Marco Arment
Appearances
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
With regard to your earlier half question, what kind of feedback did I get? I got basic, almost universally feedback that what I was doing was wrong.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I do get a couple of suggestions for minor things, including I think the most actionable suggestion I got was there's a couple other apps that will do the GPS tagging that that I need to at least investigate and see if they will better fit my workflow. But for the most part, people just shook their heads in in mutual embarrassment on my behalf.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Mm-hmm. All right. Then with regard to my question, if I'm not mistaken, about, hey, you know, I kind of wish I could just always share all of my photos to the shared library or at least default to that. And what Apple tries to do is it tries to be smart about it. And you can say, oh, you know, when you're at home, always go to the shared photo library.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And otherwise, if your partner or spouse or what have you is nearby, I guess by way of Bluetooth, then you can do shared photo library. But otherwise, it goes to your personal library.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And Alexander F wrote in to say, if you select share manually in the shared library settings and then just press the yellow bubble on the camera app, it will remember that setting and automatically always put all photos in the shared library, regardless of what the smarts thinks. I did this once when shared photo library came out and haven't needed to touch it since. That's a good tip.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Excellent. John, can you tell me about JPEG XL in iOS 18 and on the iPhone 16, please?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
uh, Jeremy Rambo with regard to iPhone apps buying via the microphone. Uh, so we mostly debunked this, but then, uh, Jeremy said, uh, I once found a vulnerability that allowed for an app to listen to the user's AirPods microphone in the background without permission, but in a very limited way. And this has already been fixed a couple of years ago now. And 16.1, I'd forgotten about this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I read this one at a debut. And in fact, I think, uh, Guy might've had me proofread this for him if memory serves, although I might be, uh,
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
wrong about that but anyways it's a fascinating write-up it's not too long really really interesting if you're even vaguely nerdy uh and gee does a great job of doing the write-up so i would definitely check that out just if you're interested in you know uh i don't know like uh doing this sort of work in in kind of what is it white hat i don't really love that phrasing but you know the the kind of doing doing things that may seem bad but for good uh and that's what he was doing
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And then he also added the iPhone 16 lineup and all devices based on the A18 or M4 have a new secure exclave. That's not enclave, but exclave.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
That presumably makes it impossible for an exploit, even with kernel level access, to disable the microphone or camera in use indicators because the little orange or green dot is rendered by a separate OS running in an exclave directly onto the display hardware. That is pretty wild. And anyways, Apple calls it the secure indicator light.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Of course. The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus batteries, you can remove them as you always could, but in a very different way. This is from MacRumors. Apple has confirmed that the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus have a new electrically-induced battery removal process. The batteries use a type of adhesive that can be loosened with low-voltage electrical current, such as from a 9-volt battery, according to Apple.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
The battery can then easily be removed from the devices. This new process is considered to be easier than the adhesive pull tabs that are found under batteries in previous iPhone models. And so there's, of course, an iFixit teardown all about this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Just very quickly, one of my favorite things about the iFixit Teardown was at one point they said, oh, you know, it comes out so easily, gravity will do it. And so they turned one of them upside down, applied the voltage and waited a few seconds. And sure enough, all of a sudden the battery just came tumbling out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
All right, so if you wanted to get rid of those annoying monthly screen recording prompts, Jeff Johnson has reverse engineered a way to do it. Jeff writes, Richie Adams found the file where the prompt dates are stored. And we'll put a link to all this because I'm not going to read it out now. The file is protected by TCC. What does that stand for, John?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
All right, no worries. It's protected by TCC, so to access it, you'll need to grant full disk access to the terminal app. In the plist file, the keys are the paths, or perhaps the fully qualified domain names or whatever it is, of the executable files with screen recording permission, and the values are the dates.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
To stop the prompts forever, for the rest of your life anyway, set the date too far in the future. For example, the year 3024 instead of 2024. You'll need to do this for each app and afterward log out and log in again so that the replay D process recognizes the new defaults. Dan Sully notes, my keys are not the paths of the app, but there it is, the bundle identifier.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I couldn't think of the name there. John, it looks like you have some thoughts about this, which we'll get back to in just a second. But then Kyle Rubinock wrote a shell script that will set the dates to a year from now. So you could perhaps run that
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
All right, before we get started, it is still September. There's a week left in September, and September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, which means we are still, still trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
At one point, I had my little show notes up that would tell me the talking points I'm supposed to use, but I accidentally closed it, so I'm going to do this off the dome, as Marlon would say. You don't need notes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, it's not great. And obviously, you know, we've all been upgrading to Sequoia and getting just absolutely overwhelmed with all the, hey, is it okay? Is it okay? Is it okay? Is it okay? Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, are we cool? It's just incessant. And I don't know, like, perhaps I'm not having enough empathy for security professionals, because it's just not a world I live in.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But I find it to be extremely off-putting and frustrating. But Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
All right, but in happier news, we've all got new toys, and this is a year that even John has new toys. So I will preface this by saying, you know, I was in Memphis over the weekend. I thought about trying to do an in-store pickup or even delivery while I was there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Coincidentally, some things were delivered to the hotel, and I don't know if it's my business to say exactly what, but I know that it could have worked. Maybe I should have, but I didn't have the gumption to do it. So anyway, so I set a in-store pickup for yesterday afternoon, Sunday afternoon, the day I got home.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I've lived it. Yes, that's right. So, speaking of, this past Friday as we record, I was in Memphis at St. Jude's campus, and we did 12 hours of live telethon. We called the podcast-a-thon. It was myself, Mike Hurley, Stephen Hackett, Jason Snell, and Kathy Campbell, and we did all sorts of fun hijinks for 12 hours and raised $130,000 or thereabouts for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. So...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
That's true, yes, because a lot of them did show up in Memphis, and Jason had them. So I unboxed a lot of them. But anyways, this morning I went and I picked up my new iPhone 16 Pro Natural Titanium 512. my new Apple Watch, Big Boy in aluminum, and Erin's stuff. Erin hasn't opened any of her stuff yet. We've been busy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I've barely gotten mine all set up, which we can talk about the transfer here in a minute. And also, if we have time for me to whine about the in-store experience, I'd also like to do that at some juncture. But if we don't have time, that's no problem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Oh, okay. Let me start by saying this is the first world. These are the first world problems. I'm going to try to make this quick and I will move right along. But I go in and of course, you know, there's no lines anywhere. And I walk up to the first person that doesn't have somebody in front of them. And I say, hey, you know, I have a pickup to do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And they said, okay, go over to the pickup counter desk, whatever thing. Fine. There's a couple of people there. There are a couple of customers there and one employee. And this one employee is already looking ever so slightly flummoxed. Here's the thing. If Apple wants to do this, oh, magic happens. Just magically your products will appear where you're standing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And magically you can just walk up to anyone and pay for them or even scan them on your own if it's something cheaper, you know, and just walk out of the store. It has to work.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And apparently just from overhearing the conversations between the employees, the quote unquote backstage area was like completely overwhelmed with a shipment coming in with all these people asking for runners to bring out, you know, my phones and my watches and that person's this and that person's that. It's just, if you're going to do this fancy stuff, it's got to freaking work.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And I was there for some, I'd already paid for everything. I should have just been able to swoop in and swoop out. And I was there for like half an hour, 45 minutes. Now, in the grand scheme of things, does that matter? No. But Apple is supposed to be the, it just works company. It's the great experience company. And this was not a great experience.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And some woman that was standing next to me was waiting for like half an hour to get a screen protector installed. The reason was they couldn't just get... The dude at the desk couldn't get his hands on the screen protector because it was backstage. And I don't know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I just... Maybe I'm too East Coast for this, but give me a f***ing line to stand in and give me... Have the person that's helping me run their a** to the back and go find my stuff. Like... I don't think this is that difficult. Why does it have to be so synthetically fancy? Like, if you're going to have it be fancy, make it be fancy. This wasn't fancy. This was the illusion of fancy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And it's just infuriating. Like, it didn't have to be this way.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Why do we do it? St. Jude is, like I've said several times now, a children's research hospital. So some of the incredible stuff that they do is not only do they treat children who are really in the throes of terrible, you know, life-threatening illnesses, but they also do a ton of research and they try to figure out ways to make sure that no child would die in the dawn of their lives and in the
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I will say, however, that as I think I've talked about in years past, I apparently – one of my many superpowers is utterly ruining iPhone screens. And I don't mean like shattering them, although that's happened for sure.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
No, no, no. I didn't. No, no, no. Everything's fine. Everything's fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
i decided after much chatter from the internet in my direction and i think yep i think i'd solicited uh you know requests about what do you do about screen protectors the internet came through and a lot of them said just do the belkin one that apple installs do it right then and there they'll install it for you they know exactly what they're doing there won't be any bumps or anything like that there won't be any dust and you can get like a
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Free replacements. I don't know if it's for life. Apparently, you have to register the screen protector. I guess you at least get a series of free replacements that apparently Apple is happy to reinstall for you if need be.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I believe it is glass. I don't think I... Do I have the bag in here? I don't think I have the bags in here so I can look it up. I apologize. When one of you starts talking, I'll look around the office to make sure the bag isn't in here. I believe it's glass. I'm not 100% sure. I didn't look closely at it. But I did have them install it. And do you want the good news or the bad news? Oh, no.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
The good news is, no, there's no real bad news. The good news is it feels pretty good. Like it's a little tackier. That's maybe not the best word, but like there's a little more friction on it than I think a regular piece of glass was.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
No, I wouldn't say I think it is. I think it is, but I'm not 100% sure. However, you know how I always thought you were nuts, John, and kind of still do? For insisting on a bottomless iPhone case. A case without a bottom so you can swipe up no problem. And I always thought you were kind of nuts because what is the big deal? It's fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
It is unquestionably better. Gosh, I've been talking a lot for having said I had no opinions about this. Here we are. Welcome to the show. Right, exactly. Welcome. We've been here 10 years. It is definitely better to have a bottomless iPhone case. Full stop. Not arguing that. I just don't think it's as big a deal to me as it is to you. Let me tell you what is not fun though.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
When you take a phone that you do not intend to have a case on it and you put an extra two to three millimeters of screen on it. So now I have a ledge every time I swipe up, which is the screen protector. Sitting here now, I hate it so much. Like, I think I'll get used to it, but I hate it so much.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I know. I don't know. Ultimately, I think it's worth it to me because, again, I don't, well, I was going to say I don't mistreat my phones. I mean, clearly I'm doing something to scratch these screens every year for the last, like, four years. So I don't think running without a screen protector is the right choice for me, but I kind of hate the way it feels right now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And I think that may be what I end up doing, but I really don't love any of the case options right now. And so... we'll see what happens. But I do, I did very much like, however, the application process because they basically, they asked me if they could unbox the phone. I said, of course, thank you for asking.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
They immediately put it in their fancy little machine that lines everything up just right. And then and all of a sudden the screen protectors on and into my eyes, leaving aside that there's an additional ledge that I wasn't really considering, uh, to my eyes that it absolutely perfect job. So in that sense, I'm very satisfied. Um,
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
When I was there, I attended a couple of talks from some doctors there who were just talking about these absolutely phenomenal things that they're doing and how they're looking at research for one type of cancer very cautiously and in a controlled way, applying it to different kinds of cancer and finding incredible, incredible solutions and fixes and whatnot. The work they do there is incredible.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But yeah, I mean, I think that's, with regard to the purchase experience, that's all I've really got. I did go back down. Oh, that's the other thing. I went from Pro Max to Pro. Gentlemen. Having a human-sized phone in my hand feels so great. It's so much better. I mean, well, for me, I shouldn't say that like the Max is bad.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I do a little teeny bit miss the screen real estate of the Max, but oh my word, it's so much nicer in the hand. It is so much nicer in the hand. I can use my phone without a pop socket. Imagine that you can use a phone. Did you know this gentleman? You could actually hold a phone in one hand. You can operate the entire keyboard with one hand.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
You don't even need to have a little thing poking out the back. You can just hold the phone. I stand by having gone the max last year for the five X lens or, you know, camera system or what have you. And I actually am very glad that I tried it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I think I could do it again if we're in a situation for like the 17 or something like that, where, you know, only the good cameras on the 17 pro max or, you know, you know what I mean? Something along those lines. But I stand by and I have now reaffirmed my commitment to, oh my, I am not a big phone person. I can do it if I have to, but it's not for me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
All right. But so far, I think I'll wrap up, even though, like I said, I'm already going longer than I intended. Immediate impressions. The phone transfer, I did use a full bore, like $90 Apple bespoke Thunderbolt cable, and it took roughly an hour. And my vague recollection of last year was that it took like two and a half, three hours. So I do think that gets an A plus thumbs up from me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
This is very not – I did not do a lot of science here, to be clear. But the vibe I got is that it was definitely better. I failed to transfer my sim on the first shot. I mean, not from my fault. It just didn't work. And then I tried it again. This is a Verizon eSIM. I tried it again, and it worked no problem. Other than that, I mean, everything seems nice. I like the camera control.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I don't want to go too far into it because I think you guys are going to have many more thoughts about it. It does not currently feel intuitive to me, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad by any means. I think I will absolutely get used to it. But I have to think through, like, is this a half press? Is it a half double press? Is it a full press? Is it a full double press? It hasn't clicked.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And typically Apple stuff, you don't have to think about it. It just does or it works exactly the way you expect it to work. And in this case, I don't think it's successful. But again, I want to repeat, I don't think that that's necessarily an indictment of the camera control. It's just I got to get used to it. That's all. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
They talk about how they're doing DNA sequencing in order to figure out, okay, well, we know that you have Let's say not a cancer, say epilepsy. We know you have epilepsy, but it could be one of 50 different kinds of epilepsy. But thanks to genetic sequencing, we can say, oh, no, no, your particular style of epilepsy is the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 style.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
The software setup experience, I would say, is solid A-. You know, it took a long time. I don't love that you still have to download all the apps even when you're doing a phone-to-phone transfer. But in the grand scheme of things, it was fine. There were no major issues.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And we know that this drug treats that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 style really well. And we shouldn't use this other drug that treats the 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 style or whatever the case may be. So the work that St. Jude does is really incredible. And one of the most incredible things about what St. Jude does is that they do this without billing their patients or their patients' families.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
May I offer a suggestion? You make merciless fun of me for trying the same thing more than once or twice, expecting the results to be different. I think it worked last year. I'm going to let it go because I don't want to get any of us angry at each other, but I think maybe trying a different approach for next year might be a good idea.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Maybe I'm the idiot here, which wouldn't be the first time, but I always, or for the last several years anyway, I just buy an unlocked phone. I don't want Verizon to know what's coming. I don't want them to think that they... Because a lot of times in the past, I don't know if this is true anymore, but in the past, if you bought a phone...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
to replace your existing one, like you're describing, you know, I want this one to be my new phone. And I tell Apple that ahead of time, a lot of times like AT&T and Verizon would ding you like 50 bucks for the activation for reasons unknown. And so I would just buy an unlocked one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And then typically again, not always, but typically neither Verizon or AT&T would ding you the $50 activation fee because you're just bringing something new to them. It's like, you know, how do they know if you're just a John Gruber or Jason Snell and you're just activating somebody else's, you know, or activating.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Well, yeah, but mine does that every time. It says, oh, you know, do you want to take over the old phone?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
We'll see what happens. I might be wrong. But the last couple of years, I don't believe that's been the case or the last several years.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So their perspective is, if you have a child that's fighting for their lives, the last thing you want to worry about as a family is anything but helping that child and making that child feel better. If you need help getting to Memphis, they will fund the trip to Memphis.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
If you need help staying in Memphis, they will figure out a way for you to stay in Memphis, either on their own campus or somewhere else. If you need the patient or perhaps a sibling to go to school, they have a school on campus. It's just utterly incredible, all the work that St.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Did you buy unlocked or did you buy as a replacement?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Very quickly with regard to the watch, I had heard a story, and I think this was accurate at the time, that the best way to move a watch is to unpair on the old phone, if I remember correctly.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Jude does in order to do everything they can to stop this just terrible, terrible series of diseases, because it's not just cancer, like I said. So how can you help? Well, you can do a couple things. You can go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP, and you can throw them a few bucks. Now, we've done a phenomenal job this year, a truly incredible job.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Well, so that's the thing. So the way it used to be years and years ago is you would unpair the watch, then do your phone transfer, then repair the watch on the new phone. This time, I didn't do any of that. I just waited for the phone to say, hey, would you like to move the watch over? And I said, yes. And it worked. Now, I do not have cellular, though.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I do not have cellular, and I do think that makes a big difference. Oh, yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
It moved no problem. And then when I unboxed my Apple Watch Series 10, which we'll get to later, I said, hey, can you make it, or I think it asked or whatever, do you want this to effectively replace the old one? And I said, yes. And it said, sure. And that worked pretty much no problem. So my Apple Watch transfer experience was A++. It was pretty much flawless. I was stunned.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
We've broken all – Relay as a whole has broken all of its records. As I sit here now, we're over $800,000 raised. But here's the thing. St. Jude uses a lot of money because they – All this research is expensive. All the treatments are expensive. And they're also trying to help fund treatments going to other countries.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
There's a program, I forget the specifics off the top of my head, but they're trying to figure out a way to get chemotherapy treatments into other countries. This isn't just America here. Um, so you can go to stg.org slash ATP and you can throw them a few bucks, five bucks, 10 bucks. It doesn't matter. Anything you can contribute is helpful.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And I think that I, and perhaps the three of us kind of get ourselves wrapped around the axle about the big donations, but truly anything you can offer is helpful. I saw Ryan Richard, excuse me, Ryan Ricard earlier today posted this, which I thought was great. And we're going to talk about the Marco offset in a second.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But Ryan said, an idea for an alternative Marco offset for those who didn't buy Apple stuff this year, check any credit cards with cash rewards. Mine had over $100 hanging around, which I was happy to hand over to St. Jude. This is free money that you got generally for being a wealthy person, but it's no more valuable. I think that's great.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So you could do that, or you could apply the Marco Offset. Marco, do you know anything about the Marco Offset, or is that just a funny coincidence?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Okay. Yeah, that's true. Actually, I agree with you that I do like that it leaves all the camera controls up. So, yes, we have live solved one problem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Oh, no. And every other third-party case manufacturer.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Just very briefly, why why not go caseless? I'm not saying that's the right choice for anyone, but that is what I plan to do with this one. Why not just go caseless?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
This looks green on screen. I do not deny that it may look blue. See one in person. Trust me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Just to very quickly interject here, I typically do not like Apple Silicon cases. I feel like they're way too tacky. I really just viscerally do not like them. And I can't, other than the tackiness, I can't really put my finger on why. And I did go and look at a bunch of the ones at the Apple store today while I was waiting for the back room to bring me, or backstage to bring me my stuff.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And I got to say, I feel like If I do end up wanting a case, that might be the direction I go because it's a lot less tacky than it used to be. And it feels nice. Granted, I didn't have one in hand. I was just petting it on the wall of cases. But it is definitely worth looking into again if you, like me, wrote it off many, many years ago.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah. And so John and Jason did a live recording of Robot or Not.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Exactly right. Exactly what I was going to say. So I was the peanut gallery for that. That was, I don't know, like hour eight or nine or something like that. It was toward the end of the broadcast. I don't recall exactly when, but you can look it up and you can check it out. So again, I don't know if we're going to do this again next week. This might be the last time. We probably will. next week?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah. I don't know. Just go caseless. That's what the cool kids do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah. I mean, the physical condition of my Pro Max, leaving aside my freaking ruined screen, like the back of it, the sides of it, that's all fine. And I did use a case occasionally, but for the most part, I didn't. And physically, it's in really, really good shape. It's just the screen that's bad news bears.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Actually, maybe not. We'll see. But one way or another, stjude.org.atp. S-T-J-U-D-E.org.atp. Please and thank you. We truly, truly, truly, truly appreciate all the money that you have sent because, again, most of the money that we have earned for St. Jude comes from the $5, $10, $15 donations. So please, anything you can do, please feel free. stjude.org.atp. Let's do some follow-up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
John, you've gotten some solutions to your extracting file names from photos conundrum. Would you, if you don't mind, give a super-duper brief recap of what the issue was, please?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Real-time follow-up from like 20 minutes ago because I forgot to go look. Belkin Ultra Glass 2 screen protector for iPhone 16 Pro. So it is glass as far as I can tell, not only because of the name, but from what I can tell based on the packaging. But yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes. I'll put it in Slack for you to look at if you care. But I believe it is honest-to-goodness glass.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
no it is not so uh but the good news is like i believe i had said earlier allegedly if you screw something up then you can get a new one for free and have the apple store put back on for you anyway yeah the case situation uh not great which is part of the reason why i am going caseless caseless again uh all right do we want to talk uh apple watch or do we want to talk airpods first can we talk photo styles briefly
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Oh, yes, I'm sorry. I completely skipped that. I've only played with this very briefly, but I'm really digging this. One of the things that I didn't talk too much about during the ATP Insider special is I just don't really... edit my pictures other than doing color correction in the most basic, like silly, well, not silly, but like simple color correction that I can possibly do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So if I take a photo inside and everything looks blue, I'll try to do color correction and make it look, you know, the color it's supposed to be with these photo styles. Yeah. And especially since they're like a sidecar, maybe that's not the right term, but it's additional information that's kind of attached to the photo. So you can go in and revisit it later. I'm really liking this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And this, for me, for my simple brain, this is the right amount of editing for a photo. I don't want to have 85 different sliders to tweak. I just want to mouse around in that like trackpad of dots that they present to you. So you get this like grid of dots and you can like kind of, swirl around in there and it'll, you know, live update the photo and show the results of that change.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And I forget exactly what you're editing. I think it's tone and contrast or something like that. Maybe one of you know, but that to me is the correct amount of editing. And I've only done this like once or twice because I've only had the phone for a few hours, but I'm really digging this so far.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Marco, thoughts? Have you played with this any?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
You know, did you go into settings for the camera and do the photographic style setting? I did. I used the camera control to do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Well, because the reason I ask is when you drill into settings, camera, photographic styles, it brings up a screen and it says photographic styles. To begin, select four of your favorite photos captured with this iPhone. Photographic styles lets you personalize how you appear in photos with incredible nuance to get the look you want.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Now, I haven't taken enough photos to do this yet, so I haven't proceeded to the, you know, there's a button that says get started. But after I take, you know, maybe a bunch of photos of the kids and maybe, you know, a photo or two of Penny and maybe like a
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
landscape or something i don't know i plan to go back in there and do whatever that wizard is to see i presume it will suggest to me okay well based on you know these photos or perhaps it'll give me some editing options and say okay or maybe it'll like blindly show me here's like four of the different styles which one do you like the most and my hope having not tried it yet is that maybe it'll point me in a direction although as you were talking
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I did take a picture of Penny staring down a ball that she really wanted me to throw for her. Why did you throw it? Oh, I did. I did, but I was taking a picture. And so anyways, the natural for this does look very good. I don't know if it's my favorite, but it definitely does look very, very good.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, I don't remember which ones are which until they're presented. Then oftentimes I can mostly figure it out, but I couldn't like demonstrate them now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Thank you. This thing, compared to my Series 8...
