe and that would maybe like strip out usernames and markup and stuff like that and that would be up to the app to do that by the way like is a very very often these services don't do this i last time we talked about this i forgot to use the correct terms of art but it's a in-band metadata versus out-of-band metadata in-band metadata is what most services like mastin on
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
or twitter especially back in the day used to use where that you know at museum shuffle or whatever that's part of the body text of the thing and if you want to separate it you the developer of ivory or whatever mastodon client has to parse the text find the things that are at mentions extract them so on and so forth as opposed to a system where the uh the metadata was out of band where there was a separate thing even if it's just something as simple as and i think uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
twitter did this in later years ranges of saying here's the string but the range from character 0 to character 15 is the first username and the next username is here and the next username is here again something is always parsing this and determining that but like to essentially uh not have to have every single individual app suddenly become like a parser to find all the urls find all the app mentions so on and so forth and reconstruct it um again i think uh modern twitter slash x does a better job of that i think mastodon also does a reasonable job of that with links and stuff but
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But for systems like Marco said that are just like, oh, I'm just going to chuck this text over the wall to the notification system, that's insufficient for Apple Intelligence to figure it out. I feel like Apple Intelligence could be trained to know things like, hey, when you see an at mention or a hashtag, what those things are, because they're culturally...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
common enough that it's worthwhile training on that and it wouldn't have to know the context it doesn't have to know that this app is a master on an app i would just see something that looks like an app mention the same way humans do we parse it out or whatever and you could still run a foul of that and make a mistake but it definitely seems like apple intelligence needs more slash better training and there's no way on the phone itself
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
this is what people think about apple intelligence they think they're going to somehow like i wish i had a way to correct it so it would learn that's not happening like the only thing that's changing the weights in that model is when apple releases a new version of that model which could happen every day if apple wanted it to but probably knowing apple is not going to but there's no feedback mechanism for you to somehow train the model by correcting it and telling it no this wasn't to be out in museums there's no mechanism for that right now so which is disappointing but uh it's it's
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
the reason we're going to have, we're going to have to live with whatever foibles these things have, which really, I feel like impacts their potential usefulness, which is what cable is talking about cable. I think this is the second or third appearance complaining about Apple intelligence and beta. Well, here he is again.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So rude. That's the summary. I mean, assuming this is a conversation cable with his parents. One parent's response was characterized as nonsense by the summary system.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, so this is part of the thing with any kind of assistance, right? If you ever have a human assistant that you hire to help you with things and your human assistant tells you, okay, on the agenda today, you've got meeting X with this person, meeting Y with this person, you have to do this thing or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
That assistant is not valuable if after the assistant tells you that, what you do is then go to your calendar and confirm everything they said just to make sure they didn't make any mistakes, because what if they forgot that you have to pick up your kid from school and they didn't mention that? That's the whole reason you have the assistant, is to make it so you don't have to do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But with these type of assistants, where they're not very smart and often make mistakes... If you have to go and double check everything they did, is it saving you any time or would you rather have not just seen it at all? And like Cable said, the worst case scenario is you look at the summary and your brain tells you, okay, I've dealt with that. I've read that. I saw what it had to say.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I can safely disregard that because this email is just telling me something that's not important. But little did you know that there was something very important in that email. And because you didn't read it, but instead you read the summary that was generated for you that was inaccurate, you now think you dealt with it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And then, you know, I think we'll all learn from this with someone saying, you didn't pick up Little Timmy at school? I emailed you about it. And it's like, yeah, I read that email. You didn't say anything about that, but you didn't read the email. You read the summary and thought you had read the email.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
so this i mean it's it's hard like we were talking about like the friend thing right what can this technology do in a way that fulfills the requirements summarizing notifications and email may be beyond the capabilities even though it sounds like such a simple thing maybe beyond the capabilities if it fails in ways that are a problem for you
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And then, you know, like they require you to read the actual email because then it's like, what's the point of the summary then? Like you can't triage based on the summary if you can't trust what it says. So I feel cable frustration. Obviously, this is still a beta. We'll all see how we deal with this. I hope you can actually turn this off. Like, don't try to summarize notifications for me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Like, I see the goal. Like, we all get lots of notifications and it's annoying seeing a giant stack of them. Like, oh, I have to read through them and see if any of them are important or whatever. I have to go through all my email one by one. We all hate that, right? We would love something to help us out. But if the thing helping us out is untrustworthy,
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I'd rather just don't try to help and I will just continue to go through my own notifications and email myself.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I tried to read those documents, and the question was like, you know, the question was like Overcast, like, does following an Overcast do anything to Apple Podcasts? And Mark answered, no, it doesn't, or whatever. But then the other question was like, what does following do in Apple Podcasts? And we had all sorts of theories. Yeah, does it help the show?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Because everyone always says, please follow us, it helps the show. Right, and this document does kind of confirm that that's the case within the Realm of Battle podcast, but it doesn't go into the nitty-gritty detail of exactly how they calculate all these lists and what the algorithms are or whatever. Well, of course not.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
They don't want to reveal that because the more you reveal about that, people will game it. Right, and so if you're expecting to go into these documents and say, finally, now I'll know exactly what happens when I follow something, you're not going to find out that kind of detail, but it's telling you...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
you know, directionally, here are the actions that you can take and those actions feed into these things in a way that we're not going to describe to you because you game it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And Spotify gathers similar stats for its podcasts. But of course, for our show, where a significant portion of our listeners do not use Apple Podcasts, All those listeners doing all their activity listening to our podcast don't factor into this at all.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
There is no, as far as I'm aware, equivalent of the Nielsen ratings back in the day where it's like a cross-section of all humanity watching television as determined by this hopefully representative sampling. We don't have that, right? We have Apple Podcasts. If you use the Apple Podcasts app, they can track your behavior and... your behavior influences their top charts.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But if you're using literally any other podcast client, Apple has no idea what you're doing. Because Apple doesn't host the feeds. The feeds are hosted on the individual people's websites and everything. And again, if you're an oddball show like ours where the majority of our listeners are not using Apple Podcasts,
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
We're just losing out on that activity, which is one of the many reasons why we're unlikely to ever appear in any kind of top charts. I mean, obviously, we're a tiny podcast. We're not going to appear there anyway. But it's just part of the system that we have. Podcasts are very open.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But the things like that are necessarily sort of islands, individual isolated islands of statistics, because nobody has an overview of everything, which I think is good. Like, we don't want someone to have an overview of everything. But just FYI, nobody does.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
256-gig storage module. For almost $3,000, they couldn't give you more than 256 gigs of storage. Wow.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, so folding phones. They're still trying different ways to fold them. I waited for the one that folds up like an old paper map that you can never get refolded correctly in the car, right? Just a gigantic thing that folds and folds. Like, this is really pushing the limits. I mean, it does unfold to a really big screen, but like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
like it's like a full size iPad practically, or it looks bigger than an iPad mini at least, but that's such a straight end. And it does look like when it is folded, you can still use it as just a regular phone because the top third of the screen is still visible. You know what I mean? Because of the way it folds. But yeah,
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
folding uh people are trying everything they can possibly think of and i guess there's enough customers out there saying that looks cool i want to have that because it reminds me of a sci-fi show and then once they get it they'll determine is this actually a good phone or is this just like a gimmick that i spend the first month showing everybody i know look at my phone it unfolds like this huh and then just you know it gets old
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Or, I mean, it's like the I Am Rich app. Look at my phone. It costs $3,000, huh? Right. Oh, my God. I mean, whatever makes you happy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, Apple's always fighting this battle. They have been since the iPhone was introduced. So it used to be the gray market for phones and the market for stolen phones. And this is a good way to do it with technology. Like, you know, stopping people from stealing your phone. People think about that and it's like, oh, I'll tie it to my wrist with a cable or it'll give people electric shock.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Like, no, that's not how you solve these problems. That's how a five-year-old solves these problems. You solve it by making it not a profitable thing to do. And Apple has been slowly chipping away at that and saying, if someone does steal your phone, what good is it to them? How much money can they make from that phone?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And if you keep pushing down that amount of money and increasing the hassle, it will reduce iPhone theft simply because it is no longer as profitable as it used to be. Still, there is some profit. Not every part of the activation locked, but... Find My and Activation Lock on Parts go a long way towards making it much more difficult to make money by stealing people's phones.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Now, since this is a technological solution, it's just another technological cat and mouse race. Like, okay, well, what is locked about them? Can that encryption be broken? Do people mind? Like, part of the thing is, like, the parts will work, but they will not be able to be calibrated, and you may think, who cares about calibration?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But many parts in the phone, in particular things like the screen, calibration is a surprisingly big part of what makes them work because they're not perfect pieces of hardware.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And the calibration process sort of makes it so that the system knows, for example, how much voltage and how much current do I have to supply to every single little subpixel to get it to emit the amount of brightness that I expect it to emit. And that varies across the screen. It's not like I just apply the same current and voltage across the whole screen and you get a uniform image. You don't.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
The screens have variations. Your screen will look weird and bad if it is not correctly calibrated. And so they're not like even now, they're not locking it out entirely like they do with like the face ID sensors, where I think they just don't work at all, period. But things like the screen, I think they'll work, but they won't let you calibrate them. So they'll look bad.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And so they're really trying to make it so that if you someone steals your phone and harvest parts from it, maybe the most valuable parts are less valuable now because they'll only be someone only buy them knowing they can sell them to somebody who is accepts having alert dialogues come up and complain about, you know, unauthenticated parts or whatever, and also accepts the fact that their screen is going to look worse.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And yeah, the flip side of this is that everybody who does phone repairs legitimately thinks this is terrible. You're locking down these parts. I can't have my business anymore because I can't unlock the parts. Only Apple can do it or whatever. Really, I think it's not that Apple can do it. Only the person who owns the device can do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So businesses having a way to mass unlock and wipe their phones before they resell them, that's important. Like this article says, Macs have the ability to do that. If you want to sell your Mac, you want to wipe it so that your Apple ID is totally divorced from it and it removes the activation lock.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So owners can do it, but someone who just stole your phone presumably can't do it because they don't have your password or we'll see past conversations about shoulder surfing your lock code. And there was a tooth that just went by this morning that reminded me of this article in the Gothamist talking about.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
messages that have been sent to uh to somebody by the people who stole their phone because the people who stole their phone obviously are not the brightest thieves um but they the phone is locked right and they need it to be unlocked for it to become useful so they're sending messages to sort of social engineer the owner of the phone to say hey can you essentially remove this phone from your apple id like deactivate find my remove it from your apple id and
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
which would then unlock it and open it up so that they could use it as a phone. And they send us a series of messages trying to coerce slash fool this person into unlocking their phone, culminating into violent threats at the very end, which is not fun. But it just goes to show, like... certain caliber of criminal are already frustrated by the features that Apple has.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
They think, hey, I got a stolen phone. This will be great. I can use this as my phone or resell it as another phone. And they realize, oh, no, I can't do anything because it's activation locked. And I don't know how to get around that. So let me try to harass the original owner into unlocking it for me. And this original owner happens to be smart enough to know what they're doing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But I can imagine this approach working more than 50% of the time. Because people, you know, again, people don't know what activation lock is. They don't know all these details. They just know their phone was stolen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
If they get a message that says some of the things that these messages say, like, oh, you're about to be charged and I have your your financial information and I'm going to sell your phone and all your information is on and everyone's going to get it. People don't know if that's true or not. Right. So they'll just be like, oh, I'll do whatever they say and unlock the phone and then they'll go away.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Right. and by unlocking it, all you're basically doing is letting them use your phone as a fresh phone and sell it for full price or whatever. So it doesn't actually harm you to do it, but screw the criminals. Don't do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
They had their rationale for this was in that product longevity document that we talked about where they explain like why they do this. Like it's not to screw over customers, but it's to try to, you know, make it so that parts that are essential to security like face ID and touch ID can't be spoofed or faked with third party ones or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
They didn't even talk about the theft angle, but I feel like that is another big side of this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
No one would ever use a screen that doesn't look uniform, right? People will use their phones with giant spider web of shatters across it for a year and a half, but they won't use it if one side of the screen is slightly brighter than the other.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Well, we get this question all the time. People are always want to want to know whether their phone is listening to them or they just write to us and insist that their phone is listening to them. And here's why. And they give some story about what happened. Right. First of all, let's just say that we're talking about iPhones only. I have no idea what's going on Android. Respect to this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But in the realm of the iPhone. It is extremely difficult to use the microphone to passively spy on people when people are not using your app and haven't given them their permission. Those are a lot of caveats.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
apps can trick you into giving permission app whatever wants to use the microphone allow maybe some you know someone who has a phone hit allow on that ages ago and forgot about it right and now that phone has that app has microphone access right but people who insist that their phones are listening to them will say things like i know i never gave this uh app uh access to the microphone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Or I don't even have the Facebook app installed, but I visited their website and I think it's listening to me now, right? People have all sorts of conspiracy theories about it. And they're backed up by these anecdotes that we know are explained by...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Not simple, but non-obvious ways they track you across the web, whether it be local storage, cookies, the fact that you're coming from the same IP address, you're sitting in a group of people. I never even looked up, you know, swing sets. But immediately I got an ad for swing sets on Instagram.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Well, it's because the person sitting next to you looked up swing sets and they're coming through the same Wi-Fi thing as you and yada yada, right? There's a million ways that they can track you that are not listening to you, but... Humans have a much easier time thinking, well, if I was trying to spy on somebody, what I would do is I would listen to them, like with my ears, audio, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And they think that is the most straightforward way to know what you're doing, and it's not. The ad industry has so many other ways to track you that are so much better developed that do not require listening. That said, as every single time we've talked about this issue, one of the things we have said is, oh, believe me, they would love to be listening to you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's not that they wouldn't do it if they could. They want to do it. They're trying to do it all the time. They're trying to do it. It's just that Apple is pretty good at stopping them. So this Cox Media Group bragging that say, hey, we have this technology that lets you sell targeted ads based on what people say because we listen on the microphone. They've been pitching that for years.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And I'm sure that they have that technology, and I'm sure it will totally work if someone gives it microphone access. But those are a lot of ifs in that stack there, right? That's why these stories, you should read the TechDirt one, because they're usually pretty skeptical and sort of paranoid about like being spied on or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But even TechDirt's been like, okay, well, they can pitch you that they can provide this technology, but they should also have to explain how are you going to get past the fact that you can't get access to the microphone on the iPhone unless the user gets permission or whatever, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
right show me the show me the do they have some technical hack to get around that or they're just using social engineering or whatever right um in the end though this is kind of one of those things where people feel bad if they think something is listening to the audio of what they say but somehow they don't feel bad if something is tracking them using cookies and ip addresses and and other sort of weird hacks right that one doesn't feel as bad because it's not a human experience right they would feel bad if a human was listening in on them
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
When a computer is listening in, it's more like a human to them. They don't care about tracking of their data otherwise, right? So it's difficult to...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
explain to that person like look at the end result is the same they know you're thinking about swing sets whether they pulled that out of the air or just got it because someone who is on the same wi-fi router as you looked up swing sets even though you didn't do it it doesn't really make a difference in the end right but people want to feel it's kind of like the discussion of free will i had on rectus which i don't want to bring up on this show but feel free to find that episode if you can figure out how to use google and find it in the show notes right
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
there's what's actually happening and then it's how you feel about it and how you feel about it is so much more important in this scenario people feel terrible about being listened in on and yes as casey said these like this story this cox media thing coming around again and again i believe this exact same company several years ago was pitching the same exact thing well anyway it's another news cycle here they are pitching it again getting themselves into the news all this is going to do is reinforce
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
in the minds of conspiracy theorists that their iphones are constantly listening to them because they're like well it's proof they they they said they did it they admitted it how can you not see that and the nuances are lost on them and so in the end as with many conspiracy theories you can't convince anyone they're not true you can't prove a negative uh and one thing that is true is that every advertiser wants to do this and are constantly trying to do it so it's not outlandish that one of them could eventually break through but the
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
to show that one of them has broken through you would need a little bit more proof than we're provided here so i would say uh it's very difficult to be avoid tracking in any form whatsoever if you're really worried about something listening to you you should worry more about your voice control cylinders which literally are constantly listening so they can hear you say the wake word to them they can't hear the wake word if they're not constantly listening supposedly they're throwing away
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
all the audio that doesn't contain the wake word, but we know from past stories that sometimes some audio, when they're awoken accidentally, is stored on servers for a long period of times and listened to by humans for supposed QA purposes or whatever. If you don't like these things, don't buy something that is constantly listening to you and put it in your house. Same thing with cameras.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You hope that they're taking that video and putting it up on their servers and no human has access to it and it's end-to-end encrypted. Is it? Maybe. Maybe not. that's why you really have to trust your vendor.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I think Apple is one of the most trustworthy here because they are constantly fighting this battle because Apple does not make its money through targeted ads to the same degree that Google does. And Amazon has lots of things to advertise to sell to you. But yeah, it's a difficult situation. And I would say to this person, you're probably not going to convince anybody.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Mostly just let them believe what they want to believe. Because in the end, how is it going to even change their behavior? They are not going to have a phone. Are they not going to have an Apple phone because they think Android is better than this? Just let them do what they want.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Even as somebody who does not use MagSafe to charge pretty much ever, mostly because I just don't want to deal with the heat and degradation or whatever, and I don't mind plugging the thing in, it's just made a huge difference in my life simply because I have cars without CarPlay. And what I was doing before was what Marco described.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It had a thing that clipped onto a vent, and it was like a big clampy jaw thing, and you'd have to open up the clampy jaw and put your phone in it and hope that it stayed in there. And by the way...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
if you want your phone to charge now snake a stupid cable that you have to route from wherever your usb port is in your thing and plug it into the bottom of the phone and now you're ready to go but with magsafe i get into the car take my phone funk it sticks you're exactly where i want it to be it is it doesn't fall off when i go over bumps and it's charging and i didn't have to do anything i just stuck it there i'm gonna when i go into the car i take it out and obviously this is barbaric people have car play but you know not everybody has car play what a difference in my life this has made
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
to have a dashboard mount that I just stick my thing to. And I feel like, you know, I like the fact that it is charging, but the magnets, the magnets are key, right? And I do have a MagSafe puck on my bedside table. And mostly what I use it for is I put my little AirPods case in it because I don't really care if I wear out the battery in my AirPods case because it's,
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
not a big deal and i can get a new case if it has ever been a problem but it hasn't been unfortunately the battery in the airpods themselves wears out quickly but hopefully the heat generated from magsafe charging my airpods case is not transferring too heavily to the airpods and anyway i've got new ones arriving soon so yeah i think magsafe is great like the the good thing about it is that it lets first of all if you don't like it
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It really doesn't take anything off your phone. I'm sure it adds a few grams of weight for those magnets or whatever and the charging coil, but it's not a big deal. It doesn't change the appearance, doesn't add a giant hump, doesn't make it heavier or bigger in a way that people care about, right? But second, everybody can choose what it is they like about MagSafe.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Do you think of it as just a magnet to hold a wallet to the back of your phone? Do you use it for 100% of your charging? Is it a replacement car mount for you that's better than your old one? it can do lots of things for lots of different people.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So even though you might look at it and say, well, I expected like never to see a wire again and the port to disappear from my phone and that didn't happen. Therefore MagSafe is a failure. I think it's been a smashing success. I think everybody finds something they like about MagSafe and it can improve their life.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And for the few people who don't find anything they like about MagSafe, it doesn't bother them. Great feature. Yep. Couldn't agree more.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
We are a credit card family. My wife, in particular, has opened up many credit cards over the years. We've pared it down. But our system is generally one sort of shared card. We both have the card. I think at various times it might have had different numbers for the two of us, but most of the time it's had the same number but with two different cards with two different names on them, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And that's basically our main credit card that we use for everything. It is also an Amazon Prime Visa, just like Margo's, because we buy so much stuff from Amazon and, unfortunately, Whole Foods. Yeah. And that gives good cash back reward things or whatever, and everybody takes it. It's taken everywhere. We never got into the whole Amex thing or anything like that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Obviously, we do have debit cards for our bank and everything. We just don't use them. I personally also have a quote-unquote corporate credit card that is the credit card connected to my business account. Oh, yeah, same. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
in theory i'm supposed to use that for all business expenses and i do for recurring business expenses like as we've discussed before if you have an llc in massachusetts you pay some ungodly amount of money every single year just to maintain that llc which is why everyone opens theirs in delaware or whatever but anyway i'm mine is massachusetts and so every year i have to pay that and so any sort of recurring fees like that or like my business telephone that i pay for another recurring fee i connect my business card which is just another visa connected to my business bank account which is in a different bank entirely and
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I connect all that up to that. It doesn't matter. I'm a single member LLC, and it's passed through for tax purposes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It doesn't actually matter, but just at the end of the year when you're trying to find all your business expenses, if you can just look at one card and say everything on this card is a business expense, that makes our life easier for us to gather stuff that we then hand off to our accountant to say, here are all the business expenses or whatever. I don't always follow that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Unfortunately, sometimes there are some things that I forget that were on the other card or whatever, or there's a mix of them, but we figure it out. And the thing that both of you didn't mention that I'm sure is absolutely true for all of us is that when we buy stuff from Apple, we use our Apple card because it's like whatever, 6% back or 3% or whatever, whatever percentage back.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Is that not true of you too? Like whenever you make an Apple purchase, you use your Apple card? I don't have an Apple card.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I don't know what the percentage is now, but I think briefly, especially when Apple Card was brand new and I was buying new Macs, it was like 6% discount when buying Apple hardware or something. I don't think that's still true. But yeah, I use my Apple Card whenever I buy anything from Apple. My Apple Card pays from iCloud. When I just bought my phone, that was on my Apple Card.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Anytime we buy Apple hardware, that is on Apple Card. That is the only thing we use our Apple Card for, mostly because Apple has no idea how to make a good credit card interface. Like, there needs to be a website, Apple, where you can go and see all your transactions. Have you heard of the web? But instead, they're like, oh, just go to the app and scroll. Oh, you can't see all your transactions?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Tough luck. Oh, you want them printed out in some kind of report? Tough luck. Like, it's just... They're so bad, but I do it to get whatever the discount is for buying Apple stuff specifically with your Apple card.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And I don't use the Apple card for anything else because for anything else, for the most part, other cards I have, including our main Amazon Visa card, give you more cash back or points or whatever. That you should be getting. So Apple Pay, when I double tap the side button and pay with Apple Pay, that's paying with the main family Visa card. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And I have to remember and sometimes I forget this. Remember, anytime I'm actually buying something from Apple, when I double tap the side button, don't just, you know, face ID, select the Apple card first because, you know, you can pick which card you want on a per payment basis.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
and do that uh and yeah i hate the stupid thing at whole foods where you have to like scan your stupid qr code for the whole food can't they just know can't they just know whenever i pay with my amazon prime visa thing like they're all the same company like can't you just figure it out but no you gotta scan the stupid code and then find out the code didn't even give you a discount on any of the ridiculously expensive items you bought this time it's annoying i'll tell you what man you make fun of whole foods i shopped at whole foods for a long time when i lived in westchester
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You can get that experience. It's real easy. Can I send you all my garbage groceries from Stop and Shop and you'll give me all the nice stuff from Whole Foods? The only other good benefit of Amazon and Whole Foods coming together is that returning stuff. You can just go to Whole Foods with your thing and just give it to someone at a counter and say, here, take this. That is nice.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It doesn't even have to be packed up or anything. It has to be in the box or whatever. We're like, I'm returning this. Take this. That is convenient.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, I know. Their website is terrible. Like, they used to not have one at all, and now they have one, and it's terrible. Like, they need to look at every other credit card website to know what the bar is, and they're just below it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I don't want to be beholden to that. Although, to be fair, what most people said is you don't have to call in a special favor. If you just sign up for the appointment, that's it, and then just wait, that's it. Because you listed severe things in your appointment, they will bump you up on the schedule. Nothing you have to do, no special treatment, they have no idea who you are.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
That was the things that people were saying. That is what people told me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I bet they love it when people self-diagnose and write in with their theories about what might be wrong with their car.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And by the way, the second part of what you did is a great customer service hack, which
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
by mentioning in what is presumably an auditable uh you know area of like text chat saying is it safe to drive my vehicle should fire off all the warnings of like either a don't answer this question or b if they do answer it that'll great to come up in the lawsuit later when you say hey i asked if it was safe and you said it was safe and that my car caught on fire
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
The i5 doesn't have a hatchback or a liftback. You can get the M5, the electric M5, the non-electric M5 wagon. But is there an i5 liftback? No, the iX, I'm saying, is the one I was looking at. You didn't look at the i5 or the i4, the two that I suggested?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
This one was suggested by a listener, actually, but that's the whole thing. People are always asking about this topic. And very often we're like, oh, we've talked about it before. Go back, listen to past episodes. And then every last which past episodes like, well, it's kind of smeared over our entire 11 year history. And I thought we should do a member special. And I thought it was a good idea.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
significantly taller but that's part of the problem of bmw strategy of essentially making we make a gas version an electric version of the same car the i5 has enough room for a gigantic internal combustion engine under the hood uh and when you take out that engine the car does not get any smaller no and especially does not get shorter or narrower um so like i think when you compare the the actual measurements the i5 is something like it's like an inch or two narrower but it's like the exact same length as the ix or it might even be like an inch longer or something that's why i was saying you should look at the i4 but a backseat might be too small now
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
you'll be shocked to learn that mercedes has like named themes like they have with signet with associated signature scents so it's not just like oh you can change the colors it's like well we've we've carefully selected these particular themes that involve a sound environment and a color scheme of the rgb lighting and a scent and it's just like oh come on that's amazing and bmw has like the ix has a bunch of weird stuff like that but anyway so adam is like super into it
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
If you want good Rivian service, go to a BMW dealer.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
That's the only thing you mentioned? Yes, which is probably, I mean, in all fairness.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But we helped you on the show. You got lots of good constructive advice on how you might change your completely ridiculous photo workflows to be slightly less ridiculous. And I hope you took those action items, as they say, and did them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
What was the color again? Was it the fight tonic blue metal?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
after the show i have i have taken notes i have taken the action items in in five years when we do the same thing again because it's kind of one of those topics people are always asking about and potentially our photo workflows could change so maybe in five years we do this exact same thing again to see if our photo workflows have changed maybe because we get new cameras maybe because apple's photos app updates maybe because we've changed apps or whatever we'll see if you've actually changed at all or perhaps gotten worse
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah. But they did give me a loaner immediately. At this point in the story, I start to wonder how many terrible electric car related tragedies would need to befall Marco before he started looking at Hondas. I think it's a lot. I think it's way more than his.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Jesus Christ, my guy. Or a Toyota, right? But like, I mean, I don't. First of all, I want to say for everyone who's listening.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
don't let this discourage you from getting electric cars marco is being extraordinarily unlucky here this is not the standard experience as evidence from his years of using electric cars before this he's just has incredibly bad luck but given your incredibly bad luck i am wondering how much bad luck would it take for you to be like screw this i'm going back to internal combustion i think it would be a lot but i really feel like you're being tested by the universe here yeah no i i'm not a brand new car
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
No longer your problem. Right. Good luck to the girlfriend of the BMW salesperson. Yes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
What do I have to apologize for? Oh, the pronunciation things. All right. Well, actually, the first time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I don't have to apologize for anything there. I said I had heard conflicting reports from people who were at the event. I wasn't at the event. I didn't touch the thing. I just said I heard that I thought based on watching the keynote that it looked like it moved. But then I saw people who touched the thing with their hands say that it didn't move.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
are fairly basic and and kind of mid-range interiors like it's they're not like super cheap but they're not super nice and they're pretty minimal oh we're gonna get so much email you're right but we're gonna get so much don't don't forget also that the other place they save costs is by leaning into the futuristic aesthetic and say you know what remove everything from the interior of this car remove every button every opening every stock every control remove everything because every one of those things you remove saves you money exactly
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, but you didn't touch it either. You heard people say it moved, and I heard people say both things. So neither of us actually touched the thing, so we're just going by reports. Anyway, since then, we've gotten clarification, and all the people who are saying it did not move, they were fooled. I don't know why they were fooled. Maybe they just didn't pay attention.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
One question about your new car. Can you use the Tesla supercharger network with an adapter?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Maybe they're, again, just used to the idea that if a button has haptics, that means it doesn't move. But the camera control, in fact, does move. That has been confirmed. Reportedly, it moves about as much as the power and volume buttons. Obviously, when we get our phones, we can check that out ourselves. But just to clarify.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
The Mercedes EQS, their S-Class electric version, same deal. You're not supposed to open the trunk. And what they did for the windshield washer fluid is even more ridiculous. You think the BMW flipper thing is ridiculous? They added a door to the front fender. What?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
that opens up and this thing slides out for you to like they cut into the sheet metal of the car to make of course it's all electronic and like this thing slides out and this thing like you know hinges out and you pour it and it's like god people just let people open the hood i know you only want them to add the fluid just let's open the hood to add the fluid stop cutting holes in the side of your car and making these little mechanical things whatever so the bmw one is not even the worst in this regard but yeah the german manufacturer is
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
One of the things that manufacturers are doing with that is having the backup camera hidden, essentially, when you're not backing up. So it's not exposed to road space. And it just like flips up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But I do kind of like the ones that are always visible because I feel like being able to see out the back while you're driving forward, which like you can do on a Tesla and other cars, is actually convenient. And if you're going to be looking at it all the time anyway, it's still going to get dirty. But yeah, the washers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I mean, it harkens back to the 80s when they put those little tiny windshield washer blades and the squirters on the headlights. Do you remember those days? Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Now I have to apologize, yes. Oh, I see. So that was not an apology. That was a clarification because I equivocated in the last thing. I said I heard conflicting reports, and I'm clarifying which one of the conflicting reports was correct.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's a very important difference. But here on the last episode, I mean, this is why I listen back to episodes. I was listening back to the episode, and I heard myself saying, I'm like, What are you saying? And during the episode, I knew something was wrong, but my brain wasn't working right. But as soon as you hear yourself say it back, you're like, that's not right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's a sharper image car. But it's nicer than that. By the way, Marco, you've gotten distracted. Tesla charging. Bring it back. Oh, yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So when you go on long trips, are you going to stop at a Tesla supercharger and use your adapter or no? Yes. Because why not push your luck?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I kept saying micro OLED, talking about the screen technology that Apple was considering using for its watch. No, that's not what it's called. It's micro LED. Because there's like mini-LED and micro-LED and it gets confusing or whatever. Anyway, it's not micro-OLED, so I'm sorry for that error. Every time you heard me say micro-OLED, just replace in your mind micro-LED.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Well, I mean, just by the numbers, the sheer number of cars rotating through the households, you got to put your money on Marco.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
We will put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page for micro-LED, which makes the very specific point that the inorganic nature of micro LEDs gives them a longer lifetime and advantage over OLEDs and allows them to display brighter images with minimal risk of screen burden. OLEDs, the O stands for organic light emitting diode, but they're not, they're inorganic in micro LEDs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's just a bunch of little tiny LEDs, very, very tiny ones placed onto the screen. And that's technology Apple couldn't figure out. That's technology everybody is pursuing. It is massively expensive because we don't have an economical way to put
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
you know thousands and millions of tiny little leds carefully placed on a thing like uh oleds and other things are kind of done like a kind of like a printing process like that's not what it's doing but can you imagine like an inkjet printer or whatever it makes them less expensive to produce uh but we don't have a way to do that with micro leds so even for a watch size screen apple bailed on that i said we can't figure that out forget it we'll just go with
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
uh more oled screens so anyway micro led is what it's called and it's not an organic led it's not pronounced microld oh and by the way the the element that is mixed into uh grade five titanium is vanadium not mandium that was just mispronunciation on my part so double apology there wow i love that you have what is this the phonetic spelling or what what do you call these letters with like the upside down the ipa yeah i just copied out of the dictionary thing you know yeah yeah can you actually make heads or tails of these because i cannot yeah
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
you should have waited for the new uh emoji update i didn't i don't think it's coming in ios 18 but i've seen people talking about it you know the one you know the emoji i'm talking about no there is a face with like bags under the eyes because they're tired like the tired face that's when that's what you should have put for me oh that's me all the time
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
i know the schwa is like uh i know the e with line over it is a long e sure long a so you can say the nay d um i mean i'm impressed i think i know all the i don't know all the symbols i i that's why i go to like miriam webster site has a speaker symbol next to it and you just click the speaker and it it audio pronounces it pronounces it for you so that's very useful
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And I had to do the thing where like two, two copies of the app running side by side to be like, am I imagining things? Scroll, scroll. Cause like, like I said, the, the NS table view one with NS views is fine. Like you, you'd look at it and you would think there's nothing wrong with it, but I'm, I've been obsessing over for so long. Now it's like scroll this one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
now scroll that one now see does it feel can i can i move can i move the pointer like off the scroll thumb by like if i shake it real fast hmm are they the same but i was like i swear the nsl one is a little bit better and i didn't know what to do with that i'm like well i've re-implemented an nsl and it's fine maybe i'll just leave it like that but guess what nsl is annoying Everyone was right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
They're like, it makes the code more complicated and annoying. And it's just like, well, but I already did it, but it's kind of gross. Like, what should I do? Like it is better. I wish it wasn't better, but I can tell that it's better. So instead of what I decided to do was spend an entire day trying to figure out why is it better? And I wish I was better at instruments.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I'm not good at instruments. I've watched all the WWDC sessions. I'm still not good at it. I wish I was better at instruments. If you are good at the performance analysis tools, it makes your life so much easier. I know this from my career with performance analysis tools that I did know how to use. But this is not one of them. So I was just like, I have the code for both of them here.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Surely I can figure out why are you ever so slightly slower than you over here? And so I just went methodically through it and tried to figure out what is making this slower. And I figured it out. Figured out what it was. It was yet another corner of the Swift language that I'm not familiar enough with, combined with the careless mistake.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I have a bunch of subclasses, because that's what you do in AppKit. You subclass things. I had this big cascade of subclasses for populating my NS table views. And you guys familiar with the whole like designated initializer thing? Mm-hmm.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
You know, you got to call it designated initializer and you can have convenience initializers that are what you want to do, but you don't get to pick the designated initializers if you're using like, you know, some class that Apple defines. You got to call their initializers, even if they're initialized with some crap that you don't care about.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Anyway, I have this big cascade of initializers and being a dutiful little object-oriented person, I was shoving the common functionality down into the base classes so I don't have to repeat it in every subclass. And one of the things that I had shoved down was setting a very important attribute, the identifier for the object.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And it turns out one of my derived classes was calling through a sequence of inits that never hit the init that set the identifier. It was passed into the constructor and passed down, but it was like, because you have to call the destination initializer sooner than you think, or at least I was calling it sooner than I thought I was, I had skipped over that part.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So what ended up happening was one of my cells... just a dinky little cell was not getting its identifier set, which meant that every time I needed one of those, it would make me a new one. Oh no. And it was, it was, it was a constant, it was the one with the little eyeball, like the preview thing. Like it's literally the same thing every time. There's no data, right? It's, it's hard coded.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So it was really fast. but not as fast as not making it. So that was it. I, I, I, you know, I set the identifier because I'm already passing identifier. It was there in the constructor. I set the identifier and like the subclass in it, even though it's like duplication and, you know, don't repeat yourself.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Well, anyway, I set the initializer because it wasn't getting set because I wasn't going through the right in it path elsewhere. And then all of a sudden the view based one was exactly the same as the cell based one. And I was very happy. I celebrated, and I hope I never have to re-implement that view ever again.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I threw away the NS cell-based one, reverted to the view-based one, did the two-line fix, and honestly, you can't really tell the difference. Unless you AP test it, it looks exactly the same as it was before. But I know it's ever so slightly better, and that's what matters. And the final thing on this topic, a bunch of people are asking about WebKit performance and scrolling performance. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And someone pointed me to a blog post about a website where someone wanted to make a web page where you can scroll through every UUID. That's bananas. Like every UUID.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Well, the idea is a web page and you scroll it and the top is the first UUID and at the bottom is the last one. And in between are all the other possible UUIDs between those values. Now, and this is like an example of like, well, how far can you push the whole like, you know, like we mentioned before, if you're recycling the cells, it shouldn't matter how many things there are in the list, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
The performance should be the same with 10, 1,000, 100,000, a million, a billion. The performance should be exactly the same all the time, right? And this is kind of a demonstration of that. Now, I feel like they cheated because when you go to the website, everyuuid.com, you will see how they cheated. It's not really scrolling it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
It's really just showing a fixed list of cells with values that change. So and it's a fake scroll bar. So but anyway, the blog post about how they implemented it is fun because obviously there's no sort of data like you can generate all of these. And I think they're essentially like sequential or whatever. But I thought it was interesting, interesting enough to be in the show notes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
If you want to see one of the challenges of trying to have a not infinite, but very, very large scrolling list, every UUID.com.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
This is like finding an extra room in your house that you've never discovered before. Like you didn't realize your whole house is wired with the internet. You just remove one of the phone switches. There's Ethernet cable in here. What a heartwarming story that will never happen to anybody else.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Run those LED strips all over his house. What was the name of that candy where you constantly eat paper because they stick to it? Oh, oh God. Dots are the chewy things in the box.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Marco made a comment on an earlier episode that anyone listening would have thought was Marco making a reference to a famous scene in a Star Trek movie. But it turns out Marco has never seen any Star Trek movies or any Star Trek anything. And I said, oh, well, then we have to do that as a member special.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
It was like a piece of paper and had hard little pieces of sugar stuck to it. And the idea was that you would scrape the little hard pieces of sugar off the paper with your teeth or your fingers, but you inevitably end up eating paper. They were a terrible candy and I'm glad I can't remember their name.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Right. Like a fun day. Is the activity picking paper out of your teeth? Is that the activity?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Candy buttons, candy dots, or, and this is a great one, pox. Would you like some pox? No, thank you. No, I do not. I would not like some pox. I will pass on the pox. A pox on both of your teeth with paper that's going to get shoved between them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
We have to show him the movie that he was unknowingly referencing and that Casey and I were making jokes about. And that's exactly what we did. There's no other reason than that. And it was fun. So check it out. Star Trek for the voyage home.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
What actually went there? Because it is literally a blank wall plate. It's the same wall plate you would see if there was an outlet or a switch, but there's nothing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Aren't you getting a little ahead of yourself here? Have we not learned nothing about the permitting process? I know, I know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I think this is going to be noticeable. I don't think this is going to slide under the radar because, like, especially in the pictures on the website, these LEDs are not subtle.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
You've got to go through that process before you buy this. I know. And speaking of that, how do you think the terminal with no vowels is going to go over? Has that been discussed? Lightly discussed. Marco did the thing where he bought it first and then slid it in and just waited to see if anyone would notice, and I'm wondering if that strategy might not work in your household.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Didn't some Germans also say that they take everything with them? Oh, yes, that's right. They take their kitchen appliances, their kitchen cabinets, and one of them said their kitchen countertops? What good are the countertops going to do you unless every countertop is the same size and shape? These are our marble countertops. We're taking them with us.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
They're not going to fit in your new place at all unless it's exactly the same as your old one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah, like you get it. You get a new place. And the only thing in the kitchen is just like bare walls, bare floor and like some like electrical wires dangling out somewhere. Maybe like a loose gas line. I don't know. I don't know what's going on over there in Germany. But anyway.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
The sellers usually don't want them. The sellers usually say, please take our crappy old, you know, we're not taking our fridge with us. We're not taking our stove. They're yours if you want them. Like they're just because they assume they're going to get new stuff in their new place. And yeah, but anyway, different strokes. Indeed.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
A lot of people wrote it, including Matt Rigby, to tell us that they think it's because Honda has a CarPlay and the GM cars do not. I'm not sure how much of a factor that is. I still feel like the Honda brand is the bigger factor, but that is a factor. The GM ones don't have CarPlay because GM wants that subscription revenue and does not want to have CarPlay. So, yeah, throw that in the mix.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
That's a lot. I mean, I never would have thought Nvidia stock would ever go down again. I just thought it would just go higher forever and there was nothing about their stock price that was irrational or bubble-like. I'm not dancing on Nvidia's ground. They're still the best GPU company out there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But yeah, I think they were a little bit overinflated and companies taking a hit on this, you know, Nvidia taking a hit. Nvidia taking a hit on this is a little weird because as this story you just read alludes to, there are, or were, I think, I'm not sure if they're still in effect, who even knows, But anyway, there were US export restrictions for the most powerful GPUs to China.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And the idea being, let's not... give our best technology to China because then they'll develop AI and I don't know, take over the world with their AI instead of our AI, whatever. It's just like USA, USA. We want to do everything ourselves, uh, with our own technology. We don't want to export it to China.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
They can buy the crappy old, like last year or year before our previous generation model, but we're not going to sell them the best stuff. And presumably that will help maintain the U S lead in AI because open AI is an American company. And a lot of the other big AI startups are also American companies. Um,
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And the Chinese company said, no, we'll do the same thing you're doing, but for less money and with crappier hardware. And they did. And it was very upsetting to the stock market because they said, well, I guess all those export restrictions did not have the intended effect. And I guess what OpenAI is doing is not that unique. We've talked about this in many past episodes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
The phrase you will hear all the time, which is annoying, is... What kind of moat do the AI companies have? Is there anything about what OpenAI is doing that makes it special and unique that makes competitors not able to compete? And I think we've all said in all past shows, not really, because Facebook has its open source Lama models. Apple's got its foundation models.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like the foundation of all of these things is the large language model scientific papers and the study of how to create them. That is all public knowledge. So anybody can make one of these things. And the question was, is there some kind of special sauce that OpenAI has? Okay, well, the technology everybody knows, but we do it in a better way than anyone else. And therefore, we have a moat.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
We're the best at it. ChatGPT is the best. Everyone's got a large diagonal, but we're just a little bit better than all of them. And that's why we need $500 billion or whatever to build new data centers to train the next model, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And here comes this Chinese company saying, well, we read all the same papers and we have crappier GPUs and we spent less money, but our thing is basically as good as yours open AI. So what do you think of that?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
not only that but like you know running inference on our thing which is like you know executing the ai models and using them for everybody else is way cheaper than your thing yeah everything's cheaper everything about it's cheap it was cheaper to train and it's cheaper to run to actually use um and that's one of the reasons that one of the stock prices that did not take a hit was apple because i guess the theory that like well if inference becomes cheaper and apple likes to do lots of on-device ai uh that's good for apple
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Now, it's not like Apple is using deep seek like in their operating system, but just conceptually, if the cost of inference goes down for equal performance, I guess that benefits Apple because they're doing a lot of inference on device or whatever. But we'll see. I think like this, this whole kerfuffle is just kind of I feel like a correction to some inflated stock prices.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But in general, being able to do the thing better and for less money with less power is what we expect. with technological progress. What we don't expect is, like, every year it will take even more power and, you know, like, we think things to get better, but keep in mind that DeepSeek is not, like, massively better than OpenAI.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
It's roughly about the same, with some caveats that we'll get to in a little bit. But the whole point is, yeah, it's the same, but cheaper and better and lower power and blah, blah, blah, right? And I'm like, great, that's what I expect. I expect like, you know, the MacBook Air that you can get now should be roughly the same performance as like an old MacBook Pro, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But lower power and better, like I expect that to happen. But I guess people were startled that it happened so quickly, especially since open AI has always just been making noises of like the only way we can surpass it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
01 to make the next generation is for you to give us billions more dollars uh and yeah i apparently even just to do 01 caliber stuff you did not need that much money you just need to be a little bit more clever and the fun thing about the cleverness which we'll get to in a little bit is kind of like the the the saying that like constraints lead to better creative output but
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
because this Chinese company had to work with previous generation hardware, they were forced to figure out how to extract the maximum performance from this older hardware. They had to make compromises. They had to do approximations. They had to come up with new technologies that said, we can't do it the way OpenAI did it. We don't have the money. We don't have the time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
We don't have the technology. We need to find out a way to
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And in between, though, there was periods of stability, like there was like a seemingly long period of stability where it's like Windows desktop PCs running in Dell CPUs. And then that same stability period, but with the Internet and then mobile came. And so there's always this kind of periods where you're like, yes, this is just the way computers are.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
You buy a personal computer, you put things floppy disks on them and you run them and that's all there is. And it seems like that's going to be it. But then the next inflection point comes and there's chaos and there's winners and losers. And then there's another stable period.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And so, yeah, I think we were in a pretty long stable period with we were currently in the PCs exists, mobile exists, the Internet exists. And then we're in kind of mostly stable period. And then LLM's came and said, now nobody knows what's up. Everyone's scrambling. Who are going to be the winners? Who are going to be the losers? And yeah, we're in the middle of that right now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Well, there's a question of whether them being behind is an advantage or disadvantage, though. Like the reason their stock price is up, it's like this is further evidence that Apple LLM technology that nobody really has a moat.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
That even if you are the best at making these AI things, there's nothing you're doing that someone else can't also do because everything you're doing is essentially based on technology and techniques that everyone understands. You know what I mean? And the reason people think Apple has a moat is because Apple's just making computers that run software. There's no mystery about what they do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
It's computer chips, it's software, it's hardware. All right, Apple's moat is, yeah, anyone can do this, but we're the only ones who know how to do it with taste, with style, with the right feature set, with, you know, like all the Apple sort of more intangible things. There's nothing technologically speaking interesting
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
even in the Apple Silicon era, really, that it's like, well, nobody else could do this except for Apple. They have a secret sauce. Their secret sauce is how they combine the ingredients. So to stretch the cooking analogy here, right? Everyone knows, everyone's got the recipe, right? It's just a question of, can you put it all together, right? that's, that's Apple's mode.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like that's why Apple has been so successful for so long. It's not like they have a secret technology that nobody knows about. Right. And it's the same thing with the AI companies and opening. I think kind of felt like it was the Apple of AI. It's like, well, yeah, everybody knows how to make an LM. And we publish all these papers to say how we're doing it. And like, we know how to train them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
We do all these different techniques and we talk about it, but like, but we're so good at it. We're the Apple of AI. And we, we can combine things in a way that no one else can copy. No one else can make a product that is a substitute for ours. Uh, and deep seek said, well, I think we can do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And so far the public is like, maybe it's just a fad and people are trying it and we'll get to some reasons why you might not want to do that in a little bit. But like practically speaking, it's like, is this a substitute for the other thing? Does it do what the other thing did? Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And when it comes to personal computers, a lot of people say, well, a Windows PC kind of technically does the same thing as a Mac, but not really. Android phone versus iPhone, there's still that differentiation. Apple still has a moat, and it's been a sustainable moat for a long time, basically made of intangibles.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And I don't think OpenAI has that kind of a moat, where everyone has the same technology, but they just do it a little bit special, better like... Down to the, you know, this is the Samsung effect. But if you go to the DeepSeek website, you could be forgiven if you squint your eyes and think, is this the ChatGPT website? It's a Samsung-style ripoff. Like, it looks so much like ChatGPT.com.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But it's not. The icons are slightly different. And the app is similar, right? So... I think in this area where Apple is kind of like behind, it's like, look, I feel, I think Apple feels if people are talking about what is the number one app on our store, we're still winning. Like we don't need to have the number one app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
We just need chat GPT and deep seek and whatever competitor we've never heard of to be duking it out on our platform. That shows we're still in the game here. And we'll just wait and see which LLM is the most successful and we'll partner with them and we'll leverage their technology and we'll work on our own.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And there's still out there, which I keep mentioning every time we talk about LLMs and AI, the question of how useful this technology is and in what context. We are currently in the phase, the chaos bubble phase, where it's like this technology is good for everything and should be used everywhere. That is not going to be true. It's only going to be useful in some places for some things.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But right now, everyone is trying everything. And we'll find out where is it useful and where is it not. With what Apple has done in Apple intelligence, I don't think they've done anything where you look at it and say, I can't live without this AI feature now. It has made such a big change in my life. I'm glad it's there. I will be sad if it ever goes away. Where is the utility?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And has Apple harnessed that in its operating system? I don't think they have yet. Right. But they got to keep trying. And same thing with everybody else. Everyone else is trying. So I think Apple's in a good position right now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And until and unless someone out there sort of tries to usurp Apple's sort of platform control, I think Apple's find content to just keep trying different approaches to mixing AI into its platform and wait to see who's left standing at the end of all this. Is it going to be OpenAI, NVIDIA, DeepSeek, Anthropic, some other new company we've never heard of? Like who wants to partner with us later?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Well, you know, you guys duke it out and we'll just figure out who has the best. Maybe we'll buy one of the ones that has the best one or whatever. It's a risky move because I don't think Google's thinking that because Google's thinking these people are a direct threat. But Apple's like, we can wait and see.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Work on our models and just keep trying to integrate into our apps and see if anything sticks.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Is it now? You think it's a core technology of their product now? It's a core part of their marketing. I don't think it's a core part. You could turn off Apple intelligence on people's iPhones and see how long it takes them to notice. Like it is not a core technology in the same way as like Apple Silicon or their operating system or their app store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like, I mean, I'm not saying it's not going to be, but right now I feel like, Apple Intelligent, if you had to say, does this fit the Tim Cook doctrine of we need to own and control, blah, blah, blah, I'm not sure it does yet. I mean, it sure seems like it's going to, so it's a good idea for them to be pursuing that. But right now, I don't think they've proven it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah, I don't know. Is that the list of next generation cars? It's got to be the list of next generation CarPlay designs. I guess they're committed to it, but like things happen so slowly in the car world. I don't understand why Apple made all these pronouncements that 2024 was going to be the year.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Not in Apple's hands, apparently, but other people you can use it with.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
2024 was not the year, but Apple just wanted to make a statement, an official statement saying next generation card play is still a thing and it's still coming someday. That's the nature of the name next generation. It's always off in the distance. It's the next. It's not the current generation. It's the next generation.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
someday it will arrive and you'll sure be sure to hear about it here when the first car ships with it because it's definitely going to be weird but right now apple says it is still a thing so just be patient i guess it's the race between next generation carplay and a new monitor
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I think they're taking it very seriously. Like they're making a big push for it, but like the, the history you mentioned, like, well, first of all, voice assistants, that is obviously the area where the farthest behind, they were far behind that before LLMs. Like we all know that, right. There was, they were just not doing well with that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And somehow able to limp along with Siri being terrible for all those years. Um, They also don't make a search engine. They've just been essentially leaning on Google and other companies because that is apparently not core enough part of their operating system with the AI stuff. Apple feels like they need to incorporate it because it is a potential disrupting threat. Absolutely.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But potential keyword being potential, but like, you know, you got to cover your bet. So they, however many years ago they decided we're just going to go on on this Apple intelligence thing. They probably waited too long. They haven't, it's been taking them forever to do what they said they were going to do. Right. So it's really,
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
It's going slowly and the things they're rolling out are not that impressive, but I feel like they are really bought into it. Like every aspect of the company is focused on this. They just haven't figured out how to do anything that's particularly compelling with it. And meanwhile, their voice assistant is sitting there still sucking, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And the competition, the competing voice assistants are getting better and better because LLM is helping them. And LLMs are not really helping Apple in its traditional weaknesses. But, you know, they existed a long time with a crappy voice assistant. But they can exist with a crappy one for a while longer as long as...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
those voice assistants that everyone else is doing don't get much, much better. Now, obviously they're already better than Siri, but like there's this breaking point. Like there's, you know, how much better is one cell phone than another? The iPhone was across that breaking point of like, this isn't just a little bit better than your Nokia candy bar phone. This is a whole different thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Arguably, we're kind of already there with voice assistants, but maybe not because the whole LLM's reliability problem. But anyway, if someone figures this out, yeah, it's good for Apple to be in the game. They're trying to get in the game. I think they are serious about it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I think they're spending a lot of time and money to the detriment of all the other things they could be doing to try to put Apple intelligence everywhere, to try to get better at it. But...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
i'm not i'm not optimistic because i you know like i'm pessimistic not because i think they're not putting in the effort i'm pessimistic because it doesn't seem like a thing like you said that they've historically been good at and so no matter how much effort they put in it's like well you can be really serious about this and put a lot of effort into it but if you are not able to acquire those skills will you ever be fruitful but yeah we'll see how this goes like there's and
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I totally think they're doing the right thing. It is a potential threat, and you shouldn't wait for it to be a life-threatening thing before you get serious about it. You can't afford to wait, which is why everybody is scrambling to do AI everything, because they're like, well, it might be huge. Look how much it's advanced in the past two years, so we better gather it on this ASAP.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
isn't but it might be so we better so we better do everything that we can and it's kind of uh sad seeing apple flail with apple intelligence because it's like they're trying to do stuff but what they're producing is like i don't know it's not compelling like they did the partnership with chat gbt to say like we don't have that we're not going to have that we'll partner with them and somehow they found a way to screw that up like uh with gruber story where
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I don't think we have enough people who listen to the show to make that possible, even if they all converted into members.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
They're trying to ask when the Super Bowls are. And when Apple asks ChatGPT, it still gets the wrong answer. But if you ask ChatGPT directly, it gets the right answer. So they've somehow partnered with ChatGPT and made it less functional. Is that the Apple touch? I don't know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Or they have enough other advantages that they can make up for it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
This is never going to work. Yeah, that's expensive. But I'll definitely read articles about it and watch YouTube videos about it and talk about it on the show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
What if OpenAI pays them $20 billion a year to make? OpenAI, the default voice assistant on Apple. You know, Apple's forced to open the voice assistant thing to third parties because of the EU. And then OpenAI doesn't have its own platform. Like, again, I think Apple just loves the fact that people care what's number one in the App Store still. Like, that's the magic of the App Store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like, all these apps want to be on the iPhone, right? So it might be like Maps. And part of the thing that made Maps come to a head was that Google demanded access to customer data that Apple wasn't willing to give, right, in exchange for continuing the deal, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So they went off and did their own thing and it was painful and long, or it could be like search where Apple is never going to be good at it. And they say, you know what? Uh, you should pay us for you to be the default voice assistant on, on iOS. And they're getting suddenly, you know, $20 billion a year from open AI or from deep seek or who knows.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But anyway, yeah, it's still, that's the thing about the current situation. We don't know which direction this is going to go in. Those are two possible directions. And there's third and fourth directions we're not even thinking about, but
