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
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
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610: More Values in the Darkness
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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
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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
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Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
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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
We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. Have you or someone you know been a victim of identity theft or harassed or stalked or doxxed? You ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the internet for anyone to see? It's more than you think.
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
And so I thought, you know, let me do something about this. And delete me really was a significant reduction. So here's what you do. You sign up. You provide delete me with exactly what information you want them to go delete. And then they take it from there. And they'll send you regular personalized privacy reports showing what they found, where, and how they were able to remove it.
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
608: Boot to Toot
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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...
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
Not a good sign. And I'm like, hmm, that's unusual. Why are the contents under pressure?
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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...
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
608: Boot to Toot
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
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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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Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from your products to your content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms. There are so many great features for Squarespace to make websites incredibly powerful and incredibly easy for you.
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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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You can empower anyone with design intelligence to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to your unique needs and craft a bespoke digital identity to use across one's entire online presence. and they also now have Squarespace payments getting even better all the time. Squarespace payments is the easiest way to manage your payments all in one place. Onboarding is fast and simple.
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You get started with just a few clicks, and you can start receiving payments right away. And as always, they're giving your customers more ways to pay than ever. With popular payment methods like Klarna, ACX Direct Debit, Apple Pay, Afterpay, ClearPay, Any way your customers might want to pay, they probably support it. So it is a great platform.
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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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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 for a free trial. You can build the whole site in trial mode. See how well it works for you. When you're ready to launch, squarespace.com slash ATP for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
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Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When you look at the physical realities of this, I just don't see it.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Whatever email you're writing, you can just delete it right now.
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Well, you can have monochrome colors as long as it's singular colors each. That is a thing. Yes, exactly.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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+.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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
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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...
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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
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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.
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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...
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is definitely a weird incentive they've created. Right?
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That was Peak Design. Actually, that's the one I've been using the last few months.
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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...
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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
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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?
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Yeah. So you're not going to have the experience and the finesse of somebody who's doing it like 10 times a day.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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I've already hit my button. I hit it while you were talking already. So I'm in.
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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...
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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.
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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
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Eventually there will be, but the protocol is mostly what has changed, not the data storage layer.
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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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
603: Too Smart to Move
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-
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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?
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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,
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
But it's bad. Like today was only in the high 70s and it couldn't keep up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
The first available Rivian appointment in my entire region of New York is 10 weeks from now, November 13th.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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?
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I'm going to shortly stop needing that because I'm going to shortly stop qualifying for my permit and lose the permit.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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?
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah, because it almost didn't. I was almost stranded on the last trip I took.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
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.
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...