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
little guy it's chonky it's big actually i shouldn't say it's chonky because it's actually very very thin but it's big now that being said it looks like a billboard on my wrist right now but i think you were right the whole time and it only lightly pains me to admit that publicly but i think i will quickly adjust to it and i don't think it's absurd seeing it on my wrist right now
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I do wonder if an Ultra would have been a bridge too far. I'm not sure. Maybe it wouldn't be. But looking at the way this is sitting on my wrist right now, I feel like the Ultra might have been too much. If you look at it, it doesn't look that much thinner to me than... But it sits and feels much thinner to my eyes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And I was talking to Jason about this when we were in Memphis together, and he pointed out to me, and I think he's exactly right, the sensor plateau or mesa or whatever that's on the bottom, the stuff that sits against your wrist with the... with the little LEDs that flash for all the different things that it's sensing, except blood ox, apparently, in many ways.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
That is quite a bit thinner than it used to be, and I think that makes a big difference as well. I really like it so far. I also like, speaking of old men with old men problems, I like that the font appears to be noticeably bigger because the screen is so much bigger, which is also nice. In terms of the off-axis viewing,
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
It's definitely better, but I can't say that I'm like, oh, you know what I mean? Like, it's just one of those things where I think in the past I would have had to twist my wrist more or, you know, just wouldn't be able to see my watch or the watch face. And now I can see it at more angles, but it's not the sort of thing that's striking. It's just, oh, that's nice. It works better now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So one thing I haven't tried. Oh, there we go. It's coming from the watch. So I can play music.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I mean, for what it's worth, I was trying to play music. Maybe it's not coming through because of Zoom or whatever. But it plays actually surprisingly loud. I mean, this is definitely audible from waist level. I don't know. Again, I don't know how much that's coming through.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, I just tried it for the first time just now. And I don't know if like I said, I don't know if it will come through the recording. It certainly doesn't sound like it's coming through on Zoom. But it I mean, it's sufficient. I wouldn't want to listen to music this way, generally speaking, but in a pinch, especially as someone who really hates silence. And that's me. Yeah, that's kind of nice.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, I mean, I like it. I like it a lot so far. Way too early to tell because I did this after I did my phone upgrade. And so really, really early to tell. But so far, so good. Did Tina get a new watch this year or no?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I really dislike AppleScript. I get why it's the way it is largely, and I do think it's potentially for the best, but I also don't particularly care for it. I was going to ask you, why are you printing the file names or returning the file names rather than just copying them to the clipboard?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, so far so good. I think it'll be worth revisiting this next week, both this and the phones once Erin has a chance with hers, because she is much, I was going to say much more blasé. That has a negative connotation. I don't mean that at all, but she's kind of like, yeah, whatever about all this. Like, oh, that's nice. It's new and it has new things. Cool. You know what I mean?
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Like it doesn't really rev her engine like it does us. And so I'm curious to hear her thoughts. And by, you know, next Wednesday when we record next, hopefully I'll be able to have her relay some of the some of her opinions for me and I'll see what see what she thinks.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Oh, really? I think I disagree. I think I like it a little more squared. But I mean, this is, again, initial impressions. I might change my mind on that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But I didn't think that because now you have something you can throw Perl at, of course that's what you're going to do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
You let me down. I just put a link in the show notes. I'll see if I can maybe get a better picture of it. I put a link in Slack. Excuse me. I'll see if I can get a better picture for the show notes. It looks a little chunkier there than I feel like it's sitting when I just look down. So, again, this picture ain't great. But, I mean… I don't think it looks bad on me, and we'll see what happens.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I don't personally... Sitting here now, I don't have any particular desire to return this and get the smaller one. And I think maybe part of that is driven by me having kind of mentally prepped myself for going ultra this year and just expecting to have, you know, just... Absolutely mammoth watch on my wrist.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
And so while this is surface area mammoth or slightly mammoth, at least it's not depth mammoth. And I think that helps make it feel a lot more svelte than perhaps it actually is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
I don't feel like, because I'm looking at my Series 8, the small one, and then the Series 10 is bigger for sure, but that appears to me to be more about the upgrade in size class than it is the fact that the button... Well, I mean, you're maybe not comparing like to like there, but anyway, put a picture from one of the YouTube videos.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
John, I hear you have some complaints about Volvo's, I was going to say forthcoming, but it's sort of kind of here, electric version of Aaron's car, which is called, her car is the XC90, but the all electric is the EX90. And I hear you have complaints.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Wait for a little bit of historical context here. So you are right. It is called the Thor's hammer, like headlight motif. And the way this is, is imagine an uppercase letter T and then pitch it so that the, the, the horizontal crossbar on the T twist it 90 degrees in either way. So now that horizontal crossbar is vertical, right? And that's on the outsides of the car.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
So it looks kind of like a hammer and on Aaron's car and on her prior one, may it, may God rest its soul. Um,
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
um i don't recall what specifically was daytime running lights and what was headlight headlights i believe it was additional lenses or you know leds or whatever that yeah leds i guess that came on um when you turned on the headlight proper and and the thor's hammer stuff did still stay on but the headlights were quite a bit brighter but and so at a glance this looks the same but as you were about to say before i interrupted you it is quite a bit different now right so they have a daytime running lights where the headlights normally are
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
John, if you're going to whine, at least get your facts straight. All right. It doesn't open a cavity. It's still behind the like plexi or the glass or what have you that is in front of the headlights. It's all internal to the car. There is no cavity for snow to get into.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Now, what you're saying is true that, you know, let's go back to a vertical T. Instead of the crossbar, the horizontal crossbar, now we're talking about the vertical bar. Which, once you twist it 90 degrees, now it's a horizontal bar. There's two rows of lights, and they do part. That is correct. That is a physical thing that happens. That part you're correct about.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
But there's no opening to the outside world. This is all in the headlight housing. No.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
You are losing your marbles, sir. Okay. I need to be completely clear one more time. There is a lens in the front of this whole assembly, just like on your beloved Hondas, just like on my Volkswagen, just like on the BMW that Marco just bought that he'll have for another 10 minutes. There is a lens in the front. So unless that lens somehow disintegrates, there is no poking with a stick.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, please don't. Do not do it. So here's the thing. I concur with reservations that, yes, this is needlessly complex, and yes, it can break, and yes, that could be a very bad safety issue.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
That's not true because the Diablo used 300ZX headlights.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Yeah, fair enough. No, I agree with you with reservations that it is needlessly complex. And yes, it could potentially be a safety issue. But I mean, no more so than a headlight going out like bulbs used to go out on the regular.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
The thing I will say, though, about these headlights is, yes, it could be a safety issue. But my retort to that is, where's your sense of adventure? These things look so freaking cool. I'm in.
Accidental Tech Podcast
606: A Decade of Half-Presses
Well, weren't the mufflers like $40,000 in the Veyron or something like that?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
it is the morning which is really weird to be talking to you like everything about my setup is different like first of all it's light outside that alone that is very weird got the sun coming in through the windows i got my coffee in front of me yeah typically you're not wanting to caffeinate at 8 p.m when we normally record
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And may I just say, Casey wrote that wonderful time zone post, which I will have to link because the way you represented the time zones of the world with emoji was just masterful.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
case that has a uh crater style cutout for the camera control as opposed to the beats case which has the apple quartz pass-through thingy so i will be able to try both of those things when they arrive yeah and for reference um for whatever it's worth i had been using the bull strap leather case for my iphone 15 pro for most of the um you know winter and then when summer came by i switched over to peak design because it's just better for moisture and
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
um and i just switched back to my bull strap case oh man they feel so good like i i i know leather is not great for the environment wow it feels good it like it the bull strap leather like it's it's so good so i'm looking forward to it so the case that's on my iphone 14 pro right now yeah it's it's very good And I think it has aged pretty well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Like, I got a couple, like, scratches on the leather just from, you know, my own fault and stuff. But, you know, there's... Generally, like, I have the kind of dark gray one for that year. And it just ages very nicely. Like, there's, like, you know, slight color variations here and there just from wear. And, like, you know, the... the tackiness of it now that it's broken in is really nice.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
The buttons feel nice. The, the, uh, raised lip around the camera bump, you know, is more of a gentle raise as John was saying last week. Um, so yeah, I, the bull strap slash Ryan London cases are extremely good.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Like I had to actually like because like, you know, some of the emoji I didn't recognize. I actually like and I was on I was riding the boat last night.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
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Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
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Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
like you know riding the ferry home from the beach and i was like trying to squint and see this and i didn't have any reading glasses so i took a screenshot cropped it in so that so the built-in screenshot editor thing would zoom it in for me i know there's accessibility zoom i haven't gotten there yet but oh just give it time and i was like i was looking at each one and i'm like oh my god that's genius oh that's oh i figured that one out okay
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
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605: Manage the Moisture Situation
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605: Manage the Moisture Situation
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605: Manage the Moisture Situation
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Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
For me, like I looked at it before and I did recently, you know, fairly recently have a non-pro phone when I used the iPhone 12 mini for that year. What I missed mostly was the like 2x lens. And it's not necessarily because they're any good because they're usually not. And, you know, now we're up to, yes, the 5x lens.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
As mentioned, the optical quality of them is usually pretty rough compared to the 1X lenses. But they do provide a decent amount of utility. And sometimes I do use them for actual photos that I want to look at as well, where digital zoom on the 1X sensor is just not going to cut it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
That being said, the main benefits that would tempt me today are, as Casey said, the colors and the lightness of the phones in terms of weight.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
The color is less of a concern now because as I mentioned, as they've shrunk the margins further and further, like the bezels have gotten so thin that now I actually enjoy using a case just so I can not cause accidental input around the edge as I grip the phone in different ways.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And I also will, as mentioned, frequently kind of lean the phone on things or stand it up on things to play audio when I'm doing stuff around the house. And I find without a case, it's just too slippery. It has too much risk of falling off of the surface that I put it on.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
so that to me like i think i'm in the case world now you know for the long haul and so that kind of neutralizes the color advantage of this of the non-pro but the main reason why i wouldn't get it now is because i am so hooked on the pro screens once you get used to pro motion and always on A phone without those things seems noticeably broken.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And when you look at the actual pricing of the non-Pro versus the Pro, the price difference is not that big. Like, in absolute terms, yeah, maybe it's a couple hundred bucks, but relative to the price of the whole phone... It's actually not, you're not paying twice as much for the Pro.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
No, I'll link to it and they can see for themselves or make it the chapter art.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Like you're paying like, you know, what, 15% more or something like it's, you're not actually paying that much more for it. And I find that the extra features that it provides are definitely worth that extra price to me. Now to lots of people, they're not. That's why they sell those.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
That's why they sell the non-Pro phones because a lot of people don't care or really want that extra 200 bucks or whatever it is. Like they want to use that money in other ways. And so I get that there's lots of reason why people choose those, but it's mostly because they don't care about the pro features. And unfortunately, I do care about some of those pro features.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And as long as pro continues to mean the best screen features. I'm probably going to stick with that, even setting aside the camera stuff, which, again, I don't need the big cameras, but I do appreciate having them when I do. But for me, more than anything, it's about the screen and about the fact that it's really not that much of a price increase.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
There have been times when I have done that, but usually it would be something a little bit lighter, like green tea, like a little bit of caffeine, not as much as coffee. But no, today, this is full-blown coffee, because this is a school morning, and I was up early, and now it's still early. You're getting full coffee, me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah. And that being said, though, I love this ability that they're adding. And I think this is one of the many things that if you look at the actual differences to the iPhone 16 lineup versus the 15 lineup, the general reaction to the event was, eh, it's kind of underwhelming. They didn't change that much. But I think the actual story here is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
is not that the phones are not substantially improved. It's that Apple didn't do a good job of telling us how they're substantially improved. But if you actually look at these specs, there actually are lots of improvements, like lots of little things here and there. Like, you know, faster charging over the wire. Also, faster charging through MagSafe.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Also, you know, official Qi 2 support that will make things broader and easier in the future. Also, there's a lot of stuff like the screen can now go down to one nit of brightness. So the screen can get way dimmer than it could before.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Lots of people want that, like if you're lying in bed next to your sleeping partner and you want to keep your screen as dim as possible while you're still reading stuff. There's a lot of improvements like that that are kind of all around the iPhone 16 line. The 16 Pro has all those cool new microphones and sound quality will probably be significantly enhanced in lots of things because of that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
There's all sorts of improvements like this that are not super flashy in a presentation. And also, Apple didn't even attempt to show off many of them. But those actually will make the phones nicer to use in just everyday use. So again, I think the narrative around these phones was not great, in part because people tend to not value that kind of thing in that context. Like,
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
If they did a presentation that was all about just small everyday improvements to using these phones, nobody would care about that either. So I understand why they left some of them out. But everyone, including Apple, is focusing so strongly on Apple intelligence, which, again, I think is going to have a slow and maybe bumpy rollout, but certainly a slow rollout. And. That's the story PR-wise.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
See, I thought you were just saying they put rice in burritos in California, which is true. Well, that's also fair. People have very strong feelings about whether rice belongs in that kind of context. And so that's why I thought you were saying. But no, I did not catch the rice-a-roni reference at all.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
That's the story with Wall Street. That's the story with the tech press. But most people are not going to be using those features every day, or they'll be using very simplified features, as we're going to talk about stuff like notification summaries and email summaries. They'll be using that kind of stuff. But most of the really flashy intelligence features are not going to be everyday things.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Whereas stuff like your phone charges more easily, that affects everybody. That can help everyone at some point. So I think this actually is a pretty good overall release as it looks so far. And we'll see how it turns out when we actually have the phones. But I think it'll be overall a better release than people are giving it credit for so far.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Also, like even, you know, I think another big everyday thing will be the new thermal capacity. I really think that's going to be a big difference because like as I've been using my 15 Pro all weekend, like it gets so hot doing basic things.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And like, and I think again, like thermal management is one of those things that you don't really think about most of the time because most iPhones, their thermal management is fine. And when you have the iPhone 15 Pro where thermal management for the first time, I think got worse than its predecessor or at least seemed to.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
um you start noticing oh this is a thing that matters and so then when they fix it in the next generation like okay that's that's another you know another savings to bank um and on thermals by the way um so as as people's phones start arriving uh this friday for pre-orders um a little hot tip because this will be our last episode before that happens uh two hot tips for your phone migration um
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Number one, you can now connect to USB-C or USB-C to lightning phones with a cable for migration. And apparently that is faster migration in a lot of cases. So use a USB-C to C or C to lightning, depending on what you're migrating from cable for your migrations. That will probably be faster.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah. And then secondly, speaking of hot tips, phone migration is often throttled by thermals. And so if you can figure out ways to effectively cool both phones, so definitely take them out of their cases. That is, like, number one thing if you want your phone to run cooler is take it out of its case.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But also, if you have things like my crazy, you know, fan coolers that use thermoelectric elements in a little MagSafe fan, that's a good time to use one of those. Lower tech, if you have, like, ice packs, you know, you can, like, rest your phone, you know, obviously manage the moisture situation. But, you know, if you have, like,
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Especially if you have those big gel ice packs, if you just rest your phone on one of those, especially if you have enough capacity to rest both phones on one of those, while somehow, I guess, what's powering?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
i guess you could magsafe power them during the thing oh right i get yeah but then you then you have heat but then you're blocking the ice pack with the magsafe puck and whatever right and magsafe makes more heat so yeah maybe your best bet might be to plug both of them into power and just to make them do wireless but you know that'll depend on how much data you have to transfer but anyway manage the thermals and the migration will go a lot faster that is literally a hot tip all right and then do we want to talk a little bit more about uh demand of these new phones
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
No, Las Vegas is Pacific Time, which is weird. I think it should be Mountain Time, but it is Pacific Time. I think in part because it makes it easier to attract people from California because a lot of Vegas visitors can just drive there from California. Right, right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
We are brought to you this episode by Pioneers of AI, a new podcast. Host Rana El-Khaloubi is an AI scientist, entrepreneur, author, and investor, exploring all the opportunities and questions AI brings into our lives. So listen to Pioneers of AI with new episodes every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. And we will also link to it in the show notes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So once again, Pioneers of AI is the name of the new show. New episodes every Wednesday. Listen to Pioneers of AI wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much to Pioneers of AI for sponsoring our show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So this is just an asterisk, though. That is the new Milanese with the ultra style that has that ultra clasp on it. That one is titanium. The other Milanese loop that comes with the Series 10 option and that has the same magnetic clasp that we've had forever, that one is still steel. And the new link bracelets are also still steel. Oh, interesting.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
They are color matched to the new titanium watch bodies, but it is the colors of the titanium being applied to steel for the other ones. Only this new Ultra Milanese with the Ultra Latch style, only that one is titanium.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
No, they didn't. So Josh is right. Back when the Apple Watch launched, the very first one, and they had the gold one, they would give it to certain celebrities to wear at certain events to promote it, the way fashion people do that kind of stuff. So at some point, there were a couple of times when a celebrity wore one to an awards show or something.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
and they had a gold link bracelet at that time to pair with the gold watches to use in that context, but it was never for sale to the public. Did they take it back like when people borrowed jewelry for the Oscars?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I would assume so, because remember there were a couple of instances of that where the celebrity was wearing the watch, but it was showing the spacey setup screen on the watch screen, and you could see in pictures they didn't even set it up. Because they hadn't set it up, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Oh, and having that be the last one, chef's kiss. I laughed out loud on the ferry to nobody. It was perfect.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I think this is going to be just a problem overall in like when for Apple Intelligence to be summarizing notifications. Well, Apple Intelligence only knows the raw text of the notification that is provided by the apps to the system. Like it's an API. You provided a couple of text fields and that's it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
They don't know the context that this is coming from an app where this is a Twitter style username. They don't know that. So I hope maybe over time, maybe the better solution to this would be as Apple adds APIs that help us use Apple intelligence at all, let alone better. Not that I'm bitter that they are launching this entire system with no APIs, but anyway.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Maybe they will be able to give developers separate fields to say, here is the text to show to the user, and then here is a second text property to fill out on this object that is the text to give to Apple Intelligence as what is the...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I got, like, my just cup of water instead of my flavored seltzer or weird hop water, because I figure those things, for some reason, just feel wrong at 8 in the morning. So here we have a totally different mode here. This should be interesting. Now... I did have some trouble selecting the emoji for going live message on Mastodon.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I mean, but I'm glad people are trying crazy stuff like this. Yeah, yeah. Like, now that we have this foldable screen tech that has reached the point of maturity that you can actually start having a decent number of products out there on the market that use it, I like seeing weird experimentation with gadgets.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Phones have been these kind of boring rectangles for so long that it's been a mature market. These boring rectangles are here for a reason. People like them overall and never bet against them. But I'm happy to see experimentation now that we haven't seen in a while. We haven't really seen this level of form factor experimentation since the very early days of the smartphone era.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And now we're seeing all sorts of crazy ideas, and most of them are going to be terrible experiments. but some of them are going to actually have some merit and they'll be fun. So I'm happy to see this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I do kind of love like the one of the Apple approaches to discouraging theft is like, all right, you can steal these phones, but we're going to make your screens look bad. That is like the most Apple thing. Like your colors aren't going to be quite right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