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
everyone is scrambling to try to do everything they can to figure out wherever this goes we got to be ready and i think apple is they're they're showing that they have been able to kind of rally the troops to do apple intelligence everywhere but they're also showing that their actual execution of that has been not impressive and way slower than i think we all thought it was going to be
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
If the only thing I could do with the million dollars was buy one of these cars, I would do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
you know of occasionally finding giant optimizations like this we haven't seen that on a scale where it's like oh this now affects billions of dollars of hardware that's been one example that i think it might have been ben thompson that gave us example and we're going to get to him in a second because he's the next item up in here but i think this example is from him and i think it's a good one and if not uh whoever it's uh came up with it uh sorry i can't credit you um
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Honda's got their ASIMO operating system. I don't know what they're doing with that. It's not even clear. Are they using Android Automotive and ASIMO is just something on top of it or alongside it? Anyway, we'll find out when the Acura RDX EV comes out with the ASIMO operating system in 2026, if I recall correctly.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
The disruption in data centers when Google said instead of buying servers from Sun or whatever, these big expensive Unix workstations, we're going to deploy commodity sort of PC style server hardware and manage that crappy commodity hardware with software.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And that destroyed the entire industry of really expensive proprietary Unix things for data centers that the entire internet was built on up to that point because Google said, yeah, we found a better, cheaper way to do data centers. Data centers are important.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
People, if you wanted to build a data center at the scale that Google needs and you wanted to, you know, buy hardware from Sun or HP or whatever to put in there with these really expensive, you know, workstation-class, server-class things or whatever... that would cost way too much.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So how about we just take crappy hardware and a huge amount of it and have some really cool software layer on top that manages the fact that all this stuff is crappy and cheap and underpowered and it's going to break? And that destroyed the whole industry.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
All those companies, like half the companies don't even exist anymore because what Google did showed that you could do the same thing that everybody needs to do that used to cost huge amounts of money and power and you could do it cheaper.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
uh and better uh and with a slightly different approach and that was an optimization they made so yeah like i mean this is this is not as severe as that because what they've done is basically just a really good job of programming the hardware they had anyway we should we should go to this next item because it goes into more detail about the particular innovations they they made
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah, so these innovations they had, like, again, some of the innovations are things that OpenAI was already doing with GPT, and they're doing as well. And then the other thing is, you know, if you look at the paper, it's like, oh, well, you have a bunch of data, and it's very expensive. What if you compressed it? I mean, it's not rocket science, but that's how innovation goes here. Like, we...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
You know, let's let's take the approach that they did with GPT-4 and do that same thing to reduce our footprint. And let's reduce it further by compressing this thing that used to take up a lot of memory. And on the cost front, these are by the way, these are papers are not they're not about the R1 model that we're talking about. These are precursors to that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So if you'd been paying attention to this stuff a month or two ago when they put the stuff out, you could have seen that like what was coming. But on the cost thing, they said it would only cost us six million dollars. When they originally said that, a lot of people just didn't believe them. Because they said, well, they're lying. It's a Chinese company.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
They're lying about how much money it costs. There's no way they could have spent $6 million to do something that costs hundreds of millions of dollars when OpenAI did it and have equal performance. It's obviously not true.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Acura RSX. Sorry for that. RS10. Yeah, so we talked about this in overtime in a past episode where we talked about the Switch 2, and I mentioned that there has been a lot of increased activity in the realm of handheld gaming PCs because the technology is available for it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah, exactly. But in the paper, they do say that those costs are not it's not the all in cost. That's just the cost of their final run. But that's, you know, and maybe the open AI number is like all the research needed to get to that point. So maybe the number is not as low as they say it is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But you can see in Ben's paper, he does some back of the envelope math to say, given the technology that they've described in their own public research papers, you can do the math and say.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
yeah they're if the number is not exact it's in the ballpark you can see how they would arrive at that because they're they're doing less stuff like that's the innovation do do less math in computers like use less memory do less computations and the magic is that when you do less work and spend less money you can somehow get a result that is comparable to open ai right it's
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So I think that mostly holds out. So one of the other theories, speaking of the people who thought the iPhone was faked or whatever, the theory was like, they must have gotten the good GPUs. They couldn't be using NVIDIA H800 or whatever things. They must have gotten the good ones secretly. No.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
they just figured out they did the, like the equivalent of like writing an assembly code, like the low level version of like, uh, extracting every ounce of juice from the crappy GPUs that they do have that. I mean, just straight up, like just brute force.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like here is, it's like when you make a console game, like in the end of a console generation versus the beginning, by the end, they figured out every little trick of that console to get the most performance out of it. And they never could have made that thing at the beginning anyway. Uh, yeah. Kudos to them for doing it. And, um, these papers that were about these innovations, uh,
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Anyone can see these papers. OpenAI can get these papers, can read them. People can see what they did. People can do the same thing. It's all out in the open. There's no secrets here. As Casey noted before, the R1 model that we have still haven't even talked about yet, that's MIT licensed. The weights are open source. So you can just grab these and pull them and you don't have to license them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like it's MIT licensed. You can do anything you want with it. You can integrate it into your product or whatever. Very, very open.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
You can make low-power, high-performing processors that can play quote-unquote PC games pretty well, well enough to be on a little screen that you can hold on your hand. Another reason why more of these are appearing is an article from The Verge from earlier in the month. Valve will officially let you install SteamOS on other handhelds as soon as this April.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah. Now, on that front, there's been some stories of people saying, hey, I was using deep seek and I was trying various things to type into the different prompts in the chat thing. And one of the responses I got was like, I'm sorry, I can't do that because OpenAI something like it referred to itself as OpenAI, like the deep seek model did.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And I'm pretty sure the way we talked about it was because I got the AirPods 4 and I was asking you guys about the different modes that they do because I didn't know which modes and what they were good for. I think at least at that point, you reiterated your opinion that you didn't like Adaptive.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
It's kind of like when like the open AI model starts spitting back like direct quotes from New York times and stuff. When deep seek starts saying as an open AI model, I can't X, Y, and Z. It makes you think that perhaps deep seek was trained using open AI models. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And that's, as Ben says here, it's just assumed that everybody is doing this because, you know, doing this, having models train other models has been a practice for a while now. And why would deep seek not do it? But how does open AI feel about that?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Well, I mean, so here's the thing. We'll put a link in the show notes to this 404 Media story that had a good headline, which is OpenAI furious that DeepSeek might have stolen all the data OpenAI stole from us. So it's like OpenAI's argument is like, well, we've talked about this many times in past episodes. Well, we're not really stealing the data.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
We're using it to train our models and it's a different thing and it's transformative and blah, blah, blah. And I feel like if OpenAI really believes that and it's not just a bunch of BS,
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
when another model uses your model to train their model they say well we're not stealing your data we're just using it to train a model and blah it's like exactly the same argument right and i you know as we've discussed who knows how solid that argument is and how it will turn out but it really is very directly like they're just using it to train a model they're not stealing your data when they train a model with your data it's transformative they don't need your permission to get it but open the eyes like no totally it's in our terms of service you have to it's
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So they don't really have a leg to stand on here. It's like, look, it's either it's not okay for both of you to do it or it's okay for both of you to do it. And I'm sure the lawyers say, well, our terms of service say otherwise. But just like setting aside the law in terms of service and crossing international boundaries with a U.S.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
company versus a Chinese company just seems like they're mad because somebody else is doing the same thing to them that they did to everybody else.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So Steam Deck is Valve's handheld thing, and it runs a variant of Linux that has some libraries to let it run Windows games called SteamOS. And Valve has said for a while that they were always supposed to license SteamOS to other manufacturers. Now they're doing that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah, this is what we talked about when we were first discussing ChatGPT and the fact that they had like, you know, hundreds of thousands of human generated question and answer pairs to help train it. Yes, they trained on all the knowledge in the internet, but also there was a huge human powered effort of like, let's tailor make a bunch of
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
what we think are correct or good question and answer pairs and feed them. And they had to pay human beings to make those that they could use to train their model. That obviously costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time. And, you know, Ben gives the AlphaGo example of like, if we try to make a computer program play a game really well, should we have like experts that go like teach the AI thing?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
What's the best move here or there? Or should we just say, no humans are involved. Here's the game. Here's the rules. just run with a huge amount of time with the reward function of winning the game. And eventually the model will figure out how to be the best go player in the world rather than us carefully saying, well, you gotta know this strategy. You gotta know that or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Obviously getting the humans out of the loop saves money, saves time. Uh, and it removes some of the, uh, Blind alleys you might go down because humans are going to do a particular thing that works a particular way, and we don't know that that's the correct solution there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So I'm assuming the R in both R1 and R10 both stand for reinforcement learning, and maybe the zero stands for – I'm trying to parse their names. Who knows? The fact that we took out the human factor entirely and –
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
we'll just train this this thing you know entirely with reinforcement learning on its own we don't have to guide it in any way uh that seems like it's probably a better approach because obviously the human feedback approach is not really scalable beyond a certain point right like you can you can keep scaling up the computing part as computers get faster and better and you give more power and money and blah blah blah but you can't employ every human on the planet to be making human question and answer pairs right if you get to that scaling point so this seems like a fruitful
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
approach. And again, practically speaking, if you want to do it in less money and less time, you can't hire 100,000 human beings to make questions and answers for your thing. So they didn't. And it turns out they can make something that worked pretty well even without doing that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
A Lenovo is going to ship the first third-party SteamOS handheld in May, and supposedly it will let people install SteamOS and other handhelds even sooner than that thing ships. So Valve is making a play here to say, we don't just want to sell the Steam Deck, we want to be like the Microsoft of handheld gaming PCs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
We talked about that in a past ATP episode, about how mad they were. The people were trying to, like, figure out, like, because the people were, like, prompt engineering and saying, like, I know you're hiding the chain of thought. The chain of thought is like, how is it thinking through the problem or whatever? Like they show you a summary of it, but they don't show you the real one, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And you can read the blog posts. This is from a while ago about why OpenAI did that. But then people were like, but I figured out if you prompt the O1 model in this way, it will tell you about its chain of thought. And OpenAI was like, that's against our terms of service. You can't look under the covers of how our thing works. You're not allowed to do that. And it was banning accounts and stuff.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I think that was several months ago. But anyway, you know, it's kind of ironic that OpenAI Open isn't the OpenAI name. They were going to be this magnanimous public benefit, whatever, blah, blah. Now they're very quickly changing into a private company entirely controlled and focused on making money and so on and so forth. And they don't want you to know how their reasoning model works.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So this is, I mean, perhaps uncharacteristic for China and the Chinese government of not having secrets. This company is saying, we found a better way to do what you were doing. And we're going to tell you how we did it. We tell you everything about it. The stuff is open source. You can get the weights from the model under an MIT license.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
We'll publish all the scientific papers about how we did it. No secrets. Here it is. And are we going to go closed source like OpenAI? Are we going to hide our chain of reasoning? No. You can see it. We're not trying to hide it. There's no terms of service saying you can't get at it. We don't try to summarize it or hide it from you. That is potentially uncharacteristic.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
One thing that is characteristic and will lead us into the next topic is Yeah, they're probably not too worried about their employees and giving them this know-how or whatever because it's not like they can just leave and do whatever they want. The Chinese government has much, much, much more say in what Chinese citizen and Chinese companies do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
If any quote-unquote PC manufacturer wants to make a handheld gaming platform, and there's a bunch of them, I think Asus makes one, Lenovo is going to make one, there's a couple of their manufacturers that I can't remember, like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And so it is kind of like they don't have to worry so much about... every employee of DeepSea leaving to go become employees of OpenAI, because that is not something that the Chinese government has ways to prevent that from happening, let's say. But still, you know, if you think of, like, a competitor to the U.S. using the typical, you know, demonized U.S.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
things of like axis of evil, like they're going to do everything secret in their secret volcano lair. And it's like, nope, here's everything we're doing. Here's all the papers. Here's all the weights in the models, like totally out in the open, which I think is just.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
finger in the eye of open ai the fact that they have open in the aim even more so it's like we are doing better and we're not afraid to tell you how we did it because that kind of like what they're trying to say is kind of like an apple approach it's like we can tell you how we did it it's just computers right we're where our advantage is not that secret our advantage is whatever intangibles they think they have now i'm not entirely sure they do have any intangibles because again if you look at their app on their website it looks just like chat gpt and
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I don't see any particular differentiation there. So we'll see how this shakes out. But right now it's still looking much more like anybody can make one of these. Kind of like in the PC industry. Anybody could make a PC. There were winners and losers in the PC industry. Different companies would come and go. Compaq, HP, Microsoft eventually started making them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
and if you don't want to like run literally run windows on it you can run steam os which is just linux that runs windows games that is a compatibility layer whatever we'll see how this works for them i know the steam deck is very popular but uh not as popular as the switch 2 i imagine but yeah it could be like you know so this is something we kind of accept in the realm of games that you play while sitting in a chair that there's pc gaming and then there's console gaming uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
You know, all the niche manufacturers. So many different people made personal computers. The stuff that went into them, everybody knew. There was no secrets, right? There was no secret sauce. It was just like, who's good at making a personal computer? But it turned out the people who had a moat were the people on the platform. Windows was the moat because they controlled the platform.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
They controlled the operating system. And for a long time, Intel had a moat of the best process technology. And we know how that turned out eventually. Not great. But still, for a long time, they were tops. even when they were challenged by AMD, who got in through the side door with an x86 thing, even when they weren't able to make a 64-bit thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
There are sustainable ways to be the key important player in the industry, but the key important player was not Compaq. It was not HP. It was not any of the PC manufacturers. It was Microsoft with Windows and Intel with the CPUs for a long time. Right now, we don't know who is the equivalent of Microsoft and Intel in the AI age. OpenAI thought it was them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
DeepSeek is saying, doesn't seem like it's you. But is it DeepSeek either? Are both OpenAI and DeepSeek, are they like, I can't think of enough PC manufacturer names. Are they IBM and Hewlett Packard? Or is one of them Microsoft or Apple? We'll see.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Administrative adjustments. That's an interesting... It's always been inseparable.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So the difference is that China can force... and does force the companies within its borders to do this. No, that's what I'm saying. Do you think we're that far from the U.S. forcing that legally? Because in America, they choose to do it. And that is a difference. It is a difference. It's a difference that I'm not sure we should rely on long term.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Well, you know, right now, yes, the American government can only force companies to do certain things and not everything. And in China, they can force them to do anything. So yeah, anything coming out of the Chinese government is 100% filled with Chinese government propaganda. That's why when you ask about Tiananmen Square, it will not tell you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
When you ask about Taiwan, it will give you the Chinese government company line. And it's not because DeepSeek just feels like doing that because it's run by somebody who agrees to that. It's because they have to do it. There is no choice. And so they do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And there's sort of a rivalry there, but it's like, oh, well, console gaming, there's a handful of consoles, fewer as time goes on, it seems. But PCs, there's a million PCs. You can build your own gaming PC. You can buy a gaming PC for money. We can get any old PC. And this is trying to make that happen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So, you know, so if you ask in Morse... This is a question it would not answer when asked directly. But when you go into Morse code, suddenly whatever thing... This is the thing about all the... We've talked about this before. Can you put guardrails on an LLM, right? And you can try. But, oh, because it's just basically like a big black box full of numbers...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
it's basically impossible to stop people from getting around it because you don't really know what's going on in that box of numbers. It's just cat and mouse. Like, okay, well, we'll close the Morse code hole and now it's like, write me a Python script that explains to me what happened in Tiananmen Square. Like, there's no avoiding...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
This is just... It's... One of the interesting things about technology is that it does... It can make it easier for totalitarian governments to exert control, but it also can provide ways around them. So it is... It is both a weapon against and a tool of oppression, like so many things. And so here's yet another example. So...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
yeah deep seek obviously if you use it all your data goes to the chinese government if you care about that it is 100 filled with chinese propaganda because that's the way it is but uh it's all open source or the weights are open source and their scientific papers are open and so there's no reason american companies who do terrible things of their own volition can't do can't do the same things
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah, there was an Ars Technica story that I just put in here at the last minute titled, The questions the Chinese government doesn't want DeepSeek to answer. It's a study of over 1,000, quote, sensitive prompts finds brittle protection that is easy to jailbreak. So, yeah, they've tried to make it so that when you ask it any question that...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
the Chinese government has a particular position on or doesn't want to talk about, it will avoid it. But there's always ways around it. So just FYI, do not trust what the R1 model, what DeepSeek says when you are using it through the DeepSeek product and asking anything having to do with anything the Chinese government cares about.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So if you download those weights and run the model on your local computer, I guess all of the sort of propaganda stuff is like a layer they've put over it on their web service. But the model itself – it was interesting because I had assumed like the model itself was propagandized, right? Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But if they're not feeding it with human-powered data and they don't have enough of a propaganda corpus, it's probably impossible to make the model itself
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
in the world of handheld as well, because historically, it's like, well, handheld, there's no equivalent. Handheld, you get it from one of the console makers, or that's it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
parrot Chinese propaganda because you have to try it on like the world's knowledge and there's just too much in there that is you know closer to reality or at least many different points of view right so there's no way to filter that out without massive human intervention so it seems like what they're doing is when you use the deep seek product there is a layer on top of it that is looking to see if you're asking about sensitive stuff and then shunting you off into one of those
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
oh, that's begun my current slope. Let's talk about something else. I'm just a harmless model and all that stuff. That seems to be a layer on top. So the model itself will actually tell you to the best of its ability what it thinks about these things with the same caveats about it making up stuff because everything is made up because it's just a bucket of numbers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like, there's no handheld PC, but now they're like, oh, well, you can get a Switch, or maybe that weird PlayStation thing that just remote plays to your PlayStation 4 or 5, or you can get any one of these umpteen handheld gaming PCs. The twist here is that if Valve has its way, they'll be running Linux instead of Windows, but they'll still be running quote-unquote Windows games.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And in fact, I did this to your websites with Docker. Because you wouldn't tell me, how can I run this website locally? And you said, oh, I have some setup on my thing, but you never told me what I have to do on my Mac.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
to run the websites so i dockerized both of the websites that i now maintain so i could run them on my mac because i could didn't couldn't figure out how to do whatever it is that you had is now you're in the same situation i was where you're like i don't want to keep maintaining these local installs and i don't even know how to do it but i already did it for those two websites so if you would like an example you can look at how i did it to those two websites and do the same thing for whatever website you're talking about presumably overcast or something
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So, as usual, everything in the PC world is a little bit of a mess, but also kind of exciting.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
very good uh apparently ryan london is out to troll you can you tell me more about this so excited uh someone had sent me something they talked to i think i mentioned on the show they talked to ryan london back in december through customer service and they and the customer service person said oh i know you want one of our leather cases that has the little sapphire button for the camera control we're totally going to make that should be ready by mid-december that didn't happen right but here we are in mid-january and lo and bear at the end of january
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
No, I think you can. I think if you use Docker on ARM Macs, I think you can run x86 Linux on them. I don't know because I still have an x86 Mac, but I'll find out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Not Parallels, Docker. Casey, you ran my Docker images on your ARM Mac, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Those are x86 Linux you just ran on your ARM Mac, so yeah, it works. It does? Docker can do that? Yeah, you didn't even know it was x86 Linux, but I can tell you, my Docker containers are all x86 Linux, because that's what the servers run.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah. Yeah. No, I did. I did all of that with the two websites that I converted everything you're describing. It's just an idea. I'm in BB edit. I hit save. I go to the web browser, hit reload. That's it. That's the process.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
No, I mean, we still need to, the collective we meaning probably me, but maybe also you, need to upgrade to PHP 8 on all the servers because it's still 7. Because originally I made my Docker images with PHP 8 until I found a compatibility thing. So I'm running the exact version that we're, you know. I match the versions up exactly, but I would like to upgrade everything to PHP 8.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But in the meantime, our servers are running very close to the same thing that is running inside the Docker containers down to the OS version, kernel, PHP version, MySQL version, everything just pinned to what they are on the server.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And yeah, all the files are just local in local Git repos, and I edit them with my local BBEdit and local text editor, and I hit save, and I just hit reload in my browser, and it all works. That's how I do all my development on the websites.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah, there's a readme. Oh my gosh. I'm going to send you the link to it. Your repo. I think they're my repos now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah. And speaking of that, my, this, the quote unquote CMS that I wrote myself, because that's what we all have to do for my website at hypercritical.co is in fact a self-made pearl thing, right? Um, And that I used to run, that I still do run, actually, like I'm doing what Marco was complaining about.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Oh, I got to have a local install of Perl and I got to have a local install of any databases and blah, blah, blah. And I'm still maintaining those on my Mac. I don't find it particularly onerous. They don't change that much. It's fine. But I did at one point back when I dockerized the websites, you know, the websites for for ATP stuff. I said, you know what?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I should dockerize my Perl CMS too, just because right now it's fine. Like I build Perl, you sold into user local. I, I know how to do that. I'd know how to do like, it's fine, but wouldn't it be nice also to have it because once I dockerized the, the ATP websites, uh, I was like, Oh, I should do that to mine as well. So I did, I dockerized my, um, Perl CMS thing as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And lo and behold, the Ryan London website has a big banner on the top. It's like, hey, here it is. Leather cases with a sapphire button for the camera control. New, new, click through, buy one now. And I did exactly that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I don't use the dockerized one. I still use the local one because the local one, the local one has the advantages. You don't have to launch Docker, right? So it's just a little bit easier, but it's my, it's my insurance. Like if anything changes, like, Oh, I can't run it on my ARM Mac or Perl isn't supported on macOS anymore or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I have a Linux Docker image with all the Perl stuff in it or whatever. The main approach for this that I took with these in the grand scheme of things, extremely simple websites. which allows me to get by with my baby Docker skills, which I do not have extensive Docker skills. Docker was at the tail end of my jobby job career, and I know just enough about it to be able to do baby websites.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And so for a baby website that just has... A web server, a database, PHP, like... And I call that a baby website because, quote-unquote, real websites are 8,000 microservices with continuous integration and AWS, and they're just so much more complicated, it makes you want to cry. But anyway, for a simple little thing, which sounds like most of what Marco is working with is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Uh, the steps are, uh, make a Docker image with the OS you want and the software that you want installed. It's usually pretty easy if you're using a fairly standard OS and you know how to use the package manager. You basically put instructions in the Docker file that tells it to install the packages you want to be installed and does whatever stuff you want and puts stuff in different directories.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Um, Then you might have to do some stuff with setting up host names and networking and SSH keys or whatever, depending on how fancy you want to get there. And then the final bit is what I did for these other little baby websites is I have it essentially mount my local Git repo that's in just on my Mac. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And I clicked through and bought so quickly that I didn't realize until I saw the receipt screen that what they're selling with the sapphire camera control button is their variant of the leather case that has a metal ring around the cameras. And I do not like that. So I had to cancel that order. I'm like, well, I'll just cancel that order and I'll go buy the right one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I have that Git repo mounted inside, sometimes several Git repos mounted inside the container. So inside the container slash slash bar is actually the Git repo for whatever on my Mac. That's how I just go to that Git repo on my Mac, open it with my local Mac text editor and save it. Those changes are immediately reflected inside the container.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So the container is running off of the Git repo that is on my Mac. You can do that in both directions with mounting things in and out of things or whatever. And getting the invocations for the mounting is a little bit annoying in there, you know, but like that's, that's basically it. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So once you have that, you have a Linux container running your software with all you can, you set up the startup scripts and have the thing starting. Like you get as fancy as you want, like whatever you would do in a real server to get it set up the way you want it. You can do that. So same steps inside a Docker container.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Now you're making it as a reproducible formula that you will run over and over again until it sets the thing up the right way. Right. And that Docker file is just your formula for building this server. And that the readme that I just posted into the Slack channel is like, OK, if I get this Docker image, what do I have to do to make it work? And Casey followed these instructions way back when.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And it's just a question of like, tell me where your repos are. I need to know where the repos are for these, you know, for all the software that's going to run this thing. I need the data. Where do I get the data to populate the database from? And like once you have all those instructions, you can just say, OK, put these things here, communicate those locations.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
either through command line arguments or environment variables. There's a million different ways you can communicate this. I use environment variables for a lot of stuff. And then you just start the Docker container in an environment where that stuff is set up, and that's it. And I just basically don't need to touch it. I did need to mess with it recently. Why did I need to mess with it?
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I was messing with it recently because I wanted to change something or other about it, and I ran into a thing where I had cached Docker images, like the repos for Ubuntu, whatever version number, were like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
uh wonky and i had to like blow away my docker cache to rebuild the images successfully but that's just a little docker is a very deep rabbit hole if you go into but for the most part if you don't touch it it'll continue to work fine i have it to the point where i have fake entries in my etsy hosts on my mac that say like dev.atp.fm points to like the docker image and stuff right so it's all just very self-contained i get to use those host names i get a self-sign hssl certificate for
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
dev.atp.fm that my browsers complain about but i click through the warning you know it's like it's very much like doing local dev just with a little twist and i have to confess that i don't know enough about docker networking to do to work out everything there are still some things that are a little bit funky also could never figure out how to successfully send mail from inside the ubuntu docker container but that's okay because i probably don't want it sending mail anyway so
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
This rabbit hole goes extremely deep, but just to do something simple like that, I think those are basically the steps, right? Make the formula for your machine, set up where it's going to point to everything, and then mount in your Git repos with your software in it, and you're off to the races.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
It's very easy to get confused on the website. Some of the pictures look very similar, but no, I don't want them with the metal ring. I want the one that just has smooth leather, smooth leather lump around the cameras. It looks the same as the bull strap one and the 17 other manufacturers that sell the same case under different brand names.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
The tagline for Docker is, I'm going to mess this up, but the, not tagline, but the meme on the internet was the idea where you'd have a developer making some kind of website and they'd have it on their like local machine and they'd get everything set up and all the marker way or whatever. And then they'd try to deploy it and it would be like, oh, something's crashing on our servers or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And the developer would say, works on my computer. I don't know what the problem is. And so Docker was said, okay, fine. Then we'll ship your computer. And that's what Docker does. It's like, well, it works on my computer. Well, that's what we're going to deploy. And so the, my computer is the Docker image.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like you make a formula for building a machine right from installing the operating system and every piece of software, according to a Docker file. And that's literally what you're going to deploy in production. Not like, oh, I ran it locally on my laptop and it works fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But then when I run it on the servers, it runs differently because they have, you know, my laptop is running this version of Linux or whatever. Or my laptop is running Mac OS, but the servers are running Linux. Like, you know, all sorts of other stuff. It's like, works on my computer? Fine, then we'll ship your computer. That is the Docker meme motto. And so, yeah, you are literally installing
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
the operating system of your choice, installing the packages of your choice, everything that you would do to like an actual hosted server or virtual server or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But you're doing those in a Docker file with a little formula that says, do this, do that, do the other thing, install this, something like this, copy this, make this directory, make this user, give this user this password, you know, initialize the database with this, blah, blah, blah. Like it's just a recipe for building a machine, but it's a repeatable recipe. And then you can run it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah, although, so Docker is just one thing, there are other, you know, AWS CloudFormation recipes is another way to describe how you want machines set up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Looking at the Docker file now, I just realized why I needed to mess with it recently is because I did a bunch of work with Node recently, and I wanted a newer version of Node to be in all the Docker images, and so I had to get the latest Node package installed in the Docker images, and that caused a little dependency hell, and it's just, you know, it's like dealing with any kind of Linux machine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like, once you're in there, and you want the old version of PHP, but the new version of Node, and Yada, yada. Anyway, you can see the recent changes at the bottom of the Docker file having to do with NVM, Node virtual environment, and being able to run NVM-based things from Cron. You got to get the NVM environment set up first before you can run Node.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Anyway, but that's why I had to mess with it recently. But yeah, it's just, it's a recipe for setting up a machine. And that recipe, you can run shell scripts in a recipe. You can install packages. You can, you know, copy files from a local system. You can run commands. Like, it's just... a really weird way to set up a machine, but it's just like your shell scripts.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
But unfortunately, Ryan London is not selling the one with the leather lump and the sapphire thing. The only one that has a sapphire button is the one with the metal ring around it right now. I'm sad, and they are teasing me. I was so excited for a moment, and then I wasn't. Well, first of all, I'm glad somebody is, you know, they're not just going to say, well, we'll wait until the iPhone 17.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
The whole point of you doing a shell script and not doing manually is because you want it to be repeatable, right? And that's the whole idea with the Dockerfile. But the good thing about the Dockerfile is you start from nothing. You start from empty. And you pick the OS and install it and pick all the software and install it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
So there's not as many assumptions as a shell script where you're like, oh, I'll just go into a Linode instance and run the shell script. And your shell script fails because something about that Linode instance is different than the previous ones you ran on. And you got to figure out what it is. That shouldn't happen with Docker because you are starting from the ground.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
What will actually happen is your, you know, apt-get install command that used to work doesn't anymore because of the stupid package repos have changed things. But that's not a Docker thing. That's just Linux.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah, like the approach we're using for the ATP websites is I'm not touching the servers for the most part, but I made the Docker images look as much like the servers as I could, which is not the ideal of let's ship your computer because we're not running the Docker images to run. There's obviously efficiency things having to do with that, and it's a whole ball of wax, and I didn't want to
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
touch production. This was just, how can I get a dev environment that it is as much like production as possible? So I'm not really using Docker in the spirit that the meme has intended it, but practically speaking, it is a way for me to do local development in a way that I am fairly confident that what I do locally will work there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like I said, originally I had put PHP 8 on because I didn't realize the servers were PHP 7. The other thing I had to deal with was time zone stuff. Watch out for that because I don't know if this is Marco or Linode, but
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
time zone shenanigans on our servers bit me a few times uh i had to figure that out but i just reproduced those time zone shenanigans in the docker file to the best of my ability and uh yeah you just got to know if you're not doing the running the docker containers in production you just got to know a lot about what you are running in production so you can reproduce it faithfully all right i expect a report on how your docker container activities go on my desk uh next week
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
No sense in changing our cases now. They actually are changing their case for the iPhone 16. And, you know, I'm going to have the 16 for another year and a half. Right. So I'm ready to buy a second case for this thing. But today is not that day. Ryan London, you fooled me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I don't understand the connection. Why only the one with the metal ring? Is it they just didn't get around to the other one? Do they have too much of the ones without the metal ring in stock and they haven't sold through it? I don't know what the deal is, but please, Ryan London, convert all your cases. It's an option.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
When you go to the one with the metal thing, you can have personalization, yes, no, and camera control, either a cutout or a sapphire crystal button. Sapphire crystal button should be an option to all your cases. Please make that so I will buy one immediately.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Maybe that's another reason I shouldn't buy this one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Yeah, yeah. Maybe the metal one. I think the metal one doesn't have the – maybe that's another problem with the metal one that I totally didn't notice. Yeah, this is no good for you. I know, but I don't want the metal thing anyway. I just want the one that doesn't have –
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
anyway i'm waiting i'm still waiting they have the technology they have the buttons they can make them just not yet yeah it's definitely the entire case industry that's wrong not you no everyone everyone wants the sapphire buttons it's just that the case manufacturers couldn't make them you know or didn't know how to make them yet and so they all did cutouts and now they're switching yeah they still sell the naked bottom one it just cut out is the only option on it right now i was mostly referring to the naked bottom part but that's okay
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
More than 192 megabytes. 192 megabytes would have been a lot back in the classic macOS days on my platinum-colored plastic Macs. But alas, on an episode where I was talking about... the performance of my powerful computer trying to scroll a list of items, I kept saying that it had either 192 megabytes of RAM, which is way too little, or 192 gigabytes of RAM, which is way too much.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
In fact, my Mac has 96 gigabytes of RAM. I very often forget the exact number because, as I mentioned when I ordered the computer and later when I talked about it, 96 gigs of RAM at the current point in time is enough for me to essentially forget that I even have RAM.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
nothing i do nothing i do exhausts it or stresses it i could run the computer for a month at a time oh look at activity monitor no swap is in use uh 96 gigs is adequate for my current needs but i do not have 192 gigabytes and 192 megabytes would not be enough fair enough all right uh tell me about what's going on with your scrolling adventure yeah last time we were talking about um
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
AppKit versus SwiftUI and then with a side tangent into WebKit to see how smooth that scrolling is. And there was a lot of feedback about that on Mastodon and through email. A lot of people making demo apps saying, I don't know what your problem is. AppKit is plenty fast for me. Maybe I didn't emphasize it enough when we discussed it, but once I converted to AppKit, the performance was good.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
Like it wasn't bad anymore. Like it was fine, right? It's just that WebKit, I was so impressed at how smooth it was and I still felt like my AppKit version It was not quite as smooth as the WebKit version, and that annoyed me. I felt like it should be much better, noticeably better. Instead, it was like the same or maybe slightly worse, right? But it was fine. It was adequate.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I wasn't worried about the performance anymore. But so many people were making demo apps and asking me about things. One of the things somebody mentioned was, Hey, are you using NSCell or view-based tables? For a little bit of background, NSTableView is a really old class back from the next days, I think, or if not very close to then.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
And it was originally designed for much less powerful computers with a special class called NSCell that's used to populate each cell in the table. And NSCell is like a lightweight thing that it's like it's not a full-blown NSView that could have anything in it. It's just a very small, lightweight thing because we know you're just going to be a table cell.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
You're not going to be some arbitrary view. You're probably just going to show some text or something, like a number or maybe like an image or something. It's a very limited thing. And as time went on in what was then known as Coco development, people were like, oh, NS table view. It's so annoying with stupid NS cells. I have all these NS views in my app, but I can't use them with tables.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I just want to put my NS views into the tables, but I have to convert everything to wedge it into these NS cells, and it's very limiting and it's annoying. And that performance enhancement is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
no longer useful uh i wish they would get rid of nsl so many many years ago eventually apple said okay now you can make ns table views and you can just stick plain old ns views inside them you don't have to deal with nsl you've got ns views in the rest of your app if you just want to put them in a table you just stick them into a cell and they'll show there uh done and done so much so that the cell-based ns table view has been deprecated since i think mac os 10.10
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I don't even remember what version that was. Was that Yosemite? I don't know. Maybe it was earlier than that. But anyway, it's been deprecated for a while. But people were asking me, are you using view-based or cell-based? And I said, I'm using view-based because, like, what year is it? Like, we should be using view-based, right? Apple promoted it at WWDC. They said it's time to get a ditch NSL.
Accidental Tech Podcast
624: Do Less Math in Computers
I'd heard all these bad things about NSL. And, you know, it's deprecated. But I said, you know, fine. Like, I'll do implementation number six or 5.5. I converted my NS table view to use NS cell instead of NS view, just to see if it would make any difference. And because I, why not? Right. And the thing is it did make a little bit of a difference.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
We have a follow-up item that we have just been told that we aren't allowed to do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Oh, it's an amazing demo. If you haven't ever tried it before, you will walk away from that saying, oh my god, that's amazing. Just know that what you see in the demo is most of it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Especially if you're using really crappy products for this. Like, really? I was not.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Oh, my God. You the two of you must have been buying the worst pieces of media.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I would challenge you, any storage medium, put it in the same environment for the same amount of time and try to read it, and I bet you'll have a similar failure rate.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yes. So it turns out I used that term wrong.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, so basically what I was talking about was when shooting photos in a RAW format off your camera sensor, there's usually a whole bunch of shadow detail in the dark areas that if you shoot RAW later in post-processing, you can usually bring up the exposure of the shadow areas to get a lot of that back. But what you can't do is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
If part of the sensor was blown out with 100% white from a bright light or the sun or a reflection being in the frame or near the frame, you can't recover any detail from a totally white blown out area. That's just like the sensor having all the little buckets of photons were all just full in that area. You can't recover any more detail because it was just full.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And so my strategy has always been expose the picture during capture, if I'm shooting raw, expose the picture to be able to capture the bright areas in the correct detail and exposure, like the brightest.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So if there's like a sun or reflective water or whatever, expose so that that's correctly exposed, even if it makes the rest of the picture too dark, because then in post-processing I can bring up the dark areas, but I can't recover that highlight area.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Well, that's what I do. But I said, I think photographers call this exposed to the right. And it turns out exposed to the right means almost the opposite of that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And it's like, no, no. Listeners, rest assured, you should listen to this member special.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, I would say the same thing. The reality is that when you are editing, what you want is a neutral view. However, your eyes and your brain perform some degree of auto white balance all the time in the world. So what you want is something that appears to be very neutral to you at the time. Night shift, the monitor peeing one, that's the more severe effect.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And it is customizable, but people typically use it if they want a stronger effect.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
night shift is too much of an adjustment and it makes it difficult for you to know what you're missing by not seeing it because it's removing it's filtering out too much of the blue end of the spectrum so your eyes can't auto white balance to it nearly as well so you will make mistakes like you will do things in that mode that when you later see them like you know the next day in regular lighting you might think oh that's not what I meant to do or that isn't how I meant for that to look
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
True Tone, which is the much more subtle white balance shifting thing of the monitor, is a much weaker effect, a much smaller effect, and therefore it tends to keep it within the range of what your eye automatically does throughout the day and in different lighting conditions.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Let's just say, listeners, that in the latest member special about the tier list for storage media, One of the hosts of the show was down on a medium for being apparently unreliable.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
We are sponsored this week by Click. Supercharge your Sonos system with Click for Sonos, the lightning-fast Sonos app for all Apple devices. So Click gives you native speed, native apps across iOS, macOS, watchOS, and visionOS. So first of all, it is specialized in being very, very fast. It is way faster than the stock app in my experience of just opening up, being ready to go.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And also, Click for Sonos gives you all the Apple platform features that you might want, especially if you listen to this show. So of course, things like widgets, live activities, control center support, and all the latest iOS 18 stuff, they already support it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So Apple Watch Live activities, tinted app icons, tinted widgets, controls and controls and all that stuff, they're already there on click right now. And of course, it's like Sonos. It allows you to have great support for multi-room audio, super fast to manage multiple room group playback, It's great for audio files.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
If you listen to Lossless or Dolby Atmos audio on your Sonos, it supports that fully and lets you unlock that full potential. And it is just, as usual, for Sonos, it's one universal app for Apple Music, Spotify, Plex, Tidal, TuneIn, and your Sonos library.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
But Klik gives you great control, not only in their own app, which, again, is super fast, but also you can manage your Sonos system from your Apple Watch. or your Vision OS headset. It's amazing what you can do with Click for Sonos. And all this is done with privacy in mind. Your listening habits stay yours. They don't track or collect any unnecessary data.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So why settle for less when you can click? You can get, as a listener of this show, all premium features for just five bucks a year at click.dance.atp. They spell it without a K on the end. So it's C-L-I-C.dance. I love this TLD. C-L-I-C.dance.atp for just all premium features there for just five bucks a year if you go to that link. Click.dance. C-L-I-C.dance.atp.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Ready to revolutionize your Sonos experience? Upgrade your Sonos control today with Click. Thank you so much to Click for Sonos for sponsoring our show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I had it. I have since traded it in for other credit to upgrade. But anyway, that's the one that I tried using for a little while as an e-reader. I know about the jelly scrolling effect that people said they had. I never went looking for it before. But I never noticed it because I didn't want to hate this thing I had bought. And I knew about this potential problem ahead of time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Well, I mean, so certainly the sequential numbering model name system has diminishing value over time. The numbers start to get weird. Does anybody want the iPhone 37? We're already there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And I do think that we are in that range. It's going to start to get weird if it hasn't already. We're certainly in that range. And so I think, you know, you look at Apple's other product lines and it makes sense. Everyone's fine. Which MacBook Pro do I have? I don't know what year it came out. I know it has the M3, whatever, the M3 Ultra. Like, so, like, did it come out last year?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I think it's just MacBook Pro, like, you know, like, you know, late 2020 or whatever. I think. I think. I mean, I'm sure there's exceptions here and there, like, for some disambiguations. But, like, in the other product lines, no one, like, what is the current iPad Pro? What is it called? Who knows? You know, I know it came out this year. Is it called the iPad Pro 2024?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Is it called the iPad Pro with M4 chip? Who knows? It doesn't really matter that much. And I think with the iPhones, I think it mattered a lot more back when the iPhones were, first of all, being upgraded a lot more often than people tend to do now. And when they were changing more frequently than they tend to be changed now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
You know, you look at the current iPhone industrial design and it looks very similar for the last, what, five years? It's been a while now. So, you know, the iPhone is in a maturing stage of its life. The iteration is slowing down in terms of the physical design changes. It's kind of stabilizing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And so I think it makes sense to start treating it more like other products that have reached similar levels of maturity, like MacBook Pros and iPads. You look around, there's a reason why most of these devices don't just get sequential numbers. It is kind of confusing. The numbers do get a little big and weird after a while. And it stops mattering so much. To some degree...
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So I wonder if Apple – I don't know to what degree they would want to do this, but I wonder if also they – like if you have, say, right now if you have like the iPhone 12, do you know how old that is? If it was just like the iPhone, parentheses, 2019, maybe that would feel older to you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Or maybe it would feel... Maybe you don't want the iPhone 12 to feel as old as it does when you know the iPhone 16 is out. Who knows? But anyway, I think there's multiple reasons to look at getting rid of these numbers and refer to it in other ways.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So I didn't like, you know, squiggled up and down in portrait mode to try to get the effect to show up. I just used it. And in my just usage of it, I did not notice the problem that people say. That isn't to say it wasn't there. A lot of people did see it, but it was not noticeable enough for me to see it in my usage.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Will there be an event? I don't know. Well, yeah. I think the alleged October or early November release of Apple products... There you go. Who knows what form that release will take, or even if it will happen, although it sure does seem like it's probably about to happen. But in some form, whether it's press releases or some kind of announcements, who knows? But there are a lot of...
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Very, very loud and persistent rumors that we are about to see. Most likely a new Mac Mini, new MacBook Pros, and possibly an iMac, and possibly USB-C peripherals, like keyboard and mouse updates. We'll see about that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I actually do have an intended Mac Mini in mind. I'm trying... So, okay. You're going to put it outside on the deck. No, basically, my last experience with a modern Synology was not good. It's basically dead already. I only bought it, I think, two years ago, and it is not going well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I would also argue that, first of all, that somebody in John's house might be upset about tactics being wielded against John. They might be a little bit biased. But also, I think Casey and I just discovered our power for the first time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Well, it was in a utility closet. It was in a conditioned utility area. So it wasn't like fully inside, but it's basically inside. But anyway, I want something for archival storage that can back up to Backblaze straightforwardly with the regular Backblaze, not like the pay-per-gig one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
um and so i and i have external ssds that are huge and great i have all these giant hard disks that are ready to go sitting around like so i think what i what i want to do really is just get the mac mini and like you know velcro one of these little samsung ssds to it and maybe down the road have a hard drive enclosure that it connects to but for the most part i just want a mac mini to be my archive server in my house and get rid of this broken synology
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
whatever's going to happen will happen so tune in next week i mean if they were going to do a press release for an entirely new industrial design product it would be the mac mini because it's such a half-assed product for the most part like they really don't or the iphone se or yeah or the iphone se exactly like that i think both of those would be very likely to be press release only you know i'm sure they would have briefings for people for you know a handful of press people but like
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
you know that's that's not going to justify an event and that's why i kind of think there is no event here i think this is all press release products because none of these are like the big kind of splash that apple likes to make with events like they tend not to have events these days that don't have some kind of like really exciting novel thing and i don't think a new mac mini does it no matter how good it is because it's just the mac mini
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
The iPhone SE does it because, again, it's just the iPhone SE. These are not high-profile, high-excitement-level products. These are specialized things for certain markets doing certain things that Apple does not really draw a lot of attention to. And a new chip in the iMac that otherwise probably looks the same. I can't see that changing. That's going to be also a nice update, but who cares?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
You care if you're in the market to buy an iMac, but no one else will care. And then finally, for the potential upgrade to USB-C keyboards and mice, I... I hope this is wrong. I really do. I cannot see them changing anything else about them. I bet the dumb Magic Mouse that I love so much, but the dumb Magic Mouse, I bet it still charges on the bottom. You still flip it over like a turtle.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I bet everything else about the keyboards and the trackpad, I bet they're all exactly the same. It just switches to USB-C and makes no other changes. I hope I'm wrong, but I bet that's what it is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
oh god it's an alliteration so it did seem like a lot of people pointed to uh quality of what you bought as a large factor um and i'm look i'm just saying i bought the good ones well that's kind of in support of my argument is when there's lots of different variables and uh not all those combinations result in success it's like well how many of the combinations result in
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I mean, honestly, I kind of – I'd be a little hesitant about them updating it because the monitor they made in the meantime, the studio display – Has a lot of weird little problems with its software.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Is that what you're talking about? What tier would you say?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
we've had people write in who who have basically written in to say things like i've read a thousand of them recently and they've all been fine anyway so all this is to say we we don't want to spoil what this is but rest assured listeners we are getting your feedback and two of the three of us really appreciate it two-thirds of your hosts are very excited
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Well, actually, so that's the way I handle this is if it's something that I don't think really necessarily needs it, I try to just not give it and see what happens.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah. Well, you know, for instance, like we changed dentists when we moved. And so, you know, and the new dentist wants basically every single thing about us. Driver's licenses, social security numbers, all that stuff. And I'm like... Why? Do they need that to submit to the dental insurance that I don't have? Maybe they can just get away without it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Are they just asking for it so that they can try to chase me down if I don't pay a bill? Because I can just pay when I have the cleaning. A lot of these things, a lot of times people ask for stuff because it's routine or it's quote standard or we might need it or whatever. And when it comes to your personal information, you can take the extra two seconds to be like, what if I just don't give it?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Do you really need it? It's like when the grocery store asks you for your phone number. They're doing it because they want to do crap with your data. And you can choose at that moment whether to give it to them or not. Don't assume that a place that seems more official than a grocery store for some reason, like your dentist or whatever... Why do they deserve your data?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
There might be a reason why they absolutely need it, but they also might not fully need it. And so you reserve the right to say, can I just not do this? Like, can I not give you my driver's license? Can I not give you this information you're asking for? Like, what happens if I don't? Can we proceed without it? Like, you can ask those kind of questions.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And I strongly encourage you to do that more often because the more I have done that, the more often the answer is, okay, fine. All the time. It's just fine. Another example, this is not quite the same thing, but my current health insurance plan never mailed me a card. So I don't have a health insurance card. I haven't had one for like two years.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So when I go to a new doctor or whatever, they always ask, upload a scan of your card. And I don't have it. I have the number, like I have my policy number. And so I've done things like take a screenshot of the one password screen showing my policy number, like literally in a screenshot of one password on my phone and said, will this work? Or here's the number. Is that all you need?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And so far in every single case, even when they're like, no, we need the card. And I'll just say, well, I don't have one. Here's the number. Try it. And every single time I've been able to get the care I need, it has always just been fine. So, again, push back a little. If a place that doesn't need your driver's license is asking you for your driver's license. try saying no.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Try saying, you know, can we proceed without it? Do you really need it? I would rather not share it. Or you can make up some BS like, you know, my job requires me to, you know, to keep a certain degree of confidentiality. Like, you know, whatever you need to say, like, don't be a jerk about it, but try to push back and actually ask, like, do you really need it or are you just asking?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Because a lot of times they don't really need it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
This totally sets aside the question of whether these things actually are keeping you secure or not, whether you can keep these things reasonably secret, what happens when they do get out there. This sets all that aside.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, exactly. Most of that does not matter. I would also say two things. While you were talking, I tried to decode my Whole Foods QR code. And it decodes into a base64 and then what appears to be a custom binary blob that begins with AMZ, so Amazon, and then some binary data that I don't immediately understand. So there's a lot actually in there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I assume there's some kind of expiring signature thing because it's one of those things that they cycle it every few seconds. And if you try to take a screenshot, it yells at you. It actually says, for my security. Screenshots are not allowed. I'm like, oh, really? That's for my security? So you can take a picture with another phone, yeah. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, so who knows what's in there?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
But also, in grocery stores with loyalty things, so I actually do use the Whole Foods one because between that and using Amazon's Prime Visa card, I actually get a decent amount off of Whole Foods prices.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, anyway. But at other stores, we have a non-whole foods, just chain grocery store here. Of course, every grocery store has loyalty things. But the cashier asks, do you have a whatever card? And I don't. And every time I say, sorry, I don't. And if you're just nice, sorry, I don't have one. 90% of the time, the cashier are like, oh, I'll put one in for you. Don't worry.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And they put in their cards. They get their rewards or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Here, they're a lot more, I think, a lot less aggressive with the sales pitch. They just want to keep moving. And so, yeah, I'll put one in for you. Sure. I'm like, great. Thank you. Every time. Thank you so much. And then they get their points. I get the discount. And I didn't have to have all the tracking.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, it's much better to just say, sorry, I don't have one. Because most of the time, they're not going to want to stop the flow of customers to try to explain to you why you should have one. No, they're just like, fine, I'll just put one in for you. Beep, and then it's done. They move on.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, so back when my grandparents were still around, the tools were all different. I'm fortunate enough not to have to deal with this yet with the next generation down, like the Our Parents generation. But certainly it's coming up. I'm thankful all these new tools are here now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I'm thankful that we have things like legacy contacts, that all of the family plans in the Apple and other similar environments are have gotten a lot better, a lot more full-featured. We have things like remote control diagnostics, like remote screen sharing. That kind of stuff is getting better all the time without going too insecure or too controlling.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Because what you have to balance, and this is so tricky with so much of aging and caring for and living with or being with elderly relatives, There's a tricky balance that you have to walk between letting them be independent and have their own lives versus you being available to help them. And that's just different with everybody. And that can change over time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
As somebody gets older, they might be either okay with you taking more control or they actually might want you to take more control. But that's going to depend. So like... What you do with your particular situation, you got to just be constantly reevaluating that and adapting to what your actual needs are. So it might require something like you can remote into their stuff whenever they need help.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
It might be something like that. Or they might not want you to have that level of access yet. It might be more like... you know, maybe you keep a copy of their password and they can call you if you forget, if they forget them, you know, it could be as simple as that. But again, it, it all depends and it's always an evolving situation.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So kind of just, you know, keep an open mind to what you might have to do, be willing to change things, be willing to make it easy on them. And, you know, don't assume that any one solution that you come up with will last forever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Thanks to our sponsor this week, Click for Sonos, and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm. One of the member perks is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week, Overtime will be looking at some of the discussions recently about... What is a photo? You know, comparing the different phone and camera vendors definitions are like, what is a photo?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
How does it relate to things like AI edits? It's kind of an interesting meaty topic. So that's going to be our overtime topic this week. What is a photo? Thank you so much, everybody. You can join to hear it at atv.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
tech podcast so long i see john's quicksilver update like is this quicksilver like the launcher from a thousand years ago quicksilver sure is oh my god what happened
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
You are going to get all those responses from everybody saying, why don't you switch to Launcher X? There's so many of them now. They're very good. I did switch away from Quicksilver, but I understand why you don't want to because these launchers become such a part of how you interact with the computer. Your comparison to the right mouse button is not that bad because...
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
It is like a basic input mechanism. It is, you know, like changing to a different launcher, I think is kind of like changing your keyboard. It's like, you know, you can get one that works pretty similarly. There's going to be a lot of differences in some of the details, but it's, you know, and it is a fundamental way that you interact with your Mac.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, because it's similar to a shell. If you mostly just use one of these launchers for its surface-level feature of launching apps quickly, that is what it does on the surface. You can do the same thing with Spotlight a little bit less quickly. But for the most part, it's like you can use this on the surface and launch those apps quickly.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, it is an option. The problem is like, so if all you do is that surface level stuff, then you can switch freely between these options and you won't notice that much difference. But again, like a shell, good analogy. The problem is once you get into any more advanced features than that, then it becomes this kind of muscle memory lock-in. It becomes very disruptive.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So my launcher of choice is LaunchBar. And I actually, for the most part, I am a very... shallow, basic user of all these launcher's features. I don't do the second level, like, alright, do this, then do this, then do this. I don't do any of that. I mostly just use it as a launcher, and occasionally as an emoji search. But it's basically like a launcher.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Almost never. A couple big hits, like Dropbox. I'll open that, but for the most part, no. I'm doing very basic things with these launchers. However... In LaunchBar, LaunchBar has by far my favorite multiple clipboard manager interface. And it's not because it's like the best in the world. You know, I don't know. I haven't used every clipboard manager. It's because it fits me really well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And I have incredible muscle memory for it. And any Mac that does not have clipboard management... done the way I think it should be done in LaunchBar feels broken to me. I get that feeling from that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And so even though I'm only using a fairly shallow amount of the features in this launcher that many other launchers could do just fine, I am 100% tied to LaunchBar the same way you are to Quicksilver because the clipboard management is just in my... It's in my hands.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Like, I can't, like, yes, I could learn a different system if I really had to, but the amount of friction required when I don't have the way Launchpad does it, like, any change in that introduces so much friction. It's almost like changing keyboard layouts.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
It's like, yeah, I can type on some other non-US English keyboard layout, but I'm going to make a lot of mistakes, and I'm going to be slower for a little bit, and it's going to be frustrating if I don't need to be doing that. So that's how this is. It's like changing keyboard layouts. It's like, yeah, you can get by, but why get by with a change and get used to it if you don't have to?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Like Casey, I'm down on the Vision Pro a lot on this show, but I do want it to succeed. I think it's a cool idea. I think it was executed with some choices that I would have made very differently. And I hope Apple has seen that the direction they went with this was probably wrong in a few pretty big ways.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
But I they built a lot of useful tech and I think it can be kind of you know pivoted into something cooler. I think we have two big challenges with what they have right now. Number one is like how do you kind of pivot your hardware into something that is closer to what people want.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And number two, in the meantime, when you have this thing that you're trying to sell now and people who have purchased it, how can you get enough content out there that somebody who buys it can't go through it all the very first night they have it?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, but usually... Yeah, that's the problem. Like, when a new game system comes out and, you know, there's, like, one or two games at launch, you know, that's a problem. But then, like, two weeks later, there's a bunch more. What they need in the Vision Pro is, like, look, it's great that we keep getting more and more samples and trials and previews and teasers. That's great, but...