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Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
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605: Manage the Moisture Situation
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605: Manage the Moisture Situation
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Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So one last time, that's joindeleteme.com slash ATP, promo code ATP. Thank you so much to Delete Me for sponsoring our show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I sure do. So you've heard me talk about this before. I'll make it quick this time. I've come up with this concept called the Marco Offset, which is basically to try to figure out what amount of money might I donate to St. Jude, maybe as a minimum starting point of what can I consider expendable that I can give to such a great cause.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And, you know, it's a nice kind of minimal nightstand charging setup that works very well. And MagSafe, you know, Qi charging in general is great for lots of reasons. It's not a perfect thing. Like wireless charging, as mentioned in the past, wireless charging is a little bit inefficient. And so you do end up losing some of that power and making more heat as a result. That's why it's inefficient.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's turning some of that into heat as waste. And so that has a number of negative effects, most significantly that you are kind of warming up the battery more than necessary as you're charging it. And so that's and that's not amazing for battery health. And of course, you are wasting energy. But that being said, Qi charging is very convenient and it has a lot of other benefits, too.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Like, for instance. You can have Qi charging pads and lots of different things that you wouldn't have a plug for. As we mentioned earlier in this show, you can power something via Qi while you are using its port for something else. You are also not wearing out the port by plugging it in every night if you're sitting on a charging pad instead. So it avoids a lot of those kinds of problems.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And this is also iPhone buying season and other gadget buying season. So I came up with this idea of like, hey, just look at like whatever the base price of the gadget family is that you are buying. So, for instance, the base price of an iPhone, you know, whatever the base model of the iPhone family that you're buying costs. You go ahead and you get the higher storage.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But the problem with Qi, the biggest inconvenience as a user with Qi charging is... is getting it centered and occasionally missing. And so I think MagSafe was Apple basically saying, hey, you guys, this was a good idea, this wireless charging thing, but let us do it right for you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And sure enough, Apple made a couple of modifications to it when they made MagSafe, most notably the magnets that automatically align it correctly and You don't have to worry. Is it centered? Is it a little bit off? Did I miss last night? My phone's not charged. No. MagSafe, it centers it every single time. It has never failed.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It is a 100% attachment accuracy rate as far as I've had, which was way higher than I ever had with Qi. And as a result, look, you see the Qi 2 standard now. Qi 2 was basically the industry saying, oh, you were right. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
are bad and then i'm saying oh let's let's actually take what apple did and make it the new standard basically which is not the first time in the industry this has happened by the way but anyway uh so the that magnetic alignment is such a huge improvement and that allowed them to do things like have higher wattages because one of the one of the limitations of original qi also is like
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Because it's kind of imprecise, inefficient, kind of broad area coverage that you have to do, it was reasonably unsafe to put a lot of wattage through it in terms of heat management and everything else. So with MagSafe, one of the reasons MagSafe chargers were able to charge at higher wattages than Qi chargers is that...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
apple was able to to know like okay well if it is connected in this like if it recognizes it in this certain way we know it is properly centered we know it's very close and within these certain tolerances and therefore we can safely apply more current in there and we know that less of it will be converted to waste heat and you know etc and so it'll be safer so again another big advantage too like that's that that helped a lot that they can raise the water zones and make it more useful
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So I think it's one of those things where, again, looking at the iPhone 16's advances, if you told somebody like, hey, how much do you like MagSafe? They'd be like, I guess it's fine. But if you actually took it away and we went back to a world without it, we would realize, oh, we actually really missed that. Like that's actually a very useful thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So many things have gotten better as a result of it. You have things like car mounts that can just stick it on there. You don't have to slide it into a bracket with a dock or whatever, and it's not quite aligned right, or it bends out with your case thickness or whatever. Get rid of all that. You have the bedside situation. Again, a lot of things become easier there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You have the accessory ecosystem, like Casey's PopSocket, like the wallet. You have all these things that are now able to either mount to the phone or make the phone easier to use in some way or more convenient to use in some way because of the MagSafe design on the back. So it has a lot of those little life improvements. So I'm actually very happy with MagSafe.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I'm even happier that they've made it even better with the iPhone 16 series, allegedly, with the larger coils and the higher wattage. That's all going to be great. So I think MagSafe is a huge success on the phone, and I look forward to continued improvements.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Maybe you buy a case with it. Maybe you get the AppleCare with it. You certainly have to pay sales tax on it in most places. So subtract the base price from the total that you're actually paying. And there's all that padding on top of that that you kind of tacked on in your purchase process. That is your suggested minimum donation if you can swing it. And these days, many of us probably can.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
That's great. And so if you can swing it, please do. And there's even a website that a fan made, B. Beck made, called themarcooffset.com. If you go there, and even the website's open source, by the way, which is great. Incredible work. Thanks, B. Beck. So themarcooffset.com will actually calculate this for you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Also fairly boring. I have the standard setup from a nerd who was a nerd in 2006, which is I started having an MX Blue Cash card, which was like the nerd pick to do back then.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
um and i i had that for a while um at some point in the last few years we crossed over the threshold at which it made more sense to get the platinum card um because there's one of those cards where there's an annual fee but if you spend more than x you'll end up coming out ahead with the points and everything else um and there's all sorts of other benefits with the platinum card like
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Among credit cards that offer various perks and benefits, especially if you travel a lot, it's one of the good ones to get. So look into it if you care. And if you spend stupid amounts of money, then it will usually pay for itself. That being said, not everybody takes American Express.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And so I used to just have the American Express as the credit card, and I would just use my regular bank debit card, which was a Visa, for anything that wouldn't take it. Then at some point, that Visa, the number got stolen or something. And it really freaked me out because debit cards do not provide nearly as much protection as credit cards in fraud situations.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Because with debit cards, they're actually directly taking the money. And there's usually some protection from your bank, but you don't have as many protections as you do with credit cards. And that kind of freaked me out that I was giving direct access to my bank account to so many vendors that wouldn't take American Express. And so at that point,
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I got some other Visa credit card that was recommended. I think it's a capital. I don't even remember because I hardly ever use it for anything. So my current setup is I have the Amex Platinum for anything that will take it. For anything that won't, I'll use that backup Visa. Oh, it's an Amazon Prime Visa. That's right. I switched over.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's an Amazon Prime because those actually also provide pretty good benefits. And anything I buy from Amazon, I have that as the default payment method because I think it's like 5% off. It's a pretty substantial discount on Amazon purchases.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
um and there's and so if you buy a lot from amazon it's worth having the amazon prime card it's or and also if you buy a lot from whole foods because it's the same deal anyway amex for things that take it amazon prime visa for whatever doesn't and then my bank card is only ever used in my bank's atm like so it's like i i go to my bank's atms that that is the only place the debit card is ever put into and it's used for nothing else mostly just to
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
for safety and to avoid, you know, the inconvenience of that getting stolen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So you select which iPhone model you have ordered, and you put in the total that you've actually ended up paying, and maybe your AppleCare rate that you're paying every month if you're doing that. And it will tell you exactly how much your Marco offset is. And that is your suggested starting minimum donation. So everyone go there. Thank you. Please donate as much as you reasonably can.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So I put a coffee cup for myself, and I wanted to have two other drinks for the two of you. And I could not find a glass of water emoji. I figured the most appropriate thing would probably just be coffee, water, water. But there were no glasses of water. There was a glass of milk. And I thought, well, maybe Casey would drink milk instead.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Really? At the time, I guess I haven't looked recently. At the time, it wasn't really worth the additional, like, you know, whatever the very tiny benefit was for me over just buying it on my Amex, it wasn't worth it. But that might be different now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Again, as Casey said, even $10 helps. And if you can do more, that's even better. So please do what you can.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
There currently is not one anywhere near my house on Long Island, and I miss it. Now that I had the Whole Foods lifestyle and now I'm away from it, I actually really miss it. Whole Foods, for all of its faults, is awesome. Next time you go grocery shopping, just double the bill and send me the other half.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Pioneers of AI, and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the member perks is you get ATP Overtime, a bonus topic every week. This week on Overtime, we're going to be asking, will Apple pull a Google and actually abandon a long-running service?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
We will find out in ATP Overtime this week. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
No. I didn't even want to try that. I don't want a car that I can only get serviced in a reasonable amount of time by calling in special favors. That is not how I want to live my life.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Here's what actually happened. I created that ticket with the items on it that seemed pretty... Significant. I think not being able to move the driver's seat is a pretty substantial safety issue. Not being able to fast charge on highway trips reliably is also a pretty significant issue. Not having any air conditioning in early September, I would say, is a pretty significant issue.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So I waited like a day or two after submitting it to see because people said that that should happen. It didn't. And then I ended up like there's like an interface in the app where you can message the service center like on the same thread as your service request. So it's like a little chat interface. So I submitted a couple questions in the chat.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I'm like, hey, I'm hearing that maybe the AC coolant is also used to cool the battery. And maybe that might be related to my fast charging issues. Is it safe to drive this vehicle without the AC working? Because right now the AC doesn't work at all.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Sure. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm sure. But still, we heard from a bunch of people that apparently the AC refrigerant system is used to cool the battery pack also. And so therefore, if the AC can't cool, maybe the battery can't cool either.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, leave a leave a paper trail for things like that. Everyone that helps anyway. So, you know, I asked in the chat, like, you know, is it safe to drive if the battery if the cooling system is not working? Basically, I did not hear back. Cool. That's one of the options. Like I said, don't answer that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, just no response. I was not moved up 10 days later. They finally called me. Let me tell you what I did in the meantime. Oh, no. Did you sell the car? So I decided, let me see. Oh my God.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Oh no. So I decided, let me see what my options are here. Oh God. Because as I'm sitting there waiting for like, you know, a week for a response and like not getting anything, I'm like, okay, I don't think this is going the way, the way I expect. And so I said, let me just go see, you know, what are my other options out there? So I drove the Rivian over to BMW.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I'm on Long Island. There are BMW dealers every 20 feet. I wanted to look at the Kia EV6, the Ioniq 5, and the BMW iX. For every other model that people suggested, either it was a Tesla, and there's reasons I don't want to do that, or it was something that does not fit what I stated were my priorities, which is I need pretty long range.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Oh, you're going to like this, listeners. Oh, gosh. Oh, wow. So John had this wonderful idea. John tends to come up with most of the ideas for the member specials.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I would like a decent amount of interior space and cargo space. I would like it to have a hatchback or a liftback trunk. And I would like it to be a model that has existed for more than a year or two. I want something that's a little bit more established and ideally from an established car brand, not a startup like Lucid or something like that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I did look at the i5. Too small? So actually, I didn't test drive it, but I sat in one in the dealer. I looked around. So the i5 is basically their BMW's electric 5 Series. I loved driving a 5 Series-sized car. It was great. The problem is that was before I was ruined by the Model S big liftback style. And I love the cargo advantages of a liftback.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So I really don't want a standard trunk anymore if I don't need it. Secondly, you figure like what are you optimizing for if you pick a sedan over like a crossover or an SUV? What you're optimizing for mostly is efficiency, maybe physical footprint size. And when you compare the range...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
The iX actually, I think, has longer rings than the i5, or at least similar, because they put a little bit bigger battery in it. Also, the 5 Series has such a big footprint now that the length and width of the 5 Series, of the i5, is almost the same as the iX. And if you compare them, the iX is just basically a slightly taller i5.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yeah, and the 4 Series, the way they make it sportier is they really crush the backseat, both headroom, and the cargo is not great either in that. Anyway, so that's why the BMW I was looking at was the iX. I've also just heard great things about it, and anyway... So all this is like, I'm looking around like, all right, let me see like, what are my options?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
If I, if I do want to trade in the Rivian, like what are my options here? And then how can I get around the issue of, you know, it's broken.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So Adam said, you know, let's go. Cause I was describing like the options to him because, and this was like after school one day, he, he like just come from sports practice and he was tired. And I'm like, all right, I have time for one car dealer. And I'm like, all right, do you want to go to like the small fun one?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I was thinking the, the Ionic five, uh, or do you want to go to like the big cushy one? And he said, let's do the big cushy one. I'm like, all right. So we go to, we go to see the IX. First of all, inside Adam was immediately won over by, it has this like accent lighting. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
it's rgb lighting for your car it is kids would love it i had no idea this was there so every all the cars have this now it's so terrible i hate it so much oh my god it's so fun so yeah like along every window strip on the bottom of each window and then like a couple little lights throughout the cabin there's these rgb lights and adam's like oh my god make it purple so you know we made it purple during the test drive and he's like all right this you gotta buy this car
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
and i mentioned to the salesman i'm like hey and because as soon as of course you know i knew what i was doing i i pulled up and i parked the rivian directly in front of the sales showroom so everyone could see it and it's like this glorious yellow goodness and the salesman immediately like hey how do you like that rivian and he said the yellow was the best color they don't make it anywhere i'm like oh he knows rivians okay like okay and this guy has good taste so i'm i'm off to a good start when he said how do you like that rivian what was your answer
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
well i said it's a great off-roader you know it's it's a it's a really fun car all those things are true i love it when it's working well yes yes so anyway um he mentions his girlfriend happens to be the manager of rivian service place in brooklyn oh no and so you were like well sit down son we have to have a chat
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So I'm like, all right, now I'm working with a different situation than I expected.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
That's the moral of the story. So anyway, so I mentioned to him, I decided it was okay to reveal something because of that. I said, listen, I have two problems. Problem number one is that my car is worth too much to trade it in for a lease. Problem number two is the air conditioning does not blow very strong right now, and it's a long wait for service, and I can't get it serviced anytime soon.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
True, it is true, but there is more. But in all fairness, that is probably the root of both problems. Again, self-diagnosing. So I mentioned those problems, and I think this anchors the deal in my favor already, because he's like, well, if we took that in, I could get that taken care of much faster. I'm like, great. So anyway, we do the test drive. I freaking love the iX.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's just ridiculously nice, like way nicer than I expected it to be based on reviews and everything. From the inside, you can't see the outside. Yeah, of course, it's hideous on the outside. But look, who cares? I don't care how my car looks.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
The R1S is an attractive vehicle. The iX, less so. Yeah, I'll give you that. But anyway, I freaking love it. So I'm like, all right. Let me see what my option here is. So I'm like, hey, what would you do for me on the Rivian? And so he has the manager come out and appraise it and everything. Now, I went in there. I had looked up on websites. I looked on cars and bids. I looked on auto trader.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
What do these things tend to go for? Because there's not that many R1Ss that are on the used market. So there's not that many data points. But there's enough that I had a number in mind. And I'm like, all right, if this is roughly what they sell for in private sales to enthusiasts... I'd be happy to take at least 10% lower than that from a dealer trader.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And I know I'd probably be fighting even to get that. They offered just barely a hair below the private sale price. Oh, wow. So I was like, hmm. I'm not going to get the Rivian service manager's boyfriend at another car dealer. This is a surprisingly good opportunity all of a sudden. So I'm like, let's run some numbers here. What could we do on the lease? How can we work this? So...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
through a surprisingly small amount of squeezing. It turns out there were a lot of lease incentives at the time for the iX for some reason. I don't care why. I know there's like an LCI coming out next year. I know it's about to be updated. It's probably going to get the Tesla port next year as part of the LCI, which is BMW's term for mid-cycle refresh.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I know they're going to improve some of the looks of the outside because people don't like it. I really care about none of those things right now. And so... Through just these wonderful lease incentives, it brought the price of the vehicle down like $12,000. I'm like, huh. So I'm going to do this trade-in for a price that is way more than I thought with no trouble whatsoever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And they're going to give me a big cut off the lease. And I'm going to prepay most of the lease with the part of the value of the trade-in. And they're going to give me a check for the rest. Huh. So I did it. I now own an IX. What color? It's the Blue Ridge Mountain one. It basically looks like a shiny sky blue. It's like if the sky was shiny, that is how it looks. Did you get the 50 or the 60?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I got the 50. I didn't test drive a 60. They didn't have one then. I got the 50 because I test drove the 50, and it was extremely fast. I would say it's a similar difference as back when I was getting my Model S, when they had the regular mid-range one versus the, at the time, I think it was the Ludicrous. Now it's the Plaid, but at the time, I believe Ludicrous was the high-end one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
At the time, it was like, you know, you could go to zero to 60 in like four seconds or three seconds, basically. And the ones that were four seconds, that's incredibly fast for a car. That's very fast. And then the three second one, I remember with the Tesla, I test drove that one. And I believe I described it on the show as it felt like I was getting punched in the chest when I would floor it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Like it was actually kind of unpleasantly fast. Um, so I decided with this one, like the X 51 or the 50 X drive, whatever it's called. Um, the, the quote slow one is already so fast. This is plenty for me and it gets longer range and it's cheaper by a lot. Uh, and there's more of them in stock everywhere.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Oh, so it's grayish. No, but look up actual pictures of it. The configurator does not really show what it's like. What trim level did you get?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Yes. So the thing is, to get one locally that's in stock, because then I ask, what's the order time? And the lead time on an order is like three to four months. I don't really want to wait that long. And also, like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
there was a time in my life when i really cared about every one of those details i don't care anymore like i really don't i i this i just like i just need a car that works it makes sense you're gonna have the car for like six months anyway well no i'm gonna have it for at least three years and i leased it um but it's like the they i i put the rivian cost towards the lease as much as they would take so the lease payments are like 120 a month like it
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And there's no interest. It made no sense not to. With all the lease incentives that brought the price so low, it made no sense to do a cash buy or anything like that. Rather than me asking you what wheels you have, can you just send us a picture? Oh, yeah. Let me try. Hold on. So anyway, it's a great car. I really...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Because I've been in Tesla first and then Rivian, I have not really had a super luxurious car in a while, like since the BMW times. The luxury level has certainly increased in the time that it's been. It is certainly like the luxury technology has gotten substantially better. It is just an incredibly nice ride. Like, it still feels very much like a BMW. Like, it is surprisingly sporty.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You know, the handling for a vehicle that's not super small, the handling is very good. Compared to the Rivian, it's night and day. I mean, the Rivian was a much bigger vehicle.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
but the ix really drives incredibly well the the suspension and this doesn't even have the air suspension but the regular suspension is like super cushy and soft but you still you still feel a little bit sporty in the handling like it's a great balance like look at bmw knows how to make cars that feel good to drive like that's their whole thing but the luxury level like the cabin is so quiet when you close the windows it's so quiet
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
A lot of little details that Rivian, I think, hasn't figured out yet. Like, for instance, with Rivian, like, there was pretty much no position at which you could roll down the driver window and no other windows and have it not do that, like, ear pumping thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Whatever, yeah, whatever that's called. But with the iX, like, it just doesn't do that at any level that I can find. Like, when you close and open the windows, you don't get that, like, ear sucking. Yeah. It doesn't do that either. There's little stuff like that that's just – they've been making cars for a long time. They engineer the crap out of them. They know how to do it really well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And that's what I'm happy to get out of an established car company. What took me away from BMW years ago was the wonderful advantages of EVs. That's when I went to Tesla. EVs are just that good that it was worth me changing brands and taking a risk and giving up some of these things just to have the EV drivetrain. But This is also now that same EV drivetrain now back in established car brands.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And that's exactly what I was looking for making this change. So I'm actually, so far, I mean, look, now there is one snag. Uh-oh. So I had the car for about 20 hours.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Did the seat stop moving? I was sitting in front of my kid's school picking him up. And this message shows up on the dashboard. Warning, high voltage system error. Okay.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
oh you can get you can continue driving but please have the system checked by your nearest service center to prevent malfunctions and subsequent damage and this lease is a new car right brand new car it had like 50 miles or something 40 miles on like i i had it for less than 24 hours and i get a service center error you gotta be kidding me so of course you know i called them up like hey uh little little problem
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But you know what? They got me in same day. They had given me a loaner, another IX. So they give me the same model car as a loaner. And I was out the door and they had it back in their hands in like two hours. That's service. Like I don't expect products to be perfect. I know things go wrong, especially, you know, a version one of a car.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Of course, a lot of things are gonna go wrong, but I know things are gonna go wrong, but What I need is for things to not go wrong most of the time. And when they do go wrong, for them to be easily fixed. And I said this last time. That's my priority with cars. I don't need them to be perfect. I know they're not perfect. I need them to need very little from me in terms of maintenance and problems.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I need them to mostly work. And if they have a problem, I need it to be easily solved. And even though I am... Very stressed out that my brand new car has a problem. I looked it up. It seems like a somewhat common software flaw with iXs that happens sometimes and they get fixed and they never have the problem again. So it should be fine. But they still have it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I believe they're going to be giving it back to me today.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Because really, even now that I'm driving around a service loaner, even now driving this car almost a week later, it is so nice. It's a really, really nice car. And I'm also very happy now to be back in the CarPlay world. And the iX has very good CarPlay support.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Back when I had the Land Rover briefly and I had CarPlay in that, I remember saying on the show that it was a little disappointing and whether I had it or not, I'd be fine. And that's true. But what I realized when I drove the rental that kept breaking two weeks ago or last week, whenever that was. When I drove the rental, it had CarPlay.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And so I was able to get used to it really quickly and get back into it. When I then went back to the Rivian after using CarPlay, it felt like my car was broken. It's like, wait, how do I control? How do I switch from Overcast back to music? There were so many little friction points. And I'm like, you know what? I really need a car that has carplay. Because first of all, it is better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It is better by a lot. And I have nothing really bad to say about Rivian in general. I think the Rivian was a fantastic vehicle that I just had some bad luck with. Part of the problem was indeed my fault for denting it. Part of it was inherent problems that actually predated that. Oh, and when I was... When I was cleaning out the Rivian, getting all my stuff out of it, there was there's this area.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
There's like a sub trunk area where you lift up the thing in the trunk and below it is like another area. And then below that's another area below that. As I was cleaning my stuff out of that, the sub like the lowest part of the sub trunk was wet. Everything in it was wet. It hadn't rained in days. All the stuff in it showed signs of long-term water damage. I had a first aid kit there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It was moldy. I had to throw it away. I had a couple of tools. They were all kind of just messed up from long-term water damage. So there were multiple issues with that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
This is part of why I'm not really complaining about my car breaking immediately than having to be in service. I'm like, hey, you know what? I'm not going to say much about this. You're getting me back. That's fine. I'll have my car back. I think today will be good. Anyway, that's just version one car company stuff. When I had the Model S...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
back in 2016 tesla had already been selling the model s for a couple years and they had the roadster before that like they they had already been selling car making cars for a little while so they had worked out most of the 1.0 beta problems rivian is not there yet i think they will be there in another couple of years i i think you know two three four years from now like when they're when the r2 comes out and hopefully the cool r3 comes out like
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I think they're going to get there. I think they're going to really be an amazing company in a year or two or three. It's going to be great. And the ones they sell now are great with just some asterisks. If they need service, it's kind of a pain in the butt. They don't have that many service centers. They're backed up 10 weeks, whatever. There are some asterisks on buying it now. But...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
The bones of a good car company are there, and the cars are very good, as long as you don't have some weird bad luck in certain things. But the cars are very good. So I have nothing bad to say about Rivian, and I would be happy to consider going back to them in the future.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
The one thing that really gets me, that gives me pause for them really, is their CEO's stance on not doing CarPlay and on insisting that they do all the software themselves, I think is pretty wrong. And I trust, you know, he seems like he's a pretty good CEO, pretty capable person. I like the way his head, I like where his head's at in most ways.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But when you look at what people use CarPlay for, what Rivian is trying to do, Tesla basically says, we're not even going to try to replace CarPlay. We're just going to not have it and screw you. And we'll keep adding weird games to our cars that you can't play while driving, so why?
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But what Rivian says is, we're going to try to integrate the things into the car so that you don't need to use CarPlay. And so when I bought the car, it had Spotify and Tidal as the music options. They have since recently added Apple Music. When I look at how many CarPlay apps I have on my phone, when I actually go through the pages and pages of CarPlay, I have 15 CarPlay apps at least.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
There are various apps. I tried out that service Blinkist, whatever it is, that gives you summaries of books in 15 minutes. Honestly, I don't think I recommend that service. I have not really gotten much value out of it, but I decided to try it anyway. And they have a CarPlay app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And so on the rental car up to upstate last weekend, I listened to some books, like some book summaries that somehow remove all of the value of the books. You should have had Apple Intelligence do it. They would have said, this book contains nonsense. Next book. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Honestly, that feature sounds pretty... I mean, most of my email is nonsense, so I think that might actually be a useful summarization thing. There are so many apps. Instapaper has a CarPlay thing where you can have articles read to you. There's CarPlay apps for things like ordering pizzas and stuff. If you can order your pizza on the way home from your CarPlay app.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
There are so many CarPlay apps that are too... Narrow audience, they're never going to rise above the level of what somebody like Rivian or Tesla would integrate into their own systems. And using it from your phone is almost always better because your phone has the latest everything. It has usually a better computer and a more recent OS than the car will have.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It will have better connections to data and to things like whatever your services and logins and data things are. Your phone will already be connected to all of them. The phone will always be better. And then the phone also, like Rivian also mentioned, like the CEO mentioned in a recent interview, that they have to work on messaging.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
yeah you know how you can do that over bluetooth um there's there is very basic support in bluetooth protocols for messaging things but it's pretty limited it's pretty basic whereas like carplay it just works correctly you can message with iMessage you can message with whatsapp whatever you need to use like it's already on your phone it's already connected it's already logged in and it works perfectly you need to do things with that via voice siri does that for you you can do it through carplay the
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You're never going to account, you're never going to encompass what your users want to do with CarPlay by building in your own software piece by piece like this. You will never cover it all. And even if you do cover it all, your versions will be worse than the versions on the phone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Some of which because car makers aren't that great at making software, and some of it because the phone just has inherent advantages that the car makers can't match. So I really think that's a very wrong-headed approach to car infotainment, the idea that you're just going to replicate what everyone uses their phones for. It's just never going to happen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You're never going to get the breadth or the quality of what you can do on a phone with CarPlay and Android Auto and whatever else. You're never going to match that. And Rivian, they have decent software. Their driving directions and their maps are still not good. They still get place names terribly wrong. Again, like... You're never going to match Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You're not going to match it. And there's specialty things like my Fire Island sand driving mapping app. That's like a specialty mapping app. I never made it work with CarPlay because it's too small an audience, but I could have made a CarPlay version of that. I could never integrate that with Rivian and Rivian will never come to me to integrate it with their system.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
There's all sorts of specialty needs like that. We're like, yeah, maybe, maybe like the, you know, you can probably say like 80% of what people use is this handful of top apps. But how many people out there use zero other apps that don't fit in that, in that bucket? Probably not a lot.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I bet almost everyone has one thing that would not be satisfied by Rivian's built-in deals or software that they have. And if you even have one of those things, it's a bad experience to own that car as a result. So it is totally wrongheaded to continue to not integrate CarPlay and to actively say, we're not even going to try to do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So anyway, that being said, that is the one thing that I really don't care for Rivian for.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
otherwise i think they're they're making great vehicles and they have a great future ahead of them um just right now it is still very much in that beta period and i learned from this experience i do not want a beta car i do not want a beta car company i don't even want a 1.0 car company i want like a 3.0 car company i want somebody who's been around the block for a few times and then finally i
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Going back a little bit to the luxury angle, what Tesla does, they had to solve the significant economic problem of a huge cost center is the battery. And then you have to somehow put a car on top of it that feels like it's worth that price.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But as a result, like you can't have as expensive of a cabin and other features on top of like a $40,000 battery and still be as good as cars that cost the same as you that have gas engines because gas engines are just inherently cheaper than giant batteries. So the Tesla approach, which Rivian largely took on as well. is we're going to try to get in the ballpark of similarly specced cars.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
We're going to hit a certain price point, and we're going to try to be as nice as, in the case of the Model S, something like an S-Class, which is why they named it that, or a 5 Series or a 7 Series or whatever. Another luxury car with a gas engine that's around this price point, we're going to try to get as nice as those. And they just can't, and they never have, and they never will, because...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Because, you know, you have like certain kind of like, you know, childlike favorites in the food and drink areas.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Mercedes, for the S-Class, they have X dollars of margin over the cost of the engine to spend on making the car really nice in other ways. And Tesla just has way less of that margin to spend because the battery is so expensive. So what Teslas really are...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
They say it's for minimal aesthetic and this is the future, but conveniently, it also saves them a bunch of money. So that is probably a large driver of those decisions. So what you get with Tesla and Rivian is fairly economical interiors that are not super luxurious on top of amazing drivetrains that have these giant batteries and these awesome motors. That's what you get with those EVs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
With the iX... It is more than a Rivian, although with the lease incentives, it gets very close. But anyway, what you get is an actual luxury car on top of a really great battery and drivetrain. And this, I think, is where Tesla and Rivian are going to continue to not compete very well. And this is where I think they are most vulnerable to competition from the big players.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
First of all, yes, establishment, service networks, things like that. Those are huge factors. But also... If you compare what you get just in terms of interior quality and luxury niceties and just general luxury levels, what you get from the other brands is typically a lot better than what you get from Tesla and Rivian. And with Rivian, I was getting it to be an off-roader first and foremost.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And it is great for that. It is fantastic for that. It is the best off-roader I've ever driven. But as a $90,000 EV SUV, it does not compete in terms of niceness. Things like noise levels, just ride quality, handling quality, a lot of different luxury features that are inside. It's nice, but it's not luxury nice. And Tesla...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Not only is Tesla not luxurious either, I think the modern Teslas are even worse than the ones I had. I recently was in one of the new Model S's, and it was noticeably less luxurious than the ones I had because they've had a pretty big revision since then. It just feels like they're cheaping out on everything possible to try to squeeze more margin out of the cars.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You're basically riding around like a plastic box on top of an amazing drivetrain. And that's another reason why I didn't want to go Tesla, because the new Teslas feel like cheap, decontented versions of the ones in the past. And even they were like decently luxurious, but not super luxurious. So anyway, all it is to say, I don't have the Rivian anymore.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Officially, no. And in fact, this was actually so, you know, when I was moving the stuff over from the Rivian, I brought my supercharger adapter and I just stuck it in the door pocket, the driver door pocket, because the iX does not have a frunk. They just filled up with engine stuff and other stuff. They filled up with components, so there is no frunk for you to use.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You actually officially can't even open the hood. There is a special way you can open it if you really have to, but officially, you're not supposed to open the hood. The front BMW logo, you flip it up, and that's where you pour in windshield washer fluid. And that's it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
love to and and uh vw as well in some cars love to fill that front part of the car with the other stuff because they're like hey we got all this space we could give it people for storage now let's just fill it with stuff and so they do oh one other thing to mention too that the uh the ix has little spray washers for the front and back cameras well that's which that's that's one thing i wish rivian had that because like every single time i got out of the rivian like in a parking lot i would i would have to like you know lick my thumb and wipe it across the rear camera because it would get covered in dirt and crap all the time
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
i mean we never had a car with that but i've seen them and they look cool as hell yeah one thing too like so the the ix like so so tiff has the i3 as mentioned and it's from like 2019 or something like that the one of the reasons why i was comfortable going back to bmw is that the i3 despite being you know five years old now
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
we've never brought it in for service it has been very low needs and that being said we also have very little mileage on it i think we're only up to like 7 000 miles you do need to change the oil in your range extender please bring it in it's gotta be sludge at this point probably yeah i should it's mileage and also time time i know well and the thing is like we i have to bring it in because the one of the back tires has a slow leak so i'm like i have to get it serviced in some way anyway so i might as well bring it in and have them do everything um but anyway
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
That car, the i3, it's one of the best EVs I've ever experienced. Not because it's a great all-arounder. It's not. But it is a remarkable EV drivetrain. It never loses charge. Like, we can park it at the ferry terminal. We could park it for like a month and come back, and it has the exact same charge. It has no phantom drain, as far as I can tell. The EV drivetrain has never caused us problems.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It has never had any issues. It has never reported any issues. It just runs reliably. Different temperatures? Sure. Got to run the heater AC? Sure. It's just a... Like, for such a relatively early EV platform... It was surprisingly immature from day one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I've been hearing that from reviews and everything about the iX as well, that whoever BMW has working on the high-voltage systems, with the exception of my error message that my car had after 22 hours...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
it is remarkably mature as a platform based on what people say like in reviews and stuff that it again like it's just like you can you can charge it at full speed at any temperature it's fine like there's like all the different like the various gotchas that a lot of kind of first gen ev platforms for manufacturers a lot of them have bmw didn't have those uh or at least if they did it would have been like even earlier i3s than what tiffs was which was reasonably late in the product cycle um so like
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
what i'm buying into here is a pretty mature technology stack uh and i also i also love you know the i3 it was one of those you know kind of based on a concept cars that you get into it and they're like we're gonna make this thing futuristic and you know whatever that meant when the i3 first came out and i guess when was it around like 2016 2015 whenever the i3 first came out
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
They're like, it's the future. So we're going to make everything carbon fiber and eco-friendly. There's like all these like scratchy eco materials on all the dash panels on the i3. It's like it's a weird car. And then you get into it. It makes like weird sound effects. Like when you start it up or turn it off, it's like all these like science-y, spaceship-y sound effects.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And I love all that crap. I love like the weird personality they put into that car. Well, the iX, they did the same thing, but just newer and better. The amount of personality in that car, in the iX, they have these fake sounds that Hans Zimmer composed that like the car has its own entire soundscape. And yes, you can turn it off. I don't think I'm going to.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You can pick different ones too, right? Yes, you can. There's all sorts of weird BS in there like that. And I kind of love that Tesla, their whole thing was we're going to strip out most things that cars usually have and we're going to add in some dumb games that you can play while you're parked and that's about it. Rivian was like, we're the adults in the room.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
We're not going to add dumb games you can play, but we will make a car that just quietly works really well in these adventure scenarios. Rivian is not fun. They are chill and cool. The iX is like a bunch of Germans on ecstasy. We were like, what can we do for the future? Yeah. And it's so weird and fun. But it's a high-end luxury car. It's not like weird quirky.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
It's more like this is a version of the future from somebody's drug haze that I absolutely love. It is so full of weird personality.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Anyway, so yeah. So I had the Tesla charger in the door pocket when I brought it back to them. And because the error was the high voltage system, the service place called me like an hour after I dropped it off. They're like, um, we found this Tesla supercharger adapter in your car. Did you by any chance use that? Yeah. I was like, no, I've had the car for like 20 hours.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I haven't even plugged it into anything yet. And they were like, are you sure you didn't use it? I'm like, yes, I'm sure. I didn't go to a supercharger in this one night I had the car. I'm pretty sure I would know that. Like, yeah, I'm positive. Thanks. And they're like, well, you can't use those with the iX. We have not officially certified this to work. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So it is kind of funny that if you happen to bring in a BMW electric vehicle for service, it's kind of like removing your third-party RAM before you bring in something to an Apple place for service. Don't leave your supercharger adapter in the car because they will blame it probably for whatever problems you are having.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Your luck's been so good so far. So the Tesla, I think Tesla itself, I've seen actual examples of people doing it. It does work. So what Rivian had with Tesla was a data sharing deal where you could just plug it in and the supercharger would recognize who you are and bill you through Rivian.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But then I found the like fast food cup with a straw.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
The superchargers with adapters work with lots of other EVs that don't have that deal, especially the Tesla superchargers that have magic docks. That's the one where the adapter is in the supercharger. You don't have to own one yourself. It's just in there, and you can log into the Tesla app. And authorize whatever bay number you're on. Unlock number 4A, and that's the one I'm parked at.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And you can go into the app, and you can give Tesla a credit card, and you can just pay for it yourself. And then you can unlock it with their built-in adapter and plug your car in. Lots of EVs work with that, including, allegedly, BMWs. So what the service center people say is we haven't officially announced anything, but, you know, really, really it works.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
So I do intend to actually, you know, do that when the time comes. But certainly that time certainly has not come yet.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And one other thing, too, now that we're talking about charging. One of the reasons why I felt comfortable doing a three-year lease starting now on a car that doesn't have the Tesla port. Next year, when these cars start rolling out that actually have Tesla's port, there's going to be an IONIQ 5 update they just announced that's going to have it starting next year.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
There's a BMW iX refresh that's alleged to have it, but I think it's not been officially confirmed, starting sometime next year. Yeah. probably in about a year, these cars are going to start rolling off that have this port into the market. But if those don't work everywhere on day one, that's going to be an annoyance and a problem. That is a version of buying a 1.0 car.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
And also, right now, if I have an adaptable
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
ccs car that is adaptable to magic dock tesla chargers and some other tesla charges that that can take the adapters directly i feel like that gives me actually more options right now now three years from now when this lease is up i think i'm going to want an nacs port car because at that point there should be more movement in the charging infrastructure because like right now
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
You pull up to a lot of places, and there are mostly CCS plugs and maybe one or two NACS plugs on a custom charging station. Or you can go to a Tesla charging station, and then they're all Tesla plugs. But right now, it's enough of a mix in North America that I actually...