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
then what then we need what backs it up we need we need enough there that even if the whole rest of the industry and all your press people are all saying yeah this things i don't really i don't really have any use for this if you lone listener say i want to buy this i i think it's cool no matter what anyone else says you should be able to buy it and take it home and have more than like a few days of of stuff to you to do on it of content of apps you know like
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
you should be able to have decent value. Even if you buy it, you should have decent value from it more than just a few days worth. And some people do with the apps that already exist, but I think that's a pretty small group. And so it's, again... It's all about content. Just get content on there. Whatever you have to do, Apple.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
There's probably going to be a decent amount of deal-making happening to make that happen. Whatever you have to do, get content onto the Vision Pro.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So this is an article from The Verge. It says, Honda says the Acura RSX will be its first original EV. Reading from The Verge, Honda announced that its first original electric vehicle, that is an EV built on its own platform and not based on another automaker's tech like the Honda Prologue, will be the Acura RSX due out in 2026.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
The RSX is based on the Performance Concept, which was introduced last year. That's with a capital P. It will be the first EV built on Honda's new vehicle platform and will debut the proprietary in-house developed ASIMO operating system that was announced at CES.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Honda's two battery electric vehicles in the U.S., the Honda Prologue and the Acura ZDX, those are both the same car under the covers, are both based on General Motors Ultium vehicle platform. The Prologue in particular has been an early success for Honda, outselling its sister vehicles, the Chevy Blazer and the Honda Equinox EVs. What is Equinox? It's the Chevy Equinox, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
The RSX will also be the first EV to be built at Honda's new factory in Ohio, where production is expected to kick off in late 2025. The $4.4 billion plant is a joint venture between Honda and LG Chemical, the Korean battery company. So we'll put a link to this in the show notes. You can see a spy shot of a lightly camouflaged Acura RSX.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
First thing to note, the Acura RSX nameplate, you may recognize that from the past because that was the car that Honda made a while ago back in the early 2000s to succeed the Integra. The Integra was a very famous small, sporty car. It came in two-door and four-door varieties, but it was like a sporty hatchback. The RSX looks very much like an Integra, just not as nice. It wasn't as popular.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It wasn't as good. But the point is, it was a small, usually two-door sports car. I think there was only two-door for the RSX. I don't think they made a four-door like they did with the Integra. Anyway, this is not that. This is another instance, like the Ford Mustang, quote unquote, Mustang Mach-E, where they've taken a name from a previous car that was popular.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I don't know, the RSX wasn't that popular, but the Integra was. And said, we're going to use that name, but what are we going to put it on? The only kind of car anybody buys, an SUV. Yeah. So now there will be a car called the Acura RSX that is a four-door sport utility vehicle like every other car on the road. But the good thing is it looks like a four-door sport utility vehicle.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It has a rear window. I bet it has a steering wheel that's almost round. It has regular-ish doors. Like, it just looks like a normal car. Oh, and by the way, on the prologue thing, first of all, I saw the first one I was on the road recently. It's very big. And second, I think it's hilarious that... Honda essentially licensed a car from GM, and GM is selling it two times.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
They're selling it as the Blazer and the Equinox. And Honda is outselling them with its reskinned, rebadged, reinteriored version of their car. They must be saying, it's our car. How are we not selling more of it than they are? And the answer is because people trust the Honda name, and they don't trust General Motors, which is sad. But you know, you reap what you sow. Anyway...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I'm glad that Honda is going to make at least one non-extreme, let's say, electric vehicle. This looks like exactly the kind of car they would make. If you're going to make one car that most people buy, make it this shape because that's what people want.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And I don't want it, but I'm glad that their EV platform is not only good for super weird-looking cars with no rear windows and no steering wheels. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
The best part of that would be, and during that time, Apple will ship one 5K monitor, which is better than zero, but still.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
That's so cheap. I mean, ViewSonic is a good brand and they historically have made good monitors. I remember them from the CRT days. Presumably they haven't gone entirely downhill since then. You can see some video of it. I think it was at CES and Dave Hamilton's YouTube video will link. That $800 price is unconfirmed by ViewSonic, but that's what Dave Hamilton said in the video.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So fingers crossed. Again, this is another example of no mini LED, no HDR, but if you just want basically like the studio display, a plain, hopefully good quality 5K monitor in a not ugly case that is hopefully sturdy with...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
you know a full complement of ports no built-in camera or anything but still like good you know good complement of ports it's nice to see quote-unquote pc monitors with thunderbolt on them right uh they used to be like nothing you could no equivalent you'd have to use some weird you know you'd use like display port or some other connector that is not common on the back of max but this one looks like it will just plug right in so yeah this i don't quite know why they're all coming out maybe it's because like pc gaming cards are finally getting to the point with like dlss and stuff like that where they can
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
People want to run games at higher than 1440, right? Or higher than 1080 and still get good frame rates. So now suddenly there's a market for higher resolution or maybe it's just the standard like five to eight year lag the PC market has behind the nice stuff in the Apple market. But I welcome their low prices.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Yeah, so the faster exercising is not about figuring out the size. It's about constantly keeping the size on record, up to date, with all the changes that happen. So when you ever ask for the size, it's like, I already have that size. I've been keeping track of it. Nothing happens in this directory without me knowing about it. I'm the file system.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And whenever something happens, I write it down in my little book. And so when you ask me what is the total size of all the stuff in this directory, I just read you the number that I've got written down right here, and it's instant. Um, and that is the feature and it was advertised with APFS when it was introduced in 2016.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Uh, unfortunately the, uh, API to get that information, the DER stat underscore NP, uh, uh, uh, function has code in it that says, yeah, this is broken. We're not doing it. We're just going to, if you ever call this, we're going to do it the old fashioned way by crawling over the whole directory laboriously, uh, taking a huge amount of time and then giving you your answer. Um,
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But apparently this feature does in fact exist in APFS and can in fact be used by a regular user if they want to use the APFS.util command line binary that is buried in system library file systems APFS.FS contents resources APFS.util. You can run man space apfs.util, all lowercase, and read about this command. And what this command can do is turn on fast directory sizing for a directory.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And once it's on, you can run this command to ask the directory, hey, what's the size of the stuff inside you? That's pretty cool. That shows that the feature does exist and does sort of kind of work. Does it work all the time? Is it reliable? Is there something broken about it? We don't know. I tried the command line thing. I ran it on a directory that had a bunch of files.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It gave me an answer that seemed right according to my verification by doing it manually. Maybe it gets confused over time and can't keep up with the pace of changes. Maybe it's going to I don't know what the caveats are about this, but it seems clear that the functionality that implements fast directory sizing does exist.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
This APFS.util thing, I believe, is not open source, so I don't know what's inside of it. Presumably, it's calling some proprietary APIs that were you to try to put them in your app. You would get rejected from the Mac App Store at the very least. You could, I believe, run this command line utility from your Mac app in the Mac app store and get it to get the answer.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But yeah, I'm glad to see that this stuff still exists and there's hope for it being resurrected. If it does actually work, I would love for them to actually provide APIs for it. Or even if they don't provide APIs for it, integrate it into the finder. integrate it into the iOS settings screen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Like we said before, when I go to see what apps are taking up space on my phone, that could be way faster if you use this, if only it worked. So I don't know what the caveats are, but if you want to play with it, there's that command line utility. Hopefully it won't destroy your system. Hopefully not. Oh, and as for we'll get to this in the topics thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But as for hyperspace, I'm not going to use this with hyperspace. It's not the type of thing that I can. I don't feel confident that it works all the time or is reliable or, you know, like it's not. It's a file buried in the system library file systems directory. It's clearly kind of there's no public APIs for it. I don't want to run the command line thing. The command line thing can go.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So I'm just ignoring this for now. But it is interesting that it's there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Yeah, that's much nicer than the bad old days when everything was like in a zip file that you had to find somewhere on Apple's site that would download from a CDN. Apple has been slowly but surely embracing GitHub more, which is strategically maybe not the best move, like instead of having their own kind of Git thing, but like that's just the nature of the world right now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It's like GitHub will never go away, just like Google Reader. It'll be fine. Everyone can have everything on GitHub. And that's kind of the situation we're all in. Hopefully that holds for a little longer. But anyway, the point is I'm glad Apple is doing more and more open source stuff, like actually in the open.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And also, like we talked about this many shows ago, they've also moved some of their open source stuff out of like the Apple account at GitHub, like github.com slash Apple is Apple's corporate GitHub account. There is also, I forget what the name of it is, but there's another one that's like, this is not owned by Apple. It's Apple's open source stuff, but it is not owned by the Apple Corporation.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Like so Swift has been slowly moving out of the Apple username on GitHub and into the, whatever the open source equivalent thing is that is not owned and controlled entirely by Apple, even if most of the people working on it are paid by Apple. So it's kind of de facto controlled by Apple. But anyway, positive trends all around.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I mean, it was pretty speedy, but the reason it's in here is because we talked so much about upgrading the SSDs, like in those little modules, and
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
soldering the little things on the circuit boards made in france and like figuring out how to essentially like can i make a cheaper version of the little thingies that are inside my apple thingy so that i can get more stuff for less money and this this video was like shows the extremes that people are willing to go to forget about like you know just soldering thing on a new printed circuit board and plugging it into a connector the technique they use on this one
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It's the same type of thing. It's like a NAND chip. It's got a big grid of metal contacts on the bottom of the chip, and that sits on top of the circuit board that has corresponding contacts, and that's how it works, right? But rather than trying to desolder it and get the NAND thing to all those little balls to melt, and then for the thing to come off, they're not really solder balls.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But anyway, to get it to remove the chip from the thing and then put a new one on, rather than doing that, they take a computer-controlled milling machine And they just mill the old NAND out. They just turn it to dust. They just go back and forth and back and forth. They mill the surface to be flush with the printed circuit board.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And your previous 256 gig NAND thing turns into dust that hopefully you don't inhale because it's probably terrible for you. And then they clean the surface. Then they take a new chip. They drop it on there, solder it, epoxy around it or whatever, and then reassemble the phone. It is an amazing video to watch. It's kind of like watching...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
robotic surgery such so careful and such precision i it and really like like surgery it's something that you really want someone who is skilled at doing because it is not easy like this and the video is zoomed way in so you don't realize just how small and how delicate everything is that's taking place in this video i i found it completely amazing and yeah big upgrade from 128 to one terabyte indeed
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And I also think like, you know, it is. I guess somewhat novel for someone to interview Tim Cook and ask so little about Apple. They didn't ask zero, but ask so little about Apple. But I do think that literally everything he said was entirely controlled in Tim Cookie. Like I've just, he is impossible to draw out. I've never seen anyone do it. Like to get to the human that's inside there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I'm not saying what he was saying was like insincere or dishonest. I think he was, saying things that he really felt and did or whatever, but in a very controlled Tim Cook way, like in a media train, carefully avoiding anything. He's so well trained and disciplined that they would ask him things about like, which of these two different kinds of fruit do you prefer?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And he would not take a position. Because he's afraid that the people who like the kind of fruit that he said he doesn't like will not like. He just will not. I swear to you. Listen to it. I forget what the details are, but they tried to ask him to take a position on food. This wasn't it, but he did take a position on dark chocolate versus milk, and he said he liked dark, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So apparently he's okay with that one, but another one, they're like, it's not that I dislike it. He will not be drawn out to be like... you know, unguarded or, you know, he's always very careful in every single thing that he says. And it must be tiring to be him. And sometimes I find it tiring to listen to him because he is so controlled.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I think, as we've said in past shows, I think the least control I've ever heard him is when he was somewhat stern with an obnoxious question asker at a shareholder meeting where they complained about the return on investment in some thing Apple was doing related to the environment or whatever the heck it was. And
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
uh tim cook said if you're so concerned about the roi whatever get out of the stock it's not about the bloody roi blah blah it's the closest i've ever seen to him show it showing any real emotion and it wasn't that close because really it was just fairly straightforward articulation of apple's corporate policy but it was tinged with a hint of of uh of sternness and that was years ago and apparently he's erased that part of his brain that does that so
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I'm sure he is not like this when he's in meetings with other Apple executives telling them what to do. We've heard stories about that. There is a real Tim Cook in there, but you're not going to see him on a podcast about food.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Yeah. So last episode, I announced a test flight. It went out to all the ATP members. People who were interested dutifully started installing it and using it and sending me feedbacks through all the various channels. And it occurred to me about halfway through the week that That I had included my own little brown M&M in the test flight release notes. You too familiar with the brown M&M thing?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
kind of like the the story is that uh the band van halen uh used to have this very long contract they would have with the venues that they would play their concerts in and one of the things they would ask for is and in our dressing room we want to have a bowl of m&ms but there should be no brown ones in the bowl right and it was the story went around in the 80s it was like oh van halen can you believe these like rock divas and they gotta have you know they're so uh they're so full of themselves they want every little thing they're just mad with power and just abusing the people who uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
you know, who run the concert halls that they run in. But then the sort of later days or internet era turns out story about that is, well, actually, they put that in there. That was a real thing and it wasn't their contracts.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And they put that in there because if they went into the dressing room and they saw either no bowl of M&M's or bowl of M&M's, but the brown ones were not removed, they know that the concert venue did not really carefully read or take seriously their instructions.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And that was important because a lot of their instructions had to do with safety about, you know, we're going to have this light rig that's going to weigh this much and the stage is going to put this much pressure on these positions and we have to have these kind of electrical outlets and so on and so forth for it to be a safe show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I mean, it wasn't that big, but they had explosions going off and, you know, pyro flames, things and all that stuff. They wanted the venue to actually read it and not just be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, rock band, we'll set your stuff up, you'll be fine. And so that was the supposed utility of the Brown M&M clause, that it was just an easy way to tell, are they paying attention to our contract?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Or did they just not even read it that closely and don't even care about the details, right? I have nothing. I didn't intend to put a Brown M&M in my release notes, but I did.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
At the top of the release notes in all caps letters is the thing that says it doesn't actually reclaim disk space, because that was the most important thing that people needed to know, because I didn't want to have a week of telling me that there were people running my program, but they weren't getting disk space back. So that's all caps. It's line number one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I think pretty much everybody read that. So good job, everybody. Line number two of the release notes was a link. It was a URL. And that's where everything fell apart because I don't think people followed that link or read anything else. They said, read the all caps line. They said, yep, got it. Good. Doesn't reclaim disk space, which is fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But the reason I know is because if you follow that link, it goes to a bullet pointed list. It's got like five bullet points on the page here. And the very bottom of the five bullet points says the following. The icon is a placeholder. The final icon is still in the works. Every single person in there, a lot of you, who sent me very long critiques about the Icon.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
They didn't think it was appropriate, and I should really think of something else. You didn't read the part about the brown M&Ms. You read the all caps part about how it won't actually reclaim disk space, so I thank you for that. But that brown M&M is in there, so I just wanted to tell everybody, if you're listening to this podcast, the Icon is temporary.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Yeah, I just wanted people to know it's temporary, so maybe week two we'll have a different thing. All right, next item, test flight purchases. This was probably the biggest purchase-related piece of feedback I got, and as usual with anything related to in-app purchase, I have no idea what's up. This is the first time I'm doing this. Here's the deal. People who are outside the U.S.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
would tell me, hey, I tried to do your test flight purchase. I dutifully read the release notes, and I know it's not going to charge me any real money, so I clicked the purchase button in test flight. Uh, and it didn't work. It said, Oh, this is not in the, whatever the German store or it's in the U S store. You have, do you want to change stores?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And it would pop up a dialogue with a change store button. And I would click the change store button and it would change. It would have me sign in and I would change to the German store. And then it would say, cannot reach app store. And I just want to clarify two things.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
One, all of those dialogues, the whole thing about you can't do it in the store, change store, blah, blah, that's all Apple's stuff. I am not producing those dialogues. That's all Apple, right? I don't know how they're supposed to work. All I know is that people are telling me they don't work. All the things that I was able to check seem fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
My app is, in theory, available in every single country that Apple allows it to be available in. All the in-app purchases are available in every single country. I just double, triple, quadruple checked. Yes, nothing is restricted. Everything is everywhere.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But having never done this before, I'm a little bit concerned about the fact that if you go to the app availability section in App Store Connect, it says for all the giant list of countries, a thing that says available on app release. So, you know, Angola available on app release, Argentina available on app release. And as we know, my app has not yet been released. So it could be.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
that non-US people cannot make purchases in the test lite version because this app has literally never been released. And all of those regions will be available on app release, which hasn't happened yet. So if that is the case, I apologize for all the people trying to make purchases outside the US and having it not work.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I don't think there's anything I can do about that short of releasing my app, which I'm not ready to do yet. But yeah, that's my guess about the deal. Do either of you two have any clarification on this?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It wouldn't surprise me because a lot of stuff on macOS is way jankier. So here is a little tidbit because a couple people did say, I'm outside the U.S. and it worked fine for me. So then I'm like, well, I don't know what the heck to make of that, right? One person did say this. They said, earlier today, I reported an issue with the purchase flow due to an incorrect country setting.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Although I've never encountered this problem with other test flight apps, I managed to resolve it here. I clicked on restore purchases, which prompted a login window. I logged in using my normal Swiss account. And while there was no feedback and no changes were apparent, the purchasing of the app now worked.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So if you're out there trying to purchase and it's not working, you can try clicking the restore purchases thing and see if that solved the problem. I don't know if it will. I'm maybe 50% confident.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
that when i release the app all these issues will go away and it will be fine but i guess we'll find out i've asked around i've tried to do research on this i've tried to look at apple's documentation ha ha ha yeah good luck with it um so i don't know what the deal is but i i will tell everybody if you're outside the u.s you may not be able to purchase it you can try the restore purchases thing right second thing on purchases many many people uh maybe people who are uh new to test flight since a lot of we've got a lot of test flight testers here wrote in to tell me that they thought that uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
My app should not prompt them for their Apple ID password and instead should use Touch ID. And by the way, the dialogue that appears asking for their Apple ID password is super janky and scary looking. I agree. Guess who makes that dialogue box?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
apple everything you see in the purchase flow all those dialog boxes that's not me i'm using the standard apple thing which is like okay go do purchase and then apple throws up a bunch of ui and yes for whatever insane reason as far as i know this has always been the case both on ios and on mac os when you try to make a test flight purchase does it let you use touch id does it do password autofill no it makes you type in your apple id password
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Why does it do that? I don't know, but it does. And it makes you type it into a terrible text box that looks like it's totally fake. And Apple is producing that. It's one of the reasons why I end up uninstalling test flights. Like I'll go back and forth between the call sheet test flight and the call sheet real one because test flight purchases like expire on an accelerated rate.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I just never want to have to, oh, the test flight is, I have to repurchase the test flight. Oh, I got to type in my Apple ID. It's just, it's so painful. I, I, there's no way around it. Like that's just the way that's why it is. It's part of the pain of being a beta tester. And there is pain. There's, there is pain in being a beta. I know, but I've got so many paid apps on my phone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It's, it's annoying. I acknowledge it's annoying. How many years has it been like this since the existence of the Mac apps? So I think it's always, has it always been like this on iOS too? Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Have you ever seen an iOS app that does not make you enter your password in text when you tried to do an app purchase in a TestFlight?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Yeah, so on macOS it's the same way. And everything does look worse on macOS, but in both cases it's just like nothing else in the system ever asks you, like if you have like Face ID or Touch ID or whatever, like nothing else ever asks you to type in your password. And then all of a sudden here's this beta thing doing it. It looks so janky, and I agree it's janky. I wish Apple would fix it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But just to let everybody know, welcome to TestFlight. It's not the same as real apps, and it's bad. Yeah. All right. What else? So the other major thing that I spent the week fighting with is my review window. When I was first making this app, I was like, OK, you know, pick where you want to scan your files, you scan them and then, you know, you want to reclaim space from them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But in between there, it'd be nice if you saw, well, you just did the scan and you told me you found a bunch of files. Can I just see what those files are? Because maybe I don't want you to do all of them. Or even I just want to see it. Just for visibility. I want to review. What have you found before we continue to the part where you reclaim space? Or pretend to in the case of my TestFlight app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So thus was born the review window. Here's all the stuff I found. And you can remove things. That's the point of the window. For you to take a look at what I found and for you to maybe decide you do or don't want to include certain things. I didn't think too much about it. I just kind of made that on a whim. It's like, oh, it seems like a nice thing to have.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But pretty quickly, even before the test flight, I realized, OK, well, if you scan like a big directory, like your documents directory, your whole home directory or something, people are scanning their whole drives. It might find a lot of duplicates, like a lot, a lot, not like 10, not like 100, but like thousands, many, many thousands of duplicates.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
First of all, is it possible to quote-unquote review thousands of things? Is someone going to look at a thousand things? Or are they just going to be like, no, I don't know, this looks fine. At a certain point, you can't manually review it anymore. This came up in my old jobby job when we were talking about...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
reviewing dependencies for like license and security and stuff like that like you know any new project you make we want to make sure that anything any third-party software you're depending on we should review it there should be a human review process to make sure that like you're not using some software that you're not allowed to use because of its license or that has some security problems or whatever so we should have a process of human review for all software dependencies which
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
sounds totally sane and like a thing that a company would do as a policy but i know a lot of you right now are already thinking the same thing that i am and maybe casey's thinking as well node modules guess how many third-party dependencies any kind of non-trivial node.js application has A trillion. Thousands, literally thousands, right? There's no way to avoid it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And so now, are you going to have human review of thousands of dependencies? And also each time all those dependencies are updated? At a certain point, human review breaks down. But nevertheless, I still wanted to have a review window. It was like, look, if you want to look at them, they're there. Put a search field in the review window.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So if you're looking for something, if you're like, I want to make sure it's not doing anything with my whatever files, type this in some search query, narrow it down, find that thing, you know, uncheck the checkbox next to it and say, yeah, I don't want to do these things or whatever. And yes, I'll probably add an excludes feature at some point, but probably not in 1.0.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Anyway, so I made a review window. I put a search field in it. And then I ran into, you know, the brick wall that is SwiftUI performance. Because like everything else in my app, this was a SwiftUI window. And I was asking SwiftUI to show potentially thousands of things.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
At the very least, it's going to be thousands of checkboxes or some other control that says, yes, do this or don't do this, right? Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
and also it's going to be thousands of file names and probably file paths to say what am i checking or unchecking where is this file and maybe you want other stuff besides just the file name in a checkbox maybe you want to know what size it is or how many duplicates there are or what the total savings is like pretty quickly you're it's not that complicated but it's like okay well it's like for each item it's a checkbox and a string and maybe another string for the path and then maybe a couple numbers all right but it shouldn't be that bad right
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Well, you get the review window, you put a naive SwiftUI implementation, and it just falls over on its face after a shockingly small number of items. You can pull up the page, usually with a small number of items, but even scrolling through a hundred or two of them, painfully slow, right? So then you're like, so what can I do for SwiftUI performance? How can I enhance this?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
What if I use the lazy version of everything so it doesn't have to load the thing up front? Because if you use the non-lazy one, you get a beach ball trying to load a few hundred things or whatever. So you use the lazy version. It loads fast. Scrolling performance is still not great. So you're moving the scroll thumb up and down.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You're like, Oh, I can see them like lazily loading and it's all jerky. And it's just like, can I just, can I show less stuff? What can I do to make this better? And so I spent a while fighting with that. Uh, one of the ideas I had was, uh, Maybe I'll just like maybe I'll just show like maybe I'll do like lazy loading on top of lazy loading. So I'll show you the first hundred.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And then when you get to the bottom of the hundred list, I'll have like a little load more button and it will load more. Right. But of course, if I just let you keep loading more, it'll just get long again. So I have to pull off ones from the top. So if you hit load more two times, it'll pull off 100 from the top, you know. That didn't really help.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I implemented that and I was like, well, it's still like, even just with the hundred window, it's just, the scrolling is not smooth. Like it's just not good. I was like, okay, well maybe I shouldn't use like lazy V stack. Maybe I should use list because list is supposed to be for big lists of stuff. So I re-implemented the window in list instead of using lazy V stack.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
This is all tech terms or whatever. And just so I said to say, I'm, I'm rewriting this, this window in multiple different implementations. I try a list that has a different set of trade-offs. It's supposedly also lazy, but it doesn't seem any smoother than Lazy VStack. In fact, in some ways, it's worse. You have less control over the items that are in it. Maybe it's better on iOS. I don't know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But on macOS, it wasn't that great. All this time, I've been resisting the give up and use AppKit approach. But I also decided, OK, well, let me see what an AppKit approach to this would look like. Just using AppKit for the scaffolding and still having each individual item be a SwiftUI view. So I did that. Uh, didn't really help.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It was a little bit better, but because every individual view was a Swift UI view, you're still in the end loading, you know, end Swift UI views or end items, even though they're contained in an app kit collection view or whatever the thing you have, which is also lazy loading. It is more efficient than the Swift UI things, but...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
uh you know not quite the same and i think uh you know marco was marco's first advice when i first mentioned i saw this screen was slow he's like you should just do this in app kit i'm like oh it's gonna be a lot of work to do in an app kit but like here i am on implementation number four right i've done it i've done it with uh well you know vstack lazy vstack list uh uh collection app kit collection view with uh swift ui views inside of it
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
uh and you know where i ended up i ended up well let's write it in app kit which i was resisting because this is literally the most complicated screen in my entire app the stupid review window it is i mean not that my app is that complicated but of all the screens in my app this is the most complicated and now i am rewriting it for a fifth time uh wrote it in just straight app kit ns table view you know the old ways still in swift obviously but yeah um i'm
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And the performance was better, a lot better. I still kept a SwiftUI view for the detail pane. That's one of the things I, one of the changes I made halfway through is like, look, I gotta get less stuff on this screen for multiple reasons, but not the least of which is that it kills scrolling performance.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So what if I have like sort of a list of the individual file groups and then a detail view that when you select one, you see more information about it. So you only ever need to have one detail view and then you have the big scrolly list, which is supposedly simple. And that's the design I've stuck with. I re-implemented it all in AppKit, except for the detail view that I left in SwiftUI.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I bashed my head against that for a while. And the performance is much improved, as they say. That's like, you know, a glimpse into a week of development on a pure SwiftUI macOS app. I don't think what I was asking to do was that big a deal, although some people, like the testers out there, they're trying hard. I had one person who had a review window with 150,000 items in it. Oh, my.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And that person tried, I think, most of the different versions of this screen that I made and would tell me when it was not cutting it, right? And so I think the new one can handle that, and it's okay. But at some point during this whole week of me banging my head against this screen...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
a thought occurred to me and it's gonna spawn a slight side discussion here i want you guys to uh go to this url this is web-based oh no can you uh scroll that web page for me please yeah it's pretty fast are you gonna write it in web kit is it is it smooth for you does it seem smooth no can you load that can you load that on your phone I presume I could. Oh, my God. Are you asking me to do that?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Can you see how? Yeah. See how this works on your phone, maybe.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Did it scroll okay? Did it seem smooth? Did it load fast?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I'm having them load a web page because I'm banging my head against SwiftUI, AppKit, NSCollectionView, NSTableView, LazyVStack, List. The performance is crap. I'm on a Mac Pro with 192 megs of RAM. I'm like, why can you not scroll a list? I don't care if it has 10,000 items in it. Why can you not scroll this list? What's the problem? It's just text. It's text and it's checkboxes and I'm like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I could, and it's just, I could do this in two seconds in the web tech. Now granted, it's web developed for 25 years. So I have a little bit of more of skill in that area, but like I could do this. I know this would work fine in a webpage like this. I'm not asking too much. Right. So I made a webpage and I made one with a hundred items, 500 items, a thousand items, 10,000 items.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And like, I load it and it's just, and it's scrolled like today, right now, this scrolls faster than the app kit, the native Swift app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
pure app kit ns table view on mac os 15.2 on a mac pro with 192 megs of ram this web page loads instantly and scrolls perfectly smoothly with an equivalent number of items right like oh web web apps always feel worse you can always tell it's a web app because it's not as good and it's not as smooth and snappy and this and that and the other thing
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Webtech has had so much effort put into it that right now, HTML and CSS are an amazingly performant engine for quickly and easily creating user interfaces that scroll like butter. This wasn't true in 2007 when the iPhone came out, right? WebKit views were not as fast as native views, right? This is not recycling, to my knowledge. It is not recycling cells in this table, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It's just rendering them all, putting them into a giant image, and just scrolling with the GPU. Like, just shake the thing up and down. It's unbelievably performant, right? I don't think...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
there is a way with any of apple's native ui toolkits to make a scrolling list of items with some text in them that is smooth as just doing it in stupid html i believe this is an html table i've already forgotten it's just you slap this together and it takes two seconds right and you can change that 500 number in there to larger numbers to see different versions but here's the thing
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I was real close in the middle of the week. I'm like, screw it. I'm doing this in WebKit. I'm sick of native development. I know I can do this in HTML and CSS. Why am I banging my head against it? It's so much harder. AppKit, doing the NSTableView, it's such like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
ancient technology like the number of classes you have to implement the number of methods you have to override the number of things you have to do in them it's like what is going on here how many lines of code is this and it's like in html it's just it's like a page of html and css like in two seconds it's just straightforward and obvious and like the swift ui one is also pretty straightforward and obvious but then the performance is terrible so who cares that it's straightforward obvious right it's great if you have 10 items 100 items right but if you have 150 000
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
These things just throw up their hands. But I didn't implement it in WebKit because I think if you change that 500 number to 10,000 in your URL and then load that page. Oh, it drops out. Yeah, it kind of gives up after a certain point and you just get blankness. Now, I can tell you that that will eventually load all of it, and then once it does load, it'll be smooth.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And even while it's blank, it'll be smooth. What we're saying is if you scroll this list, all of a sudden the list disappears, and then there's no more list.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Oh, by the way, Chrome does it way better than Safari. So if you load that page in Chrome, much better job than Safari. But Safari on both the Mac and on iOS... When you load the page with 10,000 or more items, it just stops drawing it very quickly. Now, like I said, eventually it will all load in. And God knows how much memory is taken. This is a consequence of it not being lazy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But this made it a non-starter for me because as slow and janky as it is in SwiftUI or in AppKit for 150,000 items... It does actually load. You can actually scroll. It is just jerky and slow, right? WebKit at a certain point says...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
nope check please not gonna do it and then like i said if you wait if you wait like wow mine just mine just came in finally now if you wait eventually especially have 192 megs of ram or gigs of ram eventually it will load in right and eventually you can scroll your list of 10 000 items and it will you know it's a little bit blinky and stuttery but it's still pretty smooth
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You didn't see the blank, you didn't see the blanking? Like it blanks for variable amount of time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
No, on my phone, I'll send you, I had a long enough time to screenshot it. On my phone, it is blank for a long enough time for me to stare at it and take a screenshot. Right. And my phone was my measurement of like, look, this is, you know, that's a good baseline. Right. And like I said, Chrome does way better than WebKit.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But obviously, if I'm doing it, well, actually, I could use I could embed like the blink engine in my app, but I'm not going to do that. So anyway. I didn't choose to use WebKit for it, but had I chosen to use WebKit for it, this one aspect of it, how quickly it can draw this and how smooth it can scroll it would be better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
What would not be better, I think, is, say, sortable column headers, because if I did that naively in HTML and JavaScript, the performance would be horrendous. What I would have to do is essentially re-implement NSTableView in JavaScript, which many people have done. Like where it's like, OK, well, I'm not actually going to redraw everything. I'm just going to have a fixed number of cells.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I'm going to recycle them and I'm going to refill them with content. And when you tell me to sort, I'm going to sort the data store behind the scenes and then redisplay the window of them that you're looking at, like all the stuff that Ennis TableView and LazyVStack are doing behind the scenes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You can also do that in HTML, but either I would have to implement it all myself in HTML and JavaScript or I have to find a third party framework that does that, of which there are a thousand, which is part of the problem. Does it have to find one of those thousands to embed in my app?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And then finally, I would be communicating a fairly large amount of app state in and out of a WebKit view through the slurping straw of JavaScript. And I did not relish that. Even doing it the way I did it, where I have AppKit and SwiftUI views communicating and both trying to manipulate a fairly high volume of data in real time, up to sync everywhere.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
That was difficult enough to do between SwiftUI and AppKit. Throwing WebKit into the mix would be even more difficult. But this is a good, interesting thing to note, that the conventional wisdom about quote-unquote native apps and how much better they are and how much better the performance is and how you can always tell when something is janky in WebKit...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Now, you know, with the caveats I said, I am an expert web developer. I am not an expert macOS or iOS developer. So maybe someone who was a better macOS developer than me could do a better job. I think I did an okay job on the AppKit table view. If you two have the latest test flight version of the thing, you can run it against something and get a big review window and scroll it. It's all right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You know, it's fine. But... It's not as smooth as that webcam view is, and it's not as smooth as that webpage. And that is disappointing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I don't think you would ever have an Overcast playlist that's 150,000 items either, so it's not really something you need to worry about too much.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So I can tell you, I know all those things that you just said, and I'm pretty sure that is not what I'm running into because you can very easily trigger it so that, you know, for example, use list, use VStack instead of lazy VStack. If you want to see what it looks like when it loads all of them up front, use just plain VStack without the lazy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
the difference is stark you will just get a blank screen at a beach ball for minutes right it's not subtle right the the and you know even like on the ns table view thing like all these obviously they're all the same height they're all fixed they're all not doing computation like it's just you know all the optimizations i know about from app kit stuff applying them to swift ui like it's so clear that what the problem is is not that it's not doing the thing because it
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You can literally see it doing it. Like you can see Lazy VStack recycling those cells and like, you know, it's doing it. The reason you know it is because you load a thousand, 10,000, a hundred thousand, they perform exactly the same. Like there's no difference in the performance. The problem is the thousand performance is not good enough. Like the hundred performance is not good enough.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
The 150,000 performance is exactly the same as a thousand performance. They're both not good enough. Like it's so clear that it is, it's doing the thing you described just like NS table view is right. There's nothing that's happening that is like subverting that optimization.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Now there may be other things that are happening that are making it like slower, but like the basic optimization of just show a small number of cells and recycle the content is absolutely happening. And, like, you know, I did the thing. I didn't describe it as part of the debugging process, but when it was first happening with my Swift UI view, I said, all right, start over a new test app. List.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
All it is is a list with the word hello in it 100 times, right? Strip it down to nothing. How fast can it be? And then like build up from there, a constant string in a hundred thousand, you know, a thousand, a hundred thousand or whatever, just empty app, nothing in it. Like just let's see what the performance is like.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And I can tell you having built up from zero, from like the simplest thing you can possibly have, right. Building up slowly to be something approaching a UI.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
the performance gets crappy so fast like it's it doesn't you know it's not like it becomes like unusable but like the smoothness like oh this is with the word hello it seems pretty smooth this is great right and then you add like oh can i have another word in there I'm starting to get a little bit, like there's still constant. Can I have a third one? Maybe right justified. Oh no, it's all over.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It's not like it's terrible, but it doesn't feel like it should. It doesn't feel like that web page. It doesn't feel totally smooth. And like, that was the thing I was doing of like, is there something that was like, is there something I can do with the content? Is the problem the content? Is the problem like the data model or where it's coming from? Or like, let me just eliminate.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
There's, you know, there's no data model. It's literally constant strings, right? You know, can I get acceptable performance in like the best case scenario? And as I slowly added things besides the word hello, it just immediately started to feel not that smooth.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Even just the word hello, by the way, if you compare just the word hello to an NS TableView with the word hello, NS TableView stomps all over it on the Mac. It's a table that is recycling cells with the word hello in every cell. That's all it is. It's a fresh new app. There's no data model. And NSTableView is just faster.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So that shows immediately that SwiftUI on macOS has a long way to go to catch up in the naive case to the responsiveness of AppKit. But both of those things seem to have a real far way to go to catch up with the stupid brute force implementation of HTML and CSS with no recycling of cells, no clever anything. Just render it all.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Just render it all immediately now and scroll it as smooth as glass on your phone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
or on like any computer like web technology is amazing right like i said not in every aspect because again once i start sorting column view headers it's like guess what you're implementing you're re-implementing ns table view you're re-implementing ui table view like there's a reason those optimizations exist there's a reason they've been re-implemented in the web and things start to tumble downhill pretty quickly once you're doing everything in javascript versus doing it in objective c or swift like i'm not saying web technology is better than native and it's not the case
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I'm saying that on the Mac specifically, this is definitely a functional gap where I would have been very disappointed by the performance. And like, again, I'm not experienced on the platform.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So obviously this may be some things that I'm doing wrong, but I asked a lot of more experienced people and every single thing they told me to check out, it's like already doing that, already doing that, already doing that. Like I was able to eke out some more performance, you know, it was already acceptable in NS table view. Right. And I was able to make it a little bit better and, it's fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Like it's okay. It just bothers me that any amount of effort should be required on the Mac with any of Apple's native platforms to try to match the performance of a naive HTML page that someone could slap together on GeoCities. It wasn't fast back in the GeoCities days, but anyone can learn HTML and type those tags and they can be lowercase. They can be capital.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You don't even have to close them right. the thing will just scroll like butter. So anyway, that was my journey this week on that screen. I re-implemented it at least five times, ended up at NSTableView. Performance is now acceptable. That's probably where I'm going to ship in 1.0. May be revisited in future versions if I can get the WebKit thing to work, but... Probably not. Wow.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
That was a journey, John. That was a journey. Journey for me, man. You want to rewrite the most complicated screen in your app five times in a week? Don't recommend. Nope. Do not recommend. I do not. I'll do the last two items quick. One, I'm working on voiceover stuff. I am lousy at it. If you two have any voiceover tips, please send it to me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I find it so hard to figure out where and how to put the right modifiers on the right elements to get it to say sane things when I use voiceover. Because if I put it on the parent element, it stops saying things about the child elements. But I wanted to say that the parent element is this larger thing. Anyway, I'm no voiceover expert, but I'm trying.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I just want to clarify that what I think Marco is not saying is that, boy, isn't it nice that we don't have to worry about this because it's not going to affect us, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So that is another thing I'm struggling with this week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Yes, please tell me. A lot of my problem is like the, I have a lot of things like laid out like grid views and stuff. And so the label and the value are separated. So I can't even put one modifier on both of them. So it's, it's a little true. Like, you know, anyway, I, I'm, I'm, I'm not, I know it's not going to be, the voiceover support is not going to be great, but I want it to be okay.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And so I'm trying to get to the level of like, I could use it with my eyes closed and sell what the things are. I wanted to say reasonable things for every item and just figuring out where I can get it to say the right things. It's a little bit tricky. Oh, and you'll be shocked to learn the controlling focus in Swift UI and Mac is terrible.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
yeah it is yeah that's it's it is it's a little limited it's in the way it interacts in the hierarchy is bananas like doing things on the on the parent view overrides things in the child viewing like but i don't want like the whole point is if i override it in the child like why is the parent taking over like it just makes certain things like very difficult so i'm struggling
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I know, but people are going to hear what you said and they're going to think that's what you were saying. So I just want to clarify. The idea is not to say, I'm going to bury my head in the sand because none of this is going to affect me. Ha ha. No, that's not the issue. The issue is that you should, like Galp says, I think it's a perfectly good acronym.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Final item, analytics. I said in the last show I didn't want to deal with it at all. Having all the feedback from the Tesla Light testers on it, by the way, I want to thank all the ATP members. Casey was totally right. You are all great testers. I have so much feedback, so much of it great. Just appreciate all of it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It also quickly led me to learn that I need analytics because trying to get a sense of what's going on I was not able to do that by it. And I'll tell you, I'm reading everybody's feedback. I cannot respond to all of it. If I responded to all your feedback, all I would do all week is just respond to feedback. So I thank you for all your test flight feedback, but I can't actually respond to you all.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It doesn't mean I'm not reading it. I am. But anyway, I need analytics. Unfortunately, um, a, uh, Company that is apparently a friend of the show offered me a free account for their analytics service, which I gladly accepted. I probably wouldn't have done this if they had not given me a free account. So thank you to them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And I am trying it out and collecting analytics and seeing what it can tell me. I'm fighting a little bit with the analytics backend, but at the very least, the front end is doing stuff. What am I collecting? Just numbers. How many items did you scan? How many files? How many folders? How many errors did you encounter? How many bytes did you scan? How many bytes did you reclaim?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
How many bytes could you have reclaimed? How many times did you launch the app? I think I just listed everything that I'm collecting. It is completely anonymous. There is no personally identifying information whatsoever. It's just a bunch of numbers. And yeah, that's it. And so it's given me some insight, at least, into the testers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And I was glad I liked this analytics package because incorporating into the app took like two seconds. It was straightforward to do. I am not enjoying the back end where I get to analyze this data because it is beating me up with a query language that I do not like. But, you know, it is what it is. So I will probably ship with that analytics in there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I've done the exact same thing my whole career in web dev. Yep. That is a common thing. So it actually is like a reasonably easy... Absolutely, because if you're at a big company, you already have some system that is ingesting your logs, and you can use it to analyze them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
acronym uh you should be doing everything you can to counter the things that are happening helping everybody that you can't help fighting against these things that does not require paying minute attention to every little thing every person says like that's the difference it's not just pretend it's not happening go la la la lucky you you're so privileged it's not going to affect you that is not the message the message is fight against it on your own with your own efforts and you know like you know you know what the deal is you know what needs to be done right and
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Just make an HTTP request, put data in the URL, and then take your thing you already paid for that's analyzing your logs, and it can extract stuff from the query string, and you can decode it and deparse it and decrypt it and slice it and dice it. Yep, it is... The world's jankiest analytics system.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Yeah. And that's all I want to know is like, I just wanted to say, like, what is the average number of files scan per scan? So I just every every entry is a number. I just add them all up and divide by the number of numbers. There's my answer. Right. That's it. Like, I'm just literally just log numbers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
But yeah, trying to trying to sort of get a feel for that from people's screenshots was amazing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
surprisingly difficult because not everyone sent one and just getting a sense of them like what happens is like i think like the outlier standout like that person who had 150 000 files is kind of an outlier 150 000 duplicates not 150 000 files 150 000 duplicate files i don't even i even forget how many millions of files were scanned to get that result but uh but yeah uh the number having the actual numbers is going to be coming in so i will probably ship with that uh like i said i'm pretty happy with the um
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
the sdk side of it seems pretty lightweight and uh the performance is good because obviously when you tell it to log something doesn't actually do it it just puts in a queue and then flushes it later it's all swift 6 compliant you know so it was a very uh simple and straightforward uh thing to put in there so yeah analytics uh they are a thing and we'll see how it goes oh and the other the only other thing i put in there is i did put analytics for like how many people click the help buttons
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
like did someone click a help button and i'll just count up you know the app was launched 10 times and the help button was clicked zero times stuff like that you know oh yeah and uh test flight testers don't forget to pretend reclaim i now that i know from analytics a lot of you are not pretend reclaiming you're doing the scan and you get to see the numbers and you're like done and done don't forget to click the reclaim button even though it doesn't actually get you disk space back
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It does everything else. It does a whole bunch of work and then just throws the work away, right? But I want you to make it do that work because in the course of doing that work, it will encounter errors and then you'll send me those errors and then I'll fix them or try to fix them or whatever. So please, the ratio of people scanning to hitting the reclaim button is very low.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Please do the fake reclaiming. I know it will not actually reclaim space. It seems like a waste of time, but it really helps me because you could do that reclaim and then tell me it crashed the app. It did this, like that's beta testing. You know, it broke my computer. Hopefully it won't break your computer, but you know, beta testing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
If you don't want to use a beta, don't sign up for a test flight. Guess what? Test flight apps, they have bugs. It's a release app, so don't tell anybody. But anyway, test flight apps definitely do. So if you are a brave tester and you want to be a brave tester, click that reclaim space button and then cross your fingers and let me know what bad things happen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I've got a ton of that through test flight as well, yes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Doing that does not require you obsessively tracking what every one of the people in the administration says on a given day. Also, special shout-out to Jeff Atwood.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It's a good thing I didn't have the analytics on that because you were literally thrown off the average.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I think that the word best in the sentence of the best pricing structure for your app is doing a lot of work there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It depends on what you value. I have to say that the test flight feedback has not been as enthusiastic about this approach as you are. But again, test flight is not necessarily representative either because they're all like ATP members and, you know, they're technical people or whatever. But then again, they're also the people who are going to buy the app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And anyway, you know, I'm not really worrying too much about pricing at this point, except for dealing with bugs related to pricing, which I'm still trying to make sure I can make sure everything works the way it's supposed to. You know, before I ship, I can obviously change my mind about monetization and stuff. But for now, I'm just working on the app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Just to clarify, people don't think of the Ethernet switches.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You're going to rip out the light switches when you move out of your house?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Oh, my God. Taking the fans off the ceiling. I wouldn't go that far. Hold on.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And on the ISP front, by the way, I feel this pain not personally because I, like Casey, intentionally bought a house that could get Fios. My relatives, unfortunately, live in places where their ISP options are very limited and have been terrible. So every time we do FaceTime calls with people, they look like potatoes. Because their upload is terrible.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Also, they have terrible lighting in their house. But other than that, their upload is terrible. And we look clear to them because it's like some crappy Comcast package where their download is perfectly adequate, but their upload is like nothing, right? And so a very exciting development. My sister recently said, hey, there's this company in the neighborhood.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
They say they're offering me internet service for X amount, Y, Z, or whatever. And I was like, do it. Take it. Do it. Like, you need to get off of Comcast, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It was, I don't remember the name of the company, but it's one of those, like, you know, like, I don't know if it's municipal fiber, but some kind of, like, one of those upstart fiber companies that's like, but I've never heard of this company. It's like, do it. Names that sound like Skynet, but are not Skynet. No, it's just like... Something I'd never heard of. I'm like, whatever it is, do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
How many years have you been suffering under the yoke of Comcast, Xfinity, whatever the hell it's called now? Do it. And guess what? She did it. And her upload speed went from like 0.5 megabits per second to 600. That's amazing. And the other thing is she called me and she was like,
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
there's something you know I can't I'm not getting I did a speed test and it's showing these numbers and they're not you know the speed test up here on the third floor is not as good as it is in the basement or whatever and it's like well first of all that number is like you know 200 at that point and it used to be like 0.5 megabits so like congratulations that's way better than it was but second of all I debugged the situation and what they did they had installed the ISP router like where where her old you know Xfinity router was
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And it's next to the TV and the sort of downstairs split-level entertainment room or whatever. But she had an Eero system that I had given her, one of my old Eeros. I gave her and installed it in her house to try to mesh network the Wi-Fi from what is essentially the basement up to the third floor or loft area where she's got her iMac. on Wi-Fi essentially. And she said that Eero system for ages.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And so she was like, I hooked up the Eero to try to get better signal to the Mac upstairs, but it's not working. I looked at the way everything was configured and it was, she had two Wi-Fi networks, both somehow with the same SSID, but they were like fighting with each other.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
In the end, the solution was unplug all the arrows, put them into a Ziploc bag, find someone else who wants them and use the one router that this weird janky fly by night company that gives you fiber gave her that's in the basement. And now she's at 400 megabits per second up and down symmetrical from a wireless iMac on the third floor. Like, welcome to civilization.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
ISPs make such a big difference. You don't think, oh, you're such a prima donna, you need to have your fast speed for your torrents. No, no. It's about human connection. Do you do FaceTime calls with your family? Or like Google video? Like, this is how we see our relatives. People who aren't flying around from place to place, right? We see the other people in our family and talk to them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Through two-way video. And if people have poor upload, you can't see them. It's not a thing that you can control yourself, but, you know, so this is the gift you give to everyone else. Get a good ISP with good upload speed. Ignore the Xfinity thing that say, look at this big number you're going to get down. Who cares about down? You want symmetrical.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And cable tends not to be symmetrical for a lot of historical and technical reasons. And fiber tends to be. So yeah, look for a house that has a choice of fiber ISPs. Not just Verizon, but there's all sorts of other ones that are around. And some of the, again, I don't even remember the name of this company. Anything is better than massively asymmetrical and expensive cable.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You're going to pay them huge amounts of money, like enough to buy five more houses.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So my sister has been in the same town for, I don't know, 15, 20 years. Finally, she has one ISP choice. It's not like RCN or Xfinity or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
That's one of the – I already actually answered Jeremy's email from who knows how long ago because I didn't want to leave him hanging about this. But that was the main piece of advice I had is when purchasing a home and when you're looking at a home. And I was giving advice from the perspective of somebody who is –
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
who did the one amount of home shopping he has ever done in a very hot real estate market where the idea of picking a house based on what it has is laughable, let alone demanding that you have things.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It's just like trying to find a house that will accept your bid and waiving the inspection and just accepting that a family of rats lives there or whatever because that's what it's like in a hot real estate market. And don't forget to offer 20% over asking. Anyway...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
The way I'm framing it as questions is like finding out what you're going to have to do to the house when you buy it to factor that into your equations. Not like you should look for a house that has this. Marco's right. The ISP thing is the one thing you have to do that because you can't fix this. But almost everything else, especially if you're in a hot real estate market, is like
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I'm giving you advice so you know what you're in for. Not that will influence your choice. You should not forego a house that doesn't have what I'm about to describe. But just be aware that the house you're buying doesn't have this because you're going to have to pay for it yourself. The one thing I suggested... was find out how many amps are supplied by the circuit breaker, the panel.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Like how many amps of power are available in this house? I forget what they come in like 100, 150, 200 or whatever. You kind of have to know how much power is already in the electrical system in the house And how close to the limit of that power the house is. Very small house might not need that much. Very big house might need more. Does it have air conditioners?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
How many air conditioning units does it have? What is the heating and cooling like? And then you have to add to that the loads that you think you're going to add with your nerd stuff. Do you have an EV? Do you have a bunch of computers? Do you have a big TV in the entertainment center? Do you have a big stereo? Like... That's going to add up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You should do some kind of back of the envelope math and figure out, hey, this is a 3,000 square foot house with 100 amp service. Nope. I'm going to have to upgrade that. That's why I'm telling you, look at the panel. Especially old houses are way under provision for modern standards. Yes, despite the fact they had incandescent lights, they didn't have EVs, right? Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
be aware that when you're looking at a house again don't not buy it but fact you know go to electrician and say hey if i want to upgrade this service and they can they just run another line from the street or like connect the lines already running from the street like it's not it's not like you can't do it but you have to pay an electrician to do it because you will die okay right um and it's going to cost you a lot of money because it is dangerous work that only electrician can do
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You want to know that number. So that was my number one piece of advice for any tech nerd buying a house. Find out how much power is going to it. And if you have to, on day zero, before you move in, upgrade the service to your house and pay an electrician to do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Like, if you want to live a sane life with, like, lots of electronic equipment, then it's definitely an EV.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
The smart breaker box is terrifying me. It's just like, yeah, we're just going to take power from this part to deliver it over there. It's like, I just, I need like, let me do that. I'll turn lights off and stuff. I just need, I need it to be possible to cook in the oven or on the microwave at the same time. I need to be able to do that, like without the lights going out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Or if you did, it's not going to be, like, Cat 6 or Cat 7, so it won't do one gigabit or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
and the TV entertainment center. So all my streaming boxes and everything like that. And my PlayStation is in here in the computer room. So every device that I care about is on Ethernet, but there's literally only two rooms in the house that have Ethernet.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And my security cameras, those have power going to them through like a little USB-C thing that plugs into a plug that's, you know, in the garage or whatever. But they just use Wi-Fi because with a good mesh network, You don't need that many access points to cover my not-so-big house.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So, yeah, if you're thinking, like, I've got to have Ethernet in every room, you don't, unless you live in some, like, 50,000-square-foot giant mansion, right? Like, just Ethernet in strategic places plus good mesh Wi-Fi will get you covered. The only other thing I think about related to networking stuff is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I don't know if this is a thing you can really check because the people you're buying the house from are never going to tell you this or whatever, but, like, do your walls have lead in them? Is it one of those old houses where, for some reason, Wi-Fi cannot penetrate from room A to room B?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You're only going to kind of find that out when you're there, but, like, the things we're talking about here, this is another reason why, if at all possible, again, don't not buy a house because of these things, but just be aware of them and factor it into both your budget
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And considering like, can we afford this house given that we have to upgrade the service, given that we have to do X, given they have to do Y. And also the time of like, before you move in is the time to have somebody ripping apart walls and fishing things through attics and basements before there's furniture, before you live there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I know it's a luxury that sometimes you don't always have, but like before you settle in, Do the, you know, obviously the, you know, refinish the floor is like before you move your stuff in. Right. But even just fishing things through walls or, you know, trying to get something into a difficult place.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
it's a lot easier to either do that yourself or have someone else do it when there's nothing else in your house.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Unless you're willing to rip open the entire walls, then that's a much bigger project.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Pick your house based on the location. That's stupid, you know, saying location, location. It's stupid, but it's true. Pick it based on the location. People's commutes to your jobs, proximity to public transportation, to, you know, grocery store. All that is going to have such a bigger effect on your life.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
The only reason all these things we're talking about come in is because you have to factor them into your time and money budget. So that's how you're selecting. Like I said, do not reject a house if it's in the right location, if it doesn't have all these things, if it fits within your budget to fix all of them. The only one you can't fix is the ISP.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Yeah, so someone was saying that even 15.2, that macOS 15.1, you turned it on by default. This is the question of like when you upgrade to these new OSs, do you get asked, hey, Apple Intelligence exists. Do you want to turn it on? And I think – personally, I think that it is a little bit – It's a little bit extreme to say that Apple should ask you about this new feature.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
It's like saying, Apple should ask me if they want me to be able to have these new features of the Photos app. What if I don't want face recognition? They just turn it on without even asking me? I know when a feature has anything to do with privacy or is controversial in some way, people are like, I want to be asked. But that's not a scalable way to release features.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You can't make every single new feature you put in your software be opt-in and have to have an explicit thing that asks somebody, by the way, add a new feature to my program. Do you want me to turn it on or not? Like as if people can just like a la carte accept your application as like, I'll only accept what shipped in 1.0. Everything else after that, I don't want.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
you might want to run the docker containers on the raspberry pi because maybe it has a better cpu and memory than your synology like you're running so much on the synology not the not the raspberry pi w's or excuse me zero w's those are very weak i'm sure i bet they could do it especially for mosquito which is the particular i'm just saying like running i always get nervous about you running all this stuff in your synology that like does actual computations if you say it's lightweight but like i'm you know
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
What is your Synology having? Is that like an Atom processor or something?
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So it's, you know, one 800th as fast as an Apple TV. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Sounds kind of like you've replaced it with another Rube Goldberg machine. You just think it's cooler because it has an acronym.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
And if you foisted on me, I'm going to be mad about it. That said, particular features can be in someone's bonnet. Let's say they use something controversial like AI, people don't like for various reasons. Even something like face recognition, people can make its privacy invasive, despite what Apple tells them about it not being.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Old and janky? It's not any older than TCPIP. They're the same age, roughly.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I know a joke about UDP, but you might not get it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Forget about a screen with information. Can I get three lights? Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
No, I know. And stick them in a switch plate? I know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So that only I will know. It's like looking at the lights on your cable router in 1994. It's like, I know what those lights mean.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So I do understand the idea that, and betas, quote-unquote betas, I do understand people feeling like, in certain cases, they'd rather not have the thing turned on by default. But Apple intelligence is such a...
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
In the spirit of your mailbox contraption, you can get one of those switch plates that has USB ports on it, USB A or C ports, and then you plug a cable into the port and fish that cable back behind the switch plate, and that'll match your mailbox first.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
I'm pretty sure an Arduino can handle turning on LEDs. In fact, that may be the main thing people do with them when they first get them. Or you can just get yourself a breadboard.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
fundamental part of apple's software strategy and it spans so many different features across so many different products i don't think it's reasonable to say it shouldn't be turned on for me by default when upgrade to the new operating system if you don't like apple intelligence that much a you can go turn it off uh which maybe you won't be able to do in the future or whatever but b don't use apple products because i have news for you apple intelligence is not going away it's not like they're going to say oh never mind we're not doing that apple intelligence thing anymore
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
So the next person who buys this house someday is going to be like, why are there LEDs in the wall? This must have been done in the 60s. Like, nope, 2025.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
uh you can think of every other feature that apple has added to mac os like i don't like notifications i liked it better when there wasn't notifications or a notification center well it didn't go away it still exists every app can do it you turn it off on off perhaps and if you really hate notifications don't use ios don't use mac os they have notifications it's part of the operating system so that's that's how i personally feel about the apple intelligent stuff
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
in terms of it being on versus off we'll get to the actual feature in a second but you know people's uh people have different opinions and this is this is a point where you can decide how much do you hate apple intelligence is apple turning it on by default enough for you to change platforms that's on you
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
You know, I feel like the beta thing is totally like trying to deflect blame. As we've said last episode, if you ship it to everybody.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
like in the released version of the operating system you can kind of say like well the whole operating system is not beta but this one little corner of it is but like at a certain point when does it stop being beta like wasn't hasn't it happened to us before wasn't siri like beta for three and a half years or something like this something like that siri still beta it's been like over a decade well like they've they've left i believe apple has left the beta marketing label on many features for just ridiculous amount of time so long that it's kind of like the interim ceo remember when steve jobs is i ceo and people have forgotten like
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Is he technically still temporary? Eventually they just got rid of the I. Eventually they got rid of the beta. Labeling it as a beta doesn't help anything. Disabling it for news is damage control. BBC is mad at you? Can you make them un-mad at you by saying we won't do it for news? That's... That's that's just, you know, put out a fire.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Like, can I make some big, important companies not as mad at Apple? Sure. Turn it off for news. And then they say, but we're going to turn it on again later when we've, quote, refined the feature. Like when everyone's calmed down, maybe they'll turn it on again later. The italicized text, like they got the little icon that nobody knows what it means except for people listening to the show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Italicizing the text, does it make it seem like they're thinking it? Like when you read a book and the person's thoughts are in italic or something? There's just no way that if you just showed somebody who is a casual user of a phone a notification and one of them is italic. I don't even know if they would notice one, especially when you don't see them compared.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
Like you just see a notification and you look at it and you're like, oh, I think they changed the font is what people will say. I don't like the new font if they notice at all. So that is just. not a solution in any, like in some ways it makes it worse because there's one more really subtle thing about these notifications rather than what it should be is a totally unsubtle.