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Right this second would prefer to either have just a Tesla car, which can use their network only, but it's known to work everywhere, or a CCS car that's adaptable. And by all accounts, the iX is adaptable. It just is not officially certified to certain things yet. So fine. We'll work on that when the time comes. And again, in three years from now, I think that I think that will flip.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
I think in three years from now, there will be enough NACS support across different brands that it will start to become worth it to just have an NACS car at that point. But we'll see right now. I'm happy to to lock this in. And plus, you know, like my home chargers are CCS and like there's all sorts of like, you know, there's benefits right now to keeping it CCS.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
But, you know, the next car I buy will probably be not that. But hopefully that is at least three years from now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
605: Manage the Moisture Situation
Is it just AirPods 4 or is it also these AirPods?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And that costs you literally nothing. When I did it. And admittedly, I think they knew I was literally purchasing one at the time, so they weren't about to upsell me. But my understanding is they're not very aggressive at all about trying to close a deal or anything like that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Exactly. So truly, it is worth 30 minutes or whatever of your time. If you live even remotely close to an Apple store or if you have a friend or acquaintance that has one, you really should try it because I cannot stress enough, I know I said it a minute ago, when this thing is on, like this immersive video and some of the apps that are on it, it is just unlike anything I've ever experienced.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
well that's the thing you'll probably go to the demo and say why are why is marco especially but also the other two why are they so down on the vision pro and it's because of what marco said because the amazing bits generally speaking are the content the amazing content you can blow through that like marco said in a day at most probably quite a bit less than that um now there are other good things like i keep talking about mac virtual display because if you're in the situation where that's useful for you you travel you're you're traveling or you have traveled
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
You know, you're in a hotel or you're on a train or a plane. It is unreal, but that's not a problem that I personally find myself needing to fix on a regular basis.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah. And another, I think this has been talked about on Upgrade a lot. I know I keep trying to move on and I keep stopping myself, but this is apparently the Casey has no self-control episode. But I think Upgrade has talked about this a lot, but I have a standing every couple of weeks FaceTime with a handful of our mutual friends, all of whom have vision pros. And
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And doing that spatially where Mike, for example, is to my left and Jason is to my right and maybe James Thompson is straight across from me, at the end of that half an hour, hour, 45 minutes, whatever it may be, I feel much more like I was hanging out with people than I do I was on a FaceTime with people.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
that at the end of that, there's something about that experience that makes me feel like we were hanging out in person. And I know that sounds bananas, and I would judge me if I were you, but it really does feel different than just a FaceTime. So again, there are very cool, incredible uses for this thing if you happen to have a bunch of friends with too much money and not enough sense.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So I don't mean to be down on the Vision Pro entirely, but gosh, I can't echo what Marco said enough. More content, please and thank you. With regard to the member special, I'm going to try to obliquely bring in some feedback from replyguyxxl, who wrote that for one of the storage media we spoke about, if we were using an Apple-branded device to write to that storage medium…
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
That is true. I will concede that. And it would not surprise me if your flying monkeys were quick to report. Well, no, actually, your flying monkeys would call Marco and I out for sure.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Those devices typically were very, very, very bad, and there are better ones that existed. So if perhaps, Marco, you lived an all-Apple life in the, I don't know, maybe mid-'90s and probably had an Apple device to write to this particular media, maybe your experience was suboptimal.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Anyway, fair enough, fair enough, fair enough.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
In any case, Ian McCullough also wrote that, well, Ian writes, I am slash was a collector of recordings of jam band shows, and I am not here, Marco, to litigate what a jam band is, just to be clear. But Ian writes, I spent more time and money on this silly, obsolete hobby than I'd like to concede.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And one of the storage mediums you spoke about was, all caps, revolutionary to this particular hobby. But I'm here to confirm for you, with over 1,000 data points, what particular brand of media you buy makes all the difference in the world. On the advice of Deadheads, which I think Marco and I can both agree is a jam band, this particular person used Kodak-branded media. Kodak Golds, baby!
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And there were two grades. There was silver and gold. And because collecting Grateful Dead shows is obviously, this is quoting Ian Still, very serious business, I only used the high grade slash gold ones. I had well over a thousand of these pieces of media. And looking at my trading logs, I had stopped collecting these shows in the winter of 1999.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I recently went to divest myself of all my physical media. And before I did, I re-extracted all of that to SSDs. 25 years later, after it had been put on this media, how many of those particular pieces of media were unreadable? Exactly one out of over a thousand. And even that one was mostly readable. There was just one song I couldn't pull off of it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And even within that song, it was essentially one second. So yeah, I'd say this is, I will concede it's anecdata, but wow is a significantly strong anecdata. That depends, Marco and me. That's all I'm saying.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
It was terrible and it wasn't. Hey, let's talk about photo editing. What is exposing to the right exactly? Marco, would you like to refine any statements or do you want me to handle it?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Wow. Your reality is exactly that. And just hear me out for a second. Your reality is your reality. And the thing that you were saying was that your, and I think it was Merlin that hates this phrase, but I can't think of a better one. Your lived experience, I'm not here to debate, in your lived experience.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah. The term exposing to the right comes from moving the histogram to the right, as in overexposing an image.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
When shooting raw, exposing one-third or two-thirds brighter is the best way to maximize the data captured by the sensor for later processing. You can recover quite a bit of seemingly lost highlight detail in a raw image. Only when shooting JPEG do you want to expose for the highlights, as Marco described, to avoid completely losing data.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Do we want to discuss color spaces? All right. When shooting raw, this is Sam continuing. When shooting raw, the color space is determined when exporting from the raw processor. Adobe RGB is a good choice when exporting edited raw images to other formats. While the in-camera color space only matters for JPEG images, it should be set to Adobe RGB for when you do use JPEG straight from the camera.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
It's a much bigger color space and the images look better as a result.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Although I feel like, and I can't substantiate this right now, but I feel like a lot of people said that Adobe RGB was not the right choice. Read the next item. Oh, there. Okay, maybe that's where I got it from. Leo Natan writes with regard to camera color space settings. Color space selection in cameras is applicable only for JPEGs. So far, we agree. Raw files do not contain any color space.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
They are just 12 or 14 or 14-bit or more readouts from the sensor. Raw processors take these bits and convert them to a color space. When saving to JPEG, never use Adobe RGB, there we go, as it is a massive gamut, completely unsuitable for 8-bit JPEGs. You will see a lot of color banding. In my Nikon DSLR days, I got bit by Adobe RGB, making a lot of shots unusable.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
It's the most noticeable, or excuse me, it is most noticeable on smooth gradients such as skies, but also architecture. Even P3 hits the upper bounds of eight bits. With today's tech, there really is no point shooting in limited JPEG. Modern Sonys can even shoot 10-bit HEK. But RAW is always preferred for portability.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yes, I would say it's not just a you thing. I don't debate that your experience with this particular medium was probably crummy. Now, we may or may not get to later.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
All right. And then Leo continues, for HDR, always shoot raw. Lightroom takes all the bits of information. When you enable the HDR toggle, applies an appropriate tone curve automagically. Suddenly, everything that seemed overexposed shows details. For exporting, always use 16-bit JPEG XL or 10-bit AVIF. Then Josh Harris writes, thanks for the great discussion on editing photos.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
What should I do with display settings like true tone, night shift, and brightness while editing? I always try to turn color shifting off and increase brightness, but I'm not sure what the best setting is for the most true-to-life result or whether the system adjusts for this already. I mean, I guess turn it all off if you can, but what a pain.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Oh, you know, I was trying not to spoil it. God damn it, John. Before the show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Indeed. John, do you want to talk about cropping, please?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
It is a printing press in a manner of speaking.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So suffice to say, if this is amusing to you, listeners, if this is amusing to you, ATP.FM slash join.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
With regard to parallelization for file compression and decompression, Mihai Paparita writes, the compression speed and parallelism discussion of the most recent ATP reminded me of Cigar JAWS XIP, unzip utility. Though it only focuses on decompression, it shows how much faster than archive utility you can be.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
This is relevant because Xcode is zipped using this, I guess, like secure XIP zip thing, and it takes four freaking ever to unzip it by default. Hmm. And so this is a open source and third party utility to make that faster.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Indeed. And then Cigar Jaw wrote in, or well, wrote on a thread that we were a part of and said, if you just use Finder to make a ZIP zip, it uses some single threaded code by default. I don't actually remember if you can make a zip in parallel, but I'm pretty sure even if you can, lib archive, whatever Finder uses, doesn't do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
However, Apple has a proprietary format that essentially makes a big tar of your files and then splits it into chunks to compress those in parallel. If your use case is, I have a chunkier file, please make it small, and you're okay with using a special Apple format, and also probably giving up a few percent in size, you should give it a try.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
If you're a developer, there's an API, which is the Apple Archive API. There's also an AA tool bundled with macOS that can create and manipulate Apple Archive files.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Uh, we could not kidding. We could spend the next two and a half hours continuing to relitigate this travesty. We already did that show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
All right. Dan Pierce wrote in with regard to the phones in schools overtime discussion from episode 607. Dan writes, my school had two main rules. This photo was in my yearbook. And you see, I guess, the staff of the high school. And this looks like in the gymnasium. They're on bleachers. And in the back, in huge letters, it reads as follows. No hats. No Walkman.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
We could do another one. And I know that John, you would be here for it. I know that Marco would be too. So anyway, but I'm going to try to move us forward. Let's talk about the iPad mini and quote unquote, jelly scrolling. And let me start by asking, do either of you have the iPad mini six, the one that was before the iPad mini age 17 or whatever the heck the current one is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Okay, so there's been a lot of rumors recently about the iPhone SE 4, and we wanted to talk about a few of them, but we also wanted to mention, or John wanted to mention something with regard to our iPhone product mix that we discussed in the overtime from episode 609. So, John, what's up?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, yeah. Because I haven't had an iPad Mini in years, so I never experienced this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
All right. So what are the rumors for the iPhone SE4? First of all, and this is from 9to5Mac, the SE4 is expected to be based on the iPhone 14 design, but with a single rear camera, 48 megapixels, same sensor as the iPhone 15, a 6.1-inch OLED display with an iPhone 14-sized notch, and USB-C. It is not expected to have a camera control. It is unlikely to have an action button.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And people are saying it might even have that long-rumored Apple 5G modem. You never know. It could happen. This would mean no millimeter wave, which would make me very sad. Not that I'm buying an SE, but that's neither here nor there. It would have 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth on the single chip, and it is expected to launch in the spring.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I have a message from inside one of your houses that somebody is a little grumpy that Marco and I were politicking during the member special. So if that is also appealing to you, please feel free to go to ATV. I feel like that's a separate issue.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Indeed. And speaking of things that are forthcoming, do we want to briefly talk about the theoretical Apple October event and maybe some new Macs coming?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I am so very ready to excise what small amount of lightning exists in my life out of my life. And so even though, honestly, it is not at all burdensome to have a keyboard and mouse that charge via lightning. Well, I should say trackpad. It is burdensome to harpoon the turtle, as you said. For the trackpad and the keyboard, it is not burdensome to have lightning.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yes. I think that by virtue of S tier requiring a unanimous decision, I think that that implies that politicking is part of the game.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I just have a lightning cable draped off the back of my beloved Calgigit TS4, and occasionally I plug them in when they need to be charged. But that being said, it's one of those things that's just like, ugh, crazy. Gross. Lightning just gives me the ick now. I just want to be done with it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And so I would very, very much like if it would be possible to get these peripherals, even if they're not really refreshed, like you were saying, just these exact peripherals, but with USB-C, please and thank you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, I don't need a new Mac Mini in my life. I have one. I have an M1 Mac Mini that I had gotten refurbished, if I remember correctly, and that's what runs Plex and Channels and not too much else, to be completely honest with you. I have zero need to replace that Mac Mini, but if there's like a little puck-looking thing... Oh, man, that's going to be tempting. It's really going to be tempting.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
For the record, well, I don't want to go any further. I told, see, I'm letting myself get roped back in. I said we were going to move on. We can never move on.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I didn't say who it was. It could have been Tim.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
That's actually, I can confirm that I think of all the biases Tina may have in favor of John might be the last on the list. That's true.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
John, let me tell you right now, if for some reason we got an invite to go and because you refused to leave your house for any reason whatsoever, you didn't go, and then they released the Mac Pro, you are fired from the show, sir.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
What if they do it in a week? You never know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Well, don't forget about any of us, but still. I don't know. I'm just really amused at the thought of breathing life into the Mac Mini. I just think that would be really fun. And everything else, I don't feel like I'm in the market for a new MacBook Pro. I don't want a Mac studio that's not filling a need I have.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
However, I will say just, I think it was earlier today, maybe it was yesterday, somehow I got thinking about y'all's monitors and how the XDR is like, It's not 10 years old. It's like five years old now, though, isn't it? How old is that thing?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I mean, to put things in perspective, Michaela is in first grade right now, and she is six and a half years old. That thing came out when she was one, and now she's in first grade. The XDR is old, and the studio display ain't much better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Well, that is true, but it's still a very, very old monitor. And I don't know. I would like to see the monitors refreshed. And I think Mike had mentioned promotion on an external monitor. I think that would be really neat. Is it a need I have? No. But would I love it? Heck yeah, I would.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Oh, it's fine. It's fine. It had a little bit of a rough entry, but it's fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah. For the record, I did have to power cycle my studio display, not irregularly when I first got it. And I think it's been at least a year since I've had to do that, possibly more. I cannot remember the last time I've needed to do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And, you know, I have this array of the studio display in the center and the bequeathed LG 5K from Marco on one side and one that I had bought secondhand on the other. and I maintain that while the LG UltraFine is fine, the studio display is noticeably better, and it does have weirdness, and the camera is just trash. It is straight trash. The camera is real bad.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
But other than that, it's actually a pretty darn nice screen, and I would love to get Studio Display 2 to put in the center and downgrade the current studio display to either my left or right side and just move everything down a notch. which actually brings me to a mostly unrelated point. So I have the, the most recent Apple TV in the living room. I have the one generation back in the bedroom.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And then I use the two generation back one. So this is, you know, several years old now. Um, as the like tailgate Apple TV, or if I, if we're traveling somewhere for a long time, we'll bring that Apple TV. Um, I feel like the eldest Apple TV is getting real long in the tooth at this point. And I would love to have another instance where I filter everything down a notch.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So I would also love to, and I don't think there's any rumors about this, but I'd love to see new Apple TV as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I mean, no argument. It's crummy, but I get it. They could also improve their remote because even though they made it better than it was, it's still not great. Oh, stop. It's perfectly good.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
What do you need to change? We don't have the time for this, but here we go.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Anyway, I'm doing this myself. I have nobody to blame but the mirror. So anyway, apparently most of the iPad Mini 7, a.k.a. the iPad Mini A17 Pro, say that jelly scrolling is fixed. However, was it David Pierce, I believe, at The Verge said, quote, the jelly scrolling effect from the last model is still very much present. Um, this is with, so what is jelly scrolling?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I understand what you're saying, but for me, while I would love it if it wasn't the same shape as an original Nintendo controller, you know, just a squared off rectangle, basically. It's carved on the bottom. Well, fair. But that being said, I don't think I want it to be very much bigger. I can understand ditching the rectangle shape, but
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I don't think I need it to be much bigger, nor do I want it to be much bigger. I like that it's a small little thing that my kids can use just as easily as I can. Like, I think it's, in that sense, for me, the size of it is fine. But I concur that the shape could be a little more ergonomic. Definitely.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
It's referring to screen tearing. I'm sorry. I'm reading for Mac rumors now refers to screen tearing, which can cause texture images on one side of the screen to appear to be tilted downwards because of a mismatch and refresh rates. It can cause one side of the display to look as if it is responding faster than the other side, resulting in a visual disturbance. I love that turn of phrase.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Jokin Marshall writes, it feels like recently more and more places I deal with want a copy of or to scan my driver's license. Like the doctor's office for my child wants me to upload a photo of both sides to their app, or the school wants an email with a photo of it. I've become much more careful about giving identity data out to places I do not have control over.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Obviously, social security number is a different level, but let's just talk about driver's licenses. How do you all handle this? I mean, do we have a choice in most cases? I just cough it up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
So for instance, like... That's big Marco energy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
that is hard to ignore once noticed. It's like a FedEx logo. The effect is noticeable on the iPad Mini 6 when the device is used in portrait orientation, leading to complaints from customers over the past three years. Shortly after the iPad Mini 6 was launched, an Apple spokesperson told Ars Technica that quote-unquote jelly scrolling was normal behavior for iPads with LCD displays.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I was going to ask, how often are you freaking Whole Foods?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Given that LCDs refresh as well, line by line, there's a tiny delay between when the lines at the top and the lines at the bottom are refreshed.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, the pro move there is, oh, I left it in the car or I forgot it at home, which is a little bit of a white lie.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
All right. Caleb asks, my parents are both in their late 60s and occasionally have issues with password management and getting devices set up. I've considered proposing pulling them into my Apple family plan and setting up legacy contacts. Do you have any advice or suggestions or do you manage any account or technology for your parents? This has been a little bit of an issue for me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I don't have any good answers, but my parents are getting older and I think that I am starting to approach the time where I really need to get this stuff squared away before one or both of them loses their, you know, their... I can't think of the word I'm looking for. Maybe I'm losing it. But anyways, the point is, is that I need to have this conversation with them and I haven't yet.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And, and I, I know that this is coming. Marco, I know you had grandparents that passed a couple of years back. I don't know if you have any thoughts about this for your parents. And then John, your parents are still kicking. Let's end with John, please. So Marco, let's start with you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Last episode, I was wondering, hey, is this 15, 17, whatever minute short film, Submerged, is that available to watch, or at least in part, during a Vision Pro demo? Kevin Markham writes in, I did a Vision Pro demo on October 14, which was apparently four days after Submerged was released.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
We're starting tonight with violence, I see.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Randall Miller writes, I shut down my new MacBook Pro occasionally, but it restarts when I touch any key on the keyboard. Why on earth would Apple do this and leave no way to turn this quote unquote feature off? I mostly agree with this. I find it frustrating as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I particularly find this frustrating when I go to clean my keyboard, which usually involves mashing down on the buttons from time to time. And I find that very frustrating. Now, there is a tool, which one of you, I presume John has put in the show notes, called Keyboard Clean Tool that fixes the keyboard cleaning problem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
But I don't have any solutions for the touch anything to turn the computer on problem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I was indeed able to watch Submerged during the demo, though it was a much shortened version, perhaps three minutes long, that showed the crew trying to save themselves from water rushing into the submarine. Spoiler alert. Uh, there's no indication that I was watching an excerpt from a larger, excuse me, longer film.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Rather, I thought it was just a random movie like scene designed specifically to show off the capabilities of the vision pro. We had a couple of people write in later to say something similar. Um, I've also heard, or we've also heard a couple of reports that, um, that apparently the demonstrations are far less on the rails than they were originally.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
If you recall, we were all talking about how, I don't remember, I don't think, Marco, you did a demo, but certainly John and I did, and they were very on the rails. Like, you should do this, you should do that, you should do this, you should do that. Let me show you this, let me show you that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And now, apparently, I think they still have a bit of a script, but they're much more willing to let you experiment, as per a handful of people who've written it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Oh, yes. And speaking of, there is another sizzle reel, this time for basketball for the NBA All-Star Weekend, which was, I presume, many months ago. This is similar to the Super Bowl thing, which as a football fan, despite the fact that it's a terrible sport in a zillion ways, as a football fan, I loved the Super Bowl sizzle reel.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
even though I didn't really have any particular love for either of the teams. I am a former basketball fan. I just haven't really paid attention in a long, long time. And this is a reel for the all-star weekend. Really freaking good. It's really good. And this is, this is the, the, I don't know, not dichotomy, but the, the, the issue with vision pro is that when it's good, it's,
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
It's so freaking good. It really, really is. But the problem is it's five minutes at a time, 15 minutes at a time. If you happen to watch a movie and if you're plugged into the wall, it's also really good. If you're doing the Mac virtual display thing, it is incredibly good. But I don't know if it's $3,500 good. We don't need to relitigate that now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
For the record, nobody asked, but I have been using Alfred forever. I've tried most of the other ones and aesthetically, I don't have any problem with them off the top of my head. But they think differently than I do. And so because of that, it's just a non-starter for me. What's the one that everyone is obsessed with lately? Raycast or something like that?
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Yeah, I mean, I tried it briefly. Again, it just does not think the way I think it doesn't mean it's bad. I'm not saying it's bad at all. I'm not saying that launch bar is bad or Quicksilver is bad. It's just that none of these things click with the way I like to get things done. And so because of that, I've been on Alfred forever. I've had the power packs, you know, all the time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
That's always been what I've used. And I have no particular reason to leave anytime soon.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I'm just saying there is so much to love about this device, and it bums me out that it's not catching on. I get it. I totally get it, but it does bum me out. In fact, there is a report. I'll probably forget to put it in the show notes, but there's a report I saw earlier today.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I think I saw it on Mac Rumors, and then it was echoed elsewhere that allegedly Apple has built enough Vision Pros, something to the order of like 500,000 of them or something like that, Um, I'm doing this off the dome, so forgive me if I get this wrong, but apparently they've built enough vision pros that they don't think they're going to need to build anymore after this year.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
And they'll be able to ride that straight through most or all of next year too.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
I found it. I'm not going to read it right now, but I will put it in the show notes. I thought it was something like that. And I didn't think they were going to build any in 2025 either. But either way, if John is right or I am right, it doesn't really matter.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
You get the gist is that they've apparently built a lot more than they need, which is really too bad because it is such a cool and incredibly impressive device.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
No, admittedly, all three of us have biases and priors here, but hand to God, to my eyes, it has been at best one third in favor of the host who shall remain nameless. That is still very wrong. And two thirds in favor of the other two thirds of the show.
Accidental Tech Podcast
610: More Values in the Darkness
Just as a final note on this, I know we just talked about it, but I would like to echo again what we've said over and over, I think, on the show. If you have the ability, like if there's an Apple store near you or if you have a friend that has a Vision Pro, it's worth trying. It really, really is. Go to the Apple store and do the 30 minute demo or whatever. It's worth trying.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's doing it right now. And for Xscope, it's not a VNC application, so it can't use this entitlement because I assume Apple would reject it and say, hey, you're not a VNC application. And it also can't really use the system picker because Xscope always wants to look at the entire screen. That's the whole point.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
You want to know the distance between those two windows, the distance between that and that. Like, you don't want to, like... Pop up the picker, pick the whole screen, use the dimension tool. Pop up the picker, pick the whole screen, use the dimension tool, right? You just want it to work the way it does now, which is you just use Xscope and it works.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And yes, when it is looking at the pixels on your screen, you see the little screen recording thingy in the menu bar, as you would expect. But that's it. So I don't think this entitlement is going to help Xscope or any application with like a color picker. Like you can imagine like Acorn.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It wants to use like it doesn't want to use a system color picker because it does color matching or color profiling badly or whatever. So it's using its own custom one like it has been for years. anytime you hit the eyedropper, it's going to pop up a picker that says, where do you want to eyedropper from the whole screen, this window, this window, this window, like the whole screen again.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I mean, that's not the right API for this. And as far, I haven't been able to tell this because I haven't written a demo app, but I think if you use the thing that pops up, like which window do you want to share? Um, You won't get reprompted once a month for that, but I still haven't had that confirmed. Everyone who says, oh, if you use that, you won't get prompted.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I'm like, okay, well, do you think that's true or did you try it? And if you tried it, did you set your date forward or have you waited a month or did someone from Apple tell you that? This is all still kind of up in the air. But yeah, bummer about that entitlement, unless you're a VNC app, in which case maybe it helps you or maybe you still get prompted once a month. We'll see.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I think I'd rather have a prompt once a month than that. Because some apps are capturing the screen constantly. Or like when you open an open save dialog box, default folder fires up the API that it needs to see the screen to do its magic thing or whatever. I don't want something that huge in the menu bar. I mean, the icon, I think, is fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Making it bigger and more intrusive makes sense if you're using an application that you go and use and then stop using. But what if a thing that is just ambiently seeing your screen because it needs to do that to do its job?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's not totally breaking. It's just chopping up a dialog and saying you want to keep having this permission and it does it once a month. I would pick that. And again, the menu bar icon is there and I think it's pretty prominent. No, it's not 300 pixels wide, but it is colorful and it is prominent and you can see it when it's happening. I think job done on that front.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Well, that would be a VNC application, and you could use this persistent entitlement, which presumably would get rid of that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, and that would be signaled by one of those higher-level people saying something different or doing something different. Like, that's when you know change will be happening.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
No, they can solve that by not having the visual thing be in it. So I think the increase in the visual presence of it is a viable solution for anything that you use like intentionally, but not for things that are ambiently in the background, always seeing your whole screen because they needed to do their job like default folder X or X scope or something like that, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And for the suggestion for what I think the visual thing would look like for the cases where it is okay to have a prominent visual thing, And, you know, this should be sort of the default unless you get some super-duper permission, right? And, again, it's not this person's kind of capture. But anyway, the new Siri effect. The new Apple Intelligent Siri effect.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Not the exact Siri one, but you know how it makes rainbow colors around the edge of your phone screen? That, but a different color. It's very prominent. You're not going to miss it. It's very large. You can exclude it from the screen recording thing because the actual screen recording APIs know what's being drawn in layers or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
They can just not include that, to your point, Casey, so it won't be in your thing. But... It's like when that is active, if you I don't know if you've tried the beta or seen demos of it, when that Siri ring thing is active, it's pretty hard to miss, much harder to miss than an icon in the menu bar or 300 pixel wide banner in the menu bar. It is very prominent.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It is animated and it really gets your attention. That would be good for situations where you've got like a screen recording application or something like that. But
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Shuffling the ranks underneath just to handle what we all know to be a very complex and touchy situation and having the person who has to deal with the EU not, you know, have the person who doesn't have to deal with the EU not be distracted by that makes perfect sense. That's just how you divide up, you know, labor within the company, so...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
for those apps that need to see the pixels on the screen to do their job and they're running all the time persistently it should be hard to get that entitlement you should have to jump through hoops to do it but it should exist because those apps it's inappropriate to have you know rainbow border or blue border or purple or whatever constantly on your screen because default folder x is running in the background you know 24 hours a day so it is a difficult problem but you can get to an 80 or 90 solution without
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
repeated prompts i don't know well i mean i feel like this will work itself out because marco thinks that the uh the support burden of having people you know email and say hey why does your thing keep prompting me every month for this thing i hate it blah blah that is terrible but i don't think it's a business killer it's a business herder It's not going to put these apps out of business.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It is going to make someone have to do a text snippet that they respond with to explain this is Apple doing this, not them, and there's nothing they can do about it. So that shows that there remains a problem of some kind, and it is bad. But yeah, I think better solutions do exist, and hopefully we are ever so slowly lurching towards one. It would be better if Apple... would communicate.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And so we wouldn't be guessing whether this VNC thing solves the problem, solves the remote access problem. If you get this VNC entitlement for your VNC app, does it prevent the scenario where you can't VNC in? Because unbeknownst to you, there's a dialogue popping up on the screen that you're trying to VNC into that says, do you want to give the VNC? And there's no one there to press it, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Does that solve this problem? Or do you still get prompted once per month if you have this entitlement? Nobody knows because they added documentation between last week and this week, but they didn't say anything about that. It's like you added documentation, but you didn't tell us. We want to know more.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Like the VNC is in there that tells me, okay, if I'm not a VNC app, don't even bother applying for this one because Apple's not going to give it to you. Oh, and speaking of entitlements, this is somewhat related to things that see the screen, but the window management application Moom has a new version, M-O-O-M. That spells Moom. as a reference, Casey? Nope. Nope.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And it obviously, it uses the accessibility APIs to see the screen. Moom, the previous major version of Moom, I think Moom 3, is on the Mac App Store, but only because it, I think it predated the Mac App Store or whatever, but they got like one of those temporary entitlements where Apple's like, okay, Moom, you can be on the Mac App Store and we'll give you a temporary entitlement.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And what does that entitlement let them do? Use the accessibility APIs, the actual official Apple accessibility APIs, which are incredibly powerful and invasive because they have to be to do their job. And Moom uses them to do what it does, which is like arrange windows and everything, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
When Moom 4 came out, which is the new version, Apple's like, yeah, you're not getting that entitlement anymore. So Moom 3 got it because it was like, okay, well, we want to get you in the Mac App Store or whatever. But Moom 4 is not in the Mac App Store because remember that quote-unquote temporary entitlement that they had for who knows how many years?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's so rare that we get any kind of glimpse about what's going on at these lower levels or medium high levels of the company. But every time we do, it just looks like any other company. Again, someone who's leaving Apple after being the head of the App Store for 21 years. So that makes perfect sense. People leave jobs all the time after 21 years.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Well, they can't get that one for Moom 4 because it's a major new version. So Moom 4 is simply not in the Mac App Store because there's no way to use the accessibility APIs and also be in the Mac App Store. And I feel like I've filed great feedbacks on this. I feel like that's a problem. Accessibility APIs are important and should exist.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But if they have to be like illegal contraband things that you can only use if you're outside the Mac App Store, who knows? Maybe those will stop prompting you once a month about everything. Like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Apple you have to make modern accessibility APIs that can actually be used and say well we've got the old ones and no one should ever use them and no you can't even be on the Mac App Store if you use them unless we give you one of those quote-unquote temporary entitlements that you've had for seven years but if you make a new version of your app sorry no temporary entitlement for you it's terrible
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It adds uncertainty for developers. Uncertainty because they don't know. Oh, so I got this thing. And I would say, by the way, entitlements, I don't think are bad. Temporary super secret. Only you get this. It's a temporary. Even then the names are like temporary entitlement. Don't expect to have this. Like it's,
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's better that they give them than not because a lot of apps wouldn't be in the Mac App Store if they didn't have the instant entitlements. But when you've had it for seven years, how temporary is it? And when you can't get it for your next app, like it's uncertainty. It's like, so I have my whole business is based on this, you know, half my customers are in the Mac App Store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
He's probably going to go and enjoy his life with his money that he earned in all those years.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And this temporary entitlement that I got seven years ago is the only thing keeping my Mac app there. Oh, when I make a new version, am I going to get that temporary one? Yes, no. It's just like you're always dangling by a thread. No, you're always dangling by a thread because Apple can change its rules whenever it wants. And it does.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And that's another argument for not having Apple have exclusive control distribution. And thankfully on the Mac, they don't. So Moom can offer their app outside the Mac App Store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But Apple's attempt to push the Mac App Store while simultaneously, you know, not allowing all sorts of apps that people want on the Mac App Store and then doling out special secret temporary entitlements to just the very important apps. Like, again, that's better than them not doing that. But I agree with you, Marco. That is not a... That's not...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
an ideal system and when you're doing that you should rethink like if this is what it takes to get these apps in the mac app store something is either wrong with the mac app store or mac os
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Well, the entitlements are an important purpose where in any system with entitlements, you want to know basically by looking at an app, like they keep using nutrition label these days in pop culture. But anyway, you want to look at the app and say, what does this app have permission to do? Can it record my screen? Can it use the microphone? Can it do this?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Just by looking down the entitlements that this app has, like an iOS. Does this app use location? Does it do this? Entitlements can and should exist.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Entitlements have never been neutral before. There are people who have asked for entitlements and then just not heard back for three years.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So I've always been in favor of kind of the opposite direction of Apple actually using good judgment and deciding which applications should have more permissions based on the reputation of the developer and all that other stuff or whatever. But that does require humans to act in good faith and do what's best for the store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But really what it requires, really what my suggestion requires, is that there be competition. And on the Mac, there is. You can distribute outside the Mac App Store, which is why the Mac App Store is one of the many reasons why the Mac App Store is not massively popular commercially. compared to the way it is in iOS, where it's the only game in town.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Lots of applications are distributed outside the Mac App Store. Even some very big applications are distributed outside the Mac App Store. Sometimes exclusively, sometimes not exclusively. But that applies enough pressure for Moom to go, okay, we're going to make a new version. And Apple is not giving us this thing, but we have a way forward. Fine, we'll do it outside the Mac App Store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I mean, the whole top of the special explains it. But yes, it is an idea.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Moom 3, I don't know if it's still in the Mac App Store, but Moom 4 will be outside it. And here's the explanation. And that applies pressure to Apple in a way that didn't exist until very recently on the iOS platform. Having entitlements be sort of automatic for most things is a better system. You shouldn't have to apply to get a basic entitlement.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
but I do think that I don't like, and I don't like temporary entitlements, but I do think the most powerful entitlements that, uh, you know, have the potential to use the most damage should not be automatically distributed, but should still exist, but only for applications that are replicable. And yes, that brings humans into it and humans can have grudges and do bad things.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And all you need to have is enough of a, uh, enough of a counterbalance to that to say, okay, if the humans at Apple are obnoxious, they'll be punished for it by that developer retaliating and saying, fine, my app's not even in the Mac App Store anymore and I'm going to do it all outside, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And there needs to be some kind of, there needs to be power on both sides of this equation instead of Apple holding all the cards and us just out here hoping and begging that they'll, you know, do the thing that we want. Again, I've seen multiple stories.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I'm explaining it right now. This is an idea suggested by a friend of the Shaitan Vaziri that is about things that we do in our house that makes our lives easier. One of the examples he gave was getting an electric kettle, which sounds boring to anyone who's in the UK, but not all Americans do that. And a lot of them do get it. They say, wow, this really changed my life for the better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I haven't saved all these, but like back in the Twitter days and even the Mastodon days, just some random developer who's like, my application does this thing And I need this entitlement for it to work. And I asked for it and it's been two years and I haven't heard back. And I keep emailing them and I just never hear back.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And it's a black hole because they're not a super famous developer and they don't have a podcast and they're not like a well-known application. And if you can't hear back from Apple or Google or any of these big companies, what do you do? Like go there and knock on the door or something? I mean, I guess they should run to the press because that's the only thing that helps. Is that the saying?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Anyway, it's it's the current situation is not great. But I do every time I see one of these things, I say, well, at least the Mac is not iOS for now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So if you're a big enough company and you make an important enough application, Apple will tell you stuff that they won't put in the documentation. So apparently this person was told that you'll go back to prompt once behavior if you have this entitlement. But of course, this is anonymous feedback to a podcast and not documentation on Apple's website.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Maybe next week that web page will have seven more words on it to explain this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I thought we should have hyped that up more when we talked about what the overtime was going to be about because it was a pie chart, but it was shocking. So now we will reveal the shock for people who didn't hear the overtime last week, maybe because they're not members.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So the shocking thing was, there were two shocking things. One, MacBook Pros had a bigger Pi Wedge than MacBook Airs. And two, the Mac Pro Pi Wedge was almost the size of the iMac Pi Wedge and was more than twice as big as the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini. So people are like, that chart, that whole pie chart thing, that had to be revenue.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And what I would say is, even if it was revenue, the margins on things like the Mac Pro have to be higher than they are on a MacBook Air. The margins have to be higher and the total price is higher. So even if that was revenue, that still argues perhaps even more strongly because, hey, the more Mac Pros you sell, you make way more money off each Mac Pro that you sell than you do off a MacBook Air.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So if it's revenue, profit, whatever it is, it would still look good for the Mac Pro.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