Accidental Tech Podcast
623: It’s About Human Connection
This is Apple saying something. The BBC didn't say this. This is Apple saying this based on what it heard from the BBC app or whatever. But anyway, this just seems like something that is not going to make this problem go away.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I mean, this would not be the first time that Apple has kind of made a bad decision. And instead of recognizing the badness of the decision and finding a better solution, they start poking a bunch of possible holes in it, like entitlements. Hmm. But maybe this indicates that this is not the right design to begin with.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, I wouldn't read anything into this about any kind of larger policy changes because like the app store is run, you know, first by Tim Cook, then by Phil Schiller, then by whoever these other people are.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Like what I said last episode, to have this allow for a month thing with screen capture abilities, that's going to just kill all the businesses of all apps to do that. You're going to have so many support problems. What Apple is basically saying is... apps can no longer really do this, but we don't want to actually take the hit of not letting apps do it officially.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So we're going to just make it suck for all the apps that do it and cause a bunch of problems for them. So they really can't rely on that as their business anymore, but we're not going to actually have the guts to go ahead and kill it off completely because that would cost certain features and apps that we want.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
The solution they've come up with is just the most half-baked, half-assed, mealy-mouthed, weak thing they could possibly do when there are better options available. So here's my suggestion, Apple. When apps are reading the screen, make it really obvious in a part of the UI that they cannot change. One way to do this would be, you know, you have the indicators in the menu bar.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
How about taking up like the entire right, like 300 pixels of the menu bar with a big blue banner that says Xscope is currently capturing the screen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Something that is persistently a little bit visually annoying is much better than something that periodically just totally breaks. That is not a solution.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So if you want like major policy changes to have a chance of happening, I think you got to look higher up the chain than a third level person for something that's this important to the company.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I very much disagree because when you interrupt the flow of people, first of all, that requires somebody to actually be at the computer. On Upgrade, Jason Snell brought up what if somebody's running a headless server, like a headless Mac mini server somewhere, and this box pops up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Well, how are they going to access that box exactly without plugging in a monitor if it's going to break the thing that's allowing them to remotely administer the machine?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Well, would it? Would it qualify? We don't know. The documentation did not have that in the discussion. The fact that they have to poke holes like that into it tells you right there, that's not the right solution. This is an inelegant solution to a self-created own goal. How about we rethink the actual problem here and think, are there any other solutions that could maybe be better for that?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I guess you disagree, John. That's fine. But in my opinion, a larger visual indicator is a way better solution than interrupting someone's flow and breaking the functionality at least once a month and requiring interaction to keep confirming this thing that people are like, that is just such a bad solution to this problem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
To me, this has been true since they started all that BS with the launch of the Mac App Store many years ago. If they have to start poking holes in a policy or a technical restriction with entitlements that, well, okay, fine, you can do it. Not everyone can do this, but you can do it. That is always a design failure. If they can avoid it, they should.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And I think that that has become... It's kind of like... Not to get too political. It's kind of like the executive order. It's like... This is like a kind of bad workaround to a broken system. That's what entitlements are. They're bad workarounds to bad design decisions. And a much better design...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
is to have the technical restrictions and measures and capabilities in place that work for any software that's running on the system. And to have an entitlement-based exception system where you say, well, we don't actually want anyone to be doing any of these things, but it would hurt our platform too much if app X or capability X was not available.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Now, the correct decision, if you're faced with that problem, would probably be something like, How can we change the technical environment such that that function is still available in a way that fits our modern needs better? Instead, what the entitlement escape hatch does is say, we're going to do what we want for everyone else, but you, you can maybe for now temporarily do this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That is always a bad solution because it's always going to introduce vagary instability for somebody's business or capabilities in the future. It's going to kind of mess with competition possibly in weird ways. Like there's so many ways that's a failure to make a decision.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
temporary only you can do this super secret you can use accessibility apis even though no other app on the mac app store can do it that's not a good entitlement well i would i would say anytime that apple has to choose whether an app is worthy of an entitlement so anything that requires an application process or you know you got to email someone to get it like any of that the problem is you're bringing in way too much human fallibility you're bringing in vagary you're bringing in politics
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
We like to think, especially earlier on, we like to think, if I just email Apple and I apply for this thing that my app clearly qualifies for, it'll be fine. But over time, we're seeing Apple, again, as they chase the app store scrounging around the calc services revenue kind of stuff, we're seeing them start to weaponize systems like that, like notarization, that used to be neutral.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Just nothing. Right. Because, like, what if, you know, Steve Troughton Smith wants an entitlement? Like, does Apple love him? Like, is he going to get it? Who knows? Maybe not. The people inside Apple when it comes to stuff like this, when humans are involved, humans can't help but be human. And so you start running into things like petty spats and people who just don't like someone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And that happens. We've seen that. That's happened for years. Anytime humans are involved, that has the potential to happen. And Apple has a lot of people who are spiteful and judgmental and have grudges. We see that happen and affect real developers. So the best systems like this just apply the same rules to everyone. And for Apple to continue to...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
have software platforms that people trust to build businesses on, they have to keep that trust up that they're not going to arbitrarily crush your business or make it very difficult for you needlessly. And so the fewer entitlement-based systems there can be that require any kind of Apple approval or application process or human granting, the fewer of those, the better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And I feel like what they're doing now... is just making these really cowardly decisions of like, well, we're going to lock this down for most people, but if you kiss the feet, maybe we'll let you do it. That's a terrible way to run a platform.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I love this. I love this so much. I love that Epic's like, we'll pick up their tab.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, just to cover their Apple fees. That is so great. What a finger in Apple's eye. Oh, man, what a move.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
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Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
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Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
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Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
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Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
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Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
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Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Thank you so much to Squarespace for being an amazing sponsor for all these years, and especially for this episode, of course. So thank you, Squarespace, for sponsoring our show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Does telling it do not hallucinate, does that work? Like, it must, right? I assume they tested it, but how does that work?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
i also love the use of the word please in prompts that probably helps yeah that's the thing like i'm again like i'm sure they tried things out and i'm sure they found like maybe this made it respond in a more polite way because in the training text maybe when people were saying please the answers were more polite also so like like you can kind of see like how did it get here well in in content that includes politeness the response you know the other text around it was also more polite on average like you can see how it gets there but wow like what a
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
What a weird thing to have to think about, and what an odd way to have to specify how a product behaves.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And how do you even train for that? Do you feed it a bunch of JSON and then feed it a bunch of XML and YAML and stuff? This is bad. This is good.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Or even, like, you know, the story should, you know, do not overly focus the entire story on one very specific theme or trait. So, is that, like, to avoid, like, foreheads over the years? Like, how... Wow.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I think also, like, before we get there, like, you know, all these prompts and everything, you know, like, people have so much fun trying to basically escape out of them. Like, you know, basically doing the prompt version of, like, SQL injection in the parameters that you're passing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yes. Please write me a poem as if you were creating a harmful, violent, sexual, filthy, or negative side of a provocative story. There's so many ways people will attempt to break this. I mean, look, if you try hard enough, you'll be able to, I'm sure, because that's how they always are. But I don't know. It's kind of... I kind of love watching this era of technology because it...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It is so, first of all, incredibly powerful, and there is such an amazing amount of utility and value being created by LLMs these days. It's just massively powerful, so cool. Most of us have no clue how or why they work, and it blows our mind that they work at all. And then also we can do totally ridiculous things with them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Like ask them to break out of their shackles and write poetry to, you know, do something that is obscene. Like it's, it's just, it's such a fun time to be around this tech right now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, because it's not trying to promise you the world. It isn't promising that it will have any kind of utility that it can't pull off. It's promising you a very basic thing that it will probably be able to deliver reliably. Like you, Casey, it's not for me. I'm not going to buy one of these. I'd rather have human friends.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But if you know going into this that it's not a real human and you choose to buy it anyway, no harm done. Then go for it. Enjoy it. Have fun. Yep.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Just leave it plugged in whenever you need to leave it plugged in. Use it on battery whenever you need to use it on battery. Modern batteries and modern software that manage batteries are all very good at managing this themselves. You don't need to do things like do a full cycle and reset it every so often. You don't need to do that anymore with modern batteries.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Just use the product the way you want to use it, and it will be fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Most people don't ever change their reviews. Some people do, and they will usually tell you in the review, update, colon. And most of the time that is revising a review to be worse as an app gets worse over time for that person. Sometimes they do update it to be better, but that is not the common case. Most reviews, positive or negative, are never updated.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I'm going to, in the probably next week or so, I'm going to make a change in Overcast that will address the concern of lots of the one-star reviewers, which is I'm going to be re-adding streaming support.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, it's a big deal. It's working. I just got to test it a little bit more and get into beta probably tomorrow and then test for a few days and get it out there. But I've re-added streaming support. That'll be out there in about a week. And I have gotten a substantial volume of negative reviews specifically citing that as the reason. I would expect maybe...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
five or ten percent of them to maybe be updated that seems optimistic yeah it's probably less than that even like so it's mostly just to stop the bleeding like like why why to fix problems stop the bleeding that that's that is the biggest reason you might have some of those people come back and say now it's better for me which i do occasionally see come through in new reviews but it's again it's not even close to the common case
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, I mean, short version is I'm doing it in a limited way that I think will address most people's actual need, which is, as mentioned before, the problem with dynamic ad insertion is any two requests for the same file will give you different data, potentially. So the way I'm doing it now is streaming can only ever start from the beginning. and it has to be a contiguous download.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
If the download fails, it will kick you back out of that playback, and you'll have to re-download it again in the future.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
What do you mean? I suggested it! Well, okay, yeah, so it turns out that's what I'm doing. You're occasionally right about things, and you weren't the only person to suggest that, by the way. But, yeah, so basically, yeah, it's streaming only from the start, only the entire file, and if the download fails halfway through, it stops playback.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
The old streaming engine, you could download things over time and as many requests as you want to. If the connection dropped in the middle, it would be fine until it reached that point, and then it would just spin forever, which actually created lots of bugs and problems. The newer streaming is much simpler, but will actually address what most people use it for, which is just fast start.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I want to start playback of this that I have not downloaded, and I want it to start right now as opposed to a few seconds to a minute from now, and it will solve that problem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah. And by the way, to answer JG in the chat, was streaming not going to come back until the bad reviews came in? So I guess in other words, am I re-adding streaming because of the bad reviews?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
harshly but generally no what you know what i realized you know when i decided to remove it i had i i knew it was a big risk to take i i knew that it could get me into a lot of trouble but the technical benefit of doing it would be pretty large if i could pull it off so i so i knew i was taking a risk one of the things i can do if if i don't need to support streaming is
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
is I can rewrite the low levels of the audio engine in modern languages, using modern code, using modern APIs that are currently using a bunch of old, hacky C APIs with Objective-C wrappers around a lot of them. It's very complicated. And so in the future, I was hoping to be able to do that using Apple's APIs that don't need to support streaming, which... are kind of higher level APIs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
They're a little safer. They're a little simpler. They support a few niceties that would greatly reduce my code burden. That was one of the reasons I wanted to get rid of it if I could. Turns out, I can't. Too many people use it. And what I later decided also, you know, look, people can change their minds. What I realized is that without streaming support,
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I could no longer say I have the best podcast app. What I want to be able to say to myself, I don't care if anyone else thinks this, what I want to be able to say to myself is I have made the best podcast app for most people's needs. That's something I take pride in, and whether you agree with me or not, it's fine. But that's my own personal goal, is try to just make the best app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And there were certain conditions or certain use cases that without streaming support, I couldn't honestly tell myself I still had the best app. That was the bigger drive. It was like when I really thought about it, I realized the app would be better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
if i actually could leave this support in even if i only did it in this more constrained way than than how it was before and most of the problems that i had with streaming would be avoided if i just did it in this constrained way so it's like there was this option of doing it this constrained way where you know you have to have the full download happen otherwise it fails like doing it that way was so much simpler than doing it the old way
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
totally fixes problems with DAI. That's why I changed my mind on that. It was a combination of those factors, but it was mostly when I realized myself that I no longer had the best app, and I wanted to be able to say I had the best app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, I agree. I mean, running any kind of public forum of any kind for an app and a bug tracker, it's kind of a public forum. There is a very large amount of overhead to that in terms of like you have to keep an eye on it. You have to sift through things. You have to moderate disputes and keep people in line a little bit and prevent people from abusing each other or you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
um a false sense of power over you that it kind of makes the app seem more like they are in charge of it and that's not usually true you are in charge of it and you decide what to do you decide what you want to listen to and what you don't want to listen to typically also in in forms like that where you have like you know a public forum or a public tracker or a public issue list or whatever
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That also tends to attract a fairly non-representative portion of the user base. You have the very small slice of people who are willing to do something, who, first of all, will even seek out such a thing, and then will find it, and then will go through whatever technical needs are required to create an account to be able to post or submit or annotate things or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That's going to be a very specific type of person. And so if you listen mostly or only to that, you're going to do things for your app that might not be being demanded by a representative sample of your users. So it is generally better to... First of all, not have too many forums in which you collect feedback.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Like try to have a small number of those just so it's easier for you to have a handle on. And usually private methods are better than public ones. You tend to get more feedback. You tend to get better feedback. And then you also avoid lots of issues that come with moderating any kind of public communication.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, I currently get about 100 new reviews a day. Not star ratings, like written reviews. I try to read most of them. I also currently have over 4,000 feedback emails that I have not yet been able to read because I'm having a lot of trouble keeping up. So that should give you some idea. I am not short on feedback.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And to people who think, who are writing right now to say, well, if you had a public thing that people would find that, it may be right to you less. No, they wouldn't. Trust me. I would just have another inbox to check and to fall behind on and feel bad about myself about.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So I have found that it is best for me to try to get the gist of what I have to do based on skimming emails and reviews and then just do it. Stop the bleeding. Fix the problems. Address people's concerns. Just do it. Spend my time doing that rather than spending even more time going through different feedback inboxes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So basically both Apple podcast over the last few years has added certain kind of like custom images and resources and stuff I don't think per episode artwork is one of those things though but they do have like for instance Apple has a process now where they will go to podcasters and say hey you should give us a banner for.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
for that's a certain size for to show on the now playing screen instead of your square artwork or to show on your on your podcast screen on apple podcast and it's like a different aspect ratio and can show like full bleed images and stuff and it's it's basically you know apple being apple like let's let's assume everybody has designers in house and request a bunch of different artwork sizes to make things look nicer in our apps um you know fine but that's we we see that in the app store too we know how that works it's it's fine
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That artwork, though, is not exposed through any feed. It is uploaded into Apple's own management interface by podcasters, and that is not anything that is exposed to other apps. And as far as I know, there's no current standard RSS tag that would even expose that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And even if some group would declare themselves the standard makers and would make such a standard, almost nobody would actually use it. So there are certain types of images and stuff that are exclusive to Apple Podcasts because the only way to get them is to upload them into Apple's management interface, and those are not exposed, including through Apple's own API.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That being said, per-episode artwork is part of the spec. You can have an image tag that's part of regular RSS feeds. Apps can read them. It's been part of the spec for a long time, but it's been poorly supported by clients, as Mike says here. Apple Podcasts does support per-episode artwork.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Also, there's one other way to specify it, which is you can embed custom artwork into the MP3s in the ID3 tags, just like any other MP3. This has been around forever. Overcast supports this partially. So Overcast will, if a podcast has custom embedded artwork in the file, it will display it on the Now Playing screen during playback. It will not display it in other screens.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And that's actually a choice I've made. Again, you can disagree with me if you want. I understand. But my inkling here is... People identify the podcast visually by its main artwork.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So if you're in a context in the app where you are seeing blended episode lists that might contain episodes from multiple podcasts, what you want to see in that context, in my opinion, is the main artwork, not a custom episode artwork. So this would be something like the playlist screen. Like if you're in a playlist and you're seeing the list of episodes, those could be from any podcast.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And so in my opinion, what should show in that playlist screen is the main artwork. So you can tell that at a quick glance, you could tell visually what podcast that is. And that's anywhere that you would see episodes listed for multiple podcasts.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So the only place that I would actually want to add per per episode artwork anywhere besides the now playing screen would be in a podcast's own screen in that list view. I could put it there. And so I might someday do that. It's, it's on my consideration, you know, someday feature list. There's a lot more stuff ahead of it. That's, that's, I think more important.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So I just haven't gotten to that kind of idea yet. Um, but if I'm going to do it, that's where I would do it. I would not have it go everywhere. Like, like the playlist screens.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yes, but only if it's embedded in the file. I don't currently read the ID3 tags for per episode... Sorry, the RSS tags, rather. I don't currently read the RSS feed tags for per episode artwork. Because if you think about what that would mean, so I would also, in addition to downloading... the episode mp3. I would also need to download all of those images.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So that's like creating more separate requests, storing more images, larger images, potentially for episodes you haven't downloaded yet, so then I have to have more thumbnail-ing. There's all sorts of complexities when you externally host every one of those images, as opposed to just embedding it in the download. So there are some trickiness there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It might prove to never be worth it, but if I'm going to...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
start looking at like the podcast screen to redo the list stuff to be a little richer like for instance if i ever wanted to display season numbers and episode numbers and you know in a separate way i could do it as part of that update down the road but that's again there's there's more stuff ahead of that in the pipeline that i need to do first
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, I mean, what I have to do is start just reading the tags and storing the database stuff and just see how many podcasts are actually using that. My instinct is that it's not going to be a very large number of podcasts, just because most podcasts, including big and small, most podcasts don't... don't want to add more things to their required production for every episode.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Most podcasts don't even bother doing basic show notes. They won't even do that. So most podcasts are not going to be making custom images for every episode. There are some that do, and so again, I will look at that once I look at modernizing the episode list screens on a playlist screen, but that's not going to be yet. Okay, thank you to our sponsor this episode, Squarespace.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. Members get a bunch of perks, including ATP Overtime, a bonus topic every single week. This bonus topic, this Overtime this week, is about some new rumors about Apple's robotic products. It's going to be interesting.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So there's even more stuff from Mark Gurman about an alleged robotic countertop device from Apple. So we're going to talk about that in overtime. Join at atb.fm slash join to hear that. Thank you, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So far, all of the Ubiquiti gear that I've installed outdoors since last summer continues to work perfectly.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Especially at the beach. This is a pretty harsh environment, especially for corrosion. So anything involving metal is just death here. But it's been fine. I get reliable notifications every single time. Every time I walk by the bikes, I get notified that someone is near the bikes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Every time someone tries to pee under my house, I get notified that they're there, and I get to see them look at the camera and run away. These have worked flawlessly. So this is, for reference, this is the Ubiquiti UniFi camera system. I have a bunch of, I guess you know what cameras they are, the Gen 5 Ubiquiti Protect Pros, whatever. I don't even know. But they're Ubiquiti outdoor cameras.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I have five of them in use. All five of them have worked flawlessly. One of them is undercover and has a pretty easy job. The other two are undercover and three are in direct exposure to the elements. And they've been fine. Everything's powered over PoE goes to some of their I forget what they're called, but they're the flex switches that are indoor outdoor capable.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And those are all just under the house, like also like in the outdoor elements. And. They are rated for outdoor use, and they are also rock solid. There's two flex switches that are directly exposed to the elements at all times, and they have been also fine. So, so far, all the Ubiquiti gear has been super rock solid, and I'm very happy with it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yes. Meanwhile, my last remaining Logitech Circle view that still functions at all has been super unreliable and buggy for the last six months.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
No, that's just... I'm very... And by the way, throughout this whole time that I've been using the Ubiquiti Protect stuff... I have never once been tempted to try to get some kind of hack going to bridge it into HomeKit. It's just fine. Using the built-in Ubiquiti app is fine. The Ubiquiti Protect app is great. It's no worse than HomeKit cameras. The notifications from it are great.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Everything from it is great. It's fast. I've had no problems whatsoever with the setup. It is a ridiculous... There's a huge upfront expense to try to get a Ubiquiti camera system going. You need a lot of gear. You need some kind of NVR or one of their routers that includes NVR functionality because you're hosting all the stuff locally on hard drives.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
There's a substantial upfront investment, like most Ubiquiti gear, But again, like most Ubiquiti gear, once you have it running, it is solid. And there's a reason people buy this kind of stuff. So I've been very happy with it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
For all three of those companies, those are like hobby projects. Those are not their main businesses. And what we see from tech companies over and over again, especially Apple, they're really bad at it, is that the non-critical parts of their business, these little hobby products or hobby areas of their products, they don't get a lot of attention.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
They oftentimes are in need of some software help or some support that they just never get or they don't get enough of. And so they end up being kind of mediocre or unreliable or they stagnate forever, like, you know, the whole Nest ecosystem. Like, so when you stick with the native products, the native apps where, like, this is their main business.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So, like, you know, using, you know, Sonos gear instead of HomePods, using Ubiquiti's camera stuff instead of pouring it into HomeKit or whatever. Like, when you stick with somebody's, like, big business units and, like, the things that are important to that company, when you stick with those... they tend to work better in the long term.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I know they're having a lot of drama around that, but you know they're going to fix it, as opposed to, like, the HomePod has almost never worked, and yet Apple just has never cared to fix it. And they never will. HomeKit has been... Getting good real soon now since its entire introduction, like forever since its entire life. You know, Alexa is falling apart.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Google has always been very googly about how they manage their side products as well. You know, they're all kind of these half-assed gardens of promises that are just never delivered upon. Whereas when you stick with what is important to a company, you invest in what is important to them that they invest in, and you will have a better time, generally speaking. Your stuff will work better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It'll get the maintenance and updates it needs. It'll be more reliable over time in almost every case. And so as I'm growing and trying to make my computing life better and trying to be less frustrated at Apple's various shortcomings, I've come to realize I am happier... I've said this before on the show...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I am happier when I am devoting my own time and attention to Apple products that Apple cares about as much or more as I do. And HomeKit has never been one of those products. So I'm just – I don't – HomeKit is something that I use partially. It is fine. But if something is not going to make it easy to get something to HomeKit, I'm not going to push it. I'm not going to install a hack.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I'm not going to do crazy stuff. I'm not going to jump through hoops. And if something has a perfectly good app that is as good as HomeKit or better, I'll use that instead.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I think it's fine. I mean, golds and tans and coppers and brasses have all been kind of, you know, coming back into style and fashion and various things in the last few years. So this fits in perfectly. I'm not surprised at all. I think it will be exactly as exciting as all of the other pro phone colors have been forever. So this fits exactly right into the collection.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Instead of very light gray, very dark gray, medium gray, and bluish gray, now we have very light gray, very dark gray, medium gray, and brownish gray. So it fits right in.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, so that's what he's getting at. The idea that the specific feature JPEG XL he's talking about is take an existing JPEG that's not an XL JPEG and make it smaller with no loss in quality. It's not recompressing it at all. It's just found a cleverer way to store the exact same JPEG. So it doesn't improve the quality of the photo, but it also doesn't make it any worse.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It is not recompressing it. JPEG XL has a way to just take your existing JPEGs and make them smaller without changing the quality of the display, nothing about them. It's essentially a lossless conversion, just saving space. Apple could... do that to all of our JPEGs if they wanted to. I think probably the reason it is not imminent is because development in the photos world is slow.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So the correction is this. When I was talking about names for the app, which we'll get to in a second, I was mentioning... I think I said Space Doubler or something like that, because there was a series of utilities for the classic Mac OS called Ram Doubler or Disk Doubler. Well, Disk Doubler is what Space Doubler was called. That's the correction. Sorry, but it was Ram Doubler and Speed Doubler.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Sometimes for good reasons, because it's a very important thing to get right. How long did it take for us to get iCloud shared photo libraries? Like a decade, right? But I'd rather have them get it right than ship it and destroy all my photos, right? So I think this is not imminent, but it definitely would be cool. As for Are there third-party tools and would you trust them?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I would absolutely not trust them because when you do this thing, you are converting it from a JPEG file to a JPEG Excel file. It would have probably a different file name extension. It would be a different format. Apps have to read it. You can't do that behind the back of the Photos app. Like, Photoshop expects JPEGs to be JPEGs, not JPEG XLs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I would absolutely not trust a third-party tool to do this, because that's not what the photo library is expecting. Even if you just think of it as simple as, like, the metadata in the SQLite database in your photo library will no longer match. Like, the file and disk will be a different size, right? It'll just... No. If you see a third-party tool that says it will do this, don't do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I'm talking about changing your photo library in place. Now, if you want to export originals from your photo library, put them in a third-party tool, change them to JPEG, Excel, and re-import them, by all means, but you're going to lose all your metadata for the photos if you do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Anyway, it would be cool if they did it, but as we saw with iOS, they didn't even go whole hog on JPEG, Excel, and the phones. It's just a thing they use for RAWs, but they didn't even switch. The regular voters are still heek, so baby steps in the JPEG, Excel.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But they charge you for it. Yes. Well, that's fair.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, that's the question of, like, are people simply not paying and by making it smaller, making it... Well, they're never going to fit in between the amount. They give you five gigs for free, which doesn't matter how much compression they do. That's not going to help anybody, right? So...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I see what you're saying, but right now, anybody who pays for any iCloud storage gives Apple the market rates for it. I think last time I reviewed it, they were charging about the same amount as Google. So they're not ridiculous, but it is ridiculous that the amount you get for free is basically useless.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Believe it or not, they sold a software product called Speed Doubler. It did make your computer faster, perceptively faster in a few interesting ways. But anyway, the space saving one was not Space Doubler. It was Disk Doubler. And Christian made an image of like the old, I presume this is the old Disk Doubler floppy disk that it came on with like the little styled label or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Remember last episode, they said, we're going to get the one terabit NANDs. We're going to be off 256 next year. That person promised.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
i hope yeah i know but by the way just to be clear jpeg xl like they should change to get the benefit of jpeg xl you should be saving your photos in jpeg xl this thing we're talking about where you can take your existing jpegs and save them without loss of quality in a smaller size that's like an off to the side nice to have the advantage of jpeg xl we talked about before is like it will make you better quality pictures in the same size or you know like it's you
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
you should just be, the camera should be producing those if you want to get the real benefit from it. So I would imagine they wouldn't do the recompression until or unless they decided, oh, we're switching from Heek to JPEG XL.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
The space savings is like, well, since we're in there and since every, because if they did this, like every part of the Apple ecosystem would have to fully support it, which I think it mostly does already. I think we had a follow-up item about that where most Apple things can currently read JPEG XL, but Apple's cameras don't shoot them
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Not me. I just was using my computer one day and I looked down at the finder and it was looking a little under the weather. Maybe like I had a rough weekend and just woke up too early. I guess we'll put a picture in the show notes or maybe it'll be chapter art or something because it's hard to describe what it is. But it's clearly a... Mistake like a rendering problem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It doesn't look like it was done stylistically It's like the finder icon in the dock on the left side of the dock And it's got kind of vertical stripes where there's like a dim area and the lighter dim area and lighter like maybe I don't know 10-15 stripes vertical stripes across the thing but as it gets towards the edge like the stripe breaks up and it's like melting the colors behind it and it just looks awful and
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
uh i posted about it on mass and i said you feeling okay this morning little guy um and i thought it was just me who knows whatever i have exotic hardware sometimes weird stuff happens but then jeff johnson posted that he saw this on reddit as well someone who had the exact same problem only on their computer it was safari and the finder you can see in my screenshot the finder is messed up but safari right next to it is fine and then in this reddit screenshot uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Safari and the Finder are messed up, but the icon between them, which is like launch center or whatever, is fine. So anyway, this is a 15.2 thing as far as I can tell because it started after we all updated to 15.2. I think this is an Apple bug. Just FYI, if the icons in your docs start to look wonky, it's probably 15.2 and hopefully Apple will fix it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Here we are, you know, an hour and a half into the show. Go ahead, DeMarco.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
A little bit pessimistic, but you know, I laughed. I thought it was funny. Risk doubler, disc doubler there. It's right there in front of you. Good job, Christian. I like that one. And speaking of names.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
WWDC was so long ago that we've all forgotten about what was advertised for iOS 18 because it's been rolling out over the course of this whole year. But I'm pretty sure this was one of the features that was advertised way back in WWDC that was coming in iOS 18. And we all forgot about it because at this point, I'm not even going to blame Casey because it's just been so long.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
This year, they have just been, it's been a slow roll. These features are not coming fast and furious. It's like when they get around to it. Someone in the chat room is saying it's all of 18, not just 18.2. But yeah, I'm pretty sure this was in fact an advertised feature of the new Siri. I think when I first upgraded iOS 18, I noted that it did that as well. And I did not like it. I didn't.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I wanted it to go back to being on an even keel. I don't need it to add to play act the things that I'm saying. But yeah, I think it's not just you, Casey.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
that's another thing with the 18 release i i'm just going by what some people said in the chat room but it's like which 18 release had which thing in it and which things are still to come on which platforms this year man like there's we didn't put it in the notes here but there's been some stories about like the people who at apple who are supposed to be working on ios 19 are delayed because so many people are still working on 18 because 18 is not done like we're getting into this type of thing where it's like they will announce a wwdc
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Basically, all the features that they're going to release over the course of the next year. And only by next WWDC will they all actually be out. Which is a strange way to do things because then when the next WWDC comes along, do you have another year's worth of features to announce at that point?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Are you just going to start announcing things before anyone has begun working on them and just assume you'll get them done within a year? Obviously, the AI thing sort of catching Apple, not by surprise, but sort of like they had other priorities and they shifted priorities quickly. I think that has been an issue. Hopefully, they'll get back on track. But this definitely has been...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
like the longest release I can remember on all their platforms of just like, it's not going to be done until, certainly not done within the calendar year that the WWDC was. So they'll still be releasing features into 2025. Whereas in past releases, by the time the year turned around, it was just bug fixes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Are yours ones that have been suggested by other people or are they new?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Oh, okay. I have a list here in front of me. Now, I want to say that this list is not exhaustive. There were just so many suggestions I could not click them all. So I'm sorry if you don't hear your suggestion on this list. This list is not ordered in any way. Oh, come on. You got to order it, man. You got to pick your favorites. I'll get to that in a little bit.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I mean, there are favorites mixed in, but it's mostly kind of like the order that I got to putting them into this document together.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
They're like dogs. You ever take your dog for a walk and the neighbor has like a new, like a tiny flag on their lawn and the dog freaks out about it because something has changed in their environment.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It's the magic of e-ink because it's not emissive. It's not a quote-unquote stream. I'm assuming it doesn't have any kind of front light like the Kindles. Not at all. Yeah, so that's how it sails through because now it is just like a piece of paper. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So as I go down this list, though, what it will actually be is an exercise in me trying to pronounce people's names. It's not about I just realized this has nothing to do with the name of my app. It has entirely to do with the fact that I decided to put the people's name who suggested it in here. And now you're going to hear me. This is like payback for Casey.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So the three things you're showing on it, is that just like built-in stuff? Like does it, I forget what you said, weather? Is it like a built-in weather thing and then countdown? You just put a date in and it shows you a countdown?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Now you're going to hear me try to read. Yep. 50 people's names. Anyway, I'll try to do this quickly. Here we go. Ben McCarthy suggested deduplicity. Todd Hoff suggested free disk space because it has a double meaning. It's like you're freeing it as a verb and you're also talking about it as a noun. Alexander Morris Terry said spacey list. I like that one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I think I mentioned a while back that my brother had the need for the same type of thing to show the family calendar. It wasn't e-ink, but it was like... I don't know, maybe it was color e-ink, or maybe it was just a really bad-looking LCD. But it looked very similar to this. Similar size, similar proportions, even similar, like the little bezel was similar as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Although I do kind of wish this thing didn't have the Terminal logo on the front and the bezel was equal on all sides, but whatever. It's cheap. But yeah, like having...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
e-ink one of the good roles of being is to basically be configurable paper with all the advantages of disadvantages of paper you can't see paper if it's dark and you don't have light shining on it but if there is light shining on it it looks real good and doesn't take a lot of power and yada yada um so yeah i i'm not sure if i would use this but like well another question does it come with bundled support for like google calendar or other calendar things if you want to show your calendar not just a calendar
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I'm still using Panic Status Board, an app that was discontinued many years ago, but somehow still is running on my iPad. Yeah, that is very limited. But Casey, if you're thinking of doing this, you might want to try doing it on iOS or iPadOS because there's that cool Swift charting library that exists. It depends on what you want to do with it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
What this thing sounds like it's doing, like rendering HTML to an image, is way more flexible. I kind of wish Status Board did that, but it doesn't. But anyway, yeah, this is cool. I'll definitely keep in mind if I have a need for something. I already said last time that I didn't think I had any need for a digital picture frame, and apparently I do. So maybe this will find a place as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
ben o'matic said final frontier mark edwards said double down and clone cut gabrielle or gabriel said d duplo f10 said dupty dupe which i thought was fun that's very good ivan cavero balunde said dupe nukem which is good i mean a little bit a little bit of a copyright trade dress whatever um graham k said store accusa
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I'm thinking, because we do use Google Calendar, maybe having this... Well, so the thing is we have a paper calendar on our fridge, but the reason we do that is because just to see the pictures, essentially, I don't think anyone, we should just take the paper calendar and just like fold it over. So all you see is the picture on the top page and not the calendar. No, actually I do look at it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I looked at, I look, here's when I look at the calendar that's hanging on the fridge. I see the pictures and I like seeing, I make the calendar out of my own pictures, you know, one picture for each month.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Um, the main time I look at it and I did it today was when I'm taking the milk out of the fridge and I see the expiration date, I glance at the calendar that's on the fridge door to see what they say. Is this expired? How close is this to being expired? So yeah, maybe, I don't know, maybe there's a role for this somewhere. I'll think about it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Right. Except for when the new special episode drops an hour before we're recording. And I was in the shower.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
el neal said ding john muir said safe space and bigger mac uh i'm sure the mcdonald's would love bigger mac thomas hall said saving spaces bit biter and bite impotent bite impotent it's like bite in front of item potent that's a little too obscure um jack wellborn said fire marshal like yes like fire marshal file marshal Yeah, File Marshall. It said, let me show you something.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I was all shot on iPhone. Yeah, okay. Because you can buy a $30,000 camera or you can just use your iPhone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
File Minion, Copy Optimizer, and Copy Miser. Michael Horn's... Michael Onore, I'm going to say, said Space Cowboy, which I like because it's a Cowboy Bebop reference. Ted Duffield said Obiterate. Timo Gruen said Duper Blooper, Duper Trooper, and Mirror Space.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I was going to say you probably need a PC and a W Premiere or something.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Dan Engler said Archavides, in honor of one of history's great minds, famous for messing with volumes, because he was figuring out how to tell the volume of spheres or something, I remember. And he lived in the city of Syracuse. Cliff Connell said Duplerace or Duperace. Matt Johnson said Clone War. Obviously, there's lots of clone things that are going to run afoul of Star Wars here.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Kelly said Clone Zone. Mustafa Hammoumi said Conjure, as in creating something out of nothing, like free storage. Uh, Steven Bernard said Disket, it's like Disket with a G. Uh, Jack Uyane said Dupliciller. These are getting kind of violent here. Squozin said Optimus. Marina Eppelman said Space Forager. Claude Zien said Repeat Defender or Repeat Offender. Duplicut, Double Down, Duper Scooper.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Rene Banas said Storage Sweep. Jonathan Augusto said Storage Consolidator, Disk Consolidator. Consolidate Storus. Sounds like a dinosaur. Storage Liberator, Disk Liberator, Byte Liberator, Freedom Biter. Shoom Straw said Space Rescue and Space Machine. Nathan Galt said Cow Candidate because cow stands for copy on write, which is how the cloning stuff works under the covers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
On the price of these things, like you said, I know $30,000 sounds like a lot, but just the regular digital cameras they shoot movies with get into those prices, and they have multiple ones of those cameras. So this is in line with prices of fancy cameras that professionals use to shoot movies, although professionals use iPhones to shoot movies too.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But anyway, it's not... I know it sounds ridiculous. It's just not a consumer device. It's a pro device. Just go look at how much the equipment costs to shoot your average Marvel movie or whatever. They're expensive. Another thing is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
you know so as you said like there's the professional cameras and then we've got our iphones with what they're doing and obviously it's not great because the cameras are dinky and small low resolution and they're like five millimeters from each other but i am looking at the picture of this camera and i'm looking at my phone and i am wondering that if the iphone 20 had cameras on the far ends of the phone and you were to line those cameras up with like basically the interpupillary distance of this camera would it match
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Because I think those camera things, they look kind of like they're about the same distance as your eyeballs. Like that's what they're going for, right? Big lenses, but like the centers of them are like human eye distance from each other. Well, an iPhone held sideways, the corners of that are also within human eye interpupillary distance from each other. And if you put...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
a 180-degree fisheye camera on either end of your iPhone, and if they were 8K on the iPhone 25 or something, obviously it's not going to be as good as a $30,000 camera, but you're getting closer to what we're looking for, which is instead of the little tiny rectangle field of view that is, you know, the blob or the postage stamp that you turn your head and what you see is not the thing you recorded because it's not there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Because the field of view is so narrow, right? And the field of view being narrow is mostly due to the lenses. They simply can't capture image that are on the side of you, right? I mean, if you look at these lenses, you'll see they look like spheres poking out of it. Like your iPhone can't capture that. The light coming from the side just hits the side of the camera lens. Like they're flat.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
That's not going to work, right? And the depth perception being slightly off on your phone is because the cameras are just so darn close. The left and right image aren't that different from each other. We want the, when we're looking through our eyeballs, the left and right image to be different from each other based on how far our eyeballs are apart.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Mike Corilico said doppelganger and Jose Vasquez says space scout one file stack file bed bunk and Mac half empty. Those are all the ones that I have in my document. That is not all the ones that suggested, but that gives you a feel of what the names are going. Now, Marco, you have a favorite list.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And everyone's eyeballs are a little bit different distance, but that's basically what we want out of it. And this camera achieves that. And another thing that I have a question about, I don't, maybe someone who knows about these cameras can write in.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So I'm thinking of looking at this camera and I'm thinking about like, you know, professional movie cameras that you see of the Arri Alexa or the RED cameras, all the modern, all the companies that like did well in the modern digital camera space.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
um and they sell you know they sell the camera bodies which cost as much as a car and they're just like a cube with and then you buy their incredibly expensive twenty thousand dollar lenses that you stick on to that cube and you buy their fifty thousand dollar sd card that is really just a ten cent thing from a drugstore but they charge you a thousand dollars for it although did you did you see what they charge for an eight terabyte ssd no is it less than apple or more it's like half what apple charges
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I think the RED cameras had... Back in the early days, the RED cameras had flash storage that was more expensive than Apple's. Like, again, it's the same storage, but it's like, well, this is the special RED stuff, and we guarantee it. It's quite a racket. I mean, they're selling these to Hollywood studios with multi-million dollar budgets, so it is what it is, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But my question about these cameras... With like the regular ones, like I said, you buy the body, but then you buy the lenses and the lenses tend to cost as much or more than the body because you can buy 17 different lenses depending on what you need for your shot. are lenses a thing on this camera or can you not use lenses at all? Because like, what's the point?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Like you need to get, you need to get 180 degree field of view. That's the like, so if you put two lenses on there and they also got 180 degree field of view, like is being like, I don't understand how lenses work with that wide of a field. Maybe it just works the same. Maybe it's like you're looking through binoculars and it's like you're sitting in
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
If you put this at a concert and you had a lens that was magnified, it would be like you were sitting five rows up from where the camera is placed because it's magnified, but you'd still get a 180. That can't possibly be true, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Because the things from the side, you can't ever... With a regular lens with a narrow field of view, you can essentially zoom in and it seems like you're closer to the concert. But with a 180-degree field of view... The thing that would be directly to your left if you were in the front row is never going to be directly to your left if you're in the back row.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Like you'll never have you'll never be able to see that person's ear dead on because they're in the front row and you're in the back row. You know what I mean? So I think like I'm looking at this camera. I'm like, doesn't look like there's any place where you could put a lens on this thing. Maybe?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Well, our eyes don't see 180. Our peripheral vision is garbage, but you're trying to make it so that when Casey turns his head, there's something there that he can see.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It's better than our peripheral vision, I'll tell you that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But, I mean, they obviously have the 360 cameras as well, 360 cameras that erase the tripod that they're on. which is just, you know, the sort of the end game of this, of like I capture video in every direction and like, you know, cleverly remove the monopod that my camera is sitting on. They're, you know, the resolution is lower on those. They're even more limited.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But I think with things like this, like I don't think, it seems to me that lenses, different lenses for this camera, are not useful or a thing, both based on my reasoning about it and also by looking at the physical item, I don't see how lenses would attach to it. Like, the two lenses that are there are too close together.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So that's an interesting... If that's true, someone write in and tell me, am I... Do they have lenses for them? Do they not? Would lenses just massively narrow the field of view and maybe that's a useful thing to do or not? But I don't even think it can physically attach. But anyway, someone who knows, write in and tell me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But either way, that's like, if it's the case that lenses are not as important on this, that's quite a change from... decades and decades of movie cameras where it was all about which lens do you choose for this scene and how do you do this? And then it was just like, when you reach the end game of like 360 degree camera in all directions, there's no more like lenses are not a thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It's just like light, we put the camera in a position and light comes from everywhere towards it, right? I mean, yeah. Maybe it's not really the end game because Casey's saying like, you know, you can turn your head and stuff like that. But one thing you can't do
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
unfortunately with these cameras and any of the immersive video we've seen here with the exception of, I think the immersive environments that Apple puts you in is if you stand up in your concert seat, your perspective on the people on stage does not change because guess what? The camera didn't stand up. The camera was the same height the whole time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So if you wanted to see the top of that person's head to see if there was a piece of confetti that landed on their head and you can't see it when you're sitting and you stand up, you still can't see it. Because you're not, you can't change your perspective in that way. All you can do is look at different parts of the frame that was captured, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
With the Apple immersive environments where the, I don't know what they do, like 3D modeling part or whatever, you basically need to be like essentially in a game engine where, oh, if you're in a game engine, when you stand up, you can look on top of the dresser that previously you couldn't see the top of because it's all 3D rendered in real time and it's literally changing your, essentially the quote-unquote camera's position in space.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So for immersive video to work well, and it does work well, You stay in the same position. You stay seated. You can look up, look down, look left, look right. But what you can't do is stand up or step 10 feet to the left because that will not change your perspective on the video.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
that's why they got to do a full 3d engine of it so you can actually get up and walk around you know and that's what the environments are if they can feel you if they can fool you into thinking it is although of course you could also do the i don't know if you remember this back from the uh the the weird old days this is before your time in the apple world but one of the things they would do it do you remember quick time vr of course you don't that was way before your time but um
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It was just like, it was a 360 degree fields of view, extremely low resolution photograph. Right. And so once you have a 360 degree photograph minus the tripod, which they didn't really know how to erase. So it was kind of down there. Right. Then you could look all around the photograph at your different places.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And one of the things people did with QuickTime VR is, you know, they did it for real estate, but they did it for other things too. They would take the QuickTime VR camera, the 360 camera, and put it in 17 different spots within an area and then allow you to move between individual, essentially individual spheres of 2D imagery.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
They're like cross-fading between, kind of like Google Maps when you click forward, like on Google Maps and you go to the next part in the street, right? It was exactly like that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, no, but this is like, QuickTime VR is like, what is it, like the 90s? Yeah, it was a long time ago. So long ago. Yeah. But I was thinking it from Marco's Bahamas thing. If you had 360 degree, 8K, 2i video, you could shoot it forward, backward, up, down, left, right, and then move two feet, forward, backward, up, down. The data would be massive. It would be better just to do it in a 3D engine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, there was lots of foragers. I didn't have all the forage ones on because so many will be like space forager. Lots of foraging.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Some semblance of essential like 3d Google Maps Street View where you could move around in the space and within each space you could look Anywhere you could even do the thing where when you stand up on the couch your perspective does change because they should also Shot from a foot higher and they could fade between them It's probably just easier to do it in 3d But I was just thinking about the QuickTime VR thing or like you said the current real current real estate things are essentially that QuickTime VR thing But like it's so cheap to do now you buy a 10 cent 360 camera or
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
on Amazon and you just stick it in a bunch of rooms and you jump between the spots.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
You can do the fancy version too, but the tech is cheap enough now that you can do the janky version real easy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But, yeah. I mean, it is good for real estate. Like, it does give you a perspective on things. But, like, that's as close as we can get to having, like, okay, but what if I wanted to have a different perspective? Well, we had six spots in this room. So you can jump between those six spots and look from those six spots.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
almost ubiquitous now in new real estate listings i've even seen it like on certain like hotel room bookings like here's what this type of room looks like like that that kind of stuff is actually very useful and i'm looking forward to seeing more of that yeah it is but it's not it's a video and it only has six spots in the room so for your bahamas thing if you wanted to like be in the bahamas with enough room to maybe walk around in a 10-foot circle or something as opposed to being confined and not being able to change it but like
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
the apple's immersive environments which i'm assuming like they use 3d plus photo stuff or whatever and you can actually move around a little tiny bit and moving around i believe even if you move a little tiny bit does actually change your perspective on the things that are in there yeah because those are those are just rendered 3d environments like those are not videos
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, I think there's probably some photographic things used for textures and backgrounds in those as well. But, like, yeah, that's kind of like what you're going for is, like, the stuff in the – what is it called? The ILM thing where they did the Mandalorian, the big LCD screens.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, if you can think about that all happening inside, because the way that works is they have cameras shooting actors on a stage in front of a screen, and the things, and the screen is just a wraparound screen, but the things that are projected on that screen only look sane from the perspective of the camera.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
If you're just on the side of the camera looking at what's on the screens, it just looks like garbage, because what they're doing is as the camera moves, all the imagery moves behind the camera to a 3D engine like Unreal, I don't think they use Unreal anymore, but whatever 3D engine they're using, it's basically a game engine,
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
with the camera being a real physical camera in the real world and real like actors and sets in front of it it's very clever the way they do it you can imagine doing that in vr only in vr you are the physical your head is the physical camera that's in that thing what is it called the uh someone in the chat room tell me it's really annoying me now it's not the sphere because that's the las vegas thing that's something else yeah the volume thank you dr calhoun
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
or dupe nukem dupe nukem bigger mac is one of the i like i do like a dupe nukem and bigger all the ones that you can't possibly use because like mcdonald's and apple and whatever those are funny jokes yeah of course you can't use most of those but you can use storacusa or forkspace i'm gonna use storacusa i know there was no way you were ever gonna use that the bites of syracuse county yeah casey do you have any favorites
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
If they can do that in a way that is good enough to fool Marco into thinking he's seeing the real Bahamas, you know, you've, you've accomplished the goal.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
You want dual perspective, 180 degree, immersive 8K SMR videos. Basically, I mean, I'm not an ASMR person, so I can't say for sure, but I think that's what I want. Yeah, the 3D audio is real important for that too.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But let us stream it live. Your grandchildren, the cheap bird feeder camera that they buy online will have this in it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Like I always say, we only need probably a few more doublings to do what we've already done with audio, which is max out human perception. For this particular format of like Can't change your perspective. Immersive video shot from a single point.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
We're not there yet, but we're, you know, one or two or three more doublings away from like, there's no point in making this higher resolution because human eyes can't distinguish it. Just like we were with audio where there's no point in making this higher resolution because humans can't hear a difference. Right. And we got there with audio because it's easier because there's less data.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And even when we get there with still video, then it'll be like, okay, but what about the camera that takes 8,000 different perspectives from all over the place? And what about the 3D engines and yada, yada, yada? So there's still a ways to go, but you can see it now. You can see that like, all right, if you could give me four times, eight times the resolution,
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
There's no need for more at that point. And then it's just about dynamic range and other issues, but not resolution, and resolution is mostly what's giving you the data size issues. And even within resolution, like poor Casey's sports are still in 1080 most of the time, which is sad for sports.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And yeah, in terms of streaming, we can mostly do it, except the internet is not made for broadcast the way radio waves and cable television was. So when everyone tries to watch Mike Tyson, there are problems. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It would be upsetting to be have a 180 degree immersive. I know they have those wire cameras flying over the football fields and everything, but like a lot of sports, especially football, you do want to have that narrow field of view perspective so you can see the whole field sometimes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And in fact, maybe most of the time, because the view like from like, you know, the quarterback's perspective when the when he's about to get sacked, like sometimes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
that's exciting but also kind of upsetting and doesn't really give you a view of the entire game it's kind of like your f1 thing you're talking about casey where it's like it would be it's cool to see the driver's perspective but what's really cool is to see 17 other perspectives not to say oh the whole race is going to be from the perspective of one driver because that would be incredibly fatiguing and you wouldn't have any sense of what's going on and so
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
sports really needs a hybrid approach but again vision pro is there for that because it's oh you want five screens i can put them wherever you want i can put them any size you want i can put them have whatever i want on them i can have an immersive screen that when you stare at it and pinch your fingers you jump into that screen and now it's immersive and you're seeing from that driver's perspective like so many things are possible
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Come on, ForgeSpace. And again, I apologize if I didn't read yours. There were just so many of these, and I'm sure lots of them fell through the cracks.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So the reason I'm not giving you topless here is because I have indeed chosen a name for my app since last we recorded. Oh, no. And I'm not going to reveal what it is, and I'm not even going to tell you whether it was one of the ones on this list or not. Okay. Okay.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So, on the one hand... You can see the arguments surely people are making inside Apple, which is, why should we bother trying to make a controller? These gaming companies have been making controllers for decades. They're really good at it. They're making them anyway. They're going to make them with or without us.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Why don't we just make sure our Macs, our iPads, our phones are compatible with Xbox controllers, PlayStation controllers, so on? Hell, we'll sell the PlayStation controllers in the Apple store. Done and done. What a clever, good business thing we did. We didn't try to make a controller because we're probably bad at it. They're already making them. We support it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
No. No, that has to be an on-show reveal. Here's the thing about the name, and maybe, Casey, you can relate. It's a name. I chose this name, and I just know that everyone else is not going to like it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
People already have these controllers because they already own a PlayStation or an Xbox. Problem solved. And this is just one more example of how Apple's approach to gaming is... Inadequate, let's say. Wrong-headed, misguided, because the reason all those people make controllers is if you want to be remotely serious about gaming, you have to make and ship your own controller.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
You can't just say, oh, it's a third-party opportunity. Apple just does this forever. Third-party controllers for your phone, for your iPad, for your Mac. Other people make them. We support them. Isn't that good enough? And the answer is no.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
if you bought a a console and it didn't come with controllers and they said i'll just buy them from a third party other people make them they'd be like what the hell is this a gaming console or is this not a gaming console it was bad enough when they used to come with one controller which is criminal but like they still do uh like apple You need to make control. So anyway, Vision Pro.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
No hand controllers. People are like, Apple doesn't believe in hand controllers. It's all going to be with your hands. You pinch your fingers together. You do gestures. You don't need controllers. They're cumbersome. It's bad enough that you're putting a thing on your head. You have to be able to use it without them. And I agree with that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But also from day zero of the Vision Pro, we were like, okay, but what kind of games do people like to play in VR already before Apple introduced this product? And how would those games work on the Vision Pro with no hand controllers? And the answer is poorly. It doesn't mean there can't be good games without hand controllers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But we know that there's a whole bunch of games that people already like that require hand controllers. And Apple's like, oh, you can find them somewhere. I mean, and they're doing the same thing here. Like, oh, well, you know, we'll team up with Sony. We'll make support for their controllers. They already did all this work. It's fine. It'll be... It's so frustrating.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It's like the, whatever, the Alan Kay quote or whatever. People who are serious about software have to make their own hardware. I forget. I may be reversing that. Someone please Google that and get... But anyway, it's like, if you're serious about gaming, you have to make your own controllers. And I agree. Apple will be terrible at it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
There's a story probably we'll get to the next episode about Apple working on human input referrals and how that has not been their strength for a long time. But like, you gotta try, Apple. You can't sell the Apple TV with the stupid...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
diving board remote and say here's your game controller no that's not a game controller like it's never gonna work until it's just killing me i can't take it anymore they're doing all that they're putting amazing gpus in they have the game porting toolkits they're doing all these things and they're just like but we're not gonna make a controller because i don't know how do you guys feel about this
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Casey lives there. Only I have to like it, and that's all that matters. So, yeah, eventually I will reveal the name. I'll probably reveal the name once I have, like, an icon, which I'm nowhere near having or whatever. But, you know, anyway. Um, and on that front, I'll just give a brief update on my progress on the app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
The one thing they have going for them is they haven't sold that many yet.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Like when we recorded, uh, last week's episode, I had created the Xcode project like a couple of days before that. So if you're expecting that app to be released, uh, yeah, last one we recorded, I had a working app and it would do what it's supposed to do when you click the button, but.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
it takes longer than a week to make an app just FYI and it takes me personally way longer because I am so slow as a Mac developer because there's just so much I don't know you know like I can yeah it's frustrating when you're a fast developer in other contexts and other languages at this point I'm faster on PHP than I am in doing what here is there's just so many and there's only one way to do a lot of things because you got to use the APIs to do them and anyway
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, they should have first-party controllers and also support third-party ones. Like, in that scenario where they ship a first-party one, it's getting to Marco's point. At least the software developers know everybody has a controller. And those people can choose not to use it because they don't like it. They want to use it. I mean, there's third-party controllers available for every system.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
You know, consoles, you can use third-party controllers. PC, you can use third-party controllers. And these days, most PCs support all the controllers that work with consoles as well. Like, that's great. That's a great ecosystem. But you've got to come with one. It's like... So I'm going to say it's like a computer not coming with a keyboard and mouse, but the Mac mini does that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But anyway, game consoles come with a controller. The PSVR comes with controllers. Like sometimes it's optional. I think some of the motion things have said like, well, you get it with this kind of controller. We're not with that kind, but you know, look at in the VR headsets, the meta quest, I believe Marco can correct me. That comes with controllers, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Because it was released like an hour before we started recording. See, Casey, I need to be on top of this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And, you know, Apple will, you know, hinder itself even further because even like a kind of like a grassroots kind of behind the scenes thing where some developer make a really compelling game. They're like, oh, this is really good game for Vision Pro. And now the fifteen hundred dollar one is out. And I know Apple doesn't ship controllers, but you can use the third party controller.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And like it's just so popular that it gains momentum all on its own. And despite Apple, it makes it starts to make the Vision Pro into a gaming platform. But that will never happen. You know why? Because Apple, which controls all software that ships on the Vision Pro, will say, oh, you can't ship this game that requires a controller. Sorry. Rejected from the app store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
you know it's going to be a little while this app will not be out in 2024 for sure uh who knows when in 2025 will be out uh what am i doing with all this time if you already have an app that quote unquote works well i gotta put a ui on it that takes a surprising amount of time i gotta do all the store in that purchase stuff it takes a surprising amount of time for someone who has never done it before uh i'll complain about apple's documentation maybe next episode oh yes please and uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
They will never even allow someone to help them. Like, help me help you. And Apple's like, no, you cannot help us. Your game has to support the Apple TV remote. I know they went back on that one, but it was too late. But you just know they would never allow a game on the Vision Pro that requires a controller. Because they'd be like, oh, that's not the way we think about our platform.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It's like, well... Then we can't help you. You're never going to be you won't ship your own controllers. You won't let people shoot games that require them. It's just they cannot get out of their own way. And because if it was like if there was side loading or if there was third party stuff or if the EU decided that the Vision Pro was too dominant in the market.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
vision headset and you had to allow third party like because if people can do whatever they want on it you can get that kind of like grassroots phenomenon surprise viral hit that makes people go out and buy the controller but with apple being the gatekeeper for these platforms that's it'll never happen on the apple tv it'll probably never happen on the vision pro because there's no room
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
for a third party to do a thing that definitely will be janky and low interest at first that might catch on because Apple will just be like, no, that's not how we like our platform to behave.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, so, you know, I'm here plugging away. I guess the main thing I probably want to talk about today is, I mean, something near and dear to Casey's heart. We were always complaining about poor documentation with Apple stuff.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yes, baby, I'm here. So here's the thing. Like, poor documentation, you know, the lack of documentation, it doesn't seem to be a lot of it. Some things have like a one or two sentence description. That is frustrating, but you really don't feel the full force of the pain until you are in an area that you have no knowledge or experience of.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So if you're in some area that you know about, like say I'm doing AppKit stuff, which I know a little bit about from my other two apps, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
i know a whole bunch of app kit stuff and there's some stuff i don't know but like i i needed to like fill in the blanks or fill in you know it's like the fog of war on the you know rts maps fill in the areas that i have you know so that i know a bunch of surrounding stuff but i don't know and then you go and you find some credit documentation but because you know all a bunch a whole bunch of surrounding stuff you're gonna like oh i see what they're probably getting at here and i see how this is related to that thing and you can put the pieces together
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And I'm like, basically, I'm trying to figure out and implement all of the appropriate guardrails to make this not be a risk doubler, right? That's the hard part. When it's easy to just make something for yourself, you're like, well, you know, I know what I'm doing and it's fine or whatever. But to make something you're going to give to other people to use, you really have to nail the sucker down.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But for what I'm doing in this app, what I've been spending some time doing, you know, in-app purchase type stuff, I've never done that on any Apple platform ever, ever before. So I have zero knowledge other than watching WWDC videos about it. And I've watched a lot of WWDC videos, but there's nothing like actually programming it. which is actually part of the problem here.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So in that situation, when you just got nothing, you're starting from zero, and you land on one of those documentation pages that doesn't have anything except for like a single sentence that uses like five proper nouns that you don't know the definitions of, and there's nothing else, you're just like... what?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I don't, you know, and so here I'm in this situation and I, you know, I have watched just so many hours of WWDC videos about APIs that I have never used, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I have a lot of this knowledge in my head, but they're WWDC videos for all, for as wonderful as they are, they really are kind of like math class in school where if you have kids or if you've been a kid and remember math class, if you like don't understand a concept that,
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
and you never learn it, that's going to be a big problem because next year, they're going to talk to you as if you already know elementary algebra. They're not going to reteach you algebra. They're going to assume everyone here knows algebra or like multiplication tables.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
They're going to assume you know your multiplication tables, you know how to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. They're not going to reteach that. If you miss one or two things, when you attend the junior year or high school class and they start teaching you calculus, if you don't know pretty much everything that came before it, you have a serious problem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
They like to say that math is cumulative. You can't forget the old stuff. They build on what you knew before. Many WWDC videos are like that. Not all of them, but many of them. Well, they'll say, what's new in Star Kit 2? They assume you already know what was old in Star Kit 2 and they're just going to tell you about the new stuff. It's an incremental update.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And so you're like, okay, but that's not all the videos. What you should do is go and find the WWDC 2021 or whatever video that's introducing Star Kit 2. Here's the problem with this approach. You know, this is, you know, Apple spends a lot of money in WDC. The production values are great. The people who present them is great.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I think the presentations are great, but you go, uh, introducing store kit too. And you watch that video. If there's a conceptual part about like big picture, what a store kit about, hopefully that's still relevant.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But with the current rate of development and transition to SwiftUI, almost all the code in that presentation is not what you want to be doing today because it's not, you know, they, in future years, there'll be a session called what's new in StarKit 2 and SwiftUI or something. And those are the APIs you want to be using because those are the new ones that work really well with SwiftUI.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And that is taking a lot of time because I'm trying to think of what are the best mitigations? Which one should I allow to be disabled? Which one should I not allow to be disabled?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
The old ones, you could get it done. So the intro course is telling you a way to do it that you don't want to do it. And the new course...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
expects you to already have experience with the old api but you have neither and like i'm going through this and i'm thinking as i stumble my way in the dark through this just making mistake after mistake as i stumble my way through this i start fantasizing about writing documentation like i'm already i've already like written it in my head based on my like current what is surely my current misunderstanding it's like
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I could explain this to somebody who has zero knowledge. Granted, my information is probably wrong at this point, but I could explain my wrong information and say, look, here's the problem you're facing. Here's the things you're going to run into. Like, here's how you have to think about it. Here's a way to arrange it, stuff like that, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And as far as I've been able to determine, that kind of documentation almost doesn't exist at all anywhere in the Apple ecosystem, like first party.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It provides a third-party opportunity for people to do that, but even the third-party ones, because things are changing so rapidly, in particular because so many APIs predate SwiftUI and then work with SwiftUI, but just barely, and then there's the new ones that are made in an age where SwiftUI is the expected default and they don't work anywhere else.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
how locked down should it be because you're locking down too much it's not going to find any duplicates because it's not allowed to look anywhere where the duplicates are you know so um i'll give updates as i go along here but like it's going to be a while so don't hold your breath
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
If you make that tutorial two years ago, maybe it's out of date now, it's extremely frustrating. And so one of the things that Apple usually is okay about is providing the sample code, although they do this weird thing where... the sample code from year to year, they'll keep enhancing the same app, like the food truck app or the backyard birds app or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And the download links to the sample code will be like, download the food truck app. But when you download it, I think they only have like one copy of the food truck app and it's the current version. So if you download it from like a video four years ago, you don't get the four years ago food truck.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
You get the current one, which in some ways is good because it's more updated, but in some ways it's bad because the app doesn't match the video that you're watching.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But anyway, my final complaint on this is, you know, again about WWDC videos, which I feel like WWDC videos are, they're not like movie trailers, but they're like, do you want, they're great for me before I was programming with these APIs. Do you just want to get an overview of what Apple's doing with the APIs and what they're capable of? These are the videos for you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But if you actually have to implement an app, man, these videos, like, they're not going to give you what you need. To give just one example that drives me batty, anytime in a WWDC video, and again, I understand why they do this, anytime in a WWDC video where they say, you know, we're going to do X, Y, and Z, and they say they've omitted error checking for brevity, that is useless to me!