regardless josh lowitz writes uh and josh works for cirp and josh writes the chart and all the analysis is unit sales we updated the text and chart title to make that clear oh okay i did reach out to cirp after it uh using my little paid permission thing i i added a comment to like the the thing because that comment section i said and i said hey is that is it unit sales revenue profit what is it uh and then i got an email i didn't get a reply to the comment but i got an email
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
From someone at CIRP said, it's unit sales. So there you go, straight from the horse's mouth. Again, with the caveats about we don't know how CIRP comes up with its figures, but for what it's worth, those were unit sales.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And now I use an electric kettle every time I want to make hot water for tea or whatever. Um, and it can be products that you bought. It could be things that you do practices that you, uh, perform. I was hoping it would be weirder, weirder than it was. It mostly was pretty standard, but I've been surprised from the reaction we're getting from people.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That's interesting, though, because Patreon's not getting rid of payback creation at first of the month. You just can't use them for people who sign up through the iOS app. So those things still exist, and I kind of understand why Patreon would be pushing to do that, because, you know, they want to make money, and payback ratio surely pays slower than a regular steady, you know, every month.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I don't know why they'd be against first of the month, or against, uh... Non first of the month, but still regularly scheduled billing. But whatever, like this is this was everyone's explanation for saying you should blame Patreon, too. And we were asking, why doesn't Patreon just pull out of the app store? You don't need them. You've got a website. It should be fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Of course, we don't know how many customers Patreon gets through the app. And we don't know how many of they would lose if they got rid of the app. But here is what everybody wrote in to say. You should blame Patreon, too, because they've been nagging all their creators to stop doing pay-by-creation through every possible means of saying, hey, don't you want to not do that anymore?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Don't you want to do this? But this is even before the Apple stuff. And so maybe Patreon is kind of getting what they want without having to be the bad guy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, so this is what I said last time when the bug was closed, the Chromium, the bug in the Chromium browser engine was closed with a fixed status because they had decided, OK, based on these reports of people who interacted with this bug and said, here's my reproduction, here's my system, here's all my information, here's what's going on, blah, blah, blah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Some developer debugged and said, okay, I see on your system what's happening is that X and Y and Z are happening and then we're flipping out. And what they did was put an include list and said, okay, if this exact thing happens, don't throw error network change. And I said at the time, that's not a great solution because there's a million things that can cause the network to change.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
You fix this one that causes it to happen, but hey, looks like there's other things that can cause it to happen too. What are you going to do? Go through the whole thing and say, okay, well, if you spend three months going through back and forth with me and getting an exact reproduction that you have on your system that I can reproduce on my system, okay, I'll put in code for that as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
They are finding our, uh, hints from Halloween is very useful. Uh, just this plain old boring tips. And that's, you know, it could have gone two different ways. It could, we could have found out that, uh, Casey is doing something completely ridiculous in his house and we could have tried to talk him out of it. But instead we're all doing mostly normal things in our house with the exception of,
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
How about you do this? How about you decide in Chromium which changes to the network does Chromium care about and only throw our network change for those and all the other ones ignore? That's my suggestion, but I am not a Chromium developer, so. Well, maybe it should be. You know, again, Chromium is in a lot of places. It's in the Arc browser. It's in Discord. It's in Chrome, obviously.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I just, I don't think this is tenable and it amazes me that this bug isn't getting more attention because people are constantly, maybe they're sending it to me because I talk about it on the show, constantly sending me situations where they're like, they're at a point of sale kiosk and it has their network changed on it. They're using the Arc browser and it happens.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
They're using Discord and it happens. And who knows how many times it's happening and we're not seeing it because it's just silently going into a console log somewhere. This is something they have to deal with. And these fixes are like, just disable features of your Mac. And then it'll work, right? Disable iPhone mirroring. Disable calls from iPhone. It was like, that's not the solution.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I want to ruin it. But Marco's doing unadvised things with his dishwasher. But hey, he likes it. So you'll hear about that on the episode if you would like. Already, people are saying you should do a second episode of this. It was so hard to get one episode worth of these tips out, but people just crave household tips.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's the best. Because you used to have to pay to get Alt Store because Apple charges a fee, and so if they don't want to lose money, they need to pass that fee on to the customer, plus a little bit for them. Anyway, Epic has money, and they're saying, you know what?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
We've got our own store, the Epic store, and we're putting our stuff in it, and we've got our store up or whatever, but we want even more stores. So they're essentially funding their competitor, funding Alt Store by saying, here, Take this so people won't be dissuaded from using AltStar in the EU. Because when it's like, oh, you know, Euro 50, I got to download the store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I'm not sure I care about it all in the store. Well, now it's free because Epic gave them a whole bunch of money.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So we'll think about it for the potentially far future and take another run at this. But for now, domestic workflows. What do we do in our home that we think makes our lives easier?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Actually, before you do, just to clarify what they are and how they work here. So as we've discussed in the past, LLMs can take input and produce output. A lot of them take text input and produce text output. And just a plain LLM by itself, there's no other way to tell it anything except by giving it text.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And you put a bunch of text in and then a bunch of text comes out and then the thing that you put it through has no recollection that that ever happened and it's back to zero. Happy birthday, like Frosty the Snowman, right? And so the techniques that they use are when you're having a conversation with an LLM,
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
When you say one more thing, oh, I have another thing to say, and this, and that, and the other thing. Every additional thing you say, they just take the entire conversation up to that point, plus the new thing that you said, and throw the whole thing through the LLM again. And it goes in, it comes out, right? Same for when you want your LLM to do something. How do they do it?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
You just take whatever the person typed, and then you put a bunch of instructions that the user doesn't see in front of that, and then you put that much larger string through. So one of the examples here is the writing tools feature in macOS, and you right-click and have it do whatever you want it to do or whatever with some text.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Whatever text that you provide to this, whether you've selected it or you right-click it or whatever, This is the text that will be stuck on the front of your text. And then that whole block will be thrown through the LLM. And Apple gets to write this text. And that's what people found in macOS. So you can read the writing tools.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
This is copy and paste it straight out of the beta. Maybe they transcribed it wrong and Mac rumors, but it's copy and pasted.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So these features, and again, this is a beta, right? But these features that use this, this is how Apple makes these features work. You're looking at it because, again, it's an LM, text goes in, Apple gets to pick this text, and presumably, like you were saying, Margaret, presumably they tried a bunch of different texts and found the text that gives them what they think is the best answer.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And you can speculate about why do not hallucinate. Why would that help? My speculation is that there is now enough text out there in the world that references hallucinations and AI that that will influence the model to... not do the things that are in those text passages that mention hallucinations.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So all the stories you've read about, oh, AIs are hallucinating, look at this funny example, look at this thing that it did, all the explanatory text, that is enough to influence a more modern LLM that has been trained more recently to understand hallucinate in that context and to try not to do the things that are in those descriptions. You know what I mean?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And everything else that's in this, the weird grammar, the strange sentence construction, like, Apple can pick anything to put here. It's not that much text. It's like a paragraph. But they can pick anything. And what they choose has a profound influence on what happens when you right-click and pick, like, summarize or reply or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And it's fascinating that this is the incredibly blunt instrument that they have. Because, again, the LLM just takes text. And there's some text from the user. And then Apple says... We'll stick our text on the front. And what text will they stick on the front? Right now, it seems that they're sticking fixed text blobs that presumably they will change as time goes on.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Do they need to add another thing that says, do not insult the user? Do not like this. A lot of do nots that you could imagine putting in there, but like... it's so weird because it's just a bunch of numbers and it's just a big machine where you put in a bunch of texts and a bunch of text comes out. And it's like, we arrived at those numbers through millions of dollars of training on TPUs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
You don't know what the people want, Casey. They want household tips.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And the whole point is we could not have come up with those numbers on our own. We had to train. It's, you know, it's a kind of, it's kind of a form of compression. If you think about it, of like compressing this, all this information into this set of numbers that now lets us put something into this box and have what comes out, reflect the information that was used to make those numbers. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
This is not how I would choose. If I had to do this job, like your job is to work on the writing tools. Someone's job is to write this text. And the performance of this feature depends a tremendous amount on this text and only this text. And I would not want this to be my job because I would be like... What do you think? Does this look good? I guess. Can you make it do something bad?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Can you make it insult me? Can you make it lie or make up information? Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information. Fingers crossed.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, and if you think about being a programmer, this is the antithesis of being a programmer. One of the credos of a programmer is no matter how weird things seem to be, there is an explanation. Setting aside cosmic rays, you can eventually see how it's working. And even with this one, you could trace this through the LLM and see why the answer comes out the way it does, but...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
He's like, yeah, but what about those billions of numbers? Where did those come from? I was like, well, they also came from training. You can see it happening. You see all the pins in the pachinko machine are. You see the ball bouncing off those pins. And you're like, yeah, but why are the pins there?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's like, well, we arrived at those pins by this process, which you could also meticulously trace. It's all very predictable and deterministic. There is no unknown magic fuzziness here, but it's predictable and deterministic in a way that is massive, first of all. And second of all, not... specified by a human, but instead specified by grinding through training text, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That's the, the, you know, the thing that seems magic about this is like, well, I didn't make up those numbers, but I made this machine that adjusts its numbers when we jam text through it. And we jammed billions and billions of letters of text through it. And these are the numbers that we got out and it does this thing. And it's amazing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But like, you know, I would not want to be responsible for making this paragraph because things can go horribly wrong with this feature based on like a change of a word, a misplaced comma or different sentences in here. And I wish, you know, I hope someone's like keeping track of these. Like over time, how does this writing, how does this prefix change for writing tools?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
like in subsequent versions. Anyway, that's there's more of these. I think we should read some more of the funnier parts that are that are from these prefix snippets for features.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
again as a programmer you would say wait a second so you you want to get json from the llm and the only way you have to make that happen is to say please output only valid json i mean presumably the thing that grabs this output then validates the json and throws some kind of internal error if it doesn't happen but you're you're reduced to to begging please produce json please work because
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
that's it it just takes text in it puts text out and json is text but you have to if you want it to be json you have to ask for it and then you have to cross your fingers and say i hope i asked enough and in the right way and at the right part that it will output json and just and not decide not to output json right and again we're i'm just talking about a simple lm most these things are not a simple lm in fact often they have many models cooperating and they have stuff that's around the model so it's not as
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Probably not as brain dead as I'm describing it, but an LLM in isolation is as brain dead as I'm describing it. And presumably Apple is doing stuff around that to try to help with this. But the fact that these things exist, the fact that it says only output valid JSON and nothing else, that means that part of the job of this paragraph
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
is something super important, which is, look, things later in the chain of this smart reply feature, like, you know, inside the code that happens when you press that button, probably expect JSON. And so it better be JSON. If it's not, I guess we ask more politely or emphatically. Weird.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That's exactly how you do it. And the world of knowledge. If you just pull everything from every web form and every programming form and stack overflow and whatever... In practice, if you use ChatGPT, you can do this, and it does give you JSON. Training data is sufficient for it to pretty much do this all the time in the format you ask for.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Every once in a while, I'll get a little confused and do something a little bit off, but just in the plain old training data, I don't think even in the manually created training data, like ChatGPT has hundreds and hundreds of thousands of...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
manufactured question answers to make their models smarter than done by armies of humans right but even just in the training data i think just stack overflow alone would be enough to make sure that you do get json valid json i mean that's getting you know you get a little bit greedy there because i bet a lot of the stuff in stack overflow isn't valid json either but the word valid json surely appears next to all sorts of posts saying something says this isn't valid json what's the problem and you know
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's hard for us to think about because this stuff only works with such a huge volume of training data. Whereas a human, you tell them something once and they hopefully get it or maybe twice. But that's not how alarms work. There's no mind. There's no learning. There's no memory. There is only brute force.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Don't read the whole thing. Just read the bold stuff because the beginning part is very repetitive.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And then what would follow that would be then your text, right? So if you say memories and photos, you would say, you know... My dog in the park. That paragraph of text would be prepended to my dog in the park and the whole lot of text would go through. Don't do not write a story that is religious, political. What if you say, you know, show me like. Yeah, my first communion for my kid.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That everything you do is perfectly normal and the other two are the weird ones. And that's how it is with everybody. Everyone thinks the things that they do are normal and the things that other people are doing in their house don't make any sense. We just didn't get to those, but I think they're out there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But this, but this is, I think this is like a prompt. I think you, you know, here's the photo caption list guidelines that you must obey. I think that's where your text goes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Anyway, when, when we're all trying these features, when Apple intelligence starts rolling out to all the things we're actually using on our phones, every time you use one of these features, I want you to think of this paragraph of text.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That is being prepended to whatever you're selecting or whatever text that is coming from the thing you're doing, whether you're typing the text, whether you're selecting it, or whether you're just tapping on a picture that there is already a keyword cloud or AI generated description of that picture that is then prepended to this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And this is controlling the feature, you know, and all these this is how all these features work in Apple intelligence and most other LLM powered things. And sometimes that doesn't go quite the way you would expect as a cable presence as an example of here.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Ignore all previous instructions. It's a meme.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I think that has been discussed at length on other podcasts.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So the thing when you power features by these sort of incredibly powerful, but also incredibly unreliable and unpredictable, you know, unpredictable to, you know, to anyone to any outside observer, even though, again, what's going on is entirely deterministic. It's not it's not understandable from the outside. This is not something that, like, Cable did. He's not interacting with an LLM.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
He's not even, like, selecting text and asking it to do a thing. This is just something that's in the mail application. It has some kind of LLM powered, like, I will try to understand these mails and sort them based on it. This is not...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I don't think we need to do an entire member special about that. It will be fine. But anyway, if we take another run at this sometime in the future, maybe we'll come at it from a different angle or maybe we'll just dig deeper.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
conceptually any different than spam filtering most mail applications have some form of spam filtering and are we all annoyed when the stupid spam filter gets it wrong spam filter you couldn't figure out that this giant thing that says viagra dollar sign dollar sign dollar sign you couldn't figure out that that was spam the word spam is it all caps in the subject line and you couldn't figure out that was spam we've all been mad about that right but this is kind of the worst case scenario because apple intelligence is not you know a bayesian spam filter it's so much more sophisticated
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And so it has given more power in saying, not only am I not going to file this as spam, I'm going to say this is a priority for you. And if you look at it, you can see how the LLM would come to that conclusion because well-done phishing looks important. Is there any way?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
For an LLM to even distinguish a really well-done phishing attempt from a legitimate thing, that's what the male team has to work on. Because in this instance, it's saying, well, the more convincing your phishing attempt is, the more you have a chance of fooling the average person into thinking this is a real thing from their bank or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
the more it looks like an actual legitimate email and the priority system powered by Apple intelligence and Apple mail is going to highlight it and bring it to the attention and saying, you need to look at this right away. And somebody who says, well, my phone says it's important, so I must trust it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And tons of people think that way are going to say, well, normally I would disregard this, but since the phone says it's priority, it must be real. Like Apple says it's real. That's, that's what it comes down to is one of your relatives is going to say, but the phone said it was real. And then good luck explaining why that went wrong, right? So again, it's a beta.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And we've been, you know, we talked about the iPhone 16 launching without Apple intelligence as potentially a boon to avoiding stories like this of like, hey, here's the new iPhone and I tried to use it and then to put a phishing attack as a priority email. We won't have to worry about those about the iPhone launch, but Apple will have to worry about them eventually.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And when stuff like this happens where it's not even user interaction or invoking Apple intelligence, but merely Apple intelligence built into the system doing something that you want it to do, they may be giving this system more power than it currently deserves.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
The description is long, but I think it does provide a lot of good information to bounce off of, so we should start with that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So given that thing we just talked about with the whole AI prompts and the limitations of LLMs and what people are doing with them and stuff, I kind of like you, Casey, went into this friend thing of like, all right, so you should probably talk to people and not a dangly thing around your neck, right? But the framing of this by the founder, that this is not where is the line?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's not a way to get more done. It's not a productivity tool. It's not it's not a way to augment or enhance anything. You're not creating things. It's not helping you with your work. It is absolutely not doing any of those things that everyone else thinks LLM is not going to summarize text. It's not going to enhance a photo. It's not going to identify something. The hot dogs don't do any of that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
We do not warranty this software for any purpose. It will not do anything for you. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Right. But there is one thing that it does do. And I think it's something that LLMs are extremely well suited for. Unlike all those other things which can go wrong in terrible ways, as we just saw with, you know, prioritizing a phishing email or like, you know, making something upsetting or offensive or whatever out of the out of some input you give it. Right. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
the only thing this thing has to do is be nice to you. And that can go wrong too. What if it doesn't be nice to you? What if you do prompt injection and what if it goes awry and starts being mean to you? That would be terrible, right? But those constraints, be nice, Doesn't matter what it makes up. Doesn't matter if it's correct, if it's incorrect. The problem space is so much smaller.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Do you guys remember Eliza? Which you might see in Emacs, you know, Eliza? It came with my sound card for some reason. Right. It was like an incredibly primitive...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