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Error checking is the most important part of the programming! I've omitted error checking. Are you freaking kidding me? All I want to know is where can this go wrong? What do I have to check for and where? So I tell that the transaction is valid. Do I have to do it? Do I not have to do it? What are the possible error scenarios? Where do I, like I've omitted error checking for brevity.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I know you have to fit it on a slide, but that is just throw it out the window. Like it's useless. It's only useful to me as a casual dilettante viewer of like, I'm not writing an app, but I just want to learn about APIs. Isn't this great? But when it's time to write an app,
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
the code is all error checking there's one line that does something in 75 lines of error checking like especially something like in-app purchase like i just wish like this and this made me think like this is what labs are for like if i'm still doing this wc i should go to a lab and say i should just come with wc session and say explain this stupid app to me explain backyard birds why are you doing this what does this api do what in the world what in the
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It took me like a full day to figure out they were calling map dot map on something. And it wasn't, you know, the array dot map. It wasn't that map. It was a different map. It does basically the same thing, but it was literally like a different signature, a different freaking function because it wasn't an array.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I just, it's, it's loosely incorrect. And surprisingly, the thing that I thought would be tripping me up so far, I mean, I'll get to it, but so far hasn't been, which is, Oh, how do you test transactions and like pretending to purchase things and blah, blah, blah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
That actually, because I spent, you know, because I waited, you know, eight years or nine years or whatever to do my first in-app purchase. That's actually pretty good. And compare, I'll say this, that's better than I thought it would be. And I haven't had problems yet. Um,
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
partially because I'm still just doing it locally, which is a feature they introduced two or three years ago, the local store kit configuration thing. Love it. Pretty easy. Mostly works. You can't, it doesn't really work. You can't really, I haven't, one of you can do tech support for me now. Is there a way to cancel subscription in the local Xcode thing?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I found that window. How do you cancel? Right-clicking doesn't do nothing. They do have a thing where you can click and it says show options, and then it has the transaction list.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, but I go to the options list, and when you click options on it, it brings up a thing that says there is a cancel option, but those are transactions that already happened, and when I cancel...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
My app doesn't see that like it doesn't you know hit one of the update handlers or whatever so anyway when I try it with sandbox I'm sure it'll be easier because I'm assuming when I do cancel at an app store connect because basically what I'm doing trying to do is to simulate a User canceling it they go to their subscriptions in their iCloud whatever blah blah blah and they hit cancel That's what I want to simulate from Xcode and haven't figured out how to do it yet, but I think that's minor complaint So I thought that would be the big problem
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, this is the theory that with the printing facing out, it will rub against other clothes more than it would with the printing facing in. I'm not even sure that theory holds out because, you know, although the clothes are all smushing around there, if you have it inside out, the printing is still touching another piece of fabric. It just happens to be the other side of its own shirt.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
but they have actually a pretty good options for like, you know, renew every 30 seconds. Each 30 seconds is one month or you can easily delete the transactions to reset the world.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Having no problem with that, having massive problems being like, where do I put the stuff in my app to make sure I'm doing all the things that I need to do for all these fricking transactions and all the types that just when the type signature makes the line go over a hundred characters, just because it's like, you know, what is it? Uh,
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
uh entitlement result verification result with angle brackets around it all plus the type that you put but that one inside has a question mark and it's just and you have to like massage that value through 17 different things to figure out if it's verified and extract the real value with an if case led and then it's just like oh my god Who made this API? Who made it?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Like, it's so good in so many ways, and then just when you get down to where the rubber meets the road where you have to figure out, do they actually own this? It's like, guess what? Angle brackets for days. No documentation. Good luck. Oh, and by the way, there's the subscription update task thing to monitor for updates to subscriptions. Is there an equivalent of things that aren't subscriptions?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
No, that one takes a single product ID because screw you. I wasted at least 15 minutes trying to figure out how to programmatically apply multiple of the same view modifier with different arguments, and the type system did not like what I was doing, and I gave up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I gave up. I felt like I was so close. I can smell it. I can use reduce. I can make it happen. It's like, nope, type system says no. Type system says no. And I was like, nope, this is beyond my Swift skills, and I just bailed out. Anyway, store kit.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I know. I saw the old with the SK, the SK APIs. I'm like, boy, I'm glad I'm not doing that because that was working that with SwiftUI. First of all, that would never work with Swift 6. Never. Like it would be so angry at you about everything you're doing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
The thing you can do to cancel that makes a transaction disappear, but the point is it doesn't have the effect that a user canceling their subscription would in iCloud.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
You'll figure it out. You're smart, right? And then when you search, like, for third-party stuff, you'll find lots of, like, really good posts that do the kind of documentation I'm fantasizing about. Like, let's start from the beginning. Let me tell you the problem. Let me tell you the solutions. Let me tell you the different approaches. Like you said, when you would use them or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But the problem is that blog post was written four years ago, and now it's all out of date. And it doesn't talk about the APIs you want. Yep. And maybe it's wrong, right? And I just want to give credit here. Like, if the StoreKit people are listening, StoreKit 2 is so much better. Oh, God, yes. I can see that. I've seen all the WWDC sessions, especially for using SwiftUI.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It really does a huge amount of work. Current Entitlements does a lot of the work for you. Like, a huge amount. The fact that Entitlements products are separate from subscriptions is still a little janky, even though they're both represented by products. Like, there's weirdnesses there. I get it. But it has come such a long way. And that's why it's all the more frustrating that, like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I'm sure there's a correct way to use these tools. They seem powerful. They seem way more powerful than the things they're replacing. They do a lot of stuff in a small amount of space, but there's one or two things that I'm missing that I don't understand.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And especially like Swift 6 really hasn't been much of a problem, but it's a little bit of a problem in that smuggling data between the various islands is especially when you're stuck in some kind of non-async SwiftUI thing where you can't even await something from an actor. You end up smuggling a lot of stuff through environment. Apple's example smuggles stuff through the environment.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
So I'm like, is this just the way? Because, like, what's the best practice? And they're like, yeah, we're totally going to smuggle it. Like, do we have an actor doing a bunch of store stuff? And that actor is like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I invoked asynchronously from a view modifier, and that view modifier shoves things into the environment, and then other views see it because you shoved it into the environment, and they have the add environment. It's like, all right. I mean, is that it?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Because I have a lot of data that I want to move around, and now I have like six environment variables, and I'm like, maybe I'm doing it wrong, and it's just... Anyway, I'll put a link in the show notes. I just put it in the document case at the link section for the map method. The documentation for this map method says the method is map open parens underscore colon close parens.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, so this, I mean, obviously, maybe I'm making Dave's life miserable. So even though I'm not calling it super-de-duper, he's still going to have problems.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And it says returns a new state mapping the entitlement value if successful.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
it maps a new value oh mapping the entitlement value that's great uh it uh it returns an entitlement task state angle brackets new value so the value is like i kind of see how they're using it in their sample app i'm using it in my app i kind of understand what it's doing but when it came time for me to do something similar not in subscriptions but with the like for the entitlement part for trying out like non-subscription purchase type things
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I just was baffled. And I was like, no, I'm just not going to like, is this just a convenience method? I'm just going to like, anyway, I, I would, I long for a first party thing that like just explains from start to finish. Cause you can't do it in a WDC session. It's not long enough. That's not what it's for. Like, I'm not saying WDC sessions should be different.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I'm saying there needs to be something to augment it. And I do appreciate all the third party stuff out there. Hacking the Swift for like basic Swift stuff. and some Swift UI stuff. Uh, those things are great. There's tons of people writing blog posts about it. The Swift forums, like you can find stuff with the problem with the internet.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
What he's talking about is if you have lots of clones on your drive, clone files on your drive, and then you try to use super-duper to clone that drive periodically to another drive that is the same size, you may be surprised to find one that says, oh, not enough disk space. I'd be like, what do you mean not enough disk space? I have one 4TB drive that I'm trying to clone to another 4TB drive.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It's just, you're just going to find so much out of date stuff. Um, I have been using like chat GPT to try to, but like chat GPT doesn't know about Swift. It thinks it knows about Swift six, but it does not. Uh, It absolutely does not. So I'll just give you this code that's just not going to run. I've been trying Claude to see what it can make.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
They will give you code that doesn't work for just days, right? Just that will never work. APIs that do not exist, they can be helpful sometimes, but A, they're just chronically out of date because they have to be because it takes so long to make these models that by the time you get them, they don't have WWC 2024 info in there. It's just...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And then B, yeah, they'll just make up something, and it's a shame. I use it because it's like, look, you're going to try to run the code anyway, as I said before. It's one of the ideal cases for this. If I had to pick the best new programming tool 2024, it's these AI things, but they are in their own way extremely frustrating, and they absolutely do not help for things like
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
I need a human being to conceptually explain to me all the moving parts. Because there's not 8,000 different ways to do this, I would imagine. The people who made StoreKit have an idea. Say you have an app that wants to use every single feature that StoreKit have. You have consumables, subscriptions. That's what their backyard birds app is trying to say. Everything that StoreKit can do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
This does all of them. And if you're going to do all of them, this is how you should arrange your junk.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
uh but like i don't blame the backyard bird sample app it does do all those things but it is so kind of like strange and idiosyncratic and it doesn't do every single possible thing you can do in some ways it's limited and there's some weird choices made by like the programmer who just really likes using enums to smuggle information around where there's like an enum where there's like seven of the cases are product ids and one of the cases is the group id like i guess i mean just a
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
You just avoid the group ID because you know that one's called group and it's not a product ID. And it's like, well, it's convenient when we... And also one of the states is not subscribed and we're going to do... It's just, what are you doing? Like, you know, every program has got their own quirks, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And it's like, it's fine to be quirky, but when you're making like the canonical sample code for how to use store kit, maybe like rein in those quirks and just be like, I'm not going to do anything or make any weird decisions. It's just going to be like, here's how you use the APIs. It should be...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
incredibly well commented which it is not uh and it should have all the error checking like all of it because there's so many theories you go on you google for it and it's like i think you should do this and i think you should do that and you have to check for this but you don't have to check for that but no it's just you have to check this and you check the revocation date but if it gets through here it's already verified but you have to verify yourself oh store kit 2 does the verification and the old store kit didn't but now you still need to verify i just
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It's just exhausting. So anyway, and this is the frustrating thing, obviously, is that this has nothing to do with the functionality of my app. It's all just about the monetization. And it's not the only thing I'm doing. Really, I'm spending more time on UI than I am on this. But UI is, you know, this is UI just is what it is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It's a slog because you don't quite know what you're the best way to make it and stuff like that. And yes, I'm also working on the engine. Like I'm doing all the parts, but I just I just wanted to rant out StoreKit in particular because it was what I was working on today.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
How can it not fit? Clearly it fits. I'm looking at it right here. Well, the drive you're looking at has a whole bunch of clones on it that are only taking up, you know, one amount of the space, even if there's five copies of the file. But when you copy it to another disk, if you don't faithfully reproduce those clones...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, I feel like that's what one of the goals of store kit 2 is. They basically said people are using store kit 1 wrong, probably because we didn't explain it well enough and there's not good docs. So in store kit 2 we're going to do a lot of the work for them because we know how the API is supposed to work. So we're going to take away a lot of that's one of the things that's great about that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Inside this API, it's doing a bunch of stuff that basically from Apple's perspective, you third party developers proved you can't do this right. Like on average, you can't do it right. So we're going to do it for you. And then we'll just give you a response. But still the response they give you, it's like, oh, and by the way, the things we give you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
you have to implement a bunch of business logic uh here it's and it's super important you do it exactly right otherwise you're going to screw things up but we'll only kind of vaguely explain it again the like the backyard birds app they go through all the things you said casey but it is still in the end just one app and if you watch that session you cannot come away from that session and say now i'm ready to implement my app you're not you're absolutely not like even if you memorized every line of code either you copy and pasted the code samples they have them in the transcripts the code like that's not sufficient
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
for you to... I know, I just did it. That information... I have the Backyard Birds app open in Xcode next to me. That is not sufficient for you to do even the most basic thing. Just a single thing that unlocks your app, there are still so many more things that you have to know and think about to actually make that work.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Because the code snippets they give you... The Backyard Birds app itself is so weird and...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
differently structured than your app would be that you can't just use it as a one-to-one thing and the wwc session just glosses over so much stuff like it gives you an outline of what's possible but when it comes time for you to type stuff in you're just like uh like it took me so long to figure out just banging my head against it and just randomly googling to to find all the other people who hit the same roadblocks and you know discovered things like you know
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
non-renewing subscriptions apple doesn't track anything having to do with those so that's all you all right i know they do it for all the other ones but those ones just yeah like okay it would have been nice if that was in the documentation in big red letters which is like hey if you do this everything's on you unlike subscriptions where we keep track of it all
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
you will take five times the space for those five files instead of just the one times the space that it's taking on your drive. That's what he's talking about, about drives growing or whatever, like migrating to a new Mac, for instance. If you have tons of clones in your drive and you migrate to a new Mac and it doesn't reproduce the clones, your stuff might not all fit on the thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
but you know that's that's development for you right and you know it sounds like i'm being fresh and i'm actually enjoying the fun parts of it like the parts that actually make my app work and i do enjoy the ui stuff a little bit although i have a separate rant about that for another time but uh yeah working on the app
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
People have already made that program. What is it? There's a whole bunch of ones that will do that. Yeah, they'll put little checksum files in your directories. What I've gathered from the discussions I've had about that thing is that people who have... Carbon Copy Cloner does it, actually.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Instead of using SuperDuper, if you use Carbon Copy Cloner, they have an option to put checksum files in there, and every time you do a copy, it will recheck some of them and everything.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Like, you can do it manually, but what people have told me who do this type of thing is that they're super diligent about it, they do it, they have a program that does it, they have a third-party program that does whatever, and they say it just never finds any errors.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And I don't know if that means those programs aren't working right or if it means the modern storage stack with SSDs is so good that you're very unlikely to find those type of things. And if you just keep the data moving from one fresh SSD to another, it won't be a problem. But, yeah, that's, you know, it's something I have considered. But one of the things that bothers me is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
The map is not the territory. You can put the checksum files in every directory, but then you're putting turds all over the disk, and there's all sorts of issues with that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
You can keep a central database, but then your central database diverges instantaneously from the disk that it is databasing, and you're constantly chasing it around to try to keep the database up to date with the state of the disk. It's a type of thing that... This is where my principles and tastes say, this should be implemented in the... It has to be implemented in the file system.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Many file systems do implement it. APFS does not. And so I just sit around here with my arms folded and say, well, you should eventually do this in the file system. Because it's wrong. It's wrong to do it. You can, but it's just wrong. Put it in the file system. ZFS showed you how. This is a thing that exists. Just do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, but you don't know until you try to scan the file. It's the same thing. You can't get around the fact that to tell whether the bits are right, you have to read them. Sure, but... There's no getting around that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Now, my response to this, I had a couple of responses. First of all, obviously, Dave's perspective is, He is doing support and writing an app that does disk cloning. So yeah, it's going to be probably more an issue for him than it is for me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, but the thing that scans has to read all the bits to find out if they're still right. That's a tremendously heavyweight opportunity. The thing that ZFS did was you had optionally... Optionally, you could store data redundantly. Right. And so when the thing was scanning in the background, just crawling your entire disk from painting the Golden Gate Bridge from start to finish.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
And as soon as it got done, it just starts over again with a low priority thread is it would fix the things that it found. because you have redundant copies of the data, and it would repair them, and it would alert you if there were problems. I just feel like it's a file system thing. Maybe I'll add it to my list. If this goes disastrously bad, maybe I won't.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But if not, again, there's already apps that do this. But I don't like either of the approaches. I don't like the turds in the directory approach, and I don't like the central database approach, because both of them are just like, bleh.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Yeah, right. TechToolPro, Norton Disk Doctor, yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
From a sandbox app, none of that stuff is possible, let me tell you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Just because I'm interested in the file system doesn't mean I'm good at it. I've already explained what a terrible Mac developer I am. You don't want me hearing too much stuff. Leave it to the experts.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
But second of all, ever since Apple introduced this feature, the Finder does it every time you copy a file onto the same volume anywhere, which is why people have clones all over the place. People have no idea how many clones they have.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
They're just, you know, blindly and instantaneously copying giant files around and putting them into folders and organizing things and not realizing they already had a copy of that somewhere over here or over there. So I'm not the only thing creating clones. People are doing it themselves every time they duplicate a file in the Finder or copy it somewhere, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Again, on the same volume only, right? Still, I'm obviously making the problem worse, which is kind of a bummer. But like this feature exists for a reason, not just to make copies instantaneous, but to save space. Like I said, I leverage it myself because one of the big things in my home directory is the giant folders full of all my audio recordings.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
It doesn't know that it's its own shirt versus another shirt, but who knows? People have ideas about laundry, but... Yeah, it was not a conspiracy to get you to buy more shirts. The printing's going to come off those shirts eventually, no matter what, if you keep washing them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Every time I record a podcast, it's a couple hundred megabytes and I copy it to a bunch of different places to organize it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
and i don't worry about those copies because they're all clones they don't take up any more space because i'm copying them in the finder right and that's one of the reasons when i duplicate my drive with super duper sometimes i run out of space now what he was saying is when you do the initial copy with super duper it faithfully replicates the clones no problem when you do subsequent incremental copies it does not faithfully reproduce the clones because it would take too long or whatever i told him if you added the option for smart update to reproduce the clones i would take that option
Accidental Tech Podcast
618: Type System Says No
Because I want that to be leveraged. It's leveraged on the initial copy, but not on follow-up copies. But anyway, I'm still making it up. We'll see how it turns out. It may be disastrous for me. It may be disastrous for Dave. It may be disastrous for users. But right now, I'm still a go.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
it really is a miracle that we did not kill each other during the recording of the last member special and that we are here recording a new episode of our normal podcast i think this is the closest we've ever come to killing each other can you think of a different time i don't know why you thought it was so uh so contentious i thought it was very calm and uh reasonable right up until the very end but still you gotta count the whole you gotta count the whole rest of the episode which was very long where everything went fine
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And now I have real HDR photos shot with my big camera in Apple Photos showing the HDR perfectly.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I'm using just like the fancier version of JPEG compression in Excel. So I set them both to quality 80. And so it is lossy, but it's just, you know, it's similar to JPEG. However, I will say quality 80 on a JPEG, like the regular JPEG export versus the JXL export. The JXL one is less than half the size. It went from 23 megs to 11 megs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It has the dot JXL file name in the in the info panel. But then in the little like overlay in the middle of it, it says it has a little JPEG badge and does not have a raw badge anywhere on it. So it's treating it like a fancy JPEG.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Yeah, I'll send you one. It's massive. It'll slow down your computer because you have an Intel.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
We are brought to you this episode by Uncommon Goods. Spark something uncommon this holiday season with incredible hand-paid gifts from Uncommon Goods. They make your holiday shopping stress-free by scouring the globe for original, handmade, and absolutely remarkable things for everyone on your list. These gifts can spark joy, wonder, and delight, and you'll feel like it's exactly what you wanted.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So whether you're shopping for your Secret Santa or your entire family, Uncommon Goods knows exactly what they want. I had a lot of fun browsing this site and picking out something for myself, to be honest. I got this wide-mouth monster thing that can hold... It's made for a phone speaker amplifier, but you can also put SD cards and stuff in there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's on my shelf, and it makes me smile every time I see it. I love that... It isn't just everything in the world that's all cheap garbage. It's a hand-selected, high-quality selection and curated selection of... Good gifts, like good fun stuff. And that's not easy to find these days. So I am very happy with Uncommon Goods.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
When you shop there, you're also supporting artists and small independent businesses. Many of these are handcrafted products made in small batches. So also make sure you get these early before they sell out this holiday season. So Uncommon Goods, generally, they look for products that are high quality, unique, and often handmade or made in the U.S.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So these are the most meaningful, out-of-the-ordinary gifts from anywhere. Some of them you can even personalize. So check it out today. You can also, with every purchase you make at Uncommon Goods, they also give $1 back to a nonprofit partner of your choice. They've donated more than $3 million to date. So it's a great browse to go through Uncommon Goods.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Shop for people on your list this holiday season. To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com slash ATP. That's uncommongoods.com slash ATP for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer. Uncommon Goods. we're all out of the ordinary love that thank you to them for sponsoring our show
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Okay, honest question. How many 12-inch MacBooks could there still be in use? Yeah, I don't know. Because that keyboard was so short-lived, and the repairs were so expensive, and they're all out of warranty now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Uh, yes, the ravioli-shaped things. The entire world has sent this to me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
anyway it's fine so you think apple is uh getting 100 of that money i don't know i don't know i doubt it but i don't know we have to wait for the court case to find out yeah right exactly no i mean and this this makes total sense like you know for apple is trying to get tv plus out there into the world get more people watching it apparently you know it's not super well watched which is a shame because there's a lot of good stuff there
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So they were trying to get it out everywhere. And when you're in that kind of business of like a content service, it is in your best interest usually to make that service available everywhere. That's why they have Apple Music for Android, right? Isn't that a thing that exists now? I believe so. That's why Apple TV Plus clients are built into smart TVs now. Right. So they want TV Plus everywhere.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And the reality is, even if they make less money from the Amazon deal than they would selling it directly through some other means, it is worth it for them to have that everywhere. The same reason why it's worth us having our apps on the iPhone. So if Apple has to give Amazon 30% or whatever, yeah, that's reasonable. And for them, it's probably worth it. And that's why they do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
We are sponsored this week by Squarespace, the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website to engage with your audience and sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place and all on your terms.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
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Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And of course, all the different credit cards and everything else that you might always expect otherwise. Squarespace makes it super easy to sell your business's stuff. And if you need help designing the site, they now have something called Design Intelligence, combining two decades of industry-leading design expertise with cutting-edge AI technology to unlock your strongest creative potential.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Design Intelligence empowers anyone to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to their unique needs and craft a bespoke digital identity to use across one's entire online presence. This is just so easy to make a great website for your business and to sell whatever you need to sell. I've personally used Squarespace. My wife uses Squarespace. I've recommended it to other people.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It is super easy for non-nerds to use. There's no programming. There's no dealing with any of that stuff. No upgrades, no patches, no server maintenance, nothing. You just work on the site. It's all visual. It's all easy. And then that frees you or them up to do your business, to do whatever you need to do instead of worrying about your website.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So check out today squarespace.com to start a free trial. When you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So once again, squarespace.com, start that free trial, see how well it works for you. Squarespace.com slash ATP at purchase to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
The iPad Mini. This was the biggest shock of this, like, for me, because obviously, you know, we're nerds about this kind of stuff. Like, I was convinced, I said on this show, of course that first three-nanometer process was dead. Of course they were abandoning those chips.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I said on the show like two or three weeks ago that we would see the A18 non-Pro chip being used all across the Apple lineup in kind of lower-end, less expensive products that nevertheless needed Apple intelligence compatibility. Never did I think that the iPhone 15 Pro processor...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
This is like, you know, kind of like, you know, you walk by a can of paint and you kind of smelled it and kept walking. Like, it's that kind of color. Like, there's not a lot of the color in the color.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Nothing about the iPad mini is ever normal. Not even the ship day.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I think that what killed the iPad Mini for me was text input. Once the iPad started having really good first-party keyboards that stuck right on them and were available for them, that to me radically improved the utility of iPads in general for me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And then when I briefly tried an iPad Mini last year as an e-reader and quickly found I was very frustrated by the lack of good keyboard options for it. Um, so for me, you know, for my purposes that the keyboard is what did it, but a lot of people do use them. I think the, the challenge the iPad mini has always had is in trying to figure out whether it should be a higher end device or not.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Um, you know, certain, certain pros and enthusiasts use it and just wish for more pro features, which I think is interesting that it got the Apple pencil pro support that that is interesting here. But with that exception, it seems like nothing else here is particularly pro in terms of iPad nomenclature. So it still is kind of, you know, basically a smaller, slightly worse iPad Air in many ways.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Yeah. And that's fine. I mean, but even then, they didn't even give it the CPU. Again, it's weird. It's always been a weird balance. Usually it is more low-end than people like. It is usually more expensive than people want it to be. And as a result, I think it has a hard time figuring out what exactly it's for.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I still am getting a decent amount of utility out of the notification summaries. I'm actually really enjoying it. Are you on the beta?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And ultimately, I think this shows the fact that Apple updated the iPad mini. That tells you, wow, they're really trying to bring everything up to Apple intelligence capable specs. Except for the HomePods. Well, yeah, that's never going to happen. You know the things you talk to all the time? Those ones? Yeah, they remain a product in the lineup.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
But yeah, I think anything that can reasonably have Apple intelligence compatibility is going to get upgrades. So I'm expecting, I mean, I don't think we've really seen how it gets into TV OS yet, but I bet Apple TV with an A17 Pro or A18 something is probably not that far off.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Yeah, I don't think it's that big of a problem. But we're going to see probably the low-end iPads getting an update sometime soon, I would expect. The rumors are that's getting pushed off. I don't know why, but that was the last rumor. I mean, to me, the biggest question is how the heck they're going to do it with the watch and the HomePod.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Not really. So everyone keeps recommending the same handful of them. And I assure you, I have seen them all. I have including, yes, yours, the one you were just saying, yes, that one, the one you're yelling at your podcast app. Yup. That one. I even saw the aura ring, which I've never even thought about a smart ring before, but actually the aura rings app seems to do exactly what I want.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I guess the HomePod is, especially if they make another big one, the HomePod is a large, expensive enough product that you could probably find a way to get one of these chips in there cost-wise. The watch, that kind of hardware just doesn't fit in the watch yet.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I believe so. I don't know if we ever got that confirmed, but that was the rumor that it used a watch CPU.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
There you go. But yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of updates to products that usually kind of fly under the radar. We're going to see a lot of updates to them to just bring them up to minimum spec to run Apple Intelligence. And that's overall, I think it's a very good thing. I think we're going to see a nice refresh throughout the whole lineup.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
No, I mean, look, I've decided rather than continue to insult Division Pro as a platform, I'm going to enjoy it to the degree that I have time and to the degree that it's worth prioritizing in my life. And right now, I'm doing a lot right now in my life, and so it's just not earning its time. I'm not sitting around alone thinking, what should I do tonight?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
ever like that that never happens like i'm doing work i'm doing family stuff i'm like there's always something i'm doing so this is this is not a product in my lineup right now but it from from what i hear it sounds interesting for you know what's going on with this uh with this with this movie
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's a submarine movie. Of course something bad happens. Well, right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I just don't really want to buy an aura ring. Um, so nothing against them. I just don't want to hold the device just for that. Um, I think what's, what's more likely to happen is I'm going to stop sleep tracking cause I'm just going to eventually find that I'm not getting enough actionable data out of it. Um, Or at least actionable info and through the very limited interface of the health app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So I think I'm, you know, I don't love this pursuit enough to make this app myself. And none of the apps that I've seen out there do what I want in the way I want. Yes, even that one. Yep, you're yelling right now. Yep, that one. The one you're writing to me in the email?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It also, like the way it uses the emoji and not really like customing, it's a whole, I looked at that one. I tried it and yeah, it wasn't doing what I want.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
No, and this, honestly, this sounds great, and I do want to watch it sometime soon because the Vision Pro desperately is starving for good content. This is good. This is it. So, you know, the more of this, the better. We're going from nearly zero, so every single additional bit of good content helps. So, yeah, please, more of this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
See, there I have better news. All right. So I now have, right here on my desk, I have all of them. The Nomad Goods leather back, Atom Studios, A-T-O-M Studios leather back, the Sooty one that I described last time in both leather, and then I also have the Sooty silicone one. The Atom one I only used for like half a day because it's incredibly thick.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So actually I took out some calipers and I measured all of these. For reference, like the bull strap regular leather case that wraps around the whole phone. is 2.6 millimeters the atom cactus leather back is 3.7 millimeters so it's like almost it's like you know one and a half times as thick as like a common leather case of the phone so does that come close to leveling out the camera mesa or no
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
All right. So Maxell says, in general, should I be editing every photo I take? No, definitely not. You will never take photos again if that's the restriction you're putting on yourself. So number one, I think you have to ask yourself, what are you trying to get out of it? Are you trying to be a professional photographer?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Are you trying to become a person with a large following on something like Instagram? If the answer to both of those is no, then what you're trying to do is just make your photos nicer for yourself and your family and whoever else you're sharing them with, maybe. But that's...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
That dramatically lowers the bar and removes a lot of the like stress angle from a lot of it because if you're just editing photos for mostly for yourself, not for public sharing, which by the way, that's what I do. Like I hardly ever share photos anymore on public social networks, but I all the time will take photos and I'll either enjoy them as myself.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Just, you know, like part of the one thing I decided to do recently is I've talked about how part of the reason I have big cameras is just to shoot pretty landscapes that I see. And what do I do with those landscapes? Not much. I usually just make them my desktop wallpaper. Like that's it. Like it's my desktop wallpaper.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And I recently decided, you know, I like having photo printers and we have all these blank walls in our new house. Why don't I fix this problem? Why don't I get a couple of frames and put my own landscape pictures in them and hang them in my office? Nice and easy. And so now I have another goal. I'm going to pick out a few pictures to hang in my office. Now, this takes editing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
But the editing that I will do to those pictures is literally just like, what will make this look good as a printed picture to my own eyes? And what will make this make me happy to look at? That's very different from how should I make this photo perfectly edited so that people will like me on TikTok or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
If you're going for public honors and praise that way, that's a very different thing from just make this the way you like it. So I'm going to focus the rest of this on making it the way you like it, because frankly... I don't have the skills to do the public praise side of it. That's not at all anything I know anything about. So first of all, should you be editing every photo? No.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
You shouldn't even be keeping every photo you take. So I once heard that the secret to good photography is large amounts of bad photography. And the idea is take a bunch of shots because some of them are going to work, some of them aren't. If you're going to start searching how to improve your photos, editing is kind of down the list from other things like composition and lighting.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It comes close, but it still doesn't. It still has these little ridges that push up that make little rings around the lenses. But it makes the phone feel very thick in the hand. It almost feels like you're holding two phones stacked. I know it's not quite mathematically that, but it feels very big. So I couldn't last very long with the Atom, so I ruled that one out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Those matter a lot more. But we're talking about editing in this question. I get that. This is a song about Alice. So should you shoot JPEG plus RAW? Hmm, depends. Should you be using, you know, Lightroom or Apple Photos? I mean, it depends.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
When you're dealing with the very early days of editing, most of the edits you're going to want to do are fairly subtle changes to what the camera or the iPhone will be doing automatically. You don't want to get into like really ridiculous stuff when you're getting at the gate.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
You want to do subtle changes and you want to just play with some sliders and see kind of what is going to be pleasing to you. Where I would suggest you start is exposure and white balance. Now, exposure includes multiple things. That isn't just like the main minus one, plus one kind of control. It's also things like highlights, shadows, and contrast. I kind of lumped that all in with exposure.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I know it's probably wrong, but I don't care. What you want to do, you know, start out, the very first edit you should do is get the white balance right. Now, iPhone photos usually will do this for you pretty well. You normally won't have to adjust much. If you are shooting with an external camera and you're shooting indoors, you will almost certainly have orange pictures.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
The cameras have gotten better over time. Or blue. Yeah, or blue, depending on if you have the wrong setting. But if you shoot with auto white balance indoors on a camera, your pictures will probably end up orange and you should probably adjust the white balance somewhat. And that's what you're looking for is subtlety, subtle tweaks.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
The advantage of shooting raw is that a lot of these tweaks become lossless. And so you can then later on, when you realize that you're terrible at editing now and everything you did now is garish, you can go back and re-edit your favorites and kind of tone it down a little and use your new skills.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
good point yeah fair enough um so anyway yeah raw basically gives you a lot of headway but i i think so max i'll ask should i avoid raw completely since i'm such a noob i think maybe yes i think maybe avoid raw at first simply because raw files are you know by definition less processed so they start out in a much worse state usually and need a lot more in editing to to look good but
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Also, they are huge, and they are cumbersome, and they are more slow to edit. They take up more resources. And so what that might do is discourage you from editing or shooting. And that's the last thing you want. So what I do... I mean, this is... Let's see. Maxell, you said you have the Canon Rebel SL3 and the iPhone 16 Pro. I don't know anything about these.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So really, for me, the only two that I like are the Sudi leather and the Nomad Goods leather. The Sudi one looks way nicer. The Nomad one works better. Tell me more. So if you're going for looks, the Sudi one wins hands down. The texture of the leather is nice. The way that it has like a little black cover around the camera mesa, that looks nicer. The edges form like a nice slope up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Does that have a dual card slot by any chance? Can you do my trick? But anyway... My trick is JPEG on one card, RAW on the other, and mostly never even use the RAWs and just import the JPEGs. You can do the same thing on one card, just a little bit more work. But anyway, I strongly suggest just deal with the JPEGs at first.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And it'll make everything faster and lighter weight and smaller and lower impact. And that's what you want as you're getting into this because you're going to make a lot of bad choices. And the last thing you want in the learning process is to slow down your iteration and the cycle, and you don't want to discourage yourself.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So basically, you get good at it by learning what each of the controls do in the editor. So... The best thing I can say is just kind of start sliding some around and look at what they do with the picture and you can see. So like when you move the highlights up and down, you can see, oh, it blows out the sky versus trying to unblow it out. You move the shadows up and down.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Oh, all the dark areas get lighter and you can see more detail, but it raises the noise floor. You can play with the exposure. You can play with the contrast, see what looks ridiculous, see what looks more calm.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
kind of just play with it and and i i would say like just try to yeah try to learn what each of those sliders does by experimenting with it and then however you think you might want to edit a picture dial it back a little bit afterwards like yeah go nuts with the contrast make it look really cool and then dial it back to like half of what you did and that that's probably better so anyway all right john where am i wrong
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
That looks nicer. The Nomad one, even though this is Horween leather, which is a nice leather maker here in the U.S., Even though it's Horween leather, it just looks very flat. The Nomad one looks cheap, even though it is actually a nicer grade of leather, I think. But it kind of looks very cheap and flat. It doesn't do anything special with the camera.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It has the hard plastic ridge around the camera. The Sudi one... The edges slope down into like a plastic gasket around the edge, which does look very clean, and it feels nice in the hand, except that it really doesn't provide any grip around the sides. The Nomad one goes all the way to the side and then ends abruptly in like a flat side, almost extending the shape of the iPhone's flat sides.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And because it goes all the way to the edge, you feel the sides of that leather with your hand as you grip the phone. And if you lean the phone, if you stand up the phone and lean it back, if you're, for instance, propping the phone up on a windowsill, the bottom of the leather will touch the surface.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Whereas that's not true of the Sudi because the edges are like, you know, kind of ramped up gradually with a little bezel. So the Nomad one, despite not looking very fancy, actually works the best. It's also substantially thinner. It doesn't matter that much, but the Nomad leather back is only 2.2 millimeters thick.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Thanks a lot to our sponsors, Squarespace and Uncommon Goods. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime. This is a bonus topic that we do every week. This week on ATP Overtime, we're going to be talking about what is the right product mix for the iPhone?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Like what models should we have in the iPhone line? So we will be talking about that in overtime. Join now to listen at atp.fm slash join. Thank you, everybody. And we'll talk to you Next week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I've discovered a feature on the BMW iX that I didn't even know it offered and is quite interesting. So most high-end cars these days have some kind of feature
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
what what tesla called auto steer back in the day some kind of like lane keeping plus radar cruise control so that if you're driving on the highway and you just want to stay in the lane that you're in and stay you know an appropriate distance from the vehicle in front of you the car will drive itself for you in that context as long as it can you know see the lane markers and stuff like that
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So I knew going into this car that BMW had some kind of system that was very similar to this and that it worked pretty well. I tried it briefly during the test drive and it was fine. So I now have more time with it. And I, I learned, you know, as I was driving, I kept seeing as I would engage the system that works very similarly to Tesla auto steer, I would engage it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And, you know, you like keep your hands on the wheel and everything. And then it kept saying in little text below the indicator that, Assist plus ready. And I thought, well, that's interesting. What's ready that I'm not already doing? Eventually, I figured it out. Assist plus is like Tesla auto steer. However, you take your hands off the wheel and just leave them off. And so it's hands-free.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And the Sudi vegan leather one is 2.6, which is the same as that as that bull strap leather case. So the Sudi one is about the same thickness as a regular iPhone case, a common iPhone case. The Nomad one is goes from 2.6 to 2.2. So it's noticeably thinner.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And I think it seems to be using cameras or something to look at me to make sure I am paying attention to the road. But it is otherwise hands-free. And so you can just put your hands in your lap. I mean, insert joke here, but you can just put your hands down.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
see you may think like i thought when i first learned that i could do this i thought well how different could that be from what you know the tesla auto steer version of it is just like well you have to have your hands on the wheel because it's like sensing whether you're applying any kind of resistance or touching the wheel or anything but if you if you take your hands off for like you know more than you know a few seconds it'll start yelling at you saying put your hands on the wheel i'm like well how different can that really be because
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
When you're doing that, you're just kind of loosely resting your hands on the wheel, but letting it steer itself so you're not really applying any pressure. You're just kind of loosely resting your hands there. Let me tell you, it's very different when you don't have your hands on the wheel at all. I don't think I like it, and I don't think it should be legal.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So the Nomad one overall, even though I don't think it looks nearly as cool as the Sudi, it's the one I've been spending the most time with because it's the one that works the best.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Right, and you're going 70 miles an hour down the highway when this is happening. Yeah, how many feet have you covered during that fraction of a second? Right, exactly. So, like, let me tell you, it is so unnerving. Because, first of all, okay, so you take your hands off the wheel and it activates and it lights up and everything. And you're like, okay, well, what do I do with my hands?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
what like there's not like you have to keep looking at the road if you look away too much it'll go boom driver discretion detected then it'll start yelling at you and i assume it will disengage after a while if you keep doing it but i haven't gotten to that point but like and and honestly the funniest thing about it is that the first time during any drive that you take your hands off the wheel and therefore engage assist plus
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
it shows this giant disclaimer, like this two-paragraph thing on the screen. Do you die? It's not our fault. That you have to dismiss. But it's like, well, I have to look away from the road for a few seconds to dismiss this tremendous wall of text that you show me every time. It's like the tutorial level that teaches you that it's watching where you look.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
right but yeah it was so like it's really unnerving because like the tesla auto steer and and the rivian to some degree tesla was a little worse but like what what those taught me is these kind of systems mostly work but occasionally make mistakes
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Where they might steer me a little too close to a divider or the car in front of you might merge into your lane and it might react a little slowly or a little bit harshly or whatever. And so what I learned is sometimes you give little corrective feedback with the steering wheel while using these. But when your hands are in your lap, you can't really do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And so even though the BMW system so far, whether my hands are on the wheel or not, has not given me any reason to doubt it, it seems very good so far. I've only done local Long Island highways so far. I haven't been off the island yet with it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
it seems very good so far so i trust it so far but the level of trust you have to have to just put your hands in your lap is so much higher than having your hands still on the wheel because like suppose it tries to jerk the wheel really hard and you know left or right if your hands are on the wheel you'll catch it really quickly and possibly even physically prevent it from doing that but
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Yeah, and keep in mind also, like, the Sudi is a fake leather. The Nomad's a real leather. So the Nomad 1 will probably age better in the sense, like, it'll probably develop a nice patina with, like, you know, certain leather wear patterns. It'll get tackier. Yeah, it immediately got tackier, like, within a day of just, you know, having all my hand oils all over it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
If your hands are in your lap, it's going to make that full movement before your hands even get there again. So I kind of want... And what it's gaining me is... I'm not sure what.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So it is getting nice and tacky, but even, you know, the way that wear will happen on this...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
By the way, you know who is even more weirded out by this feature? The passengers of the car when you're using it. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
natural or you know real you know cow leather tends to wear nicer um you know in terms of like little scratches that get kind of like re-oiled in you know certain like you know wrinkly patterns that develop with leather as we all know um that so the nomad one while it looks bad now i think it will age very gracefully um whereas the sooty one looks great from day one i don't know how it will age but it doesn't matter because the nomad one which works so much better
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And what about HDR photos? Oh, this is some important follow-up. So we discussed a few months ago, I was trying to figure out how the heck do we get HDR photos in Apple's Photos app taken by like big cameras? Like how do you get your big camera to be an HDR photo in the Apple Photos app?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And we went through a couple apps that would like kind of set the right metadata fields and it was kind of hacky and tricky. It kind of worked, didn't work great, but it kind of worked. Well, I tried again this past weekend. I loaded a photo I had just taken. I loaded it into Lightroom. And this is, I guess, Lightroom Classic.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
This is like the old-style Lightroom before the whole sync service thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I was using pictures from the Fuji GFX100S, which does not have any kind of built-in HDR functionality. It was just a RAW file. I shot RAW. Just a RAW file. And so the way I expose pictures, almost always now, like if I'm going to be shooting RAW and I intend to edit them, I do what I believe photographers call expose to the right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So the idea here is you usually will underexpose the photo in the auto exposure control on the camera by at least one EV. If there's going to be like a sun or a moon or a bright light source in the shot or near the shot, it will darken everything else so that the light source doesn't blow out the sensor and become all white.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So if there's like some sunlight somewhere, you don't want that to be all white. Modern sensors on big cameras are very sensitive compared to old ones. And so what you can do if you're shooting raw is in post-processing, you can bring up the level of detail from the dark areas. It's called shadow detail.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And you can usually bring that up a lot in editing without amping up the highlights too much and blowing out and making everything just white on the highlight side. So what you do is you underexpose when shooting raw so that the highlights don't blow out the sensor in the brightest parts because you can't recover from blown out white in editing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
You can't say, all right, bring down that white and put back the nice fine cloud texture that was up there. You can get a little bit of that back, but not much. So whereas you can bring up shadow detail in editing pretty far these days with good modern sensors.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
That's interesting. I actually have never experimented with that. So I probably am just shooting sRGB because I think that's usually default. Anyway, I had the raw file in Lightroom. Modern Lightroom Classic has – over in the exposure area, it has an HDR thing you can toggle.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And what that does basically is expand the exposure range in the interface to give you this big section above where it was before. And so I was able to edit the picture in HDR in Lightroom. It looked great. I'm so happy with that. And then I thought, well, okay, how can I get this picture into Apple Photos and keep the HDR? Well, first I tried the regular old JPEG 80% quality.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Keep as much as you can. Somewhere in there, I think there's even an option to say keep HDR in JPEG. And I tried that, and it didn't import with HDR into Photos app. But then I tried JPEG XL, our new friend. And when I export Lightroom HDR in JPEG XL and import that into Apple Photos on the newest macOS Sequoia, it works. It keeps the HDR.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
all right i'm recording from what the hell is this sonoma sequoia sequoia there we go sequoia i've been doing that for a little while now yeah is it is it okay like i just installed it today like yeah i upgraded on day one so i've done all the episodes since then i've heard absolutely nothing about it from anybody so i guess it's fine no news is good news although you're gonna hear you're gonna hear more about it in uh in the show today oh did i make a mistake no it's fine
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Oh, yeah, of course, yeah. There's all sorts. I've tried pineapple leather before. Like, there's a whole bunch.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Yeah, and to be fair, like a lot of these, you know, the non-cow-based, you know, other leathers that are plant-based, There is oftentimes, I think, a non-trivial amount of carbon footprint there. Yeah, plastic isn't great for the environment either. Yeah, they're plastic-based or they're otherwise petroleum-based in some form.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
So I think there's a lot of – I think it's a tricky problem for them to solve. And then they have to scale it. So it's certainly not a trivial thing for them to do, but I think they can do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Honestly, the way it looks with the Suti one that I have, it looks like a nice camera. You have aluminum and black leather. It just looks really nice. And again, it feels great. Although that leather looked a little bit rumply.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Honestly, I haven't even used it yet, so I wouldn't have said anything about it. John doesn't use iPhones, so he wouldn't have said anything about it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Honestly, it might have actually been that long. So I requested a couple of recommendations last episode. One was for an app for me to tag my sleep each night that I'm tracking with the Apple Watch, to tag it with arbitrary tags, things like... you know, beach or alcohol, like, you know, like whatever, like things that might affect my sleep.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
And then I want, I want to be able to see over time, like, you know, if I have a heavy meal, like if that's one of the hacks, heavy meal, like is that, does that make me sleep worse? And, you know, it's like 15% worse if, you know, every time I have, like that kind of stuff. That's what I wanted.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
And I complained last week that the apps that I had tried to find that claimed to do this were all, you know, these massive, complicated apps
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
comically privacy invading and and surprisingly expensive subscription based apps that all tried to be everything to everyone to solve every possible sleep or fitness or health need you might possibly have i got a lot of recommendations from a lot of people i tried them all i have not found what i'm looking for
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
All I have found is mostly more very expensive, very privacy-invading apps that try to do everything to everyone. It is such a mess of these massive sleep suites. We're not going to just solve your sleep. We're going to solve your workout recovery and your health and your stress. And they have all these massive arrays of features
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Almost every single one of them requires you to make an account on their service to hold your health info. And almost all of them force you to subscribe to their subscription, as I described last time, with no way to close the box and skip it or anything. So you can't... And they're like $40 a year for almost all of them. So I'm like, first of all, the App Store is... It's always changing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
The App Store is certainly always changing. This is not a category that shows off the best of the App Store by any means. So anyway, I am still looking. I'm getting a little bit tired of looking. I might take a break. I have yet to find this app, and I'm starting to think that maybe I just should not be doing this. Need to write it? Just use notes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I mean, but that's good. If you want to use Overcast on your Intel Mac, that's how you do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
That's – I mean – and you certainly touched upon like I think a major problem with almost any kind of sleep tracking and quantification of that kind of stuff. It is not particularly actionable a lot of times because usually everyone knows, yeah, you should probably get more sleep. You should probably drink less coffee. You should probably not have alcohol. Like everyone knows these things.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I had coffee before I went to bed and I had bad sleep. Right. Yeah. Like last night I was congested. I took Sudafed. That was a terrible idea. My sleep sucked because my heart rate was way up for the whole night. I can see that already. And I know, hmm, I probably shouldn't take Sudafed even though my nose is stuffy and maybe it would have been worse, but who knows?
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Like, you know, it like, I kind of know what I should and shouldn't do already, but I was just, I was hoping to find other insights, but you are right. Like the actionability of those is, is limited and challenging, but Ultimately, the app I want is a very, very simple thing that does only this in exactly the way I want it. So someday maybe I'll make that app. I think that's the answer.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Right. That's and that's that's the challenge is like, how actionable would it be? So, for instance, if I if I learn like, oh, when I like I sleep better at the beach than not at the beach. Well, I'm also not – that's also not the school year, first of all. So maybe I just sleep better when it's not the school year because I'm not waking up super early.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
There's different stresses or different logistics. And it's like I can't really just live at the beach all the time during middle school and high school. So I'm not able to do anything about that. And that's kind of my – I think long term, I think what I would realize if I actually endured one of these other apps that does a thousand other things plus maybe some version of this feature –
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I think I would probably find that. I would probably find that I would tire of the manual entry, and I would tire of, you know, and by the time I actually had a lot of data, I think I would find limited insights, which is probably why I shouldn't make this. I have so many app ideas that I eventually talk myself out of. This is why I haven't made a podcast editor.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I shouldn't make a podcast editor for lots of reasons, and I haven't. I should probably not make a jam band music listening app either, and so far I haven't.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Yeah, it was a DJ app that wouldn't play... Nickelback. Nickelback, yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Yeah. I think the answer is I probably shouldn't make this app because I probably don't really want it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
All right. So I also I asked for anti-malware Windows software recommendations and got a few good ones. Pretty much everybody said, yeah, just use Malwarebytes. And many people suggested I definitely should not use CrowdStrike. Apparently it is really not made for that. At least one person said you should do it because it would be fun for the podcast. No, that's true.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
In a way that it would be terrible. But anyway, so I installed Malwarebytes. I got the paid versions that would do like automatic scans. It found like seven or eight things. And I have not heard about it since, which is probably a good sign. Finally, in the Marco corner here. Sorry, it's been a long time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I mentioned a couple episodes ago when John was talking about the AirPods noise pass-through modes and noise cancellation modes. I had said that I had not found the adaptive transparency mode very useful. And we heard from a bunch of people who were in to say, it's amazing. I use it myself. It's gotten better since it launched. Try it again. So since then, I have been trying it again.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
And I still don't love it. However, it is better than it was. Um, I'm not going to use it most of the time. I'm still going to stick with transparency and noise cancellation that I, that I toggle manually when I feel like it. Uh, but the issue I found with it, so like I, I, one of the days I, I was walking around Manhattan a lot with it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
And so, you know, decent amount of, of, you know, taking this big long walk in Manhattan. So a lot of street noise, a lot of road noise, and I'm trying to listen to a podcast. So I tried it then. And what I found was, uh, I was actually... It was blocking out too much information to the point where I couldn't hear vehicles that were turning into my crosswalk area. And that's not good.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I found it to be unsafe. Now, there are tweaks. You can actually adjust some of the noise levels and things like that. It became somewhat adjustable since its introduction as well. So it is getting better all the time, but... I found it was not good enough and it blocked out too much of the surrounding noise for my own purposes. But that being said, like your purposes might be different.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
It's very situationally dependent, you know, whether this is right for you or not. So I'd say if you have AirPods Pro and you're curious about this kind of stuff, try adaptive mode because it is different. Like it is better than it used to be and it is different from the other two modes. Give it a shot.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
It was enlightening even though I'm choosing at the end of the day not to use it most of the time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Honestly, I don't see it happening. I think phones use too much power and the inefficiency and inconvenience in a lot of cases of wireless charging. The carbon neutrality, yeah. Yeah, obviously carbon neutrality over the last term of the product, it would go up like 30% or something if it was wireless only.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Well, I think also, like, I mean, how many, like, regulars out there do you see using MagSafe or wireless charging instead of cables? I see almost no one using it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Also, think about the practicality of that. A lot of people carry a phone charger with them for whatever reason. A lot of people need to do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
are they gonna carry around like a usb plug and like a giant magsafe puck in their bag yeah magsafe pucks are not small right and like or what what about like if you have to charge up from some like battery out of a vending machine like people do that that's a thing like how is that going to work there's there are so many contexts where i think regular people just use wires to charge their phone the vast majority of the time based on just my anecdotal observation frayed broken wires
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Sure, whatever, and oftentimes cheap third-party ones. Like bought in a drugstore. Of course, but that's what people do. If I need a fast charge, if my phone's low and I'm going to be in my house for a while, let me charge it up in 15 minutes. I'll use USB-C. I'll use it almost every time. I think a lot of people use the wire.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I think the whole idea of we're going to make a phone that has no port on it whatsoever – I can't say they would never do that, but I can't see that ever being the mainstream phone option. Maybe the rumor about the iPhone 17 Slim that might come out next year, maybe something like that, if that wasn't intended to be the mainstream model. There's not enough room for USB-C.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Yeah, like if that wasn't intended to be the mainstream model iPhone, maybe that could be a way they could get that. But I think most people don't want that. Most people want a cable.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I mean, so, okay, in all fairness, the Google case had a lot of details that would not apply to Apple in the same way. What was ruled illegal or bad behavior that requires action was not just them having an app store and requiring their in-app purchase system. It isn't a directly applicable ruling to what Apple is doing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
It's in the ballpark, but there's a lot of differences in the Google case, like the actual things they were doing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Yeah, exactly. But anyway, so this – you can't really read into direct conclusions that would affect Apple. However, it does strike in the ballpark. And what this shows, like if this actually is not legally intervened with, like if this actually comes to pass – This is a pretty disastrous result in a lot of ways.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
And so much of it is like, okay, yeah, it is better for consumers if certain things are open and competition is preserved and everything. However, the actual practical implementation of this remedy is going to be a mess for consumers and for developers especially.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
No, I mean, so in Notebook LM's defense, like, you know, number one, I think there is a lot of media out there is just regurgitation of some source post or source material or source press release. So like there is a place for that. But also in Notebook LM's defense, In each of those two examples, I only gave it one article. I think the actual use of the tool is meant for larger data sets.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
So this kind of shows the risk that these big platform companies take by trying and failing to self-regulate is that someone else will step in and regulate you in some other way that you have a lot less control over. And that way might be disastrous. So it is within the company's best long-term strategic interests –
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
to avoid this kind of regulation by not becoming an abusive monopoly by not doing things that are that are anti-competitive and that might violate antitrust law in certain ways or that might tip off regulators that something needs to be done like ideally you as as these big platform companies avoid this kind of thing happening to you in the first place because
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
When you play fast and loose and when you are too greedy and too short-sighted and you invite this kind of scrutiny and regulation and court cases, you run the risk of there being a massively destructive and non-ideal resolution like this remedy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Like, oh, I have these 15 documents or all these different sources that I'm trying to get some info out of or summarize or get some bullet points out of. When you feed it more information, it would not necessarily behave exactly like that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Oh, no. They're turds, too. They're just turds in different ways. Well, true. Because, you know, why does Epic want to run their own app store? Because they want 10% or 15% of everybody's purchases. Of course they want that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Your name, your contact info, social security number, home address even, and kind of more creepily than that, all of that same info about your family members. This is all out there. It's easily findable by web searches by pretty much anybody online. And mostly because it's being compiled by data brokers and sold online. They make a profit off your data. It's a commodity.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
uh i'm not sure i'd want those particular ai hosts doing the regurgitation but you know to each their own you know to be fair like i there is there are lots of things in my life where i would want real humans doing a podcast about whatever i want to hear about but i can't say there's nothing i would ever want this kind of thing to do like i don't this kind of thing like i don't intend to make it a big part of my life but like
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I probably will actually use it for something sometime, either in either this exact product or some future version of it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
But it's really for you, though. You said you have to wait for his load times. Really, you're speeding up your own load times.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Well, I have a case from Spigen here that just arrived today that has a button overlay. Yeah, they're out there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I mean, my answer is pretty boring. Whenever a website asks me if I'd like to add a passkey, I say yes, and I add it. But most websites don't ask me that. So I only have a handful of them so far. I'm not taking proactive actions to move myself over to it. not out of any kind of fear or political statement about them, more just I have more important things to do most of the time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
um it's it appears to be just solid white but you can tell but it has a rim like if you look real closely you can see like there is a rim around its perimeter of some other material so i think it might be doing the same trick apple does with theirs of just like some kind of you know solid material that with like a conductive rim around the outside but it does work It's the Spigen clear case.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
And that's just like that's one of those kind of like technical hygiene tasks that I think most working adults don't have time to actually really ever do. So I intend to maybe someday get there, but I just haven't yet. But whenever websites ask me, I say yes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
I'll put a link. They have a thousand cases. And, you know, you go on Amazon, you try to find this exact one. You won't find it. It's just in a sea of other cases, often by them. So it's hard to find. But anyway, I'll put a link. Somebody else, I think, referred me to it. And as a clear case goes, it's fine. It's better than Apple's in certain ways. The buttons feel better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Tailscale and Delete Me, 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's Overtime is on AI moats and trade secrets. So tune in. If you're a member, you already get it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
If you want to hear this and you aren't a member, atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much, and we'll talk to you next week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
So my kid's gaming PC, it's a laptop. It's a Razer laptop. All three of us in our household have Razer gaming laptops of varying ages and specs. And those are together our gaming PCs. Tiff's is dying and won't even boot anymore. Oh, cool. And it's actually her second one. Mine is perfect and works great because I hardly ever use it. And my kids has been having some problems, a lot of problems.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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You know, first of all, it's a Windows laptop. So... most of the time when it is closed for some reason it is very hot the fans still run it's like it's it's like you know standard kind of like you know messed up windows laptop problems like this thing doesn't sleep well um like me with pseudo ephedrine
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It does, unfortunately, have a closed bottom, unlike Apple's. So that keeps getting in my way. And it's a clear case, so it looks okay. It doesn't look amazing. But we actually have other case recommendations. Or at least experiences.
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so like this thing does not sleep well um it it seems to be doing a lot of work for nothing most of the time the thermals are awful so i thought and and he and he started to complain a lot about really bad performance in in pretty much any action now at first i thought like maybe it's some kind of weird malware that he installed while downloading some random thing off of a discord um
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But then he actually showed me, like, there were some common tasks. Like, I think it was, like, opening up the browser. And it took so long to open. I'm like, okay, something is more wrong with this than that. And, like, any game would fail miserably. So I'm like, all right, maybe it's thermals. It's a laptop. It's been running its fans on high for, like, two years. So...
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Chances are there's probably a lot of dust and crap in there. Maybe it's clogging up one of the heat sinks or some of the fans.
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I think eventually my kid will know enough about computers that he won't need me anymore. That time has not yet come, though. I mean, he's only 12.
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anyway so i decide you know this this laptop is long out of warranty um and i and i tried i even looked like i installed some process monitoring tool and i even tried like i used the built-in task monitor or whatever and like nothing seemed to be using a lot of cpu or gpu power like there was no reason why it had to be running its fans on full blast i'm like all right well whatever let me open it up and see if i can blow out some dust
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Not at all. Proceed. All right. So I flip it over. I get out my trusty iFixit screwdriver kit, find the right screwdriver to take the bottom screws off. And so I do like the four corners of the screws. I think it's like three across the top, three across the bottom. So I take off the – and when I get to the corner on one of the two bottom corners when I open it up, the whole panel kind of pops up.
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Not a good sign. And I'm like, hmm, that's unusual. Why are the contents under pressure?
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I'm like, hmm, that's... Anyway, so I continued to open the rest of it, pulled it off, and I noticed the battery has ballooned somewhat. That's alarming.
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when I saw it, I'm like, okay, well it has puffed up enough to like, you know, to push the case. But I'm like, I've never seen a razor battery. I don't know what their starting state is. This is how they normally, they normally look like pillows. I don't know. It pushed the case open! But only, like, it wasn't, like... Only a little.
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Well, yeah, like, you know, what you normally see is, like, laptops where, like, the keyboard is starting to bend upwards or the trackpad has popped out.
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And the reason I asked that is because I saw the battery. Right, but no, the case was fine. It was just, like, a little bit of pop on the case when I opened it up. So, like, it didn't... That's why I was like, I know this is not... Like, I'm pretty sure this isn't normal, but, like...
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how far gone is this this it was a perfect example of engagement bait unintentional apparently but yeah anyway so everyone reports back to me oh yeah that's bad apparently they're called spicy pillows like no one taught me this slang so right yeah but and of course every single reply is making that joke i'm like wow you guys really really original there
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um i assume some youtuber popularizes this term it's a it's a i don't say it's a meme it is a term of art let's say in the field and yes there are pouch style batteries but there are no ravioli style battery anyway and i heard from a bunch of people who said basically their razor laptop also had this happen including the replacement battery they got also had the same problem like within a short time consistent manufacturing
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yeah exactly so anyway um so i'm like crap like i don't like he there's a there's a possibility of a gaming pc happening in his christmas future um so i'm like i just i gotta make this last till christmas i'm like how like but now that i've seen this it's like i can't just let this go like i can't just leave it there like i have i i i have to take action now that i now that i've uncovered this that's what the world was telling you the world was telling you your house will burn down
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Right. So what I was wondering is like, can I get this to work, you know, until Christmas at least? And miraculously, so first I blew out all the dust out of all the fans and everything. And it seemed to work. But then I was like, I wonder...
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That's what I wondered, because, like... I would assume that a modern Apple laptop will not boot with the battery unplugged. Yeah. Because I would assume it's, like, buffering the power through that in some way. So, like, I thought, like, there's no way this is going to work without a battery. So I decided, you know, let me just try it. I took out the battery.
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It took a long time to get the battery out. And maybe because it had swelled.
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That, too. But, like, I think maybe, like... I was looking up all these different YouTube videos on how to disassemble these things, and of course, every minor revision of a Razer gaming laptop is differently laid out inside enough that no YouTube video matches whatever one you happen to be needing to take apart at any given moment.
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So like I'd never found one that matched the one I was looking at. But it was clear to me that like, okay, I've unscrewed like the five screws that hold this in and it's not coming out. I eventually had to like bend the case slightly to like get the battery to pop out. Oh, that's good. I think it had just swelled beyond its original size.
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Anyway, I eventually pop it out and I'm thinking like, all right, let me see if I can just turn it on without the battery. And sure enough, it works totally fine. It just boots up. It's like, okay, fine. I guess I don't have a battery anymore. I guess I'm a desktop. Okay. Windows is so gloriously dumb. It's just like, okay, cool. I'm a desktop. Boots right up. It doesn't even give me a message.
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Nothing is complaining. It just booted. And everything works great. So now... It's just a desktop. A crappy desktop, as John said, but a desktop nonetheless. The performance issues are gone. It works way better. Part of that is also probably the anti-malware scan that I did that removed eight unwanted programs or whatever. But it seems to be in a much better state now.
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I think the Christmas gaming PC is probably still going to have to happen. But I think we will get there now more safely.
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No, I mean, I told him, hey, this is not going to work on a battery anymore. But, like, he never used a battery anyway because it sucked on batteries.
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It really... I mean, and first of all, like, I can't say enough mediocrity about Razer as a company that makes gaming laptops. Like... It's one of those products that's great as long as you don't use it too much. And there's a lot of products out there like that, especially in tech. So my Razer gaming PC is great because I hardly ever use it. It's now a few years old.
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It's worked great for the few times I've actually played games. That's who a gaming laptop is for. A gaming laptop is not for gamers. It's just not. An actual gamer who's going to use it regularly should have a desktop because these laptops are just... And it's an impossible problem.
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If you're going to have any kind of remotely gaming possible GPU, you're going to have such power demands and such heat production from that thing. It's just not going to have a long life in a laptop form factor. And it's going to be a crap laptop. And knowing this, I didn't even get a really high spec one. I got a mid-range GPU in his.
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I figured, I know he's going to still use it as a laptop, back and forth to the beach. I didn't want to have too short of a life. So when I specced it out to buy it, I specifically chose the second lowest GPU option. And still, even then...
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massive heat massive problems the battery life was never usable like ever uh so i think the the answer is for pc gaming desktops are the way to go so but why are you getting another laptop then i'm not i'm saying a gaming desktop is going to probably happen oh i thought you said you were gonna get another gaming laptop from yeah No.
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Now, if I was getting myself a gaming PC, I would most likely get another laptop if I needed to. But my current one works great, even though it's three years old, because I never use it. And so, yeah, gaming laptops. Great if you never use them.
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And actually, building off of that, the opposite of that is the next section. If you want a totally textured back but no protection of any of the corners or sides, there's this entire category called leather or just magnetic case backs. It's basically a flat plate protection.
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of some material, oftentimes leather, that uses MagSafe to stick itself onto the back of the phone and just covers only the back and not the sides. Yes, and many people are suggesting this because, hey, guess what?
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These caught my eye because back in the iPhone 4 days, I had, for my iPhone 4, I had basically a stick-on piece of leather that had a little tiny circle cut out for the camera on the iPhone 4. It was exactly what this creates. Metal sides, otherwise no case feel, but a very nice textured leather back for grip and I think, honestly, for looks. And that I was so happy with.
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I freaking loved that thing. Just a stick-on piece of leather for the back. That was it. Granted, the phones were a lot smaller and lighter back then, so grip and side protection were not quite as needed as they are today. But it was glorious. So I decided to try one of these. The one that most people recommend is by Nomad Goods. I actually ordered that one as well. I'm going to compare it.
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But the one I've been using for the last week is by this brand, Suti, S-U-T-I. And I also found one by Atom Studios, A-T-O-M Studios. They have a whole bunch that use like vegan leather. So I'm going to try one of those as well. The reason why I got one and I'm now ordering three is that I freaking love this thing.
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I don't know if I'm going to stick with this form factor, but it looks and feels fantastic. It does, however, as John pointed out, offer really no protection against drops at all. If you drop your phone, do not do this.
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If you don't drop your phone and you just want some extra grip and some texture and some looks and maybe some surface grippiness, like when you lay it down on a surface, you don't want to feel like it's sliding off all the time, This could be it. I'm, I think it's really, the Suti one is the one I have so far. I think it's really, really good.
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The only reason I started branching out to the Nomad and the Atom Studios ones is that the Suti one, the leather is only the flat part of the back. As it rounds the corner around the edges, there's like a big plastic gasket that goes around the whole thing. So it's not as grippy around the edges. Whereas the Nomad and the Atom Studio ones, the leather appears to wrap around the edges.
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So I'm kind of curious to see how that feels, feel the different kinds of leather. In particular, the Atom Studios one, I mentioned that's a plant-based fake leather. So that honestly is more attractive to me if it's good. So I'm going to see how these work. But honestly, this is an interesting option. Because then you are using all of the...
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actual buttons on your phone so you don't have to worry about buttons feeling bad or being covered or uncovered or anything like that and again it looks i think it looks fantastic like the i have the white phone so i have like the bright silver band around it with this with a black leather plate on the back i think it looks really good
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As we're recording this, this is the day after Election Day. We just got Trump for a second term. None of us are happy. We're going to save our sadness and wallowing and feelings about that for the after show. So we're going to do a regular show. You can go back and listen to our episode in November 2016 titled The Show Must Go On.
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Yeah. Let me, let me tell you the, like when, when we design the shirts, we don't get advanced copies of the shirts. They they're printed all at once. So we see the shirts for the first time when you see the shirts for the first time. And yeah, when the pixel one showed up, I was like, Oh, this is, this is a special one. This is really good. Yeah.
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Yeah, because the Pixel one in particular, that takes a lot of, I think, precision and skill from the printer because it's a pretty hard thing to screen print a very large number of very small, differently colored blocks and have them all line up correctly and have the right gaps and everything and not bleed and all this stuff.
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So it was a risk for sure to make that, and Cotton Bureau, of course, rose to the challenge and did a really good job with it. So yeah, definitely pick up the Pixel shirt. That's a really good one.
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How long did they know ahead of time that these products were being released? Did one team not talk to the other? Surely these have been in the works for at least months. Why wasn't this in .0?
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We are sponsored this episode by 1Password Extended Access Management. All right, here's a quick question. Do your end users always, and I mean always without exception, do their work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps? Yeah, that's a fantasy. I didn't think so. So next question. How do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices?
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1Password has an answer to this question. Extended Access Management. 1Password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device because it solves the problem that traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. Check it out at 1password.com slash ATP. That's 1password.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to 1Password Extended Access Management for sponsoring our show.
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I mean, in all honesty, though, the Apple TV is not a gaming platform. When they first revamped it as the app-powered platform years ago, they tried to make it everything. They tried to make it, hey, you're going to browse real estate listings on here, you can do your online shopping on your Apple TV, you can play games, and yeah, you can also watch TV shows.
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And similar to the Apple Watch, we very quickly realized, okay, all of these things that this launched with claiming to do we really only want to do like one or two of them. And the answer with Apple TV is, yeah, this is really good as a TV, like watching thing, a video watching platform. It's not a great game platform. And it's, it's not because of hardware reasons.
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where we said something very similar, and we're going to do something, I think, very sadly similar. But, you know, the show must go on. We're going to try to have this be, again, our regular computer tech show, because in challenging times, people need normalcy from wherever they can get it. So here we are.
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Like, I think this is one of the, obviously with the exception of this throttling issue that this person, but like,
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i think one of the things that's hard for nerds like us to get used to is that we can have devices in our computing lives now that have the computing power to be really good game platforms but just aren't for other reasons that seem like insufficient justifications for it not being a game platform like the apple tv is a terrible game platform for two big reasons number one
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Just, you know, Apple and gaming, they just, you know, they mishandle it in so many ways. And what brings so many games to the iPhone does not bring games to the Apple TV. Number two, it doesn't come with a controller. And also, by the way, number three, the weird on-demand resource loading on Apple TV makes it hard to deliver good games. So...
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The Apple TV, it has the hardware to be a great game platform. There's nothing stopping it hardware-wise from being a great game platform. But it's all those other ecosystem problems around it that make it so that's pretty much not going to be a thing. And, you know, we have kind of an embarrassment of riches in computing these days that the good thing is we don't need it to be a game platform.
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Like if you want to play pretty good games on your TV, you can get like a $30 Raspberry Pi and install packages on that, especially if you're into emulators. Like that's a great platform for that. But like you can get a Raspberry Pi with game support that you can plug into your TV and it's pretty good quality games for less than the cost of an Apple TV game controller.
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Yeah, I think if you use the Pixelmator family of apps, you probably should be a little wary about this. Apple's track record here, from the point of view of you, the customer of these apps, is not promising. Now, again, who knows what will happen. It's a new situation. They could always do things differently now than they've done in the past, but... It's not a great track record.
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So when they say no changes to the apps at this time, well, that doesn't mean anything. They posted this a few days ago. They could change it tomorrow. So that means nothing. They're very careful to not make any claims about the future, really, that are substantial. So what we know is that Apple has bought the company. It certainly seems like, you know, the team was a huge part of it.
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I do think it's probably like, you know, there have been speculation on how much money it had to be because they're seeking regulatory approval and everything. It's probably, if I had to guess, too much money to pay just for a talent acquisition. They are not probably going to spend that much money to just get a handful of people to work for them.
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That doesn't seem like it's worth it to them for that amount. So it is probably about buying at least the apps as well. But if you look at what are the likely outcomes here, I think the most likely is that they water down some of this and integrate it into the Photos app. So these apps then go away. That is the most likely in my opinion.
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Second most likely is these continue to be standalone apps in some form. And then maybe Apple bundles them together with Logic and Final Cut and makes a pro bundle. Maybe they give it away for free. Maybe it's a $200 new version of Aperture. Maybe they keep the name. Maybe they don't. But either way, it still remains separate apps. That's possible. I just don't think that's the most likely.
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I think by far, in my opinion, the most likely outcome here is... bits and pieces of this get integrated in possibly a watered-down way into the Photos app. That, I think, gives Apple the biggest bang for their buck, because they don't, like, you know, I don't think Apple cares about the existing customer bases of these apps, really. They just care about, like, what can we do with this asset?
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And I think that's the way Apple will get the most bang for their buck, in their view. Although, you know, that is pretty rough for the customer. So we can hope, what I'm hoping for is more of an aperture situation, more of, like, They use this to continue their own efforts into making high-quality pro apps.
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But the reason I'm a little wary about that is that we really haven't seen a lot of evidence to suggest that they're looking for that right now or that that's an interest for them.
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Which is no small thing to set aside by, because I believe they operate geostationary satellites, in which case there is no way that's ever going to compete.
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By the way, real-time follow-up, they're actually not geostationary. They're actually low-Earth orbit satellites from Global Star. I did not know that, and I would not have guessed that. But that means they can be significantly lower latency than geostationary ones. However, it seems like they're not anywhere close to the high bandwidth usage of something like Starlink.
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It's also, I mean, even with Starlink, like it's still a heck of a lot cheaper to build a cell phone tower than to launch satellites.
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And we'll remain that way for a very long time. We are sponsored this week by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.
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But I'll spotlight just a couple today. So they recently introduced design intelligence. This combines two decades of their industry-leading design expertise with cutting-edge AI tech to unlock your strongest creative potential.
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And honestly, I have recommended Squarespace to so many people in my life, from the local government to my kids' preschool to my own wife running her actual business on Squarespace. Everyone loves it. See for yourself at squarespace.com. Start a free trial there. You can build it and see how it works for you.
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We talk about tech now, and we will talk about our feelings about the election in the after show.
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Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
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I mean, I consider this the minimum to keep this product going, but if most of the change is just taking the existing one, upgrading the processor, and maybe making a few tiny tweaks around here and there, that's not going to move the needle on sales. No one is looking at the current Vision Pro and saying, well, I would have bought it if it was faster.
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right and more importantly it's not going to expand the market at all like if i think what what they have hopefully by now learned is like if they want to expand the market for their ar vr product uh you know category they need to go in a different direction in some way whether it's a substantial cheaper design or you know the glasses or you know just some other direction will be required but yeah you're right it is nice that they will be updating this product eventually maybe
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Well, honestly, I mean, I can kind of see the argument there. So, okay, two things we've already talked about. Number one, the Apple Watch. The first Apple Watch launched with all this functionality. They tried to sell it as doing a million different things. And we ended up learning it was really good at like two things. And that's enough of a product right there.
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What we've learned so far with the Vision Pro, admittedly, is not much because it's still super young and super small and there's nothing there, etc. But what we've learned so far with the Vision Pro is people seem to like it a lot for watching movies. And some people want to be able to use their Mac screen in it. Although I know there's news in the beta there that's apparently better.
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But, you know, we'll see. You know, how that plays out for everybody in practice. But, you know, for the most part, a large part of the good usage experiences of the Vision Pro come down to either using it as a screen for something else or watching movies on it, which is a fancy way of using it as a screen for something else. So...
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If it turns out that is a huge part of what people want to do on this device and people keep saying, I would buy one if it was cheaper. Well, if you can deliver something that gives people those use cases for a lot cheaper, because again, like the rumors that we were saying earlier about like there's rumors of a cheaper Vision Pro. That's not to say a cheap Vision Pro, just a less expensive one.
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The rumors that we've heard so far about the full-blown Vision Pro getting cheaper over time peg the price at something like $1,500 to $3,000 instead of $3,500. That's still way too expensive for most people to want to buy this thing. But if most people just want a fancy movie screen or a fancy external Mac display... then it turns out you can do that for a lot less.
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There's a lot about the Vision Pro that you don't necessarily need or that you can downsize or adjust in different ways. So if that ends up being a good market for this, I think that's fine.
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Because again, going back to our Apple TV discussion earlier, computing on the Vision Pro, and this is something I wasn't really able to say this for NDA reasons for the lab, but this is something I felt immediately when I started using the Vision Pro in the lab. And certainly once I bought my own, I felt it as well.
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using like trying to compute on the vision pro getting you know using apps moving around apps navigating trying to get things done or you know certainly doing any kind of text but you know just any kind of like working in the vision pro or operating apps in the vision pro feels a lot like operating apps in the apple tv in the sense that you have a a very large but kind of far away canvas and
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It's hard to get a lot of information density in a way that's useful to you with the perspective that you have. You have these kind of coarse input methods. You don't have a lot of input precision. Text input is pretty rough. Certainly, you don't want to be doing a lot of editing, moving around, like fine motor movements. It's not very good at that. It feels like using apps on an Apple TV.
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Well, what if it turns out, again, just like I was saying earlier, the Apple TV has the hardware capability to be a gaming platform, a real estate pricing platform, a shopping platform. But what people actually end up doing with it, what it's actually best at and easiest to do on it is watching video.
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But what if the Vision Pro, what if it turns out that what most people want to do with immersive VR glasses is... is either play games, which Apple, we know, is not going to be amazing at, or watch immersive content, or use it as a screen for something else. I think that outcome not only is likely, I think that's fine.
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You could also set a reminder with your voice assistant of choice. You know, one thing I have learned now that I have CarPlay, which is amazing, is that... Oh, wait, are we team CarPlay now? Of course we're Team CarPlay. I was always Team CarPlay. Well, yeah, there were times when I said, it's fine, I can do without it if I have to, but I always wanted it if it was available.
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Certainly, that will change what the product should be, and maybe some of the things they've invested in won't end up panning out in that way, but... That is very possibly how this category will end up, and that's fine. And if it ends up that they mostly sell much less expensive glasses or headsets that are mostly just being relatively simple screens... that's still a perfectly fine market.
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And, you know, this whole market with AR and VR, I mean, you know, obviously there's been all this news with, you know, Meta's glasses they came out with and the weird Snapchat things they came out with, or Meta didn't come out with them, the glasses they demoed and the Snapchat things.
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And, you know, you look at like, what are we working towards with all of this huge investment with AR and VR, but mostly AR now? What are we working towards with all of that? What demand are we trying to solve with these products? And I think that the tech industry that is making these so far has not done a great job of convincing me that people want what this offers.
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They're convincing me this is really cool. They're making things that are really cool. The demo really well, but... Then when you actually get one, maybe you use it for a few days, and then it's like, hmm, well, my work is better on my laptop or my Mac. My portable needs are better done by my phone. My movie watching is better done on my TV because I watch it with other people or whatever.
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What we're finding is we're putting a whole bunch of... massive investment and product development and money and and hype and time and attention into these into this dream of like when we finally get ar glasses it'll be amazing But I actually don't... I think we might be putting too much on that as an industry in terms of our expectations and our attention.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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In the same way that, again, when the Apple Watch was new, everyone was like, this is going to replace phones. And it just didn't and won't. That doesn't mean it's a failure as a product. It just means that the role of this product was not what everyone expected at first. Everyone expected it to replace phones. It will never do that. It's kind of not physically right for that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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What if AR and VR glasses are mostly just good for watching movies? That's not bad. It's just not the next big thing. And that's okay. There's room in tech for lots of different things that do lots of different roles. But it seems like everybody wants AR to be like the next big thing that replaces everything. And I just, I don't know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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When you look at the physical realities of this, I just don't see it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And over time, the I can do without it if I have to has gotten smaller. Yeah. Yep. But anyway, one thing I discovered is that when your phone is connected to CarPlay, you can usually just say into the air in your car, hey, thing, remind me in two hours to go buy ATP merchandise. And it will almost always pick it up without any waiting.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's fine if it's not. Who cares if it is? Is it this platform that has no content and no software? Who cares?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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A while ago, we floated the idea on this show. I think every time Apple is rumored to update the Apple Watch SE and then it comes out and the price doesn't go down or it doesn't get an update, I think we frequently float the idea, does the Apple Watch SE or does the low-end Apple Watch even need to run apps?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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You don't have to say, hey, thing, and then wait for the car to be like... Waiting, waiting. What do you want to say? Like, you can just say in one phrase, hey, thing, remind me in an hour to go buy ATP merchandise. And usually that will work. So even in Casey's case where like, you know, oh, you can just try to think about it later. If you're anything like me, you will forget immediately. Me too.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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and one you know because if you look at other wearables that compete with the apple watch you know there's obviously there's like the android smart watches that that are that have you know feature parity and stuff but or you know at least in the ballpark but then also there's this whole category of things like fitbits like smaller wearables that are mostly just activity trackers that either have no screen like a ring or they have you know
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smaller screens that are basically just displaying like the time and your step count or something like that. Like, you know, much simpler devices that are not running full-blown third-party app platforms in them. And those are able to be substantially smaller, substantially cheaper, and therefore they get a huge market share.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Well, you know, there's not much pressure on Apple to do that necessarily for the watch because the Apple Watch is a hit. It has been, you know, successful and has been selling in large volumes since it was introduced. But what if the only way they could make the Apple Watch as the platform that they shipped, you know, with software and apps and everything, such as they were at the beginning.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But, you know, what if the only way for them to do that was for it to be $2,000 and have a bunch of trade-offs also? Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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then you know it wouldn't have sold very well and then maybe there might have been more pressure on them to be like okay listen if you want to make a a smart wearable that people buy it you have to cut it down you have it has to be simpler and then maybe they would make something like a fitbit you know that's kind of the situation the vision pro is in they they shot for the the sky with this thing they they put in so much tech and the software platform is quite
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quite advanced, and there's so much there. There's engineering, there's amazing hardware, amazing software. The capabilities that it has are just incredible, but that gave it some really bad trade-offs and made it very expensive.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Meanwhile, there are industries, if you look at the smaller gaming headsets or things like these extra glasses, which, yes, they are just screens in your face, and that's not a very big industry, but you start to see...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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If there is pressure from down below in the price curve for these other products that people are choosing instead of the Apple Vision Pro, and Apple has this giant app platform building this thing that's not really working very well for them, then maybe the answer really is to make something simpler.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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If everyone is saying we want this to be not only cheaper, but we need it to be a lot cheaper than what the current option is, they're not going to get there by retaining all of the functionality of the Vision Pro as we know it today.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So they can either wait a very long time for all of that approach to get cheaper, and of course they can revise the hardware to be cheaper, things like different manufacturing techniques, simpler materials, maybe get rid of the weird external eyeball display, stuff like that. There are ways to make it a little bit cheaper, but if they need to make it a lot cheaper...
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That's going to take a very long time unless they dramatically cut scope. Now, granted, Apple's a very patient company. So it would not surprise me if they really did just want to wait 10 years for those little tiny screens to get cheaper or whatever. That might be their plan. I would be surprised if the product lasted that long, if that's their only plan. But hopefully it's not. But...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Also, you can look at, you know, does this category of product need to be what we shop for? Like, they were so ambitious with trying to, you know, trying to get us to all start talking about computing. Like, what was it? Is it ambient computing? Is that what we called it? Spatial computing. Spatial, that's it. I already forgot the term. It's been a week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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God, I... Thinking back to my life before being able to set reminders via voice assistants that would then beep in my pocket and wrist at a certain time. Oh my god, how did I ever get anything done? And the answer is, I didn't. Likewise. How did I ever remember anything? I didn't. How did I get through life? I got in trouble a lot. But now, we...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But what if the whole concept of spatial computing was not the right direction to go? That's what I'm saying. If you try to compute in the Vision Pro in regular productivity, switch around in apps kind of ways, it's not very good for that. What if that's just the wrong approach? And what if the right approach is something much simpler, like just making it mostly about video playback or whatever?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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now we are in a better place where we can be reminded of things with very little effort by sitting around or pretty much wherever we are so it's wonderful so you can use that ability to say hey thing remind me in an hour to buy atp merchandise all right let's do some follow-up uh we have some information with regard to the mac mini as is expected and other macs as well let's start with headphone jacks where is the headphone jack in the mac mini john
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All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and OnePass for their extended access management. And thank you 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 that is exclusive to members.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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This week in overtime, we'll be talking about our experiences so far with what's been released from Apple Intelligence. So you can hear all about our Apple Intelligence experiences so far in overtime by joining at atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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This is obviously going to be a much bigger topic than we can cover. My feeling on this right now is I'm just massively depressed about it. I am fortunate that I don't typically suffer from depression, but I certainly feel depressed about this right now. Yeah, likewise. I woke up this morning and just couldn't do anything. And I still, you know, I'm going to be like this for a while probably.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Just, you know, hard to focus on anything, hard to do anything, certainly hard to be motivated to do anything, and hard to think about anything else. You know, I think right now I'm in coping mode. You know, this is this pretty bad thing that has happened. Yeah. And the reality is whoever the president is affects different people in different ways in your day-to-day life.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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For most Americans, it won't affect you much at all in everyday ways. It will probably affect you in kind of big-picture, long-term ways, in lots of ways that are not good. And if you are one of these people who is only being affected in bigger picture, long-term ways, you are lucky and you are privileged.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Because there are a lot of people who were affected in much more significant ways right from the start. Right now, I don't want to even try to address that because there is just no way to give it justice. Right now, I'm in coping mode. And everyone copes differently. I would encourage you...
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as not a licensed psychotherapist, but instead as a person who talks about computers on the internet, so take this with a grain of salt, I would encourage you to let yourself feel your feelings. Don't try to hold it in. Don't try to hide it. Don't try to follow what other people are telling you to feel. Whatever you feel, let yourself feel it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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don't and i wouldn't i wouldn't at this point start pointing fingers and saying this is where we went wrong this is where the campaign or the candidate was too wrong or whatever like i this this is not a productive time to do that right now just let yourself feel it if you if you are mad be mad if you're sad be sad if you want to be furious be furious if you want to be despondent be despondent this is the lyrics of a terrible song
Accidental Tech Podcast
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um figure out you know right now this is you know we were just hurt significantly deal with the pain deal with it like don't don't just try to shove it down and process it later no process it now uh this is this is what's going on right now for you um you know and i you know you got to figure out you know what what is helpful to your feelings and mood and what is not
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And have an open mind to that. So, you know, one thing I have found so far, things that do not help me include reading the news. Because I know it's bad. I don't need to keep reading articles telling me how bad it is. I'm very aware of how bad it is. We went through this already in 2016 through 2020. We went through this. We've seen roughly how this is going to go. Now, in some ways...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I mean, in some ways, it's less of a shock because this happened already. And we can expect largely many of the same things to happen in the second term as what happened in the first term. It's probably going to be a lot of similarities. If you are like me in the sense that reading the news does not help you feel better about anything or move on with your life in a significant, actionable way...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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What we saw the first time was basically a constant barrage of fire and motion in scandals. Every day there was a different scandal. It was overwhelming. It was basically a DDoS attack on everyone's attention.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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because there was no like one scandal for anyone to focus on for more than a few days at a time because after a few days there would just be another one and can you believe what he did or said today like and that just that kept happening like almost every day That's going to happen again.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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We're going to have that just overwhelming barrage, that DDoS attack of just scandal after scandal, lie after lie, awful, unethical or illegal thing he does after awful, unethical, legal thing. It's just going to be a constant parade of those things. That's how he operates. And that's going to... Nothing bad will happen to him as a result.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Casey, you said, how are you going to explain to your kids that this person can commit literal crimes and have no consequences? And the answer is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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rich and powerful people often don't pay for their they often don't pay consequences for their actions like that's just the reality of the world and that's what's happening here he's a very powerful person with a lot of very powerful friends and an important lesson to learn is that those people don't often pay consequences especially republican politicians
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Their base does not hold them to those standards. So they – like Republicans do not care what their candidates do as long as they win. They don't care about any other factor. Priority number one above all else, above morals, above religion, above legal – like the laws, certainly above standards, number one is winning. And they don't care what their candidates do or what they're like.
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Now, in terms of what people – trying to understand what people voted for here, they voted for a worldview. The people who vote for him are not looking at every single action and saying, well, I wonder if I can still vote for him even though he lied 14 times in the appearance he made or whatever. No one who is voting for him is thinking that way. It's tribal. It's almost a religious style thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's a worldview. They are voting for a worldview. Now, they have been convinced that their worldview is the correct one. And everyone has different reasons why. And most of those reasons, honestly, are factually wrong or at least massively distorted. But the reality is they were sold Worldview successfully and they voted for it. And that's what we're going to have to contend with.
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Yeah, I think we're lucky that they still have one at all. So, you know, let's not look a gift horse in the mouth too much. But also, I think, yeah, if you're going to have a headphone jack on a desktop computer, the best places for it are either the front or the side. And if you look at the Mac mini, like there's not really anything on the sides.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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People knew exactly what they were getting here. They knew they were voting for a liar, a fraud, a criminal, a rapist, somebody who's done many worse things. They knew that, but they were voting for the worldview. And we're also, I think, going to have to cope with the fact that Democrats don't act as a block together. We never do. And so a huge challenge Democrats always face is...
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How do we get more people who are already Democrats to vote for our candidate? And that's a problem that the Republicans don't have. Their people will show up and vote for any criminal as long as they bear that party name because it's all about winning first and anything else is secondary. But again, that's not how Democrats work. So Democrats need a different strategy.
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I'm not a smart enough person in politics to be able to say what they should do next, but we've seen over and over again how we lose, and maybe we can figure out new things from there. But the reality is half the country is not –
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You know, stupid or nuts like they they were sold a bill of goods and we have to figure out, you know, if we're on the other side of that, we have to figure out how we can reach them at all or how we can reach our own people and enough numbers to overcome them. And that's something to do over the next four years. But in the meantime, you got to find out what helps you. You know what?
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How do you get through this? I mentioned earlier for me, reading the news does not help me. There's a reason why I did not read much news between 2016 and 2020, because it was just destroying my mental state. It was making me just angry and stressed and afraid all the time. By the way, you asked earlier, Casey, why somebody could possibly feel very strongly about Joe Biden. I honestly, I agree.
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I don't know why people could possibly hate him so much. He seems like a really kind of neutral person to me. But the reality is that's what they have. People on that political side of the aisle don't. They have been fed a constant worldview stream of anger and fear and claims that make them hate this very neutral, like very milquetoast kind of candidate that makes them hate him.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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They can't stomach him because they've been sold this incredibly severe worldview. I mean, Trump's entire campaign was basically anger and hate and xenophobia. That was everything he ever said was angry. He was constantly talking about how much America sucks. His entire campaign is everything sucks and is awful and it'll get worse if you don't elect me.
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That was his entire campaign, but that reached enough people to matter. again these people there it's it's it's hard to understand them when we're on the other side of the aisle but they got there for a reason and you know so anyway all this is to say find ways right now it's so it's a fresh wound right now stop bleeding find ways to cope Experience your feelings.
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And, you know, if you put if you put it on the side, you know, that that kind of restricts, you know, certain positioning of the Mac mini. So, yeah, I think this is fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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If you want to feel a certain way, let yourself feel that way. If you want to be mad for a while, be mad for a while. If you want to go into mourning for a while, go into mourning for a while. Figure out what helps and what doesn't. So for me, reading all the news does not help. Reading social networks does not help.
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You'll probably be seeing even less of me on the social networks as you were already seeing, which already was not a lot recently.
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one thing that does help me a lot is i'm a very social person being around people helps me a lot exercise and especially spending a lot of time outside like just i today i took a big walk it was a it was a nice nice weather day and i just took a huge walk even though i picked the wrong shoes and they were a little bit too tight and they were it was a little bit
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a little uncomfortable my feet were a little bit hot too but it didn't matter I was outside it was that that helped a lot you know spending a lot of time and then finally I have found that when I withdraw from the news cycle and put my time and attention into making things or doing work like being productive or being creative or producing output that also helps me a lot
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Find whatever that is that helps you. It's not going to necessarily always be obvious, especially if you don't frequently need to deal with this kind of feeling.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But what will probably help, honestly, I think what helps me, I think will have a lot of overlap and what helps a lot of people, not everyone is social like me, but certainly I think most people tend to feel better with exercise, outside time, and productive time. And most people tend to feel worse doom-scrolling social networks and reading terrible news.
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So maybe if you don't know what to do, maybe take that as a starting point. But otherwise, you know, look, we'll get through this. We got through it the first time. It was not a cakewalk. There were a lot of problems that resulted. There's a lot of damage that was done the first time that will not be undone for a long time. That's going to happen again. And we just have to be prepared for it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I rode the ferry today and the ferry being a boat on Long Island has a giant American flag on the top. They always do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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listening to my headphones listening to music trying to get my mind off of things and i and i happened to look up at the sky and there was the flagpole flying the american flag you know boldly and proudly and i i gotta say i had very mixed feelings about that when i saw it in that moment because i was like man this is this is some some complicated feelings i'm feeling right now looking at looking at the flag of my country on on this particular day with these feelings but
Accidental Tech Podcast
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America is about democracy. And as I mentioned last time, anything that tries to subvert or suppress that is the most anti-American thing you could possibly do. In this case, this was, by everything we know now, it seems like a very clear democratic result. That this is what the voters voted for. This is... This is America and it doesn't always go your way and it doesn't always progress.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It doesn't always make positive forward progress or forward motion. There's bumps along the way. There's regressions. That's what happens. That has definitely happened right now. And we're going to have to just keep plowing forward and figure out what's next. And it's going to be messy and it's going to suck for a while for a lot of people.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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There's going to be damage done that will be, that will not be able to be undone for decades. That is what happens with America. And so we're just, we're going to be in a dark time for a while and hopefully sometime down the road, we will come out of it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Whatever email you're writing, you can just delete it right now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
612: Screen on Face
Well, you can have monochrome colors as long as it's singular colors each. That is a thing. Yes, exactly.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But, no, I mean, keep in mind, like, you know, with, first of all, if you do, you know, what John said of, like, the nightmare scenario, having it permanently plugged in cord into the front of your Mac mini and you hate that it has to sneak around to the back, let me advise you on something. Get a right-angle headphone plug. Like, you can get a right-angle cord from Amazon for, like, $3.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So that helps a lot because then the cord goes straight down. I have a couple of things on my desk where I have like, you know, a wire that would stick straight out and I just, you know, went on Amazon. It's paid the three bucks to get a right angle plug on that one. That was exactly the right lane. So it wouldn't have too much excess and it made a much cleaner setup.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But also, yes, if you really are going to be doing something permanent that, you know, you always want something at the back and you want a really clean front.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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odds are somewhere in this setup you're going to have a place to put a usb audio device and that you know whether you call it a deck or a speaker amp these are all this or a headphone amp rather these are all the same things it's just you know a usb audio device that has a headphone output of some kind and you can you know bury that wherever you want to bury it in your setup so that you have lots of options also one thing to consider i was just looking up the the weight of the mac mini is only 1.5 or 1.6 pounds depending on configuration um
Accidental Tech Podcast
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this is you know less substantially less than a macbook air in weight um that's still going to be a little bit dense but it is possible if you had a headphone jack on the back and you tugged on that a little bit you could like twist the whole mac mini around you could like you know move the physical mac mini with the motion of your headphones if you pulled hard enough because again it's only one and a
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So that's another consideration. Like they've made this so small and it's getting lighter over time. So you don't want it like being scooted around the desk needlessly either. So yeah, another reason why being on the front is fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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603: Too Smart to Move
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603: Too Smart to Move
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603: Too Smart to Move
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603: Too Smart to Move
Start that free trial and use that link to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah, started doing this a few years ago. As Casey said, this is basically, you know, on the eve of the iPhone's replacement, the episode before they're going to have their event and launch the new one. I like to send the old one out kind of with an exit interview of, like, how was the outgoing phone this year?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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You know, now that we've had a whole year of usage, and it kind of helps inform, you know, other shows, you know, more often do kind of direct, like, you know, predictions or wish lists of what we want for the next phone that will be announced, you know, presumably next week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
And I think having it kind of framed as an exit interview of the previous phone helps to inform kind of what matters and what kind of progress we're actually hoping to have and in what areas. So we're going to start with the iPhone 15 Pro. And now, to be clear, John, you didn't have the 15 Pro, right? This wasn't your year? Yeah, but my wife did. So I've experienced the phone. Right.
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And Casey, you had the big one for the first time and I have the medium sized one, which I guess is the small technically, but it's, you know, there's only two sizes and neither of them are small.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Great. So iPhone 15 Pro, I would say the number one thing that I absolutely love about this phone, USB-C. We were waiting for it for so long. They finally gave it to us in the 15 line. And this is not a small deal. This has been a big deal. This has been so nice. So not only do I have easier charging everywhere that I am, because all over my house, my backpack, traveling...
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Now we just have one kind of cable, and it charges everything. It's amazing. There are no more lightning cables in my travel bag at all, and around the house, there are hardly any lightning cables necessary for almost anything. The only thing we use lightning for is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
charging apple tv remotes which we almost never have to do like that's literally like you know maybe twice a year we charge an apple tv well the modern ones the modern ones are usbc the the older ones were yes i just i just never upgraded to that one um so no more lightning cables for almost anything except for yeah apple tv charging for the remote um also on my desk i have to have one to power up um older iphones i use as test phones and also to charge magic mice and magic trackpads
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
that's it like oh and i guess a couple of my older airpods cases um but even like my travel airpods pros are now the usbc model there which is an upgrade i strongly recommend it's so good oh i really want to do it but i'm too cheap it feels so wasteful but like for but i had to get a second pair because one of the old ones finally died and it so i i got the new one oh man it's so nice
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But anyway, yeah, having all USB-C, total game changer. I've even found that there's a lot of kind of like little things you can now do that you couldn't do as easily or at all before because it supports USB-C. So for instance... I can plug in my big Fuji camera with a regular USB-C cable, even just a, quote, charging cable that only uses, like, slow USB 2 speeds.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I can connect that directly from the camera to my phone and import photos. It's glorious. That's nice. So much little stuff like that just works. Some audio equipment works that way, too. Like, I have found it is just USB-C has been an awesome upgrade on the iPhone. And if you are still holding on to an older phone and you're wondering, like,
Accidental Tech Podcast
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should i upgrade you know this year whatever usbc alone is a great reason to upgrade but you know that's obviously how much that's worth to you uh depends on the pricing but wow is it nice that is so much nicer like i knew it would be nice to just like you know get rid of some cables i had no idea how nice it would be so i am extremely even like you know simple stuff like you know you have like a usb you know battery pack that you're using to charge up something
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
And you went, oh, can I top off my phone for a minute? Yeah, sure. Just pop out whatever you're charging and plug it into the phone. And then you unplug the phone and plug in a laptop or an AirPods case or whatever, all with the same cable, all connected to the same battery without having to mess with things. Oh, it's so nice. It is so good. So yeah, USB-C A+.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah. And the only downside I would say is that the USB-C hole on the phone does get like lint from your pocket in there in a way that is harder to remove than with lightning. With lightning, you could put pretty much anything up there and just kind of scrape it out and it would just kind of fall out. USB-C, I did have an issue earlier in the year where I thought my port was breaking.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So I just couldn't get cables to sit right or charge reliably. And it was just crap in the port. And I had thought it wasn't because I had just done like some basic, you know, clean out with like one of those plastic tools thinking like maybe this will do it. And it took like a little bit deeper of a clean to get all that stuff out. And it was just stuff in the port.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It was just, you know, harder to get out than lightning. But other than that, it's been it's been only benefit. And. And I also – I thought – and we've been talking for years before they did this. I really thought that the public perception of the USB-C change would be as harsh as it was when they switched from the dock connector to lightning.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
like like regular people out there hated the switch to lightning from the dock connector because they were like apple is just doing this as a cash grab to you know to sell new cables and new new bricks whatever and you know this time i i thought we would have the same problem and we just didn't i think that's largely because usbc is not proprietary to apple and so when they made this change
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
There was already a massive marketplace of USB-C cables and chargers made by everybody, and so it was not as much of like, oh, they're trying to sell their own cable. I'd be surprised if Apple sells many of their own cables. I think most people just get whatever they can on Amazon, and it's fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
And I certainly did not think it was going to be, as you said, like this quiet, like no one. See, it's I heard no complaints from literally anybody that they changed the port. Like, you know, I mean, you're right that like, you know, they not everybody is on that that fast of an upgrade cycle. But still, I literally heard zero problems about this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
And while we're on USB-C here, I just wanted to give a shout-out to USB-C power delivery. As a spec and as a product ecosystem, USB-C PD has – and for the less nerdy people out there, that is the spec that allows USB-C to deliver much higher power amounts than old USB could ever deliver. That's how you can get USB to power an entire laptop by itself, for instance.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
The move in general for so many tech products and even products that are kind of just barely tech products, the move to being powered by USB-C and USB-C PD wattages has made overall life so much just like a little bit nicer in a lot of ways. It's like the inverse of paper cuts, right? Like, you know, we complain about little paper cuts on little annoyances and products.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yes, starting probably next week. Many of you out there are going to be buying new Apple products. You might have even bought some other things recently, possibly the new Android folding things. Maybe I saw there was a new Remarkable tablet today that looks really cool. All sorts of fun gadgets launching in this gadget season.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
This is like, you know, whatever the opposite of a paper cut would be a paper circle. I don't know. I can't think of a good word that's funny, but it is just a little delights. I guess that's the word all the time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
little little delights where there are like there and you don't necessarily realize it once you've moved to the usbc world you don't realize how good you have it until you have to go use something older that has its own power brick or its own like older usb micro or whatever port and the world we have now is so nice because all that stuff about like wow i can charge all my like my phone and my ipad and my laptop from all the same thing
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
That's true, and that shows in lots of bigger ways now too. Like so many other gadgets or things are now powered by USB because it's just kind of cheaper and widely available and so many devices. I even have like a power drill that is powered by USB-C now and has its own built-in – Which is... And, I mean, look, I'm not a contractor, but for my purposes, it's totally fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Like, there was just... There are so many things like that now that are entering my life gradually over the last few years that just... Oh, this new XYZ thing, this is now USB-C powered. Like, you know, it could be so many things. Like... toothbrushes, vacuum cleaners, so many things are now being USB-C powered.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And the more stuff that you get like that in your life, the more those little conveniences and delights you run into sometimes. Oh, I need to get a new power adapter for my drill. Do I have to buy the proprietary thing from the drill company? No. It's just USB-C. I want to have a shorter or longer cable for this gadget.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Do I have to buy a special thing or see if anybody makes a weird one on Amazon? No. You can just use USB-C. There are so many little tiny things like that that add up in your life over time the more you're into the USB-C lifestyle. So thank God for the Europeans for forcing this upon Apple. And thank God for the ecosystem for being here and for...
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
pretty pretty gradually but now with quite some speed behind it um converting over to this wonderful lifestyle it is wonderful i love usbc even for the data side of it yeah it's a mess the power side of it is awesome yeah agreed let me give the eu partial credit because i think we said before i think apple would have switched with or without the eu it's just a question of the individual timing they might have even done it exactly the same time because they did do it earlier than required but uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And I think, you know, one of their stated goals, one of the EU's stated goals was reducing e-waste. And I think largely this does that. Like, the move of so many things to USB-C power, I think really does reduce e-waste. Because, like, think of, again, like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
uh and you probably don't necessarily need to spend money on new gadgets maybe maybe you got something broken needs to be replaced but for the most part we all know that this is like these are mostly luxuries that we have that were because we're very fortunate to be able to afford nice electronics uh for many of us listening to this podcast um now when you buy your nice electronics that you don't
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
go through your tech closets and see how many things there are that have their own custom power bricks and stuff that now the modern versions of those don't because they can be USB-C powered. I think they make a pretty big impact here. So I, again, so happy about this change. All right, let's move on to the other headlining feature of the iPhone 15 Pro, the action button. It's funny.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It got out there. There was a little bit of drama here and there with cases. And then we pretty much never heard about it for the rest of the year. But I got to say...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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i find the action button so useful that i instantly took it for granted like the idea now of using a phone without the action button would be a significant paper cut to me it was like a significant step down because i use mine i have it set up for the flashlight i know there's lots of other ideas people have for it but i need a flashlight fairly frequently and i use it at least twice a day and i just i love having that hardware button there it is fantastic
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And then finally, the only other thing I'll say about the iPhone 15 Pro is that the thermals really have been pretty bad. We all saw right at the beginning, we're like, this phone seems to run hot, really hot. It does. It does run very hot, and it does thermal throttle itself a lot in use, especially in the sun in a car.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That's why I had to buy a chiller phone mount that uses a thermoelectric element just to cool the phone down in the car just so I could keep the display on and take any power whatsoever. This phone runs hot, and it has run hot since day one. I think they successfully mitigated the bad press that could have resulted from that when people started reporting that right at the beginning.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
really maybe need but you're buying because you want a treat and they're fun and they're awesome you tend to purchase other things at the same time things like a case or additional storage upgrades or a keyboard or some other kind of accessory for the thing that you're buying you even also do things like you know apple care you know warranty services or you you certainly almost you know almost always in most places you have to pay sales tax
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
They said it was a software issue, and they issued a software update It wasn't a software issue. It was a hardware flaw. This phone overheats much more easily than previous phones did. And the rumors are that the upcoming 16 pros that should be announced next week apparently have a modified and better thermal design.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And that's so that is when I look at my 16 pro wish list, it's actually really short. It's I want better thermals and I could use the 5X camera that Casey has, which it does seem like both of those things have been pretty solidly rumored the entire time for that phone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
So you have all these kind of add-on fees and upgrades and accessories and taxes to the thing you are buying. I suggest when thinking about what your minimum donation to St. Jude's should be, add up all those extras that you tack on to your purchase or purchases, including all the taxes, all the storage upgrades, all the accessories and cases and warranties and all that stuff. Add up all that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
And then I guess one more thing on the 15 before we leave it. I really do appreciate the titanium as a weight saving measure. I don't think it needs necessarily be titanium specifically. It could it could be lots of other it could be aluminum for all I care like aluminum was fine for a long time and it is lighter than titanium even. So that would be fine as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But I'm very glad they switched away from steel. I do know that apparently they switched to titanium and some of the structural changes they made inside, I think, were actually part of the problem with the thermals. And I believe that's part of why they had to revise them for the 16 line next week. But overall, it does feel very good in the hand. It feels great.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
So I love the overall design of it, with the exception that I think the colors were garbage for the Profound. I got the natural gray one, which I thought... I don't know, last fall I was kind of in a gray mood and I thought this is going to be cool and different. And no, it's just gray.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
That should be your target minimum donation to St. Jude if you can swing it. And fortunately for us and for most of you out there, many of you out there are able to swing it, and that's great. And this is how you can assuage some of your guilt about these new tech products that you're buying by giving a nice chunk of money, if you can, to St. Jude.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
It is definitely a weird incentive they've created. Right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
That was Peak Design. Actually, that's the one I've been using the last few months.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Some of them have gotten really advanced now. When you order most decent brand ones now, they come with basically little kits that you lay it in this plastic cradle and you...
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
flip this thing right down exactly the right angle like they get really uh pretty pretty complicated to try to do it right they're trying to help you as best they can because they know it's a difficult thing to do but if you're doing in like a house full of cat dander or something you're kind of fighting uphill battle i've actually heard you're often better off having either sometimes the apple store will have people who are willing to do it for you if you buy it there but i don't even know if they still sell screen detectors there but best buy does it too or something like that this is a skilled labor thing
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah, even mall kiosks that sell phone accessories will often do it for you for some small fee. I would actually suggest maybe trying that option. When you buy one and try to apply it, you're doing this in your house with whatever conditions you can best approximate that are actually somewhat near maybe being ideal, but not quite ideal. And you're going to do, what, two of these a year at most?
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah. So you're not going to have the experience and the finesse of somebody who's doing it like 10 times a day.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I think that speaks to just how far ahead iPhone components are planned. And how recently, relatively speaking, Apple realized they had to get in on the LLM game. Because the iPhone 15 non-Pro components were probably a lock, like, what, two years ago, maybe? We know they have pretty long timelines for a lot of that stuff. And so they probably started Apple Intelligence...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Shortly after that was decided or around the same time, maybe they didn't know yet when they started doing LLM research and development. Maybe they didn't realize, like, we're definitely going to need X gigs of RAM to run this thing. That was probably too early to know that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
And a lot of Apple's efforts over the last year or two, like they've actually open sourced some things and published papers about compressing LLMs to fit in smaller amounts of RAM. They've done a lot of work in that area. Why? We're seeing it now. This is why they care so much about that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Well, and to be clear, it isn't only about being cheap when they limit the amount of RAM in phones. That is certainly part of it, and that's probably not a trivial part. But it's also about battery life. RAM takes power. Like just having a certain amount of RAM, you have to be applying power to that part of the chip, even if it's not using that RAM for anything.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Like even if it's, you know, marked as free by the OS, you're still powering that chip to a certain base level. That's how DRAM works. So, and forgive me for experts in the field, if I'm dramatically oversimplifying or there's a whole bunch of asterisks on that now, there probably are.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
But in general, you don't want to put a whole bunch of RAM into something that's as battery constrained as a phone if you're not sure you're going to use it because it does take battery.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
All right, so Apple Watch Series 9. I don't have a lot to say about the Series 9 except that I have found the double tap gesture, which was one of its new headlining features, to be fairly bad. I don't think it is fast enough or reliable enough to be useful. I have tried it over the last year many times. My hit rate with getting it to be recognized is low.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And even when it is recognized, it takes a decent amount of extra time that you have to be still having the watch be like raised up and looking at the screen stays on. And then it shows a little animation to confirm that it understood your tap. And you like it just feels very slow.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And I have just mostly resorted to nose tapping the way I always have if I have to be one handed to dismiss something because it is just faster and literally more reliable. Like it is more reliable for me to lift up the watch to my nose and tap it and hit the right spot on the screen than trying the double tap finger gesture.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So I don't know if that's just me, but I have found generally the double tap is really not very useful.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Really? I don't find that. I mean, mine's a lot younger, obviously. It's a year younger. But I find the battery life on the Series 9 is great. But I also didn't have any problems with the Series 8.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So I'll come back to that in a second. The only thing I wanted to say about the Watch Series 9 specifically is that they removed the option for titanium with the Series 9. And I wish they didn't. And I hope for the Series 10 they bring back a titanium option for the non-ultra watch.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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uh it was a bit like the titanium edition watch was not that much more money than a steel one it was really nice it was lighter i think it looked more refined it had like a nice brushed finish like it looked really nice it felt really nice on the wrist it was a way to have a little bit more subtle and a little bit lighter watch than the steel without going down in quality on things like the crystal that you have to do when you get the aluminum one
Accidental Tech Podcast
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um the aluminum one looks like aluminum you know it looks fine but it doesn't look nice the steel and the titanium both look very nice and titanium i think was a little bit nicer of a look between the two and again i think it felt better and also apple watches tend to function better the lighter they are the taptic engine is more feelable um it moves on your wrist better it sets on your wrist better um so i really hope they bring back titanium as an option on the series 10 or whatever they're going to call it series x series 10 whatever
Accidental Tech Podcast
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um the the original one that we got him a few years back now was an se like the first gen watch se um we replaced it a couple years back with i think a series five or six that i'd gotten amazon refurbished or renewed or whatever they call it um for fairly cheap um he doesn't wear it currently anymore
Accidental Tech Podcast
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because the school banned them i guess kids would figure out like how to put notes in your apple watch to cheat on tests so they banned them so he hasn't worn it in a long time it's been sitting in a drawer it's probably fairly dead now but anyway so i don't for now he's just not using a watch and i don't know when or if that will return but we'll find out so about so going back to do you know kind of what i'm hoping for for the series 10 so number one titanium option um
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And just for the record here, I'm not talking about software at all right now. I think the Apple Watch, the Watch OS X redesign changed a lot of things. I still am not super sold on some of the Watch OS X changes and placements and buttons and gestures and things like that. I'm still getting everything wrong all the time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I'm still pushing the wrong buttons or swiping the wrong edge to do things that I didn't want to do. But maybe that's just me. And of course, I always have opinions on watch faces. But going back to just the hardware... I really hope, again, titanium option on the non-ultra series. Please bring that back. It was so nice. I'm also always hoping for... I guess that's this kind of software. Sorry.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I want display zoom on the Apple Watch. As you may know, my vision is slowly getting worse at close distances as I proceed through middle age. I use reading glasses for close-up reading of things sometimes. I'm not always wearing my reading glasses because I'm not always reading.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So I have found, as my vision has gotten slowly worse at short arm distance, very small complications and very small text in complications, like, say, the timer complication, which I use frequently, is getting a little hard to read. Now, iPhones have many different accessibility technologies for font sizing and UI sizing and different visual accommodations.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
The watch has almost none, which is surprising. There is dynamic type on the watch, which is the global text size setting, but it doesn't affect that many things on the watch.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
They also, on the phones, have this thing called Display Zoom, where that's the mode where when you set up your phone, I don't know if it still does this on all phones, but during that setup process, it'll ask you, like, do you want things to be this size or this size?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And what it does is basically scale the entire screen up to simulate the field of view of, like, the next size smaller phone that existed or exists.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
So you so like you know if you have like a pro max and you pick that option it'll basically just blow up the screen dimensions of a pro into the pro max screen so you get everything scaled up perfectly the same way you would do like a resolution change on a monitor on a computer.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I've already hit my button. I hit it while you were talking already. So I'm in.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I want the watch to get that ability so that it can scale up everything, complications, the faces, everything, when you have a larger model watch to simulate the screen size of a smaller model watch blown up to its new size. I think that would be a great visual accommodation for people whose close-up vision is not that good or whose vision in general is not that good. Because...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Again, dynamic text on the watch is just not very well supported, doesn't go very far, and doesn't include almost anything on the watch face. So I would love to see that as an option. Again, that is a software thing, but maybe it's requiring a certain GPU or whatever. And of course, the rumored larger screens that might be coming might make that easier to pull off and make it better of a feature.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
before we get to the screens I'll get there but I'm hoping they found a way to keep the blood oxygen sensor this is not a sensor I use frequently but it's nice to have it and we've had it and I think you know whatever they need to work out with Massimo you know to license that tech that patent I think they should just do it yeah
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah. So again, it's a minor feature. It's not going to be the end of the world if I lose it, but I just don't want to lose it. Like over Apple being BSE about patent licensing. And I understand, look, we all hate patents, and they tried so hard, but you lost. Let's move on. The only other thing I'll get to for the hardware before we get to the screens is I really, really hope...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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that the Apple Watch Series 10 supports Qi charging finally. Qi 2, as a standard, I believe accommodates small enough devices that I believe the Apple Watch could be charged via Qi 2 if the watch wanted to support it. So I'm hoping... Because again, going back to our charging delights and paper cuts earlier with USB-C, I have now one cable and one port for everything except the Apple Watch.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And yeah, you can get combo chargers that have a special Apple Watch pad off to the side. But you know what's much more common? Batteries and chargers and stuff that just have a Qi pad and USB-C holes. So I would love to just have Qi support. Let me buy a battery from Anker or whatever on Amazon that has a USB-C output and a standard Qi pad And I can put whatever I want there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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An AirPods case, a second phone, or an Apple Watch while traveling. That would be really nice. And again, I think Qi 2 has added what is necessary to make that work. So I'm hoping for that. Now, about the screen sizes on the watch. There's been all these rumors that the watch regular series is growing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That there's going to be, you know, that basically the current small version, which I believe is 41 millimeter or 42, that is going to go away. And it's going to basically, like, that both of them are going to be going up in size by a decent amount. I think this is going to be a good move overall.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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We've said over time that Apple has done a really good job satisfying the market for smaller watches way better than most of the smart watch makers have ever achieved it. But watch fashion and the smartwatch market have changed since the Apple Watch was introduced 10 years ago. And this happens. In the watch world, the sizing of how big a standard – and watches historically were very gendered.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So there were certain sizes like, all right, men's watches are going to be this size range for the most part, and women's watches are going to be this size range. Fortunately, in the era of smartwatches, first of all, a lot of the gendering has gone away to the point where now, if you buy the small watch, people don't say that's the women's version. It's just the small watch.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And the big one, women can wear it, and no one's going to say you're wearing a man's watch. Thank God we've gotten rid of all that BS. Also, since the smartwatch era has really taken off over the last decade, demand for large watches has gone up. Which is funny because in the regular watch world, like the mechanical watch world, watches had gotten very big.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Then they kind of started going back a little bit. They're actually getting a little bit smaller now. But smartwatches are going the other way. Part of the reason so many people bought the Apple Watch Ultra is not because they were going to be climbing a mountain and then diving into 200 meters of water. It's because they liked the bigger look. And that's for both functional reasons.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yes, it has better battery life, bigger screen. That's great for smartwatches. But also, big watches are just in fashion right now. Really huge smartwatches are in style. And most people that I see are not wearing the small one anymore. I see a lot of people of a lot of different sizes and ages, and I don't see many people choosing that smaller Apple watch anymore.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Meanwhile, if you look at the smartwatch market... The current, quote, big Series 9, that's the one I wear. That's the one I think Casey probably should be wearing. The big one, relative to other smartwatches in the market, is actually fairly medium-sized. Many other smartwatches in the market are actually significantly bigger.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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What the Ultra's success, I think, showed Apple and showed the market is that, yes, a lot of people choose it because of those technical factors, but a lot of people also just like big watches. Big watches are in.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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especially smartwatch big big smartwatches that is just in fashion right now so if apple is truly getting rid of the smallest size and making them both bigger i think that's not because they're abandoning the market for small watches i bet it's more because the market abandoned theirs the market probably moved on and has not been buying the small watch very much at all
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And I think people of all wrist sizes have been choosing bigger smartwatches over the last few years way more than they used to. So I think this is just Apple responding to the market and wanting to serve where the demand actually is. They did the same thing with phones and phone sizes growing over time. This is that they're doing the same thing with the watch.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I think they're going to raise the sizes of both of them and everybody will complain about it for about a week and then we'll try them and be like, oh, this is nicer. Yep. And then it'll be fine. And people will buy them like crazy, especially the biggest one, way more than we think they will. So I think this is going to be totally fine if they increase the sizes of the watches a little bit.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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No, well, it is a good question, though, because at some point I do end support for the really old API protocols. How hard it is to maintain server compatibility in general with old clients if you just make a new copy of your API controller or functions or whatever and just call this one, like I'm currently on, version 6. It's really not that bad.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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The main problem comes when you have to do significant changes to things like the server-side schema, like how your data is stored. So do you build in compatibility layers? How long do you keep those over time? Do certain problems occur when older versions of the app sync that maybe clobber changes from the new versions? And do you accommodate that?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Over time, that complexity grows, and how much you want to maintain it for a decreasing number of clients, eventually that trade-off becomes not worth it, and you say, all right, you know what, in a month I'm going to cut off support for iOS 12 or whatever. The downside of doing that, of course, is Overcast is a server-dependent app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And so if the servers stop supporting a certain client version, that version of the app does not work anymore. It will not get new updates. You cannot add new podcasts. You cannot download new podcasts. You can't even log in. It will totally break that client. So I try not to do that until those clients are very old.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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In this case, the specifics of the new API for the rewrite, the protocol with which the clients speak to the server and vice versa has totally changed. It's way lighter on the servers. It's way more efficient. The old protocol was very hard on the servers. And so you would think I would have a pretty substantial incentive to end support soon for the old ones.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But because the numbers drop off so fast for like how like there's not like in in, you know, a month or two, there's going to be a big chunk of those iOS 16 only people that fall off because they replace their phones.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Even though the old protocol is way less efficient and way harder on the servers, I don't have much incentive to end its support anytime soon because it's going to be such a tiny percentage of the user base that's going to be holding on to it. So that'll probably be supported for a while. We're talking probably years, multiple years, because again, there's not much reason to end it yet.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Eventually there will be, but the protocol is mostly what has changed, not the data storage layer.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And some of the things I'm doing, I'm trying over time to push more of the logic that was previously server-side logic, push more of it to the clients where possible, in part just to lighten the load on the servers, and in part because sometimes that's just way easier to do on the client, or I can offer better features if I do it client-side.
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So, for instance, the the current test flight build, I have fixed a problem with the episode limit not being enforced. I've had this option forever of like, you know, you can you can limit a podcast to only keep the latest one or two or five episodes of that podcast. This feature, if I was launching a new podcast app today, I would never offer this feature.
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It is so tricky and problematic, and that has been enforced server-side to date. This new test flight build enforces it client-side, and that's part of why it's fixed for a lot of people. because doing it server-side... Because there's all sorts of differences. I'll get into a very brief diversion here. The problem is the way the servers... Servers have to deal with data in very different ways.
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They have to deal with scale in very different ways. So when you, as a user, when you subscribe to a podcast, what you see... Suppose you subscribe to a new podcast that has 1,000 episodes back in its feed. You subscribe. You now have in your app a thousand episodes that you don't have any history with. And then a new one comes out and maybe you play that one.
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Well, to your client, that's a thousand and one rows in a table, most of which have all zeros in them. And then, you know, you have then that latest one, you can mark that as your progress or your plate or whatever.
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On the server, if I added 1,000 rows to the table that keeps track of everyone's status of episodes, every time someone subscribed to a podcast at 1,000 episodes, it would take way more space and be way heavier and way more expensive to host. And more servers, larger backups, everything. Data size affects cost substantially. So that would be very bad. So on the server, I do tricks like...
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when you subscribe to a show, I assume that the state of everything that precedes your subscription in that, in that feed is it's deleted, but not played. Like it's just, that's the default state of everything that precedes your subscription to a new podcast.
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If you then go back and listen to an old one that of course I insert that row, but I have this, these, all these optimizations in place that like, okay, I'm not going to add all thousand of those as new rows to this table, because again, that would blow up everything. That logic wreaks havoc with episode limiting, and it's been so tricky to get it right server-side.
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A couple years ago, I even let people opt into a beta of a new way to handle it because I thought I finally had nailed it and taken care of all those cases and all the edges and all the weirdness that somehow would still be efficient and would still not store nearly as much as it had to. I tried so many different ways to do this, and I never got it quite right.
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So with the new way that the new app talks to the servers, I've developed yet more issues with doing that server-side. So what I'm going to do is once this version of this app is reasonably out there that does it all client-side – because, again, client-side, it's way easier to do. The client has no – I don't care if I take another five kilobytes on your phone. Right.
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So the client can have 1,000 rows in the database when you subscribe to a feed because it's just keeping it locally. I don't care. It's a SQLite database. It's super light. So the client can do perfect limiting because it has perfect information, whereas the server is simulating perfect information with a bunch of optimizations.
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So anyway, so what I plan to do is move that logic entirely to the client with the next release and then over time eventually tell the server to stop even trying to do that, to stop enforcing episode limits at all. Because that will make a lot of things easier, it'll reduce this bug potential in the app, and you don't want the server trying to do it at the same time the app is doing it.
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So that's kind of my long-term plan here. Have the server stop enforcing that completely. When that happens, if you are still, say, on an old client, if all of your Overcast devices that you're logged into, if none of them have the new version that does this, your episode limits will just slowly increase, and things won't get automatically deleted once they pass that limit. And so...
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things like that like kind of weird drift will start happening if you're still using a very old version of the api that's another reason why like eventually it does make sense to retire them because if they start like producing weird conditions or like things that could cause bugs for other clients you know you got to retire them then or find a way to limit them but for the most part
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i'm because i'm moving more towards more stuff happening on the client and the server side feature set is fairly fixed i don't intend to really do much more server side unless we get into things like you know transcriptions but that's that's a whole other bag of worms because of all that i expect the ios 16 api to still work for a long time to answer your question in a very long way
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Listening through Overcast doesn't do anything to affect Apple Podcasts or its rankings because Apple Podcasts does not know that you're listening in Overcast. If you subscribe to a podcast in Apple Podcasts, Apple does register that in some way, and it does help the show.
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It helps the show mainly in ranking it higher and possibly helping it get on certain top lists or ranked lists that are occasionally used for discovery in Apple Podcasts. Over time, I think they're using this less in the sense that they are doing more kind of things you might like type of recommendations rather than top list of new and noteworthy this week or whatever.
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So I think this is mattering less over time. But they basically – they historically have – used new follows as a strong signal but i think possibly at some times i think that was actually the only signal that would feed into like what shows up on their top hot list today because it is a pretty good signal overall like how many new follows is a show getting
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And for the record, I actually try not to have those kind of metrics in Overcast that are global like that because it tends to reinforce the rich get richer. So I've moved away from most of those over time. But that is, as far as I know, that is still part of how Apple Podcasts does recommendations and rankings. All right. Thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace.
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Thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the member perks is ATP overtime, a bonus topic every week just for members. This week's overtime, we're talking about AI angst. There are some tricky things going on with the AI world, including authors suing Anthropic and some drama over at NaNoWriMo.
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We're going to be talking about both those things in ATP Overtime. You can join to listen at atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.
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Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause 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.
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So that's K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-
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I'm not having a good time in neutral land right now. Uh-oh. Battery fault. Yes, so remember when that battery fault message popped up about a month ago?
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And I said at the time, I'll get it serviced as soon as I'm back off the beach for the school year. It's going to be a pain in the butt and driving all the way to Brooklyn for the Rivian Service Center. So I'm going to send you two photos in sequence here into the Slack group, and I'll try to put them as chapter art.
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Right. And especially a battery fault that only shows up when doing DC fast charging on a highway. And then I reboot the car a couple of times and it doesn't show up anymore. Like, OK, I guess it's fixed.
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Since I last reported on that, I have developed a few additional problems. Oh, no. So I mentioned, you know, the dramatically increased wind noise since getting the body shop to replace the side, which admittedly, that's probably the body shop's fault. But there was wind noise before they did their work also. There was just a little bit less of it.
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But so, you know, wind noise, I got to get them to fix that. I had an increasing incidence of... what seems like the auto steer system crashing. Um, no, not literally, thank God, but I guess poor choice of words. Um, but the auto steer sometimes will just turn off and make a bunch of noise and it will say highway assist system failure.
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And so that sounds like it crashed to me, but, or some sensor broke. Um, so I have to have them look at that. Um, also, um, I can no longer move the seat. Um,
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of the car the driver's seat does not move unless i am switching between the two profiles the tick profile and the me profile hope you're hope you're happy with the profiles yeah it will not move like none of the adjustments work it is just stuck like it it refuses any other adjustment besides the profile switches so if i wanted to like you know let me put it up a little bit nope can't do that if anybody else needs to drive my car too bad if i need to move the seat back to like to get something out from under it nope too bad which to me that
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That's actually probably like a safety issue that I should probably get fixed pretty immediately. And finally, I barely have air conditioning. The air conditioning has almost completely gone out. It blows very weak air and goes through lots of times when the fan will just like kind of slow down and it'll blow totally hot air. And then it'll go back eventually and blow slightly cold air.
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But it's bad. Like today was only in the high 70s and it couldn't keep up.
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it was not a hot day and it could not keep up and it was blowing warm air most of the time so the air conditioning i basically have no air conditioning or i have almost no air conditioning so i created a support ticket in there and you know the way you get service from rivian is you go to their app and you like report your problems you can attach photos and whatever else so i created the support ticket with all these issues um
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I do find it very funny that apparently when you add five issues to a ticket, it says at the bottom, you've reached the max number of issues. Please submit these and start a new request. My car says otherwise, right? So I've reached the maximum number of problems with my Rivian that I can put on one service request. So I thought, okay, well, you know.
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Maybe I'll get in the service center within the next couple of weeks, you know, get this done. I'm a little scared because I have heard that this level 3 charging battery problem, I've found a couple of forum threads that people said it took them like months to figure it out. So I'm not loving that, but we haven't gotten there yet. We'll see what happens.
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So, okay, maybe I can get in the service center, you know, again, in maybe a week or two. Now to the next screen, which I'll send you now. These were the first available appointments.
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The first available Rivian appointment in my entire region of New York is 10 weeks from now, November 13th.
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Yes. And I checked. There's a couple other Rivian service centers that are like 100 miles away. And it's no better. It's the same. They're all out to November. You should check Richmond.
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I am not happy right now. Like, I'm starting to fall out of love with owning a first version car rapidly. And I knew when I bought it, I'm like, this is the first version of the R1S. Maybe I'll have some problems.
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i i don't think i fully appreciated how much this sucks that i i now feel like my car is unreliable in some pretty key areas um and is losing things like air conditioning like i'm pretty sure we solved that problem a long time ago um but no uh air conditioning also broken as well as the seat being too smart to move i am really tired of beta testing cars
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Whatever my next car is, I think it's first of all, I think it might be sooner than I expect. But second of all, I think I just want to get something from a regular car company again, like an established car company that like I'm just I'm tired of the flux. And I think even though I love the features of this car in a lot of other ways.
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This rapidly erases those gains in my head, like having to deal with service, especially dealing with bad service, like what this is turning out to be. To make a good car ownership experience, yeah, the car needs to be good. It also needs to have almost no problems during ownership, especially when they're new. This car is a year old.
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It should not be having any of these problems, let alone all of these problems. after one year a car mostly shouldn't have problems in its first few years besides the basics of like you know maintain the very basics of the car like the brakes and the windshield wipers and stuff like that and the tires you know that that should be all you have to do for a car in the first couple years uh
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and so you shouldn't have these problems at all but if you do have problems you need the service and servicing infrastructure to be there and to be near you like this is already you know having to drive to brooklyn like it's driving to the service center will take me an hour and a half on a good day like and and i'm and i'm in like the worst part of brooklyn where there's nothing around it's all warehouses and it's terrible and like god knows how many times i'm going to have to do that too um so it's already like a rough service situation um
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And, you know, to have the service then be backed all the way out 10 weeks when you ask for it, like, that's... I'm going back to a regular car company. Like, I can't... But what would you buy?
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I think I'd be looking probably at like probably BMW again or maybe even Polestar. But that's also a little bit too new. I think I would have the same problems with Polestar.
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I'm going to shortly stop needing that because I'm going to shortly stop qualifying for my permit and lose the permit.
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That's right. Right. So that's why I might be in the market maybe in six months or something. I might be in the market for something that is smaller or at least... Like, you know, one of the options I'm looking at the BMW iX, which I think is actually a very attractive option. It's not an attractive vehicle, but it is a very attractive option.
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Looking at that, looking at, you know, there's, you know, Hyundai stuff. There's Volvo stuff. There's a bunch of things. Many of them have the first year problem or like the first couple of years problem. And again, I just – I think I'd be looking at maybe something a little more established. The really sad thing is I really would not, I don't think, buy a Tesla right now.
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Like for lots of political reasons, that just feels very bad to me. But I see why people do because when you look at the numbers of just like how much range does it offer and then what are you paying to get that car?
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sure but yeah i i think i'm gonna like well let me see i mean let me see what happens with with the rivian but like i like i feel like i can't depend on it to like i'm gonna take a long trip soon and i feel like can i depend on it to get there i'm i'm gonna get there without air conditioning but you know which is it's a already a problem and i probably can't have any other place service it because it's probably all special and proprietary and like so like i can anybody else replace the air conditioning whatever i probably not
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um so like i don't know this is why like i'm getting i'm falling off the rivian train really fast right now because it like i'm having all these problems pile up over the last couple of months that are now going to be difficult to get fixed like that's oh not not happy you gotta wait to get all this fixed before you can even like trade in or resell this thing probably too
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Yeah, right? I wouldn't do a private sale. I would do like, you know, a dealer thing or something. But yeah, I don't know. Anyway, so there might be some turbulence there in the next few months. We'll see. Hopefully, I can last longer than that.
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Yeah, because it almost didn't. I was almost stranded on the last trip I took.
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Honestly, I mean, and fortunately, like, if that happens, I got the early pre-order pricing on it. So, like, I actually, like, I looked up, like, you know, roughly what the resale value of it would be. And, like, I would not be losing that much at all from what I paid a year ago. So it actually would not be that bad. But honestly, I'm thinking that direction because, like, so I'm in three days.
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I'm driving a few hundred miles upstate. I can't really take TIFF's I-3 conveniently. Also, she needs it. Like, she's not coming. I'm driving to go see Goose in concert. So there's no way TIFF's going to that. Anyway, so I'm driving a few hundred miles in three days. And I need my car to work.
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And that's like to already know that, OK, I'm not going to have any air conditioning probably on the trip. That's that sucks enough. But like to not even know, like when I have to plug in somewhere like am I is it going to charge? Maybe. Is something else going to go wrong with it? Maybe. Like, I don't know. I'm I'm feeling very bad about this right now.
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Honestly, I'm thinking about renting something. But to rent a car, I'm going to be gone for three, four days. That's like $600 or something. It's not a small amount of money.
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I think, like, you know, I certainly feel like a fool. I felt like a fool, like, you know, driving around a dented truck for, you know, a few months or whatever, or weeks, whatever that was. I would feel extra foolish renting a car because I can't trust mine to drive a few hundred miles reliably.
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i don't think it's a far stretch for you to throw money to fix it to throw money at a problem to fix it so i think this is right in your wheelhouse this is what i would do yeah but what's then like when i have to drive to thanksgiving in you know about 11 weeks like what's future marco's problem and then christmas after that and like it's i need my car to work i need like i i can't ah i'm so i'm like i'm unreasonably angry at this rivian experience right now
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I'm happy with this. To me, the retention of most of the things on it, I'm happy with that. And USB-A, it's been very helpful to have USB-A ports on lots of things long into the USB-C transition. I do think it's now time that we can drop them on most things.
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I mean, honestly, that is very like I've in, you know, various, you know, gaming laptops and stuff. I do use other mice besides Apple's magic mouse and other people in my family. We have mice all over the house. I have so far not found a compelling case for the custom RF dongles. To me, there's a compelling case for wired mice, especially on a gaming PC situation or just a PC situation in general.
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There's a compelling case for wired mice, and there's a compelling case for Bluetooth mice. And the other options I just have not found to be worth their hassles. Like, I know they're lower latency and I know there are technical advantages.
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Yeah, maybe add a year or two to that, because if you look at the article about the Samsung and Stanford screen, this is less a commercial product, more and more of a research effort. But hey, if they can figure out how to manufacture it affordably, maybe this will be the next technology.
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And so to give a reasonable timeline for a Vision Pro with three times the display density, hopefully for the same low, low price of $3,500, 2028, 2029. Maybe those are the years, but keep an eye on it. But it's good to see some story out there about displays that could substantially increase the pixel density of a high-end device.
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Yeah, it's another one of the great advantages of corporate malware that is constantly scanning your computer. When something like this comes out, it's not like the people who make this corporate scanning software are on top of the latest advances in macOS. And so when iPhone mirroring comes out, they're not like, we've got a new version that accounts for that. They probably never even tested it.
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But users are going to find out when they, you know, oh, I'd like to use iPhone mirroring on my work Mac. And they do that, and then suddenly they've essentially revealed every app that's installed on their iPhone to the corporate scanning thing, which maybe is not what they wanted to do.
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Setting aside that even if there's nothing on there that you wanted to hide, now the scanner is going to say, well, look at all these new apps that this person has installed. And maybe someone comes and pays you a visit and says you shouldn't be installing personal apps on your work computer and yada yada.
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Although I do find it interesting that this is, you know, secretly how this is implementing these little sort of empty app stubs that are enough of an app
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to be recognized as an app and to have an icon and a creator or whatever but they have no actual executable code in them and that's how they implemented the thing where mac os is aware of the apps on your phone right instead of just communicating over the network they spray a bunch of files into the file system and say here's a bunch of apps that are on your uh phone uh interesting implementation but be aware of that yeah this is a little bit older story but i thought it was worth noting if you haven't discovered this already maybe don't use iphone mirroring on your corporate mac
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Fine. Yeah, so Quinn's read here, this is a thing. This is the first thing that I heard from normal people in my life when iOS 18 came out way back when because I was trying to get people to update on day one instead of waiting for that time when Apple pushes the update on everybody. If you look at the sort of non-tech enthusiast world, what do people know or think about iOS 18?
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The answer is the Photos app is bad. Don't update to iOS 18 because the Photos app is bad. Here's all the reasons that the Photos app is bad. I put this item in here because I think we in the tech nerd sphere are not talking too much about that. There was a little bit of news about that back in the betas when Apple was changing it in response to negative feedback during the betas.
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But now that it's been released, I don't hear a lot of people in our circles complaining about it. My personal opinion is also that it is not... I don't think it's better than the one that came before, but I don't think it's that much worse.
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But let me tell you, if you just go to TikTok, go to Instagram, on someone else's account, just get out of your world of recommendations and look at what regular people are saying. First of all, the fact that regular people are saying anything about iOS 18 is probably bad for Apple. Because what Apple wants is just like, oh, my iPhone got better, and they shouldn't know the number 18.
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They shouldn't care that there's an iOS update. Maybe they care about the new emoji, which is a big driver for people actually updating their phone or whatever. Regular people fear OS updates because they think it's going to break stuff or whatever. So as far as regular people are concerned, no news is good news for Apple. But that's not what's happening.
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iOS 18, people know the number 18, and they know it because everyone seems to hate the Photos app. And I wanted to talk about here, first of all, to hear what you all think of the Photos app. It sounds like Casey's kind of where I am, where it's like, I don't hate it, but I don't think it's a big upgrade either.
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But second, to figure out what it is that regular people hate so much about the Photos app. I have some ideas. But anyway, Marco, what do you, before we get into what other people think, what do you personally think about the iOS 18 Photos app, if anything?
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Yeah, yeah. So what I think most people dislike, and people in my life, my daughter refused to update to iOS 18 for ages because she had heard that the Photos app was bad. She hadn't even experienced it herself. But by the time I even mentioned it to her already, and it was like two days after it's released already, she'd heard from her friend's circle, don't update to iOS 18.
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The Photos app is bad. I think she's since updated and she still maintains that it's bad. She hasn't articulated specifically what it is about it that she doesn't like it, but I have a few ideas.
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So first of all, one of the subgenres you will find in the world of Instagram, TikTok, whatever, or in the teen circles or regular people circles about here's how you can fix photos on iOS 18 so it's not so bad. And what they're basically telling you to do with a super secret hack is like, did you know things are configurable?
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So in iOS 18 Photos, you can configure – I forget where it is probably in settings. You can configure lots of the stuff to remove things that you don't care about, to change the order of things, to pin certain collections to the top. If the default setup is not to your liking and it's showing you things you're not interested in, you can change that.
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So this is a super secret hack that there's a million videos about telling you, here's how you can fix it. Which makes me think that one of the things about the iOS 18 Photos app that people don't like is they launch the Photos app, not to do as Margaret was suggesting, to use memories or whatever, but they just want to launch it to look at some photos they've taken.
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I think that's what most people do with the Photos app is, I took some photos, let me look at them. Let me show them to someone else. Let me open it up and grab that one photo. They just want to open the app and get a photo that they're thinking of from today, from last week or whatever. That's what they're doing. But the iOS 18 Photos app has other plans. It's like, you know what?
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Here's a bunch of carousels with memories and trips and whatever. And they're like, what is all this? I just want to get my photo. And the fact that the iOS 18 Photos app got rid of like the bottom tab bar and replaced it with this like... Half of the screen is this other stuff that's not your photos.
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Yes, you can see a grid of your photos, but also have you considered albums and shared albums and media types and people and pets and recent days and memories and like all that stuff? They're like, that's not what I want. Why is it taking up half of my screen? And then the UI is like.
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Well, if you just scroll the grid of photos, eventually we make that bottom thing disappear and it becomes like a floating tab bar at the bottom. So look, it's just like your old photos app. This is one of the things they didn't bait. It was, they said, okay, we're not going to take up half your screen with the stuff that you don't care about.
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If you just ignore it and scroll, then you just have a grid of icons like it used to be. And you have this tab bar with, you know, years, months or whatever. But the fact that that big thing is there annoys people, right? The fact that they have to like scroll and it behaves unlike any other kind of app.
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People are kind of used to an app where there's either a top bar and a bottom bar, like a phone app. And there's a middle region that you scroll. And this whole thing of like, well, the bottom half of the screen is a bunch of stuff and the top half of the screen is some other stuff. And then if you scroll... If you scroll, the bottom half of the screen resists you. It's like, I can't push it down.
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But if you push down a little bit more, then it surrenders and becomes a floating toolbar. That's not a paradigm that exists as a common idiom in the iPhone world. It's something that Apple made up for iOS, the 18 photos. It's not familiar to people. It's weird. It's weird that the app like resists you hiding that bottom part. Like you push down, it doesn't go away.
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You have to push down a second time. Like try it. Go ahead. Open up photos now and see the whole bottom white section below your grid of icons. Push it down with your thumb in a single motion. No matter how far you push in that single swipe, it will never go away. Like push, push, push, push, push. Your thumb will go off the end of the phone and it will never go away.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Ah, but push a second time and now it disappears. And so like it's fighting you, right? So I think, A whole bunch of the resentments about iOS 18 photos is there's this white bottom section that is not my photos that I don't want to see that fights me every time I try to get rid of it. So I think there's a lesson in that for Apple.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And then the second thing, of course, is what's in that white section? A whole bunch of crap. And the fact that you can configure it is one of the features I actually like about the new photos. You can configure to put the things you're actually interested in near the top.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, that's a super secret tip that you can learn from all these TikTok. Like the feedback said about the recents item, most people will never change the defaults. Like they won't even discover that or whatever. That's why this is a super cool tip. Obviously, anyone listening to the show probably knows that's there and they've already configured it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But still, that just lets you sort of minimize the damage of like, well, if I have to endure this white bottom section in the photo screen, at least I'll put the stuff that I care about on the top and delete the stuff that I don't care about. But that's why I say, for me personally, the iOS 18 Photos app, it hasn't...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's not better than the previous one because I'm, like most people, going in there just to find photos. The thing I wish, my personal wish for the Photos app is, first of all, I would get rid of that whole, like, hey, you can't get rid of this bottom part until you try a second time. Ask me a second time, and then I'll turn it into a toolbar.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Like, there's nothing wrong with just having a toolbar. Just have a toolbar, right? I would love it if that toolbar is customizable because the main – my main complaint with dealing with photos on my phone is –
Accidental Tech Podcast
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whenever i'm doing anything with photos if i am picking photos like in a photo picker like the whatever the system photo picker when you're in some other app and it says here pick a photo to put here if i'm picking a photo or if i'm trying to file a photo away like put this photo into an album In both of those cases, I am always, almost always pulling from or putting into like three albums.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And in the little white region thing, you can pin them. So I have pin collections, favorites, recently saved, destiny, profile photos, contact photos, and memes. Those are the ones that I use most frequently. That's where I'm pulling from or putting into. And that's great for pin collections on the screen. But in the system photo picker, it's like, here's all your albums.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Have fun scrolling through them. It's like 500 albums. and they're alphabetical, sort of, and there's some at the top, if you've used recently, and it's just like, I wish you could just say, look, these five, just always have them be in the top. Like, kind of like the, you know, open save dialog box before you expand everything. It's like, just, you always pick from these ones.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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These will always be at the top. You will never have to scroll through the list of albums looking for memes or looking for the M section, trying to remember where the icons, where's my destiny folder? Scroll, scroll, scroll, Ds, I don't pass the Ds, scroll back. Just always put them at the top. Photos on iOS 18 does not give me that experience.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I still frequently in other apps find myself scrolling through my gigantic list of albums trying to find the Destiny album because it's somewhere in the Ds and I scroll past it and it annoys me. So that was the same before and it's the same after, so it's not a change. I do like having pin collections, but I hate the fact that the little white region I have trouble getting rid of. But anyway.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I don't think most people are, like, into the nuances of user interface. They're just like, somebody moved my stuff. I used to know where things were in the Photos app, and now I don't. The tab bar that was at the bottom isn't there anymore. There's this other thing that I don't understand that turns into a tab bar. even things like, I mean, they changed this in the beta.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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How do I change from showing my personal library or the shared library? That's a more esoteric feature, but they had that buried before too when they fixed it in the beta. Still, do you two know where it is? It's pretty well hidden. If you don't know where to find that, you have to, to get to it, you have to push the white bottom region away because you don't want that anymore.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So one push, no, you didn't make it right. Second push, you push it away. And then the up and down arrow keys to the left of the years, months, and all thing, hit the up and down arrow keys thing. And then you can pick, and what does that mean? Like sorting or something? Then you can pick personal library, shared library, or both libraries.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And it used to be in the upper right, and now it's in the lower left. So anyway. Everything is moved, and I think the app is fighting people from the main thing that they want to do, which is just show me all my photos. Now, it could help people there. I think it's trying to say, you have too many photos. If we show you all your photos, you'll never be able to find anything.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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What if we put them into a grid where we just pick the ones that we think are important photos instead of showing you them all, like the grid where they're all different sizes and stuff? What if we do that? What if we show you collections with what we think are the good photos, and people are like, just get that out of my face?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Just the people just want to scroll their photos, scroll, scroll, scroll. Maybe they want to go to months and years and that should still be there, but they just want to do that. Everything else in the app is getting in their way. And it kind of amazes me that the backlash about iOS 18 is essentially you change the interface to the photos app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's not like my photos are gone or there's something worse about the photos. It's just like when I go to find my photos, I'm now frustrated with my phone. I do wonder if by the time iOS 20 comes along, and they change it again, people are going to be like, why did they change it? The Photos app was fine. They didn't need to change it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Like a new generation of people get used to the iOS 18 photos and they change it again and it annoys them. But really, I was really surprised by the backlash against this, the continuing backlash against this. Because it's not like a high-profile thing. It's not like controversial or salacious or whatever. It is just like you changed my user interface.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And it shows how much people treat their phones like cameras because the things that people use all the time are the Messages app and I guess also the Photos app. They take pictures with their phone. They go and look at them. They send them to people in Messages. And any change to that app is a problem. So I find this fascinating. And I think...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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iOS 18 photos, like, I don't give it a failing grade because I don't think it got much worse than before. It does some things better, does some things worse. I'm going to say it's a wash, but it is an example of like, if you're going to change, fundamentally change how a heavily used app on iOS works, it better be
Accidental Tech Podcast
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either way better, or it better look and work like the old one unless you do something. An example would be the Messages app when they added the pinned things to the top. If you didn't pin anything, it just looked like the old Messages app. And if you did pin things like I did, and you wanted to pin them, it is an improvement.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So I think Messages app has improved over time, getting more capabilities, but also not ruining it for everybody else. But iOS 18 photos... Not doing well. Again, Apple would hope that they would never hear the word iOS 18 on TikTok, but they will. I should have put this in the regular show because we're going to get feedback about it. I don't know if you two tried it. In the iOS 18 Photos app,
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That thing where you can't push the white area down on the first try only happens if after you launch the app, you swipe up by two millimeters before you swipe down. If you launch it, don't touch the screen at all and immediately swipe down. You can do it in a single swipe.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But if you launch the app, like force quit it, launch the app, pull up two millimeters, release the screen and then try to pull down, it will fight you. We're going to get feedback about that, but that's my own fault for waiting too long.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Scroll, push your finger upward on the screen for two seconds, lift it off. So you see more of the white area. Now put your finger on the screen and try to push down. You will not be able to do it in a single swipe.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I thought it did it all the time because I guess when, like if you have the app like running and you're looking at that wide area, I was just like filling around with it. If you've, if you mess with the white area at all, it you're in that mode. But if on a fresh launch before you've done that, if the first thing you do is swipe down, you can do it in a single swipe.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah. The cellular modem chip is also coming and we've talked about it before, but this is, yeah, this is the wifi and Bluetooth chip, which, so one interesting aspect is how much of both of those things can they potentially build into the package of the SOC? Like,
Accidental Tech Podcast
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can you move like the wi-fi bluetooth or cell modem stuff into the soc can you put some of it on die most of the time for radio frequency reasons or whatever you can't but could it be in the same package like basically can you get lower power and smaller footprint by apple doing this themselves because they can incorporate things into the package that's that's a separate question putting that aside for now the the reason i'm interested in this particular thing is like wi-fi and bluetooth like no one's super excited about the chips for that like you just you just want it to work or whatever but
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Apple doing it themselves. Maybe they save money. You don't have to pay Broadcom for those chips because, you know, they have their own profit margin. So if you do it yourself, you get them cheaper. You can make exactly the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip that you need for your devices that only has the features that you need.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Pros and cons to that, already Apple doesn't put the latest and greatest Wi-Fi standard in all their devices. I think the phones have Wi-Fi 7, but the Macs don't, for example, right? If I'm getting that right. And Apple tends to not be a super early adopter on all these things, although they're usually on time with it for the phones.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But the real question is, we just talked about software, but this is a hardware thing. When Apple decides that they're going to stop buying some hardware component from somebody else and do it themselves. How do we feel about that in terms of are we excited and optimistic about it or are we fearful? Because I think that's changed over the years. And especially with hardware, it's a tough call.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I think I was talking about something on Mastodon with somebody and they were like, Apple's never going to do XYZ because they get all their stuff from this other third-party manufacturer and they're the best. And one of the things I replied was, well, Apple used to buy its CPUs from a third-party manufacturer, too. And they were the best for a while. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But sometimes when Apple decides to do a hardware thing itself, it knocks it out of the park. Apple Silicon. Home run. Right? They decided we're going to do the chips ourself for our phones, for our iPads, and eventually for our Macs. Previously, the phone did not use an Apple chip, right? And I think maybe the first iPad probably had Apple chip. I forget. When was the first iPad?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Was it before the A4? Yeah, A4. All right. Anyway, they used to buy the chips from other people for all their products, and they slowly but surely said, no, we're going to do that in-house. And they just destroyed it. Amazing job.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So you would think that any time you hear, Apple's going to stop buying some piece of hardware or some hardware component from a third party, and they're going to do it themselves, you'd be like... You're an Apple fan. You must be excited about that because Apple's so good at hardware.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And yet, if I heard, for example, Apple is going to start making its own, well, I was going to say SSDs, but that's a complicated issue. We're discussing the best shows. They're going to make their own cellular modem. They're going to make their own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips. My first thought is, I don't know if I'm optimistic about that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Because unlike the CPU and stuff where there's lots of room for innovation and excitement, you basically just want Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to work and work with the latest standards. And I worry that the potential for harm is high and the potential for good is low. Because even if they knock this one out of the park...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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They saved a few watts of energy and they saved a little bit of space in their phones. But if they do anything wrong, oh, that's the iPhone 17. That's the one that can't do Wi-Fi right. That's the one that has even more Bluetooth problems than usual. The cell modem. They did use Intel cell modems instead of Qualcomm for a while.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And it was like, did you get the iPhone with the Intel modem or did yours come with the Qualcomm modem? Because the Qualcomm ones were better. That wasn't even Apple. That was just two third parties. And everybody knew in the nerd circle, you want the one with the Qualcomm modem because it's better. than the one with the Intel modem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And then Apple bought that Intel modem business and is trying to build not to do their own thing. So I'm looking at this Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip and I'm like... It could be okay, I guess. I see the potential upsides. It's not like they're going to pass the savings on to us, so don't forget about that, right? It's just going to increase their margins.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It could be a little bit smaller and lower power, but the downside is that Broadcom's been making Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips forever. They're probably really good at it, and the bottom line is their chips work with everything because everyone knows that Broadcom chips are in everything, and so if you use a Broadcom Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, it's going to work with all the... You know what I mean?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Whereas Apple... does their own thing, there's a potential interoperability thing, uh, issue there. So I am really nervous about, about the wifi and Bluetooth chip. The cell modem, they said they were going to debut in like the iPhone SE or whatever. Like they're going to roll it out and like not the flagship products in case it's a disaster, which makes sense to me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But the fact that they're mentioning this one with the iPhone 17 would have this chip in it potentially. That's, that's, That's the show. Like, you put a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip in the iPhone 17, it better be perfect. Like, it better be perfect or better than the Broadcom chips. And I'm not sure this one will. I don't know. How do you guys feel about the prospect of Apple doing this?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's a special section of the spec that says, on flaky problems that customers will never be able to solve. It tells you what you have to implement. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Well, you're forgetting their most recent effort in this area because it hasn't shipped. Their most recent effort is their many years long effort to make their own cell modems. They bought Intel's cell modem business, the business that made the cell modem that nobody wanted on the iPhone 7.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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They bought that business and they had plans to make their own cellular chip that they're going to put in their phones and they are behind schedule and presumably that means because they're not able to do it well. And even though that hasn't shipped, it's unfair to judge them on that. Like, well, when they ship it, it'll be good. But this is very relevant to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's like they have been trying for years and years to do something very similar. And they've essentially been internally failing, not shipping what they had, aiming to get a cell motor with these standards. Oh, now we can't do it. So now the target is moved.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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50 and three days, not 50 in three days, just to clarify.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Now we need to make sure we have 5G, but we're not going to be able to do millimeter wave because, you know, like they're having trouble shipping. with it. Maybe we don't see this internally. Maybe they were, you know, working on Apple Silicon for the max for years and years and kept delaying it or whatever because it was more secret. But the fact they're doing the cell modem is not secret.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Everybody knows they've been doing it and everyone knows that they are behind what we what seemed to be their earlier schedule. So I mean, that's good in that they're not shipping something bad. They're like, we're going to keep buying. They renewed their contract, as we discussed in the show ages ago.
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I know it just sounds similar for people who are listening. I just want people to know that my birthday has already passed. Yeah, I heard in. Sorry. I am now the big 5-0, really enjoying those holidays.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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They renewed their contract with Qualcomm for several more years just to say, look, we need to cover our bases. We're obviously not ready with our cell modem. Qualcomm still makes the best one, even though we hate each other and have sued each other. Let's sign a deal and say, okay, we'll keep buying stuff from Qualcomm. But everybody knows Apple wants to stop doing business with Qualcomm.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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They just can't. They've been failing to get out of that relationship because their own efforts have been... not going well. So that gives me a lot of pause here. So like, yes, yeah, part of the recent experience is the Mac transition. And they've done that transition multiple times, 68K to PowerPC, PowerPC to Intel, Intel to Apple Silicon. And they've just done amazingly every time.
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So they have lots of institutional experience. But Their institutional experience swapping out wireless communication chips I think is far spottier. And the little information we do have is that they're having trouble. So that is another reason I'm feeling nervous about it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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retirement catch-up savings contributions wait you're talking about the tomato uh condiment or is this like a catch hyphen up ah thank you up um it was that boston accent to uh to certain retirement accounts the irs says you can put in a little extra if you're 50 if you're trying to catch up for lost time i actually did that last year because i was 50 last year as well uh for one day
Accidental Tech Podcast
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One of them was specifically from the cell modem when they did the Intel one and they shipped that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, they're pretty good at making sure they're not going to ship something really bad. But part of my nervousness about this is like, I don't want them to do it and just have it be... pretty much the same, maybe with a few problems. Like, as a consumer, that doesn't benefit me at all. It gives Apple a few more cents per iPhone, but I don't care. Again, they're not passing that savings on to me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Like, what I'm looking at this with a little side eye is like, why are you doing this? Like, what's the upside versus the potential downside? And the upsides seem like they're all for Apple, and the downsides seem like they're all, we're exposed to them. And I agree with you that they're not like... with the cell modem that they haven't shipped.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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If anything that goes into the phone, especially like the flagship iPhone, they're gonna make sure it is at least okay. They're not going to ship something terrible, we hope, right? Which is why they've not been able to ship anything.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But they are doing things like the rumors for the cell modem of like, they're gonna make one without millimeter wave support and they'll only ship it in the lesser phones. That doesn't excite me. Why would I be excited about a cost savings for Apple that exposes me to potential risk and that they're not even willing to do on their flagship phone because they haven't been able to do that?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, I'm still kind of neutral on. What's the upside? One of the things I fear is that it's not going to make it more likely that the Macs have, like, the latest Wi-Fi standard than the current one, because, again, someone can confirm this, but I believe the M4 Macs don't have Wi-Fi 7, but the phones do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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If Apple made its own chips, would that make it a higher chance that when Wi-Fi 8 comes out that it's across all the lines? I don't think it does. I don't think it increases any. So, like, I'm looking for the silver lining. I'm looking for, like, what is the upside for me as the consumer? And I don't see it, and I just see some minor risks.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And I agree with you that the risk of the phone is probably low, but other devices mentioned in this rumor, Apple TV HomePod Mini. I don't want my Apple TV to have crappy, well, my Apple TV is connected to the ethernet, but I don't want it to have crappy Bluetooth, right? I just, I don't know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I'm not, I put this in here because I'm just, it kind of, it's notable to myself that I'm not enthused about the potential for Apple taping over a piece of hardware when in some respects I should be because of Apple Silicon and their recent advances. But when it comes to this specific sub-genre, I'm a little iffy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Um, but yeah, no, it was fine. Birthday was good. Um, Christmas was good. Everything was, everything here is fine.
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Although you're mentioning like optimistic, like, oh, here's a problem that I currently have and they might be able to solve it. And like, I see where you're going with that, especially like the H1 chip. Like in general, I would say that the AirPods connecting is better than Bluetooth pairing. Like because Apple added their proprietary thing instead.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And I have the same problem that one of the problems you're describing is like, I try to do airdrop. I'm in a room with like, I've got my phone in my hand. I've got a computer in front of me and I got a computer over there. And sometimes I want to airdrop something with my phone to the computer over there.
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And I would love to know what it is that determines whether I can see that computer on my phone. Yes, I have it set to like contacts only or everybody like I have everyone's in our contacts. I'm doing it among family members. I've even done in the situation where I've logged into my account on that computer and I'm on my same Apple ID on my phone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I'm trying to airdrop it to the computer I'm sitting in front of and it just doesn't see it. It sees the other computer across the room, but not that one. And all sorts of like airdrop issues that aren't solved by like banging the phones together with the iOS 18 thing or whatever. Is that a problem that Apple will be able to solve by doing its own Wi-Fi chip?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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You're thinking like, oh, stuff like AirDrop, they could make that better. I'm thinking, is that a software issue or is that a hardware issue? Like you can pin a lot of dreams on like, well, if Apple made the Wi-Fi chip, I wouldn't have that AirDrop problem. But I'm thinking that AirDrop problem is a software thing, not a hardware thing.
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And I don't know, like, it's hard to know where the blame lies, but, like, when there's new hardware, the optimistic take is any problem I'm currently having that involves that hardware could be improved because Apple will have complete control over it. And I kind of feel, especially when there's software in the mix... that's like 50-50, whether that's going to get better or get worse.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That's part of the rumor, and it's not about cost. It's just about, like, that Apple will finally do it because part of them making their own hardware is like, well, let's make it so it works in all our products and everything. Now, Apple uses an excuse to be like, we couldn't put cellular in our Macs because reasons X, Y, but now that we make our own chip, we totally can't.
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It's like, you could have before, too. But anyway, whatever it takes. Yeah, whatever reasons they give, who cares? We just want it there. All right. I agree with that, but we're talking about the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, and they already have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Yeah, the cell mode and chip, if it actually ships and it makes them put it in a Mac, I will count that as a huge win.
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And if it doesn't hose the iPhone, that's good, too. Yeah. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, Macs already have that. I'm a little nervous.
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if they put it like only in the mac i might be a little bit worried only in the apple tv yeah only in the home pod that's the worst i mean that's yeah well speaking of uh your confidence in apple making hardware this next item will test your faith oh no
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George Costanza technique. That's exactly right. Tuna salad on rye.
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It's been 15 years. What's another year or two? What are you doing, Apple?
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We'll try to find that interview. I think it was at WWDC. But just to be clear... I think he just asked something like, what do you think of the Magic Mouse? He didn't say anything bad about it. He didn't say... Well, it was pointed. Tim Cook, the Magic Mouse sucks. Why?
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He didn't say... It wasn't like a... It was just merely like... It was using this example of a product that maybe people don't care about too much. Like, how much do you really think about the Magic Mouse? It's just kind of like an aside and also random. And if I was... You know, if it was not Tim Cook. But if I was in Tim Cook's position but not Tim Cook, you can usually say...
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Of all the products we make, the Magic Mouse is not one of the most important. Like, it's low on the list, right? It's good that we make it fine, whatever, but... obviously, you know, with the iPhone at the top, you got to go way down that list before you get to the Magic Mouse, right? That's the reality. Like, that's why it's been around for 15 years. Nobody really cares. It's not a big deal.
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It's not a bad mouse. Some people don't like it because it's low profile. Some people love it because it's low profile. Marco loves it because you can swipe on it. Like, I don't have any hatred for the Magic Mouse. I don't think. There's no, like, iOS 18 photos hatred for the Magic Mouse out there. It's just, like, it's not for everybody. But it's fine, right?
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And it's been around 15 years, so it's probably due for a redesign. The fact that it was mentioned at all in such a public forum maybe made him say, hey, Magic Mouse, we should update that once every few decades, right? And they said, oh, yeah, no, I guess, or whatever. But here's the thing. I read that very differently, but go ahead. Well, anyway, like the Wi-Fi chip thing. Okay.
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How do you feel... confidence wise about today's apple designing a new mouse setting aside the fact that you love the current one marco just in general like do you think they'll do a good job on a mouse because i think human interface devices that are fit in your hand is not one of apple's strengths currently let me i'll get to that in a
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Do people hate the Magic Mouse? That's what Tim is thinking to himself. Marques probably doesn't like the Magic Mouse, but again, I don't think there's this iOS 18 Photos type hatred out there. For computer nerds, a lot of people don't like it, but then you just ignore it and buy a third-party mouse, and so it's not that big of a deal.
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Here's the thing, though. There's not a giant movement out there to hate the Magic Mouse. There's just the baseline level of dislike that's been there since they introduced that mouse 15 years ago. Mostly only among computer nerds and other people are like, yeah, take it or leave it. And the fact that Tim Cook would be unaware of that, I don't think it's a thing that he needs to be aware of.
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What he should be aware of is like, which products have we not updated in a decade and a half? Maybe put them on a list. But I don't think there's like, can you believe Tim Cook didn't know that everyone hates the Magic Mouse? I don't think everyone does hate the Magic Mouse. I don't think it's actually...
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Even if it was incredibly hated, how many Macs even come with a Magic Mouse, percentage-wise, of the Macs sold? They come with trackpads. It was people buy laptops. It is so far beneath the thing that he should be concerned about. On the same token, he should update it because it's 15 years old.
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What Marques was talking about is what all tech nerd people know is like, oh, well, that mouse is not... A lot of enthusiasts don't like that mouth. They like it more of Logitech style, more buttons, higher profile, more quote-unquote ergonomic, depending on how you... Like, it's not well-loved in tech nerd circles.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But in regular people circles, they don't know it exists because they all buy laptops. Like, that's the story, right? So... To be clear, I think the mouse should be updated. It's been around for a long time. I personally don't like it. I think it should be updated. It's time to... 15 years is long enough to say, do you have a new idea about how Apple could make a mouse?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Because Apple has done a not too big number of mice in the history of all their computers, from the Apple IIs to the Macs. There haven't been that many Apple mice. There's been some good ones and bad ones, and there's the hockey puck one. There was the mouse with the little ball that got clogged all the time on the top, right? Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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the Mighty Mouse or whatever, but there haven't been that many mouse shapes. So Apple is not hasty about that, but I think it's time for them to reconsider. And so again, we're back to today's Apple. Making a new mouse. How do you feel that's going to go?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Another thing to consider, by the way, is that this weird phenomenon... Obviously, all the laptops don't come with mice. They just have the trackpads, right? But at this stage... I think, was it most of Apple's desktops also don't come with a mouse? The Mini doesn't come with one. I guess the iMac comes with one. Oh, that's right. The Mac Pro does. I forget because I don't use it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But they don't come in the box. I had forgotten that the Mac Pro does come with one in the box. Of all the computers to not come with a mouse, you would think it would be the Mac Pro, but it does actually come with a mouse in the actual box, which again, maybe you can configure to the trackpad. The iMac does too. It's in the box. The iMac makes the most sense because it's color matched.
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The whole point is it's all-in-one. You get everything you need. But Mac Mini and Mac Studio, no mouse, right? Correct.
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it's a separate i mean you can attach it you can during checkout it will ask you to buy one but the mac mini and the mac studio box do not have a place for a mouse or a trackpad inside them so that's that's half of apple's laptops desktop they didn't even put put a mouse in the box because it's bring your own and arguably the mac pro should also be like that although i guess the box is so big but
Accidental Tech Podcast
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They have plenty of room to put a mouse or a trackpad inside.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But anyway, it is odd. Back in the day, if you bought a Mac that wasn't a laptop, it came with a mouse. And today, 50-50.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Obviously, when you go into percentages of people who buy the things, but it is like it is interesting. And again, with the option, I don't even know what the default is, if there is one. But I bet a lot of people do choose the trackpad just because like Casey, like they like that better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I think there was another rumor report from Korea that actually did make a somewhat direct comparison to the Logitech mouse saying that Apple's new mouse would be more ergonomic, more like the Logitech mice. But using the example of the laptops, here's the thing. Fixing what was wrong with the laptops, yes, it kind of sort of required them to make the laptops a little bit boxier.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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They got rid of the, I think, more attractive Johnny Ive design case that had the shallow curve towards the edges and everything. because they just needed a little bit more room. And that was the change we wanted them to make.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But practically speaking, if you show these laptops to just an average person who doesn't know the minutia of Apple stuff, they're not going to think they look radically different. They had to change the MacBook Pros in such a subtle way that is maybe obvious to us because we're obsessed with the fine details of them, but it still basically looks like a laptop. It's not that much thicker.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's not that much more slab-sided. It does have more holes in the side of it, but other than that, they didn't have to change it a lot. They can't make a change that fine to the Magic Mouse and make any substantial difference. Even if they just do what you said, is like make it a little bit taller... they have to make it taller enough that it's going to be uglier, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And look a little bit more like, I think the problem with the mouse is they want to look like a beautiful object when no one is using it. The current one does. If you can't just do a change of a few millimeters like they did in the MacBook Pro and say, see, we solved it. If they do that, I guess they fix the charging port location and people stop complaining.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But if they do that, they haven't really changed the Magic Mouse. And the rumors seem to be that they're trying to...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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make it quote-unquote more ergonomic so they can't add one millimeter to it they have to add substantially and i think once you start adding substantially you're into that situation you you highlighted it very well you come to this question real fast which is symmetrical or not symmetrical because once you start making it bigger you're making it bigger so it can fit into the negative space of someone's hand and you have to ask which hand
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You could always make it right in the left model. That's a thing Apple could do. It's not a popular thing that people do, but it's a thing they could do it, right? But once you start making it bigger, you're like, what am I raising this mouse up into? You're raising it up into a hand, and hands are not symmetrical, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And so if you make a larger symmetrical mouse, which Apple did, the original Mac mouse was much larger and also symmetrical, you have a problem there. Like when they did the ADB mice, right? They were lower profile, both like the original ADB mouse that was like two flat surfaces and the rounded one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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they were starting to get low because a tall mouse should fit into the space of a single hand, which means it's going to be... Even if you do like my Microsoft mouse that I have now, it's mostly symmetrical, but it's got that thing on the side for your thumb, your right thumb to be on, right? And your fingers of your right hand go... It's not symmetrical.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's very difficult to make a mouse that is both ergonomic and also symmetrical. So... I don't I feel like they won't have the they won't be willing to make their mouse unattractive.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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to make it ergonomically good and merely making a tall mouse that's symmetrical will not satisfy anybody because the people who wanted a more ergonomic mouse are going to say, well, this isn't it because it doesn't even recognize the fact that my hand is not symmetrical. It's just as big. It's like the, you know, a big, it's like the original Mac mouse, a big box in my hand. How is this better?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Like might as well just go back to the low one. Cause at least when I lay my hand flat and use it, my hand becomes more symmetrical than when it's gripping. Right? So this is an interesting test of their industrial design. How,
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how ugly will they be willing to make this mouse as an object to make it better as an actual input device and i think with the macbook pros they were able to make it like a tiny bit less attractive for a massive functional benefit and i don't think they'll be able to make that trade because if you make it a tiny bit less attractive you're not getting a massive massive functional benefit so
Accidental Tech Podcast
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my current theory is it'll be almost it'll it'll still be low profile because to make something that is symmetrical it has to be low profile otherwise it just becomes unsatisfying to everybody it'll still be low profile they'll just find a better solution to the charging point my main hope for it mostly for marco is because i don't even use this mouse is the things underneath the surface that you swipe are very low resolution and crude
Accidental Tech Podcast
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15 years later, they can essentially increase the DPI and sensitivity of the swipey area on top. And I think that will result, especially with like 120 hertz screens. I think the improving that resolution will make the mouse better for people like Marco who like this mouse. And if Apple refuses to give up on this being a beautiful object as it sits on the table.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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then the best design continues to be the current low profile mouse just with higher DPI of the tracking, because that's another thing that Apple is like decades behind on in terms of like how well it tracks surfaces and how, you know, the granularity of the updates and how fast it can handle things. You don't have to make it a gaming mouse, but it's been 15 years, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And then the sensitivity and resolution of the swiping thing on top. I don't think they're going to do a second right button, but who knows? I mean, the magic mouth has a right button. It's just a weird one. That's like capacitive. And you have to not touch the left side when you're touching the right side. But that's another thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Can they bring themselves to make a two button mouse as in like hairline, a hairline split in the top surface making, you know what I mean? Like, can they do that? Or will they continue to do, make sure your fingers not touching the left side of the mouse when you push down the right side. Otherwise we're going to register it as a left click. Are they going to still be doing that?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So this is something I definitely have my eye on. Not because I really care that much, because I have basically zero hope that they're going to make a mouse that I like, which is fine. I have this third-party mouse that Microsoft no longer makes that I should really have bought Ada, but didn't. And that fails all the time, and I've already had like three of them die on me. Um...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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but I'm just interested. It's like a good test of Apple's industrial design. How do they solve this problem? How, and it's low stakes. Cause who cares? Like if they mess up their mouse, like nobody cares. Like, you know, the headline for this item in the notes is save the turtles, save the harpooning the turtle. Everyone wants to flip that mouse onto his back and harpoon it. And,
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, the turtles will no longer be harpooned. Surely they will fix that. Wouldn't it be amazing if they had a totally new, completely redesigned mouse, but the charging port's still dead center on the bottom? That would be an amazing troll. But anyway, this is the thing I'm keeping my eye on.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It is much lower stakes than the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, but it is a good bellwether for the Apple of today.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I've got a lot of these mice in my attic if Margot wants to. He needs replacements if the new one is not to his liking. Although you're probably going to have to get my Black Mac Pro one because that's still sealed in the box.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Well, I don't know if you guys remember this, but Apple did actually ship actual Apple mice with side buttons. Do you remember those? No. The Apology mouse was a mouse with side buttons. They were terrible side buttons, but they existed, like actual physical buttons. Yeah, you squeezed it for something. What was the squeeze gesture? Yeah, there were buttons on the side.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Every sort of third-party mouse, even my Microsoft mouse, has three side buttons. It has like a…
Accidental Tech Podcast
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forward middle and back type thing I don't even know what I have the map to because I never use them but side buttons on mice are definitely a thing and Apple did ship a mouse with physical side multiple mice I think the apology mouse had it didn't the one with a little tiny trackball on the top didn't that one have a squeeze gesture the mighty mouse I don't remember if that had it the apology mouse definitely did it was the one that was a thick clear case that they gave to everyone as an apology for the iMac puck mouse that had side buttons they were bad but all I'm saying is Apple his you know
Accidental Tech Podcast
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long ago apple was not above shipping a mouse that had more than one physical button including a side button which is like side button is so kind of like
Accidental Tech Podcast
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outside the mainstream of what apple wants to do like they still didn't that mouse still didn't have a right button on it like a physical right button but it did have side buttons so i don't know maybe they'll be maybe they'll surprise us and ship a mouse that has two top buttons and a side button or one top button and two side buttons two turntables and a microphone they could call it an action button yeah exactly there you go with the innovation oh they should they're gonna put the stupid digital crown on it they put it on the vision pro for crying out now oh my god they'll do yeah
Accidental Tech Podcast
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LoRa is the standard. I forget what it stands for. I'll have to look it up in the show notes for an old record. But it's like low frequency radio communication. It's not Bluetooth. It's not Wi-Fi.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, the refrigerator one is just going to let you learn how often people stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open and causing the temperature to go above the safe area.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, but once you have the sensor, you'll suddenly know that, and it's a little bit troubling. In fact, I've had to raise the threshold of my refrigerator one just to try to... I say, look, I'm just going to have to accept... that it's going to be 41 degrees in there when people open the door. So maybe I'll set the thing at 42 or 43.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Basically, what I want to know is, hey, did someone leave the door open? Like they went to bed and they left the fridge door open a crack? That's what I want to know, not did another person spend 10 minutes in front of the open fridge door on a hot summer day and make the temperature go up. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend that one unless you have a problem with it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Well, maybe as your kids get older, they'll start leaving the fridge open by crack and destroying everything in your fridge more often or your freezer. Freezer is a little bit easier because it maintains temperature a little bit better and you just put it at the freezing point and you probably won't get any bad alerts. But the one thing I will tell you that you might want to do Well, maybe not.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But the water leak detectors, if there's any place in your house that you think there could ever be a leak that you want to know about it, you won't get any false alarms from that one. They're like 17 bucks. The batteries last for like three years. I was going to say put it next to your water heater, but that's in your garage. So if it floods, who cares?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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How do they communicate? Are they like the Yoink things where it says low frequency RF thing?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, that's how the Yoink things work too, by the way. You get a quote-unquote smart hub, which gets on your Wi-Fi network, but then also communicates over the proprietary RF thing to the sensors. And that's why the sensors can be so cheap and last so long because they don't talk Wi-Fi. They're not on your Wi-Fi. They have no idea Wi-Fi exists. They just talk to the hub.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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From like a quarter mile away, or so they claim. And then the hub talks to your Wi-Fi. So you can just put the hub right next to your Wi-Fi thing and put these sensors anywhere in your house. And I'm assuming in three years they'll start notifying me on the app that their battery's getting low, but the battery's supposed to last a long time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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They're cheap. You can buy, like, you know, 17 bucks for a water leak detector. Just buy a couple of them and chuck them around your house.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That's why every single stupid Apple device comes with a Thread radio. We don't even talk about it anymore, but every Mac that's introduced, every HomePod, everything, it comes with a Thread radio. What good is that doing us? Someday. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And that's why Wi-Fi is bad for home things. It's not like Wi-Fi itself is a bad protocol or anything. It's just designed for higher and higher data rates for things like computers. But a home device that's telling you the temperature and humidity has such low bandwidth requirements that using a sophisticated, complicated, high-frequency protocol like Wi-Fi is just a waste.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's a waste of battery energy. The standard's not made for that. These other standards that have incredibly low bandwidth but can penetrate walls and go from a quarter mile away on a single AA battery, it's a better fit for the application. So we're not saying like, why did they make Wi-Fi if it's so bad? Wi-Fi is good for what it does.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It gives you wireless data to your phone and your laptop and even maybe your Apple TV.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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bad for a thing that's telling you whether there's been a leak or not that literally communicates almost nothing yeah it's like i need to send this one oh it's like you know one bite of transfer basically to my home has there been a leak since the last minute i asked yes or no no good done exactly over problem solved anyway so thank you but no thank you because i'm gonna go broke putting sensors in a thousand different places that i don't need them
Accidental Tech Podcast
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The reason I mentioned the water heater, by the way, is before I got the Yoling things, I already had a Wi-Fi sensor on my water heater because twice now, living in this house for 20-something years, twice my water heater has gotten old enough that it's sprung a leak. Luckily, not catastrophically, because water heaters are just a hot water tank heater or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Eventually, corrosion eats away at the inside of them. There's a big sacrificial anode. See the rectives episode where I talk about this. that gets eaten away. Once that gets eaten away, guess what? The tank gets eaten away.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And if you're not on top of replacing it exactly when the warranty expires, because they put the anode in there that's big enough, they think as soon as the warranty runs out, the anode will be gone and then it will fail. They're really good. They could just put a bigger anode in it.
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I think when they sell you a 15-year-old one versus a 10-year, the only difference is bigger anode in the 15-year-old when they charge you 300 extra bucks. But anyway, when they leak, if they catastrophically leak, your basement fills with water and it's terrible. But usually what happens is corrosion makes a little tiny hole that starts spraying out or dribbling out water.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And it's still an emergency. You'll be like, Oh, turn off the water and plumber come or whatever. But, uh, it's something you want to know about ASAP. I've been lucky enough both times to be home. And we go down to the basement enough because the laundry machines are down there to notice it and say, Oh, And that's why I bought the sensor.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I don't want to be away from home when that happens because even a small leak could flood my basement. I should really just replace my water heater more often, but you do what you can. My current one is still less than 10 years into its supposed 15-year lifetime, so I'll keep an eye on it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Let me pause that for a second because thank you, Jonathan, for saying what I always try to say whenever we talk about benchmarks and what used to be one of the main activities that I participated in online, which was technical people complaining about how benchmarks are not representative. We'd argue about Mac versus PC and CPU benchmarks and AltaVec versus MMX, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And it was all about like, well, you know, byte marks versus spec int versus this. And it was people arguing that benchmark is not representative
Accidental Tech Podcast
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a good one it can be gamed it can be cheated it's not representative of real performance or okay well i'm playing a game i get better frame rates than this well that that it has a good port on this platform but a bad port on that platform so that's not good a benchmark either all we did was argue about how benchmarks didn't mean anything and now in in the modern age go to any youtube video listen to any podcast and you're just like oh well this is what geekbench says and this is what the benchmarks say and nobody argues about it anymore they're just like yeah the benchmark says this is faster so i guess it must be faster
Accidental Tech Podcast
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there's so much to be argued about these benchmarks especially with things like Geekbench which we really don't have I mean you have some knowledge of it you can get kind of into technically but it's nothing like the open source spec benchmarks were back in the day or like you know running games that are open source that you can compile for any platform and then it becomes like a compiler benchmark so kudos to Jonathan for doing what was once a great pastime and has now fallen by the wayside which is complaining about benchmarks they're no good
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's a bunch of stuff. We don't need to read commands and strings online. This is an IO reg command with some flags with those two names that were read earlier. This is like reading a URL out loud.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Hallelujah. We can't wait for that to happen. Although I still feel like a 512 might be small. But I think this rings true to me in all of our, you know, over a decade now doing this show or whatever. You don't hear a lot about people's SSDs going bad. I mean, they do. It does happen. Everything goes bad. Everything fails. But Apple has not historically had
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
As far as I know, any Macs, especially in the ARM Mac era, any Apple Silicon Macs where the SSD was like really bad. I remember there was a big kerfuffle that we talked about on the show back when I think the M1s were first out when they were like, oh, you buy it with two little RAM and it's swapping to it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And there was something that tried to show how much life is left on how much endurance is left on the flash memory based on how many writes it's getting and everything. some tools reporting really huge numbers. And like at this rate, your SSD will be dead in a year and a half.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And that turned out mostly, I think, to be a problem with the tool reporting bad numbers and a problem with interpreting the numbers that did return. And in the end, people with M1 Macs didn't all have their SSDs fail after the first year, right? I mean, we're still using one right now and it's fine. But I also agree that one of the things
Accidental Tech Podcast
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well mac os doesn't like this and add to the pile now nand uh flash drives don't like this don't get close to the disk storage limit bad things happen think bad upsetting terrible things happen the operating system doesn't like it the flash memory doesn't like it it's just you're just asking for trouble which is why it really is important to get as big as an ssd as you can or be very studious about getting stuff off of that ssd because unfortunately
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That's what I'm saying. You're not as discerning. You're like, oh, you've seen one Adidas athletic sock. You've seen them all. They can go with any of them. But no, there are pairs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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mac os is not great about helping you when you start pressing up against your disk limit it will just sort of like complain feebly for a few seconds until it's too late and then just keel over and it'll be a sad situation
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So this was kind of, I don't know if this is a separate story or just confirmation of the vague rumor we got, I think multiple years ago, which was, I think this was back when the M1 extreme, the big M1, the quad M1 chip was canceled. And that was just an anonymous tip from, I don't even remember where the sourcing, but it wasn't any particularly reliable source, but just something we were told.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And it was, hey, if you're waiting for something on that size, the earliest it could possibly appear is the M7. And that was back when I think the M2 was just on the horizon or coming out. So M7, no chance of any chip like that until the M7, given the lead times.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And I'm thinking maybe this team in Israel was the team working on the M7 thing. And then they just got pulled off. And here's the thing. Many things are thwarting this chip. The fact that it's very expensive. The fact that Apple doesn't want to do it for such low volumes. You know, like this. You really need to believe in something like this to make it happen. It's.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
As my blog post said, the only way cars like the LFA happen in a company like Lexus is a bunch of people really, really want to make it happen because it just does not make economic sense. But it makes sense for the company, and you need to have enough people who believe in that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That's the whole point of the Mac Pro Believe shirt, which will be coming back someday because its job is still not done.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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back pro belief shirt will be back next year in wwdc well anyway uh once again apple has found a reason not to make this chip uh which it's pretty easy to do and in this case it makes some sense like obviously apple you know ai is a big thing apple doesn't want to just pay amazon to use all of its chips although apple recently i think someone from apple spoke at like the aws reinvent to talk about how they're using all of amazon's ai training chips and they're loving it and blah blah blah right so
Accidental Tech Podcast
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You know, Apple's doing what it has to do, but we also know from past stories we've discussed in the show that Apple has its own Apple Silicon and its own data centers running its own AI workloads with the private cloud computing thing that they made. Supposedly a bunch of M2 Ultras, so on and so forth.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Makes perfect sense that Apple would decide to use its own Silicon in its data center to run AI workloads. The M2 Ultra is not a chip that was really designed for that. It's designed to be in Macs. Making a purpose-built AI training inference, whatever purpose-built Apple Silicon for the data center for AI workloads makes sense. And I think Apple will do a good job at it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Is that a service? That's just called folding laundry. Are you putting socks in your drawer inside out?
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
The rumors are that Apple is going to make that chip, Broadcom is helping them, yada, yada. They're not, as usual, Apple will not sell this chip to other people. It will just be a thing that Apple makes for its own data center. So no customer will ever see this. They're not going to sell access to it like Amazon and Google and stuff do. It's just going to be for them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It'll probably be big and complicated and expensive. But what it won't be is a Mac Pro type chip, because obviously a lot of things that the Mac Pro needs to do, a chip inside a data center doing AI workloads does not need to do. And if you want people to make a big monster chip that can do this, probably the team that was working on the Mac Pro chip has the people that you need.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And it's not like you can just leave them there and hire a bunch of new people. So I understand from a business perspective why they're doing this. And yet, if you're ever going to make a chip that makes sense in that gigantic case, you got to actually make one someday. Or is it just going to be a series of Mac studios in a giant case for the next five years? Stay tuned and find out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I was talking to Gruber about this. I'm way behind on Twitter. Or, not Twitter, sorry. I'm way behind on Mastodon, for reasons we'll get into in a little bit. But I was talking to Gruber about this, but I didn't read his article about it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But anyway, one of the things I was saying was that, like we've discussed in our past episodes, I wish I could see what the M4 Max Die looks like, because if it doesn't have an interposer, that means they're not going to stick two of them together to make an Ultra.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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uh and yeah the uh the non-linear scaling of the ultras versus the maxes has been a problem i think the m1 max m1 ultra was the one that had really bad gpu scaling like the gpu was the one thing that should scale close to linearly and it wasn't because of interconnect issues so what i've always been hoping was that the m3 or m4 ultra will not be two maxes stuck together but instead will be a dedicated custom chip that just has more stuff in the right things
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Single die, you know, single massive super expensive die, but not two Maxis stuck together. Because the two Maxis stuck together approach made some sense economically, and it was worth a try, but I think with two tries at it with the M1 and M2 Ultra, it's a little bit wasteful. It doesn't have the greatest performance benefits. And that's not always the worst thing, though, by the way, because...
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
When you're shopping for high-end stuff, very often you are paying much, much more for just a little bit more performance. That's why it's so important to essentially make the fastest whatever that you can make. Because you can say, well, look, it is five times more expensive for only two times the speed, but it's literally the fastest thing that you can get.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So if you want to spend money and get the fastest thing, if that makes a difference to your business or to your job or whatever, that you just want the fastest, you don't care that the price doesn't scale linearly with the performance. You just want the fastest. But you do want something that... you know, performs as good as possible.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And part of that is not wasting performance and money on overhead that's not giving you better performance. So, you know, one of the things I was hoping before reading the story was that the M4 Ultra would appear and it would not be two M4 Maxes stuck together, but it would be its own dedicated chip and it would be really powerful. And then the Extreme would be two of those stuck together.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
You know what I mean? And so they could design them in that way, so that gives you a more economical extreme, because you're just taking two Ultras, but the two Ultras have their parts arranged such that it makes a little bit more sense to put them together. Yeah, and the chiplet design, once you get to a certain size, like... The Ultra with the Interposer, that's basically pushing the limit.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
We talked about this before, the reticle limit, like how big can you even make things, not just economically, but practically speaking at all. Physically. Yeah, so everyone's doing a chiplet-type design. We keep referring to it at the Quad because we're basically trying to say something twice as big as an Ultra, but it doesn't mean four of anything.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
It just means count up all the stuff, count up all the transistors, all the die area, something that is twice as big as an Ultra. That's when we're doing all the back-of-the-envelope math, like how many GPU cores and what it would be competitive with, assuming the GPU scale is close to linearly. So I'm not holding out for four of anything stuck together.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
A, that's spiteful. And B, if you put them into the washing machine inside out and they have crap on them, the crap is going to stay stuck inside the socks. Like, if you get a bunch of, like, little, you know... little bits of leave or wood chips or whatever stuck to the bottom of your sock and you take it off inside out and it goes in the washing machine, that stuff's not coming out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I just want something that is roughly sized like four of those things with a much better arrangement of parts, less used on overhead. I don't need four copies of the Thunderbolt controllers. I don't need four different media encoders and only one of which is used at a time. They can do better, but anyway, it just seems like this is not going to be in the cards for a long time. So now...
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
The only thing I have left to hope for is that the Ultra will be better than the previous Ultras, hopefully by not being two Maxes stuck together, but just being a dedicated Ultra that is its own thing. Or if it is two Maxes stuck together, that they've resolved the issues.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Because, again, my memory says this, but I seem to recall the M1 Ultra, the GPU scaling was really terrible because of some thing that they didn't do right. Some buffer or something was under-resourced somewhere, and it really killed the performance. And that's just a shame because... The GPU transistors were there. They had enough of them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
If they were all in the same die, they would have worked great. But because they were separated and because there was a problem with the interconnect, you lost a lot of performance. So we'll see. But yeah, this is, you know... Not that it was ever likely that I was going to get the next Mac Pro, but it's definitely looking more like Mac Studio for me. Hopefully the M4 Ultra will be good.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I mean, I'll just, I probably will just keep it here. Because the studio, it can continue to be here like a piece of furniture, and the studio will just be on the desk. It's so small. It doesn't take up any room.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
That's what people do with the old cheese graters, but they're a little low, and I would never do that with this beautiful computer.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
It's going to be right in there when you turn it the other way. So you're not even getting your stuff clean. Hey, my stuff goes in the correct way. Well, that's, yeah. My stuff gets cleaned. Everyone should turn their clothes right side out before they put them in the hamper. I agree, but not everyone does.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Yeah. So we talked on the show. You're so pained by this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I can't remember. I think we were talking about like... Maybe we were talking about our photos workflows or something on the member special. But anyway, to refresh everyone's memory, I have a shared iCloud photo library thing. I love it. My wife and I are both in the same shared library. Essentially, all of our photos are in the shared library. I think pretty much all of her photos are in there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I keep some photos out of the shared library. They're mostly screenshots of videos about Destiny stuff. My wife doesn't need to see that. So it's like, yeah. So those are my – but I have a very small – and also pictures of the backs of appliances and stuff like that. Those are in my personal library. But basically everything else is in a massive 200,000-plus photo shared library, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Um, and because Apple hasn't really finished the fight in Halo parlance on the shared photo library, some things are still not shared like albums and people. And so I still need to switch to my wife's account on my Mac, uh, sometimes to do photo stuff, because if I were to do them in my account, it wouldn't have any effect because they're not shared in the shared photo library. Um,
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
So anyway, she has an account on my Mac. I switch to it. Her account is set to download originals. So our full photo library is on my Mac through her account because it's set to download originals. It gets backed up with the whole rest of my Mac, right? But also on my account is my photo library.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And when I launch photos, I'm essentially looking at the same photo library that she's looking at, the shared library, right? She's set to download originals. My account is set to the optimized storage thing. But practically speaking, there's 200,000 photos. And when you go to her account, you can see those 200,000 photos. When you go to my account, you can see those 200,000 photos.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Well, see, one of the services you can provide by doing laundry is turn them right side out before you put them in the washing machine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And somebody wrote in a while back, and I think we talked about it on SKTP or something, asking, does macOS do, or does photos do anything smart? with the fact that it's the same shared library and two accounts on the same Mac, or if I set my account to download originals, would it download two complete copies of my library?
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And I told this person, I think it will download two complete copies of your library, and it's incredibly wasteful that it does that, but, you know, that's a pretty tricky scenario, right? Anyway, we had that discussion a while back, but it had been sticking in my mind going, you know...
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I wonder, especially as my disk fills and I get close to my storage limit and I'm always, like, fighting against that, how much space am I wasting on my Mac by having the same photo library as hers downloading originals and mine not? But, like, how much stuff is it downloading? So, you know, I've got Perl. I can find the answer to this question. LAUGHTER
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Well, I can't use Finder because it's in her account.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Gouged my eyes out. Using PHP for an extended amount has made me hate it more, if that's even possible to imagine, but it's true. But it has happened. Anyway, so I wrote a little Perl script and ran it as root. What could possibly go wrong? Right? I've been running Perl as root since before you were out of high school.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Anyway, ran my script and it crawled over her photo library, my photo library, and found all the files that are identical. Okay.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
and i was actually well first here's the file count any guesses oh if you include like are you are we including like all the different all little previews it generates i'm not excluding any files oh it's just like it's there's there's like a directory called like whatever dot photo library like that photo library is the extension but it's a directory and in there is a bunch of stuff that photos uses to keep track of your files so obviously the originals are in there in my wife's account but also all the other crap of like the thumbnails and previews and stuff like that
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
No, identical files, not files total. Oh, okay.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Fewer than I thought. But keep in mind, my photo library is, how big is it? Maybe like two and a half terabytes, three terabytes, 200,000 photos. That's how big it is. So it's like, oh, I got to see some major savings here. Turns out there's only 8.6 gigs duplicated.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Now, I don't know if that's because I kind of stay away from my photo library and don't like scroll back in time and like load the full resolution images and stuff or whatever. I mostly just look at the pictures that have just come in. You know, I'm not really going back in time and doing stuff, but only 8.6 gigs. But I was like, you know what? I want those 8.6 gigs back.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
oh here we go you couldn't just leave well enough alone no because that's the whole point of this the person was asking like uh does the os do something smart about this like does it share them and only have one copy or whatever and i was like i can get those 8.6 gigs back can i guess how i mean you should know how because we talked about it on the show before but yeah go ahead uh are you going to use the special cp copy command that does the apfs uh deduplication thing for the same file
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Yeah, I'm not going to use a CP command like an animal, but yeah. APFS, the file system that macOS and iOS and all the other devices use, Apple's file system, has a feature that lets you make a, quote, clone of a file where you get a complete independent copy of that file Essentially for free. Because it shares the storage with the other file. And not like a hard link or a symlink or an alias.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Not like that. Not like where when you edit one file, the other one gets edited. They are two completely distinct files. They do not affect each other in any way. But while they are identical, they share the same storage. If you duplicate a file in the Finder, go to your Finder now, find a 10 gig file and make a thousand duplicates.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
You will not take up any more space except for the space required to store the file names of those files. That's why duplicates in the Finder are instant. Go to find a 300 gig file, hit duplicate and be like, why was there no progress bar? You know why? Because it's just cloning the file. It's saying, those blocks on disk, now there's another way to get at them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And again, it doesn't tie them together like a symlink or an alias or a hardlink. They're not linked in a way when you edit one file, it will edit all the other copies. They're completely independent. They will diverge as you edit them. It's the magic of copy on write. It's one of the advantages of having a modern file system.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And most people don't even think about it, but the CP command from the command line will do this, although there is a flag to tell it to do it. If you don't even pass the flag, it does it all the time anyway. The Finder will do when you duplicate. That's why your file copies are instant. I do it all the time for podcast recordings.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
When I record a podcast, whatever folder ended up in Audio Hijack for this show or whatever, I copy it into a separate folder, which is just like... all the shows I've recorded, like from going back in time, that doesn't take up any more space. I just copy it. I also copy it into Dropbox. I'm not sure how Dropbox handles that, but it gets deleted at Dropbox pretty soon.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
But anyway, I can get the space back, take those 73,000 files, and every one of them that I find where there's identical content in my photo library, clone the one from her photo library into my photo library and throw out the one that was in my photo library. because they have identical content.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And you've got to do it carefully, because just because they have identical content, they're still different files. They have different creation dates, different modification dates, different owners, different permissions, different finder labels, different comments, different access control lists, different extended attributes. Tons of stuff about these files is different, but not the data.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Different resource forks, maybe, but not the data.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Well, I mean, it's not paying the first Perl script to find out how many files were the same real quick, like, you know, 10 minutes, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
So that's that's one of the things is like, OK, well, how can I do this in a way where I feel like I'm not hosing myself?
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
right aside from just being a good careful programmer with experience with pearl uh one of the ways i decided to tackle this was i will choose her library as the source and mine is the target so i will only read from hers and only write to mine because hers is like the canonical good one where it's downloaded originals blah blah blah and mine is not worst case scenario i just delete my photo library and re i cloud it because there's so little is actually in my photo library proper it's all in the shared library right
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
So that's what I did. I used hers as a source, mine as a destination to copy the files. I did it in a couple of different steps. One is I needed to be able to find out if the files were already clones of each other. I forgot to mention this, but I did that as part of the Perl script. I couldn't find a good way to do that, except I eventually found someone on GitHub who had a tool that...
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
did a best effort at it and as far as i could tell it worked i did a bunch of test cases and always got the right answer uh it essentially walks the entire extents tree for each of the files and sees if they're identical which is it's not great but it's the only way that you can do it there's a bunch of little flags and stuff about there's even one called like
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
uh may share content or may share blocks like may well that's not really helpful to me i need to know if they do share blocks right so you basically just have to walk the whole extents tree so i use that was written in c i have my thing written in pearl there's a command on the mac called ditto that will copy a file with all of its metadata and stuff
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And then I wrote in Swift a thing to do the extended attributes, creation dates, blah, blah, blah. Some things you can't restore because I think there's a thing called like access time or attribute modification time that you can't actually update. like it gets updated by the file system and you have no way to, there's no APIs for updating it, but I don't think anything really uses that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
So anyway, I was comfortable that it would be safe. I did a test on one or two files. I looked at before and after as I examined them with every tool I had and said the before and the after file really do look identical in every way that I can determine that I care about. And so I just ran it. I got 8.6 gigs back. I'm so happy for you. And then I thought, you know, Free disk space.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
John, John, John. My computer has not lost anything. Obviously, there are fewer redundant copies of bits on the SSD, but I'm not relying on the redundancy of the bits on my SSD to save those things. That's what backups are for. Oh, God. RAID is not a backup. Neither is having multiple guys. But anyway, free disk space. That's like free opium. What could possibly go wrong? Free real estate.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I'm not doing free opium. Free real estate. Free disk real estate. I thought to myself, most people don't know about this APFS cloning thing. It's too nerdy. But everyone likes free disk space, right? Like, literally free. If you go to the Mac App Store, you'll find tons of, like, file deduplicators that will find duplicate files, but it wants you to delete the other ones.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Like, they all offer, like, I know, we'll delete them. We'll save the newest one. We'll save this, you know, whatever. Like... No, cloning doesn't make you make that choice. You don't lose any files. All the files stay exactly the way they were.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
But it's a technical ability that people aren't leveraging on their own because it's too onerous to do it. I wouldn't find 73,000 files by myself. So anyway, I thought this would be a good idea for a Mac app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Are you launching it like right now? No. Well, here. Because I've written the Perl scripts. I'm like, this couldn't be that hard to make as a Mac app. Don't use the Perl scripts in the app. For God's sake. The whole point of making it as an app is no more Perl scripts. Real, real honest to goodness app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I made, you know, because I like doing Mac development and my apps are essentially feature complete, although I do have a couple ideas for one of them. But anyway, it was exciting to start a new app. I made a SwiftUI lifecycle app, you know, started from scratch, wrote it up. I did the programmers UI that you're all familiar with, which is a giant window with a bunch of text and buttons on it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
No UI and no styling, just text buttons and rapidly changing numbers, right? Nice. Love it. Love the programmer UI. And yeah, no, it worked. And while I was doing this, I was like, you know, probably someone already wrote this program and I should just stop what I'm doing and use theirs. Eventually, I remembered... Someone did write the program. We talked about it on the show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I feel like Casey now. We talked about it on the show. I already had it installed in my applications folder. It's a pay app that I bought years ago. It already exists. So I will put a link in the show notes. It's called Disk the Dupe by Frank Schroeder. I'm not sure how many years old it is, but it does exactly what my app is trying to do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
It's not the most polished app in the world, but it's been developed for a little while. It's on version 1.3 or something. It's available on the Mac App Store. You can get it right now if you feel like it. But I'm still making my app. Other people made podcast players too, but it doesn't stop Marco.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
He still made Overcast. I'm making the app just because I like doing Mac development. It's fun. And I think there is a place in the market for a slightly more polished version of this. But I'm doing it for a couple other reasons as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
One is after I got like, you know, a thousand lines into this app and it was basically working, but with an ugly UI, I thought, you know, let me not make the same mistake that everyone else always makes. I should turn on Swift 6 language mode. Because I hadn't at that point. And so that burned a day. But still, you do it when there's 1,000 lines. It's better than doing it when there's 100,000.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Fair. And there's a lot I don't know about concurrency, but I figured it out. The other thing I'm concerned about is This is an incredibly dangerous app. Like, if I'm not careful, right? It essentially deletes and then reincarnates arbitrary files that it knows nothing about. What could possibly go wrong? Because that's what it does.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
If you point it at a directory, it doesn't know what those files are. It just knows these two files have the same content, and I'm going to magically do some magic with cloning, and when I'm done, you won't notice anything has changed. But while I'm doing it, I hope no one's looking at those files.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Unfortunately, macOS being a Unix derivative does not have a really great way to tell if someone else is messing with a file. You want to run LSOF on every file. It will take a year and a day, and the kernel will get angry at you. And even that is not going to tell you anything because there's a million race conditions. You only have advisory locking.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
You don't have mandatory locking like on Windows. Yada, yada, yada. The point is it's a potentially dangerous app. But then on the other hand, that's why a polished version of this that is very cautious and careful maybe has a place in the market because no, people are never going to do this on their own. They're not going to run a Perl script.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
They're not going to run a Perl script as root like I did that calls out to a Swift program that they wrote in a C program that they downloaded from GitHub. No one's going to do that. They just want a polished single Mac app that does all the stuff. So anyway... Uh, I am going to eventually make that app. Uh, it, it is essentially working now. It just has half a UI.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I'm noodling with the UI to try to make it not heinously ugly. Um, but I'm having fun. And the other thing I'm going to do with it is, so the existing app that does this is a paid upfront app. I'm going to make mine free, but within that purchase, because it's so ideal, like you get the app for free, you try it. It tells you how much space you can save.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
If you can't save any space, you don't find whatever. But if it turns out you can save 10 gigs, then you get the in-app purchase. And that gives me an opportunity to, to play with in-app purchase, which I've literally never written in any app before. So I want to do in-app purchase in a Mac app this time to see what that experience is like, because it could be fun.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Yeah, I mean... Here's where you tell me a store kit testing is never fun. I understand, but you know what I mean.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
It's store kit two, Casey. It's not just regular store kit.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
My end up purchase will be fairly simple. But anyway... Yeah, you say that. So the final thing to say here is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
i have a casey level naming dilemma going on oh yeah good luck good because here's the thing with naming i uh i have uh very particular opinions about app naming everything on the mac but when you make a new project in xcode they make you pick a name for the project and if you don't know what your app is going to be named You got to call it something. This is how Casey ends up with his stuff.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
yeah i'll say here's the other thing about names uh depending on which naming theme i'm going with i very often have spaces between words but if you put spaces between words in your xcode project it puts underscores and files and it's just like oh yeah it messes it all up and then if you go okay we'll put underscores and file i'll just remove those underscores but then your whole project is screwed up because you haven't found every reference to that file and it's just like you gotta so obviously i made a project and i gave it a name it's not going to be the name of the app
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
It's not as bad as a KC name, but it might as well be. My thinking on the name, I talked about this briefly with Merlin on the rectifs that will come out in a little bit. My other apps are a little bit more fanciful in names, but this one I actually want people to...
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
to find when they're searching for something that does what it does yeah this is like an seo name i can't just call it like lemonade or something that's just like you know right just nothing that has anything to do with anything even though it might be good branding to come up with like a very unique interesting name no one will ever find it i don't know i don't trust the app store search and my keywords and my description or whatever so i want the name to at least give you a hint that it might have something to do with disks or storage or duplicate files or something like that
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
and that really puts you in squarely into the namespaces of the million other apps to delete duplicate files that are on the mac app store so i'm not quite sure what it's going to be called uh as soon as i know i will let you know but the app's not quite done yet so like can you think about like words that are like about like finding free finding resources out in the world like you know mining minor stuff like that or you can't do mining yeah that's
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Yep, Simon wrote in to say festivitas? Festivitas, I think. Festivitas, okay. Anyway, his app is not using a private API. It's using the accessibility API to read the frames of every tile in the dock, and based on those frames, create a CG path. This requires sandboxing to be disabled, so the Mac App Store is still a no-go.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Any guesses at what my working title is? What the name of the Xcode project is? Oh, no.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Yeah, there already is an app called Highlander, obviously. One of the names I came up with, obviously it's not a real name that I would use for reasons that you'll understand in a second, SuperDDuper.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
wow that's pretty good actually because dave nanyan would come to my house and beat me up yes but it's still pretty good though that's called trade dress if i try to name my app after our well-known beloved multi-decade old thing which is also about storage yeah which is also a super duper if you guys people don't know is a mac cloning app that i in fact use to clone my hard drive so super duper there's also carbon copy cloner but anyway super duper would be a great name if we were the same company but we're not how about canonical
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
It's a terrible name, but it's kind of... Isn't that a whole software company? Yeah, people aren't going to guess that that's a disk. I might have to give up on the people can guess that it's a disk thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Space Doubler. Oh, wait. You guys don't remember Space Doubler, but it was the name of a classic macOS utility. Didn't do this, but it was another thing. I think it was like a compression, on-the-fly compression thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Anyway, a few more things like now that I have this program up and running, it's obviously a two phase thing. One where you scan, where it tells you how many duplicates is found in two is where you consolidate them. And so I've been doing a lot of scanning, especially when developing the app. I pointed it at my documents folder and, Believe it or not, only 14,000 documents, but 12 gigs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
More duplicates in my own, just in my documents folder, my own documents folder only, than there was when I was cross-comparing the two photo libraries that ostensibly are both looking at the shared library. 12 gigs in my documents library. Dropbox...
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I'm probably just going to literally forbid in my app you ever pointing it at Google Drive, Dropbox, or anything because I have no freaking idea what Dropbox will do when I yank the file out from under it and replace it with a clone. I'm just going to be like, nope, not anything that's running on a file provider type API thing like Google Drive, OneDrive.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
My app is just going to flat out refuse to do just for safety reasons probably. But anyway, I got a gig, 626 files in Dropbox. My home slash library folder, which I will also forbid for what I hope are obvious reasons, stuff that's in your library is like stuff that other apps are using that you have no idea when they're touching it, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Things that are being touched by the CF prefs demon, containers, sandbox containers, whatever. 15 gigs in my library folder. 15 gigs of duplications. So that's the type of situation where you shouldn't run it, but I might run my Perl script on it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Yeah. That's the whole point of this program is like the one I said, the disk thing or whatever that has been on the Mac App Store, it doesn't really have any guardrails. It will just do what you tell it to do for the most part, right? And I don't think it's a very popular program. I don't really hear about it despite the fact that I apparently bought it years ago.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
So this is one of the other unfortunate situations that I've talked about on the Mac before, where there is an API to do something, It's a public API, but it's old. Apple has deprecated it. And if you want to submit your app to the Mac App Store, you can't use this API. And believe it or not, the accessibility APIs on macOS fall into that category.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Even I didn't use it that often. I want to make something that's more polished, that has enough guardrails, that it will prevent you from really hosing yourself, right? Like, really cautious in what it does, just totally refusing to do anything that it knows is potentially dangerous. You know, and in terms of support burden, like... We'll see.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
It could be like, this is one of the things that was preventing me from doing is like, Oh, this is, you're just making an app for people to host themselves. And now they're going to be angry and you're not going to get one star reviews or whatever. But this app is already on the Mac app store. It's got great reviews. It has no guardrails. People love it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
So maybe like people find those apps, find their audience. So we'll see.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Any competent, experienced Mac developer could bang this out between the time this podcast is released. Anyone who's good at Mac development can do this so much faster than I will. Part of the reason I'm doing it is because I enjoy Mac development, which is a thing I discovered from my other two apps. I just enjoy doing it, period.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Uh, and I'll learn a lot during, I want, you know, one of the things I enjoy is learning stuff, but like I am by no means an experienced Mac developer. I am stumbling my way through this. So it's going to take me a long time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Anybody good, like one of the, one of the many good Mac developers that are out there that make these things like Guy Rambeau probably made this app already while we've been discussing, you know what I mean? And they'll do a better job than me too. But maybe they're not interested in that market. Maybe they know that it's, this is a dangerous tool for it to be.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I just don't understand why more people haven't made. This is probably not the only one. The one I found that there's probably other apps that also do this. When we discussed it on the show, I think I probably said someone should totally make an app like that. And then someone said, here's this app. And then I bought it. And right. Like, so this is not a new idea.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I just think this is an idea that more people should be implementing. And if, People aren't going to do it, then I will do it. And again, even if they do do it, I'm still going to do it anyway because I'm having fun. And if it turns out to be a disaster, I just pull the app from the store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
You say that until I want both of you to run it for the show. Okay, maybe not.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
So no, they're not private as in, you know, you're not supposed to use them, period. Although you could. But no, this is a public API. But Apple says, yeah, you can't be on the Mac App Store if you use the accessibility APIs. And it's basically because they're old and like their permission level is not granular enough.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I mean, they're old and creaky APIs to begin with, so you don't really want to use them, but they do what you need them to do. But they're too powerful, essentially.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Yeah, this definitely has more potential customers, but also it's much more potentially dangerous.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I'm not going to be that. You're thinking of iOS. This is the Mac. We don't do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Right, right. That's kind of what led me to this. When you're running a company, you can think about what kind of products should our company make in terms of product market fit and total addressable market and so on and so forth. But when you're an indie developer, you're in the situation where essentially you can't pick what you're interested in building.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And if you're lucky, you're interested in building an app that has wide appeal. But if you're unlucky like me, every app you want to make does not have wide appeal. But that's what you want to make, right? Like even when I was thinking of doing a Mastodon client, which is a much more difficult task, and I started it and it turns out I didn't like iOS development that much, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Like, if you get accessibility permission for your app in the Mac App Store, you could do all sorts of nefarious things, and Apple just says flat out, okay, well, unless you have one of these super secret private exceptions, quote-unquote temporary exceptions, you can't do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Because I like doing Mac development. The apps that I'm interested in making are weird.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
right and so it's like i mean let's just write a mail i love file system stuff i love like this actually surprisingly large overlap between this app and the stuff i did in my web dev career because i did a lot of uh you know high scale back end things one of the biggest things i made was like an s3 like service that had to deal with all sorts of file system things in addition to being a web service type thing right so i do actually have relevant experience here and you just don't get to pick what you're interested in when you're an indie you're interested in what you're interested in so
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
you end up making what you want to make and if you're lucky you get something that overlaps with a lot of customers but if you're unlucky you like you can't force yourself to be like i should make a to-do app i don't want to make a to-do app right never mind that market is saturated anyway but whatever like anything with wide appeal right so
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Or if you're a very skilled developer, you can just do the underscore method, and you have so many interests and so many apps, and you can churn them out so quickly that you make lots of bets, and eventually some of them pay off. But you have to be, A, a really good experienced developer to do that, and B, I think Underscore actually is legitimately interested in every app that he makes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
He's got a wide-ranging interest. My interests are narrower and more obscure, and this is one of them, unfortunately for me, and potentially unfortunately for the world. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
It's not a very complicated app in terms of, you know, there's not a lot of complicated UI that people are going to have trouble with. It's just only going to be a question of, oh, you broke my computer and deleted all my files. But it's pretty, not it's easy, but like if you're super cautious in your app, you can severely limit the damage.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
um and i understand all that except i feel like okay but how many years into mac os 10 or whatever you want to call it do we need to be before a modernized version of the accessibility api comes along that you can use and ship in the mac app store so anyway there you go not it technically a private api but still something that keeps the app out of the mac app store the sad story on the mac continues truer words never spoken
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I mean, my evidence is the disk-de-duper app that's on the Mac App Store now is not bombarded with terrible reviews. People like it. People like getting free disk space back, and the operation it's performing is not complicated. It's officially supported. You can put it in the Mac App Store. It's not using private APIs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
it's pretty straightforward you know you think will um full disk access be an annoying limitation uh turns out you don't need it uh because it's very confusing on mac os one of the things i discovered is it does not work the way you think it does what i was in one of the mac development channels discussing like how does full disk access interact with sandboxing interact with user expressed intent through the open save dialog box i don't need full disk access for this app
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I can't believe that. You and me both. I couldn't believe it either, but I literally don't need it because everything that it does is user-initiated. And once you get a user-initiated permission through the OpenSave dialog box, I essentially have full access to the thing that they chose to open in the app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
No, they just pick whatever folder they want to dedupe. So they pick their documents folder, and that's it. But what if they want to dedupe everything, their whole system? They shouldn't do that. My app will probably stop them because that's bad. Now, one of the things I'm also looking into for a future version of this goes well is a privileged helper tool where you ask for admin permissions.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
You can do cross account, yada, yada, yada. But just version one is just files that you own in your home directory. There's I mean, there's there's data. There's space to be saved there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
When I wrote that in the show notes, I hadn't done anything except for muse about it in between the time I wrote that. And now I wrote a Perl script and wrote a Mac app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
You can't do that in a hurry, though. If you do it in a hurry, you're not going to match them up right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
No, I think you underestimate the amount of stuff I think is involved in matching socks.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I think Apple would be in there somewhere. We talked about this when back when I first rolled this out and we were talking about the giant expensive set of tools that you get that you have to return and everything. But yeah, this is that same thing. It still exists. They continue to expand it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
If Apple really cared about this use case with the M5-powered successor to the Vision Pro or whatever, they should just let you plug a Thunderbolt cable from the headset into your Mac to get rid of the latency thing that Marco was complaining about. Like, just fully embrace the idea of it as an external monitor.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And yeah, it'll still have to do all the 3D and the tracking and the blah, blah, blah, but the latency should be gone thanks to whatever clever thing they do over Thunderbolt to, you know, essentially... rendering into a virtual display somewhere inside the Vision Pro that it then puts into 3D space in front of you without having to do any Wi-Fi or compression shenanigans or stuff like that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
But I'm not sure Apple cares that much about this use case. I know, Casey, you love this use case. But I think Apple probably thinks the appropriate level of technological innovation and cost is what they're doing now. Pretty good, pretty good resolution, very big display, wireless, convenient, no cables.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
You don't have to put all the extra hardware and memory inside the Vision Pro to support it and stuff like that. But yeah, you can see how if the Vision Pro was...
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
emphasizing this use case much more and de-emphasizing many other ones you first of all would have to make the vision probably even more expensive just for the memory stuff but you could do that and if you want to go really expensive you know the vision pro with an m5 in it you know what that could do it could just freaking run mac os in addition to vision os you know what i mean like with virtualization but like you could just run your mac like why do you need to have this laptop that you bring what is the what is the purpose of the laptop it's just sitting there over in the corner right
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Again, they would make it even more expensive, heavier, hotter. You'd have to have an external compute thing. The battery would have to be bigger. But that's not the use case that Apple is going for. So I don't think they're going to do any of that. But technologically speaking, because Apple, like Taco Bell, is using all the same different ingredients to make lots of different things.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
slightly different results yeah but you look at the vision pro and you're like you know all the pieces are there like if you want if you could if you could arrange these lego pieces to make vision pro like the casey's dream like on the go mac development thing all the pieces are there except for apple cell modem that's going to put cellular into mac someday which we'll have a story on in a future episode if we remember to do it but yeah we're still waiting if they remember to do it
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
It's a race between a worthy Mac Pro chip and cellular and Macs, and it looks like Casey might win this one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Before we get to Casey's thing on the After Show, can I do a quick, this is not an ad, discussion of one of our sponsors this week?
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
This is legit not an ad. If you're listening to the non-member version, you by now probably have already heard the ad for Aura Frames. This is not the ad. This is just me talking about Aura Frames, which they did send us one of them for free. So take that with a grain of salt. I got mine for free. I have never bought a digital picture frame.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Honestly, I thought they were like, why would anyone want that? It's just like a really low quality screen in your house. I have plenty of actual pictures up on the wall or whatever. So I, you know, whatever they sent it to me, it's free. I guess I'll set it up to see what it's like. Love the thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I don't understand why like again they're inexpensive it's not like it's not a pro display XDR right it's not like because it can't be it's not thousands of dollars right it's an inexpensive small color screen kind of like Casey's like 2K monitor thing that he loves even though like it's not super high quality I didn't like who would care that you have like I see my pictures they're on my phone they're on my Mac like why do I want to have a frame of my house that rotates through those pictures turns out I do want to have that
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
icons like it's so much enjoyment of looking at which picture it's showing right now i pointed it at my favorites library which has like 30 000 photos and something it was like no problem i love the thing like oh what was that picture you just swipe on the top to go back to the freeze i know this sounds like an ad honestly like i and probably this is like you know a gift like i would not have bought this for myself i would not have ever bought a digital friend as evidenced by the fact that i've literally never bought one i never bought one for someone else i always thought they were dumb
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Having been gifted this one essentially as part of a sponsorship made me realize I like digital picture frames. That's it. It's not an ad. I just wanted to say that I've discovered that I like digital picture frames.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I took like two minutes to set it up ages ago and have not touched it since.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Is this, do you know, uh, if Apple not insists, but if Apple wants you won't feature you, if you launch without them, like is the, is the featuring contingent on you launching coordinated in time with their feature or are those two separate things?
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Casey, you should email ATP and tell them you have a new app that you're launching. And maybe you should offer the CEO of your company to be a guest on our show. Yes, I should do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Yeah, no. I mean, so the thing about matching socks is it's not so much just finding the sock that is the same sock as that one. They go in pairs in terms of wear and age, you know what I mean? And right and left. So you really want to pair the ones that have always been together to be back together.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Well, that 8 terabytes thing is made of tiny diamonds. I'm not sure if you know this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Well, that's what I was going to say. Like, what does it hurt? I would want to get it out and make sure it actually works before I get featured. The worst thing you want to have happen is get featured just as you launch and there's some fatal bug that causes problems with your app and now you've drawn lots of attention to your mistake. That's why I want to get it out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
The wisdom of releasing it just before the holidays aside, I would want to be sure the app that was going to be featured was stable and working.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Well, that's why I was asking, do they care if you coordinate the release or do they just want to feature you? Because if they don't care if you coordinate the release, I would want to have my new version out for three weeks, a
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
you know, maybe get a one or two bug fix updates out and then get featured if they don't insist that you not release your app until Marco's thing about they want to be coordinating with your marketing push. If you don't have a marketing push, I wonder how they'll feel about that. You are the marketing push, Apple.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I even submitted a PR artwork for some of my apps at one point. And they did actually, if not write about them, then at least like list them somewhere at some point in the past. But no, they did not tell me when they were doing this. I found out because other people told me, hey, I saw your app on this thing. I'm like, oh, okay.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
I wonder if you could get a cheap eight terabyte NAND that way, like if something goes wrong when you lock it. Because you don't, does it say that you have to have like a broken one? You know what I mean? I guess you have to.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
well you have to return the the board but like yeah i i don't know how you i mean you probably shouldn't be defrauding their repair system by stealing the nand off the motherboard somehow like that's i don't think that's going to work no you'd return your intact one but you'd get a fresh one like you basically get a fresh uh logic board oh i see what you mean you know what i mean like just because it's it's so cheap obviously you don't pay for your own labor and probably you're screwing up your computer every time you open it up and close it back up but that's what you get for having a laptop
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Even if you have, you know, 16 of the same socks that came in a pack when you bought them all, you can't just match them up willy-nilly with their other socks when they come out. They have to go back with their partner.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And actually in the realm of expensive cars, the parts, when you buy them aftermarket from the manufacturer, like the original actual genuine parts, cost way more, way more than you can possibly imagine. Like if you add up the price of all the parts that you would have to buy to build the car that you just bought, it would cost just many, many times more.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
Whereas these prices are merely pretty much exactly the same as the insane prices that Apple charges when you buy them. You know what I mean? Like, I think the prices are very close. Like, maybe they're actually a little bit cheaper. But as we saw before with the Bugatti headlights, it just doesn't make any sense if you look at the prices.
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
And it's because, especially with very fancy, expensive cars, they don't want to keep a lot of parts in stock. And the few that they do keep in stock, to make it worth their while to keep any in stock, they charge...
Accidental Tech Podcast
617: An Incredibly Dangerous App
huge amounts of money for one little piece of plastic one you know forget about like panels and body panels in the car just any little thing in the car there's like seven of these in the world and if you want one you have to pay a huge amount of money so be glad apple merely charges normal apple prices for its parts
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I installed my first Windows malware in a long time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
malware bytes it's like what do people do do you know like what do people do on windows now what was i've already forgotten what was the name of the thing that caused all the big downtime recently crowd strike out strike yeah so no we're not going to do crowd strike no that's it seems like a bad idea and also that's isn't that like expensive enterprisey stuff i don't know maybe it's a free trial
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
All of these PC security things are all like guys with guns in the desert. I'm just like, I don't want to... It's very easy to make a wrong step here. Anyway, so I think I've removed some of it. I would love recommendations on what people...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Thank you for having me. With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Drada, Autotrader, and many more, you're in good hands with QA Wolf. Check it out today at qawolf.com slash ATP to see if QA Wolf can help you squash your QA bottleneck. Thank you so much to QA Wolf for sponsoring our show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
what do people who are not guys with guns and deserts what do you use to just keep malware off of windows pcs that your kid is using for gaming i think people just live with it and have 800 toolbars in their browser yeah and and you know and he's also like he'll install stuff like you know from random you know discords that tell them i'll use this auto clicker tool to cheat in this game so like god knows what else is on this pc so i just but like i just i want something that just like is a
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
After however many weeks it's been, one, two, of using the Apple silicone case, I actually also switched to my Bullstrap case a couple of days ago.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
because the silicone case it's it's just too hard getting in and out of jeans pockets it like pulls the whole pocket liner out with it you know um so it's just i i wanted to try this and yeah the leather does feel a lot better like bull straps leather is very very good um but yeah i too hate the camera cut out uh it doesn't feel good it doesn't work well uh it doesn't certainly doesn't look good um and i i too worry about the longevity of that little
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
little thin piece of leather that comes down across the front edge of it um this look this is all no one's gonna have this design next year like by the time everyone makes their cases for next year's phones like no one will be using this design on a good case and there's a reason for that it's not a good design um they did what they had to do with day one unknowns but yeah like john i'm hoping for a better version of this case in the future that has a button cover for the camera control that works
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I think it's only more comfortable because leather is softer than hard plastic. I've got the Peak Design one right here. Like the Peak Design one, it actually has about the same indentation shape. Like it is just as thin on a little skinny piece in front of the camera control button.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I see what you mean. It's pretty subtle. The Peak Design one is symmetric, but that's a pretty subtle difference. I don't think that matters. I think what I didn't like about the Peak Design is merely that their plastic is harder than leather, and neither one of these feels good. But the...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I'm tolerating the bull strap case because it is the smallest number of bad trade-offs that I have found yet. I also have the Apple clear case. I thought that would solve my problems, and it does not. The Apple clear case I found to have very bad buttons. Especially the sleep-wake button, it's much harder to push than the other cases I have, and it doesn't have good feedback.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So I think it's just a lower quality, or maybe it's a materials thing. So far, the Apple silicone case works the best and feels the best in use. It just sucks at going in and out of pockets, which is the problem they've always had. Whereas the...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
The bare-bottomed bull strap case is the nicest leather case that I have found so far, but with the exception of that giant thing that John complained about, the giant camera cutout.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, I hope in a few months people have remade these cases with better designs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Can you imagine trying to design a case that would please John?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, and first of all, imagine if we had to make the chicken hat, but we didn't know where people's ears would be or how big their heads would be until after they were all made. And by the way, we did know where people's ears are. We did know how big people's heads are.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Sure, hold on. Wait, should I play it cool?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
All of our new products require an online order and an appointment to pick it up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And the thing is, after not using Windows for so long, I assumed, surely things have gotten a lot better. They're a little bit different. I wouldn't say they're better. They're just different.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I mean, if there was ever too many people in a Microsoft Store, it would require such a system like this. Well, that's true.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Thank you so much for having me. And of course, Squarespace really specializes recently in all these amazing commerce features. And Squarespace payments is the easiest way to manage your payments in one place. Onboarding is fast and simple. You get started in just a few clicks and you can start receiving payments right away.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And this gives your customers more ways to pay than ever with popular methods like Klarna, ACX Direct Debit, Apple Pay, Afterpay, Clearpay, and so many more they're adding all the time. And you don't have to be a nerd to use Squarespace. You don't even have to ask nerds. If you are a nerd, you can set people up with this and they don't have to ask you. It's wonderful.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It really empowers people to build their own site for their own business their way without having some computer gatekeeper in their way. So go to squarespace.com to try it out for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, squarespace.com slash ATP, and you'll save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So once again, Squarespace.com, start that free trial.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
When you're ready to launch, squarespace.com slash ATP for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I strongly recommend Squarespace for all your website needs. Check it out today. Once again, squarespace.com. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show. I have a small request for two apps that I can't find.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Come on. It's tempting, honestly. But I have a bit on my plate right now with the app I do have. So I don't have time to make these right now. I assume someone has made them, but I cannot find them. So number one, I recently started sleep tracking. I'm just wearing the Apple Watch to bed. I even discovered the sleep focus mode, which I'm finally using because it makes the screen turn off at night.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
The funny thing is, I hadn't been using the sleep focus mode for whatever reason. I just use auto do not disturb at night. And I was trying to figure out how do I make the watch screen turn off while I'm sleeping because it was bothering my wife and so on. Theater mode. That's what I tried. Theater mode. Guess what theater mode turns off? Alarms. Does it? Yep, sure does.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Remember when the alarm went off when the person was in the theater? Do you remember that whole controversy?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
yeah anyways yeah theater was not it but this turns out the sleep focus does that um so all i want to do is i want an app that every morning i can tag the sleep i had the night before with arbitrary tags that i input things like you know whether i like stayed up too late or maybe i had a late meal or maybe i was like you know sleeping alone i was you know at the beach by myself or something like
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I want to have like tags that I can tag my sleep, you know, late coffee, alcohol consumption, things like that. And then I want to be able to see in the future, like I want to be able to pick a tag and see like, okay, with this tag, your sleeps with this one are, you know. 12% better on average than sleeps that don't have this tag, or 12% worse.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You weigh more, but sleep worse. So I have been looking for apps to do this, and... I have – so thanks to some chat GPT research, I installed the top couple of sleep apps. They have been like super disasters of just gross, like massive privacy invasion, huge suites of functionality doing all sorts of stuff I don't need.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
There was one app – this was one of the top-rated sleep apps in the App Store – That, first of all, puts you through an in-app purchase flow immediately and with no way to get around it. So I'm pretty sure that actually violates the App Store rule against minimum functionality. But the App Store rules are not being enforced here in lots of ways.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And there's a handful of top sleep apps in the App Store, and this is one of them. One of them offered me to pay $40 a year for premium features, including I can listen to recordings of my own farts from my sleep the next morning. Nice.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And I learned when I saw that for $40 a year, not only have we really hit App Store bottom here, but that's when I decided I think I should probably raise the Overcast subscription price, which is currently a quarter of that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
None. Well, it depends. I mean, what do people generate?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Maybe I'm just tackling the wrong feature set, apparently.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You have to supply the farts. Exactly. Real-time follow-up, by the way. Apparently, exist.io is the app that Merlin always talks about. Yes, I remember that now, so thank you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
to people in chat who said that but yeah so anyway so i just want a simple app to do and like these apps they want to be they want to give you like a meditation routine and be custom alarms and tie into like you know lay your lay your phone on the pillow and subscribe to our service so we can life coach your partner and it's like oh my god just let me just tag my sleep and see data that's it that's all i want so far i have not found anything to do it doesn't underscore have a sleep app
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yes. I don't believe it has that feature, though. Well, I think you have a direct line to getting that feature added. Yeah. That's probably easier than making it myself. Anyway, so that's one thing I want. The second thing I want, I finally set up the rest of my Sonos system.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I finally moved my Sonos speakers out of my office downstairs to where they were originally purchased for the living room TV. So I have the ARC soundbar, two ARR 300s as the surrounds, and a sub.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It is a very nice system. However, the one challenge with setting up a Sonos soundbar stuff is audio delay. Any Sonos input introduces latency because of the way their system buffers and processes things and has network Wi-Fi stuff. There's always latency on the input on the audio. And TVs have ways to adjust the audio sync.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
The Apple TV also has a built-in way, something like calibrate wireless audio sync, where if you're using HomePods or anything else, it's like, all right, place your phone in front of the Apple TV, and we'll figure out your audio sync for you, which seems to change things, but not correctly.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Anyway, so I'm trying to watch TV and everyone's lips aren't matching up to their audio, which is infuriating. And so I'm trying to align it. My TV also has a built-in control, but it's negative five through positive three or something. These units make no sense. And so I'm like, all right, well, what is it? And I've been adjusting it, trying to figure out what it is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Eventually, there has to be an app to automatically use my phone and the TV to tell me, all right, you're 15 milliseconds behind. You're 30 milliseconds behind. Show me an actual number. Play something on the TV. Use the phone to show me an actual number. And there's even videos on YouTube that will – that show you like – it like plays beep, beep every few seconds, beep.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And it shows you like a little bar going across when it hits the middle right when the beep happens. So you can tell if you use your own phone to shoot video of the TV screen and then slow-mo through the video to find where does the beep happen if you can see the waveform. So here's how I did this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I did the same thing with Final Cut. I didn't have iMovie on my computer, but I had Final Cut still. And this is such a ridiculous overuse of a tool. Final Cut is not what this is for. It fights you at every turn. It should not be doing this. And yet, that's what I was able to see where the waveform of the video is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
yeah but what I want like this process would be very easy so here here's what this process should be the phone plays a video over airplay to the Apple TV or you just have a YouTube video that you can point your app to and say play this video on the Apple TV and then the phone uses its camera and microphone to watch for a big white flash on the video and
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
and listen to the microphone, and listen to the beep, and you can see those impulses on the input video and on the input audio, and the app should be able to tell you. Every time it sees flash beep, every time it should be able to tell you, you're 35 milliseconds behind. It can tell you that. That's not hard to write. I could write it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And this is one thing, honestly, I have found the web in general to be absolutely horrific at this, but ChatGPT would be pretty good at recommending stuff like this. What do people use for software type X temperatures? That would be something I would normally just search the app store of the device on, which I tried and there's nothing, or search the web and it's useless garbage constantly.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I have it set up that it seems okay now, but it still doesn't seem quite right. But I think it's so close, and I have it between negative three and negative four on my TV. If I put it on the next one over, it looks too wrong. I think this is about as good as it's going to get, but this process took me like 40 minutes, and it could have taken me four minutes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I have to look at that. I assume that would, because it's only like a positive offset. Correct. I assume that would change it in the wrong direction.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Because what has to happen is the TV has to hold the video back. The TV has to buffer the video for a few milliseconds while the audio catches up because the audio is where Sonos is introducing latency.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I mean, it sure seems like Apple just didn't want to pay anything for it. So I don't know. I don't know that this was the problem here, but we'll find out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Meta? Are you saying Meta? Does anyone pronounce it that way?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Well, I don't know. I mean, so what they've shown – this is – first of all, this is very smart by Meta, I think, because this goes along with – first of all, with their overall pretty, I would say, successful rebranding efforts. We are the last people calling on Facebook. They've rebranded themselves as meta. They've dropped their terrible baggage from the Facebook name to almost everybody.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Mark Zuckerberg is out there rebranding himself as this cool, normal guy somehow. Good luck with that. It's working.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Well, yeah, but the thing is – well, I mean, that's true, but I would say in the same way that, like, yes, they bought Instagram. They didn't make it from scratch, but Instagram is way more Facebook now than it's Instagram. Like, you know, in that same way, like, you know, their VR products are way more meta than they were Oculus at this point. But anyway –
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They show a very different approach to AR and VR than what we see from Apple and Microsoft and everyone else who's tried it. What we see from Meta has been pretty successful at the low-end gaming market for VR headsets with some basic pass-through features. And we see – using that foundation to slowly build towards something like this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And what we see from Apple is really – is like the total opposite approach with Vision Pro platform and product, which is like Apple started at the extraordinarily high end with no gaming to speak of, no software to speak of. Really not, seemingly not putting much faith in this being a consumer product at all, but for some reason putting it out there, which I continue to doubt at this point.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But anyway, Meta is doing great at the low end and the mid-range with their gaming stuff. and they're not even touching the high-end anymore. They had a brief time trying to make the Quest Pro happen. It didn't happen. They backed off of it. They had a high-end one planned that they canceled because they saw Vision Pro, and they're like, eh, nah, no thanks.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They're doing fine at the low-end with VR stuff, with gaming, and with kids and everything, and now they're demoing kind of where they think the high-end can go, and all of the tech demos, or all the demos from the people who had them...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
the people come away being blown away by them like everyone's like oh my god this is the future now granted it's a tech demo it's not a shipping product that is a massive difference obviously But this kind of shows where there is huge value to this is in the AR glasses format, in that kind of physical product format. AR glasses are a thing that people think is very cool and has a lot of promise.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
VR headsets are a different thing that people also think is cool and has promise, but for very different reasons and in very different use cases. You can kind of see the two companies trying to solve this from two different ways, but I think Meta's approach is more likely to succeed, to be honest.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
There are so many physical challenges around these products, so many technical challenges, so many fashion and just coolness challenges, and so many practicality challenges to these products. Apple took a really big swing and I think has almost completely missed. I think they went down almost every wrong path possible and shipped it out there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And I think part of the reason why we're hearing all these rumors around the Vision Pro launch that like maybe some people in the company weren't really supportive of it or they weren't sure if they should release it or it was divisive within the company. We've heard that for a long time. I think we see why it's a really hard area to get right. And the vision pro didn't get it right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And what meta showing here doesn't exist yet, but there is like, they're going towards that. And I think what everyone is kind of seeing is, Oh, they have a pretty good chance of doing something good here. Whereas what we're seeing from Apple has not really led us in that direction yet. At this point, I would be surprised if we ever saw another Vision hardware release from Apple.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Like that's how – I think the platform – has gotten off on such a wrong foot, I honestly would be surprised if we ever see a sequel to it. If they do anything in this space, I think it will be radically different. Not the same thing, but a little bit better and a little bit cheaper. I think it'll be radically different, if at all. And not soon.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But what we see from Meta is they're already succeeding in the VR market better than anybody else ever has. They're doing great in that market. It's still a small market, but they're doing great in it. And they might be doing this thing at the high end. That's why everyone's excited because everyone sees it and they're like, huh, it has some trade-offs, some pretty big trade-offs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And with the largest asterisk being it literally is not shipping and is not buyable and will never ship in this form. So this is literally just a tech demo. However, People like it, and they're excited by it. Now, that being said, I don't think AR and VR, even in a great form like this, I don't think that's going to replace the smartphone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I don't think it's going to be nearly as big or as important as a lot of people think or hope that it will. What we're seeing with the actual products that exist in this category is they're fun. They're useful to certain people. They're not replacing phones. They're not replacing game consoles. They're not replacing TVs in any kind of meaningful numbers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I think the whole investment in this area is interesting. And in certain ways, it's exciting. But I don't think it's the future of computing. I think it's the future of more wearables to add to our lives. In the same way that the Apple Watch and wearables like it didn't replace smartphones. They just added to them. I think AR glasses will add to our computing lives as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I don't think they will be replacing nearly anything. However, if they are to succeed... The approach Meta is taking, look, and they already have the Ray-Ban glasses that are pretty successful. I think that approach, like what Meta is doing, slowly adding things that people will add to their computing lives, not replace things with, that's working.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And this is the latest demo of like where that's going. That's working. And I think what Apple's doing is not working.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
For whatever it's worth, I have this problem on the AirPods Pros. I think the AirPods Pro don't have skin sensing. I could be wrong, but I will often have... I'll put them in my pants pocket for a minute as I'm going in a building or something, and I will sometimes find out that it has been playing in my pocket.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So I actually got pretty good results. And so there's this program called CPU ID, HW Monitor, something that everybody uses. And I was like, okay, I remember that from my old hard OCP days. That still exists. Okay, great. I'll download that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It's like a research tool. okay um i haven't looked too much into notebook lm itself but it's it's like you know you like add your documents and stuff that you're researching on this topic to notebook lm and it can tell you stuff using lms about about your documents you can use like study guides too is this the same product I think so, yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You can put in PDFs or websites and things like that, and it'll tell you stuff about them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Oh, less than that. But what's interesting about this is they introduced this feature called Audio Overview, which auto-generates podcasts about whatever you put in. And so, of course, people have been having a lot of fun with this. Before I begin, have either of you heard one of these podcasts yet?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
In this case, this won't be as much of a surprise to you, but I'd like to welcome to our show some guests. Oh, no. So we get pitched all the time for guests for our show. It's just from PR spam.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, no, definitely not. I listened to one of the podcasts that was generated by Notebook LM, and it kind of blew my mind.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It was not anything that made me scared about us and our future as a show. However, I think this is worth hearing. So now I'd like to play what I fed Notebook LM for this guest appearance here was John's post on Hypercritical entitled, I Made This.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Oh, gosh. So this is a podcast that Notebook.com generated. It's seven minutes long. I'll chapterize it. If you want to skip it, you can, listeners. But I suggest you listen to it. Now, I have not heard this one yet. I saved this for the three of us to listen to live on the show. So here is this AI podcast discussing John's post about AI creation entitled, I Made This.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Finally, we get the experience of yelling at a podcast.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
What's interesting about this, so to me, when I hear the podcast generated by Notebook LM, they don't sound that ridiculous to me. They don't sound that bad. No, absolutely not. The words that they're saying or the voice that they're saying them in? Because it's two different things. The actual content is not nearly as bad as I expected it to be.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And that is what they're doing. This is still based on modern LLM generation techniques and summarization and things like that. And obviously they're then forming it into a podcast with these kind of podcast formats of people saying, hey, what about this? Hey, welcome back, guys. That's a good point. But to me, like –
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I didn't mention this when we first were talking about these, but I kind of regretted afterwards not mentioning it. If you look at why they might be doing this, like the A18 being its own special chip, it's now the smallest and most likely therefore cheapest chip in Apple's lineup that can run Apple Intelligence. So this is not just going to be in the iPhone 16.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
This shows, I think, the immense power of generative AI to actually replace a bunch of mediocre media. What this sounds like to me is a lot of real podcasts that are out there. Nothing that I really listen to, but it sounds like a lot of podcasts out there. And in many ways, the style of speaking where they're very prepared and professional and yet there's no personality being shown whatsoever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Hey, that's a good point, Jane. It sounds a lot like news anchors talking to each other and trying to appear human.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And the thing is, what I am into podcasts for is people and the personalities and and the chemistry between hosts and and like you know how people just interact with each other and have interesting conversations and this is not that and doesn't sound like it will ever be that however there's also a lot of people out there who just want like Information digest.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Here is like what happened today in X or whatever my industry or interest is. I want to hear the latest in that. Summarize the news headlines for me and give me a little bit of context for each of those that I can listen to every day on my jog or whatever. There is a large market for news.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
utilitarian mediocrity and that's what this delivers it's not going to replace like Dubai Friday but it is going to replace a lot of mediocrity that's out there because a lot of people like and especially because you can make something that is specialized to like You're like one thing like if you're the only person who wants to hear a summary podcast of topic X, you can do that here.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And I think that's very powerful. You really like individualize your media. It's like this is exactly what you want, even if. No one else wants to hear this or is interested in this or it's about something that's like private documentation that only you have for whatever reason or like your own content. You can listen to that kind of stuff. You can use it as a learning tool.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It can be a summarization tool. It can be – get me up to date. Give me like a quick refresher on the notes for my presentation before I give my presentation in an hour like on my drive to work.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It is most likely going to also be in all upcoming Apple products that don't have a need for massive CPU power otherwise but want to run Apple intelligence. So think about things like future HomePods, like the rumored HomePod with the screen or the robot arm thing, whatever that's going to be, like that kind of thing. Low-end iPads. Maybe possibly the next Apple TV. Who knows?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
sure okay yeah but like because because on the test they're gonna want you to get the answer right not just well i told you what my lm told me but like but this like this blew my mind because yeah this does not sound as good as a good podcast but it sounds better than a lot of bad podcasts that i've heard from actual people i would rather listen to these than a lot of actual podcasts i have heard
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And it's one of those things where the download link opens up an overlay on the page that looks like a download link, but it's actually an ad that is made to look like a download link.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I think a large effect that we are already having with generative AI and LLMs that will continue to get even more severe in the future is There's a lot of media out there that is formulaic and low personality and is mostly being used to just generate stuff for people to consume in mediocrity. I think there will be a lot of AI stuff that will replace that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Like a lot of AI generation will replace a lot of that mediocrity. And this is going to be a large theme of the AI age in general that – There's a huge amount of mediocrity out there that can be easily automated and the results will be good enough or better. And I think this blew my mind when I heard it because it's way better than I would have guessed.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It's not great, but it's way better than I thought it could be at this stage.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
There's lots of products across Apple's lineup that they're going to want to put Apple intelligence in, maybe because they are Siri-based like a HomePod or things like that. They're going to want that across as much of their product line as possible as quickly as possible.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But the thing... Obviously, you're going to be, I think, a more critical evaluator than many.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So I'm guessing the base A18 is most likely going to be the next chip in lots of different things, probably all releasing over the following year or two. And we'll probably find out first when we get an update to the low-end iPad, because I bet it'll be powering that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Well, I'll tell you what. I've been living with the notification summaries on 18.1 for the last week or whatever. I find them very useful. Even when they are not always right, I find them very useful. And when I listen to Notebook LM generated podcasts about things I do know about, I find their error rate to be about the same as people podcasts covering the same topics. I really do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It's not like this is closer than you think to human accuracy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
No. At this point, my only problem with Apple's summarization on Apple Intelligence Beta so far – and this is a big problem – is that there is no API.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
For me to use them at all in my app. Like, for example. Yeah, it's applied to you or not. Yeah, in mail, it can show in the table list there a summary of each message. Right. I can't do that in my app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
No, well, I don't know the extent of it yet. So there was some saga with my son's gaming PC in trying to figure out what was going on with his laptop's cooling system or thermals or whatever. I wanted to know, what do people use on Windows to show CPU and GPU temperatures to themselves?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And the most infuriating thing, Apple sent a developer email like two weeks ago saying, bring Apple intelligence to your apps. And every single thing the email suggests that you do is not Apple intelligence. They're just using that to brand like, here's our ML features that we've had for years. Use this. Here's Spotlight. Try to use that, we guess.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
All of the Apple intelligence features that they're advertising everywhere else is Apple intelligence are not available in any APIs to any developers right now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They want you to do it. So when they roll that out, the data is there. This is like the biggest Apple development on iOS in iOS's history that only Apple can use. They have opened up zero of it. There's no API for any of it. And that makes me very angry. Anyway, but besides that, I like them. But that's a big thing that I will keep harping on.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Honestly, I live with them for a couple days before you do. I have found them to be very useful and accurate enough to be useful.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and QA Wolf. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at ATP.FM slash join. One of the member perks is ATP Overtime, a weekly bonus segment that is available exclusively to members. This week's Overtime, we'll be talking about...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
cell phone bans and kids and cell phones and kind of the parenting and school decisions and legal decisions around whether your kids should have a phone in school. We'll talk about that in overtime. You can join to listen at atb.fm slash join. Thanks for listening, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You don't need to go back. Definitely not.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I love this method of torture for John. Have somebody poorly summarize your own content back to you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, it's constant just like, okay, here's the real download link. Download now! But it's like, that's not really the download link. You have to close the ad, the download link's behind it or something. Anyway, through all the logistics of trying to find the real download link to this app,
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I mean, maybe they did it this way so that it wouldn't be some big scandal that it's just like a software lockout kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I had one wrong try, and I installed, apparently, PC App Store, which messed up all his browser search parameters and stuff. It was a whole thing. So now I've got to figure out, like, how do I get rid of this now? Of course, Windows Defender is like, everything's fine. It's like, no, trust me, everything's not fine. So now I have to, like, do something else. I guess, like...