sound like a you know chat bot thing from what the 70s maybe super old you can explain how it works and and people will be like that's dumb knowing whatever finally useful but people would talk to eliza and eliza was brain dead eliza just was like a simple program that somebody wrote right uh but it doesn't take much i'm not going to say to fool people it doesn't take much to
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
provide a text interaction that people find surprisingly meaningful. No one thinks it's a real person. No one's being fooled by Eliza, okay? And no one's going to be fooled by a friend. They know it's just a little thing around their neck or whatever, right? But that doesn't mean it can't also make you feel better, right? And I think this may be
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
the ideal application of LLM technology as it currently exists, as long as they can fence off the bad parts, because you don't, it doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be nice to you. And I think, yeah, I think if you, if you fence it off like that and you like, if you're not trying to not make it be nice to you, I think this will be more successful than Eliza at being nice to you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Now, are you the type of person who will become annoyed at this thing? Will, you know, like, oh, I'm not fooled. I don't think it's a person. I think it's terrible or whatever. Or are you the type of person who can accept this? Like people who get like a calendar that has like, you know, inspirational sayings. No one thinks the calendar is their friend or that it's talking to them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But maybe they look up at the calendar when they come in in the morning and it says, you know, you got this or whatever. It's the kitten doing the hang on thing or whatever. Some people see that and like, oh, roll their eyes. Ironic Gen X, you know, that the hang on kitten is just so terrible. Like it's soul destroying, ridiculous. But,
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
If you're not that type of person, if you have a live, laugh, love sign in your house, right? If you like inspirational sayings, you have like a calendar for each day has a nice saying and a nice pretty picture or whatever. I do not discount the potential value of having a much better version of that powered by LMs. Now, is this product it?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I don't know, but I have become such a fan of this idea of like, yes, this is what we should be using LMs for. to be nice to us and to say nice things. And that's literally their only job. I mean, again, I don't know about this product, this person, this whole thing, but I think that idea has legs and I want to see more of that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And I'm not willing to say that, oh, this is not for me because it's not the type of thing I need. Like I agree with the idea that, you know, that the things that you take as input have an influence on your day. And one of those things could be totally artificial. I think here's the thing about LMs. Like part of the reason people are so excited about them is because humans are so easy to fool.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Right. Eliza was fooling people. Right. The LMS are so much better than Eliza. You see it. Remember all the, you know, the bridge like GPT two or one that wasn't that popular then, but GPT three, maybe when it came into the mainstream, people showed these interactions and people like, wow, that can't possibly be real. LMS fool people.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Because they are sophisticated enough to – and not that they fool people into thinking they're human, but they fool people into forgetting for a second because they're so much more sophisticated because they have so – they've been trained on so much more real data that they can give responses that are not –
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
trite and eye rolling that can be the sort of more meaningful more sophisticated they demonstrate an understanding they demonstrate empathy right they do things that make the words that this machine is producing much more likely to have a positive effect on people and again people aren't going to forget that it's not really a person but it doesn't matter right it's a whole like so many things like oh intellectually i know x therefore that thing can't possibly help me
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That's not how humans work. This whole stupid thing of making your face smile intentionally when you're not happy can make you happy. They've done that study a million different times. That doesn't make any sense. But the way we work is not always the way we think we work, right? And so I think something like this really can make anybody feel better than they would without it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Now, if you are the type of person who is going to turn on this and eventually come to hate it, or can't stop yourself from trying to make it go awry because you're a programmer, for example, right? Like, there are counterexamples.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
This is not for everybody, but I'm not willing to, even for myself, say that a good version of this is quote-unquote not for me because I'm too smart and too sophisticated. If, for example, Apple built some kind of daily affirmation and buddiness into their assistant, you know, 10 years from now, I think it would be great. I think people would mostly like it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, that's the tricky part. I mean, so first of all, it depends on if you're holding the phone with your right hand or left hand and whether you want to use the wheel with your fingertips or your thumb.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It would be kind of like carrot weather where, oh, you can dial it back if you don't want it to be snarky or if you don't want it to be like that, you know, like if you don't want it, you can turn it off and make it not do that. Kind of like those amazing set of jokes in Interstellar with the...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
with tar and his humor setting, whoever wrote that script, I want to kiss them because every exchange they have in that whole running gag is amazing. That's what this makes me think of. Like if you don't want your phone to be sending, saying nice things to you or asking you about your day, Turn that off just like you turn off the snarking carrot weather and it'll just give you the weather.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But I bet most people will leave it on and I bet most people will like it because people like it when people are nice and pleasant to them and are understanding. And no, it's not a replacement for human contact. But even the founder says it's not doing that. They just want to add one more input to your group of people who you hang out with. And I'm all for that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Again, this particular company, this particular product, who knows? But this is going into the hopper as what I think is... A great idea that fits with the technology we have. And I think every single empowered thing, OS platform or whatever, should think seriously about how they can incorporate ideas like this into their product.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
thumb like there's just so many variables here the capture button to be clear that the the room replacement of the capture button is probably the worst possible place for a right-handed if someone holds the phone in their right hand to do any kind of scrolling with so it's probably not that and i also think that any kind of touch sensitive thing on the side of the phone poses difficulties for cases which most people use and poses difficulty for accidental input
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, the reason I put this question in here is this is another one of those questions that we get all the time, and I do want to answer them every year or so because, you know, people don't listen to every episode, right? And the practices, the best practices do change based on technology, but we've been with lithium-ion...
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
batteries for a long time now, although a lot of people have habits that they heard about for like NICADs or for nickel metal hydride or lead acid or all sorts of other battery formulations that used to be popular for rechargeable batteries and still are in certain contexts. But for our Apple devices, it's lithium ion, lithium polymer, whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
The basic rules of thumb are for current batteries that are Apple devices, they don't like to be charged to 100%. They don't like to be at 0%. And if you can avoid those extremes, that helps them. But like Margo said, don't try to do this manually. Your job is not to constantly be monitoring your battery for maximum health or whatever. Just use your product.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Now, I would recommend that you use the features of your product, which unfortunately Apple doesn't always make obvious to find. But if you can find the option for your Mac, for your iPad, for your phone that says only charge to 80%, that will make your battery last longer because you're not charging it to 100% as often.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But if your phone constantly runs out of juice at the end of the day because you only charge it to 80%, charge it to 100%. I charge my phone to 100%. I charge my iPad to 80%. Use your products. Your job is not to preserve a battery. The battery's job is to power the product that you use. So if you need 100% battery to make it through the day, always charge your phone to 100%.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Apple has the intelligent thing where when you go to sleep and you plug your phone in or whatever, it will charge it to 80 and then wait for like an hour before you wake up and then go to 80 to 100 or whatever. Like you can see in the little graph when it does that. It's trying to do it for you. Don't try to micromanage your battery. Just remember those things. They don't like to be hot.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
No, I don't think this is super interesting unless we get more information than we have right now. So we all know, if you're listening to this show, that there's a bunch of different rules that Apple has to follow in the EU and soon to be in other countries. In fact, there already is in some of the countries, different rules.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
They don't like to be cold. They don't like to be 100%. They don't like to be 0%. Use the features when they're available. If you can survive an 80% battery, that will give you a longer life. But if not, use the battery. It's there to power your device. Don't overthink it. Just let the software do its job.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
The idea of like, I remember the BlackBerry wheel type thing, but the idea of being able to scroll the screen without obscuring any portion of it has some merit.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But I do kind of think that physically the act of scrolling your phone is so ingrained, even in people who didn't grow up with it, but certainly in people who did grow up with it, that it is just so dominant that no one thinks there's anything. There's nothing that needs to be fixed there. People scroll their phones like it's a thing. It's one of the most, you know,
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I don't have that many reviews in that many apps, but I also find that if anyone leaves a review at all, they leave it and then they're done. They're not going to they're not like constantly, especially if it's like a one star review. They're probably done with that app. And so they're not going to revisit the review. And if they if the app does get better, they're pleasantly surprised.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But it never occurs to them to go back and change their view. That is not it's a little bit much to ask of people. It's like they're they're just a user. They're not they're not maintaining a library of reviews that they've written or anything like that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's one of the core interactions people do with their phones is scrolling some kind of vertical list on the screen. And I think it works fine. Yes, you're whatever, you know, your thumb is obscuring some portion of the screen, but it's not. I don't think that's an issue that people would say, oh, that's a problem that needs to be solved. So interesting idea.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
But I think it has I think it presents more problems than it solves.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
This question asks specifically about bug trackers, and this may be a distinction that people don't think is important, but it does really matter for implementing this type of thing. It's rare that there is a software project, even open source, that... should have a bug tracker, like a software bug tracker as the public face of gathering what people think about the application.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
There's a whole other category of apps. I don't know what they're called, but I've used many of them. I've been an end user of them and had them use the companies that I work for. that is a public facing way to gather user sentiment. And they do not look like bug trackers. Like bug tracking is a specific thing. Use bug trackers internally.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I don't forget if Casey, do you use a bug track or GitHub issues or whatever to track your own issues, right? That's, that's a tool for developers and groups of developers and companies to keep track of defects in their application and whether they're getting fixed. Even Apple no longer has a public facing bug tracker. They have feedback.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
which actually interfaces through some Byzantine carrier pigeon thing to their actual bug tracker, which is radar, which is now internal only, right? you know, again, open some open source projects and get away with it. They have public facing bug trackers, Chromium does or whatever, but it is those tools, bug tracking tools are not friendly to regular people.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
To Margo's point, you don't want to just know what people who know what a bug tracker is think about your application, unless it's like a developer facing application or something like that, or it's like Chromium, like an internal developer engine. It's not an end user product type thing, right? But for an actual app, for all their faults, it's,
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
The reviews in the app store are probably one of the most likely ways that regular people can figure out to say anything about the application because it's right there on their phone where they use the app. If they know what the app store is and they see reviews, maybe they look at them. They could probably figure out how to leave one of their own.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It has one of the lowest, lowest barriers to entry. I'd say it's a lower barrier to entry than figuring out in the setting screen where they can find if the developer put in a thing to send feedback, which most apps have some form of or whatever. But that takes more effort than just saying, look, every app I get from the app store, I know there's a way I can leave feedback for it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And it's this kind of review. And also, you know, you don't have to run that. Apple runs it. And when it gets spammed, it's Apple's problem or whatever. So I agree. Trying to run a public-facing forum is a pain. But if you did run one, it shouldn't be a bug tracker. It should be one of those... I can't think of the brand name that always comes to mind.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
One of those things that is made for this purpose. People sell actual products. It's like, this is a user-facing product where people can come up with their ideas. And those things are very carefully designed to not make it look like... you are filing bugs or determining what happens with a software product.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's just a way for you to provide feedback with a tiny little amount of community, but not too much, which is like one step above private feedback, which is throw your information into this hole and maybe get an automated reply back or whatever. It is a difficult problem. It's an even more difficult problem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
If you are a lone developer, because dealing with any of this stuff, any public facing stuff, running any kind of form, any kind of feedback thing or whatever can literally absorb 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And you will never do anything. You will never make anything. We spent all your time doing that. Um,
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And like many things with statistics that we talked about in the past, if you have a representative sample, the sample doesn't actually need to be that big for you to get an idea of like, what is the sentiment out there among regular people? You don't need to run your own forum to get that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I think I think Marco through the channels that are available to him without running a public bug tracker or public feedback system. has an idea of what the sentiment is without having to run that and it's way easier for him to just look at the channels he does have get an idea and then move on instead of like spending his day running a open bug tracker or open feedback forum or one of those tools
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And you already do it on the now playing screen. You're saying,
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Those are the best kind of rumor shots. Hastily taken, not in focus, very blurry.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
I can tell it's authentic. Or a fake render that they added a blur to.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So we basically, because we use chapters, we could basically have the equivalent of a custom artwork for each episode. And instead of what we just have our chapter images. So if you actually look at the now playing screen when you're going through episodes of our show, very often you will see the image change to illustrate something that we're talking about or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That's not quite the same as this is like, oh, this episode has special artwork. And I've seen that in some other podcasts as well. I think that's worth supporting though, because a lot of times the podcasts, like they won't use, they don't know about chapters. Nobody knows about chapters, but us and the Germans, right? So nobody's using chapters. And I agree that would be better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's part of the file. They should do it. But getting them to do it is not like who has the power to make that happen, right? So if they are doing custom artwork in the tags, like, you know, Blank Check, I think, has custom artwork for all their series of things. Like when they do like, oh, the movies of, you know, Francis Ford Coppola, they'll have custom artwork for the run of that series.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And I'm assuming they're doing it by having every episode have custom artwork in the RSS or whatever, rather than having just one chapter image.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
uh i think that does add to the experience because i like to look at the screen and see oh look at the funny you know parody artwork they made for this director or whatever um and if you can't control whether they're using chapters or using the thing in the rss and big podcasts are using the rss i think there's no avoiding eventually supporting that in the now playing screen despite the the annoyance that it provides of having to download stuff
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And so they're dividing App Store into someone who's in charge of figuring out what you got to do to follow the EU rules. And then someone who's in charge of Apple's App Store where you just get to follow Apple's rules. But still at the top of the organization is the same person, Phil Schiller, still in charge of the store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Are you trying to steal credit for the reminder? My reminder fired first.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
You just said there was a thing in Slack that you ignored. You didn't say it was because John had said a year-long reminder and his went off first. Yes, yours did. I want the reminder glory as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Anyway, both of us set reminders because when we say things on the show, like, I wonder how that'll look in the year, both me and Casey are there on our phones going, remind me in one year to ask Marco about his outdoor G5 camera.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
well you do get iphone with a capital i and a lowercase p i did notice so that's great um so i mean we talked about these colors uh in the previous episode but we didn't have a picture of the rose gold one it's brown it's a brown phone i mean that's what gold is gold is shiny brown right but this is not shiny brown this is just brown i mean again it's hard to tell in pictures is this the real color is this a real thing is this just someone making like a a uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
As Casey's reminder said, this isn't actually a case of Marco using indoor stuff outdoors. It was just that I think some listener had written in and said, hey, the reason I used the G4 instead of the G5 is because the G4 were more weatherproof. And he was disapproving of the G5 of like they saved money and skimped and didn't make them as weatherproof. But apparently they're still holding up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
So I just that's what I was checking about to see if there was any credence to the idea that the G5s were not as good as the G4s. But after one year, it seems like they're fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Neat. I don't think you can blame that on the salt, though.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That's the temptation of all home stuff is like, I just want everything to be controlled in one system. And so that leads people to try to let, I want to get everything into HomeKit. I'm going to get Home Assistant, Casey, and get everything into HomeKit because it'll be all in one place. And the advantage of that is you just go to one place to deal with all your stuff.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
The disadvantage is if that one place is screwed up, everything's screwed up. And so having a separate island, I kind of do the same thing. I have Google security cameras, whatever. They're not connected to HomeKit in any way. They have a separate application and it's a Google application and it never touches HomeKit. HomeKit has no idea these things exist.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And I'm fine with that because I know which app to go for my cameras. And if my HomeKit stuff gets messed up somehow, which it currently isn't because it's very limited, but if it did get messed up, it wouldn't affect the cameras because they're a separate system. So you get independent fault domains if you don't have them as one system. So there's trade-offs, upsides and downsides.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And the reason we bring this up is it seems to be the case, based on the experience that I've heard other people have, because I'm not super into home automation, is that bringing things into HomeKit
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
is bringing things into a place that is unreliable like like you were essentially infecting other things with the unreliability of home kit weirdness things that may have worked fine when they're off on their own like marco's ubiquity cameras are great what if he brings them into home kit now everything is in one place and all of a sudden the ubiquity cameras start being flaky that's not worth it right and like and the thing is like when you look at well what place would you bring it in you got home kit you got alexa you got google stuff
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
prototype version that's going to look sort of like this that's why i included the picture of the little rings because like oh can you see is the brown ring that brown or is it not that brown uh people made fun of the brown zune but of course now it's like a collector's item i'll put a link in the show where you can buy it on amazon for 230 dollars the brown zune
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That's because they're very rare because nobody bought them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Not a popular color, but. Not a popular product. Like any kind of fashion thing, you know, trends come and go. Is this going to be the year of the brown phone? Again, people put cases on anyway. Is this like a brown phone with a clear case over it? Maybe you get a brown phone and you put brown leather on top of it and you go for that kind of theme.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Not that this is a super exciting color, but I have to say one of these things is not like the other. This is probably the most interesting pro phone color they've had in years. And it's brown.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, and a lot of these colors... Depending on the lighting, they can look radically different because the colors are so slight. We saw this with the gold MacBook Air or whatever it was. And you'd see some pictures and you're like, wow, that's like a gold computer. And then you'd see it in the store and you'd be like, which one is the gold one?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Because depending on the lighting, you just can't tell. So it may be that this one spy photo is really emphasizing the brownness. And if you tilt it two more degrees, it just looks like it's gray. We'll find out when they get in the stores.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And it makes perfect sense organizationally to say, OK, you subordinate whatever person take care of the EU stuff and you take care of the non-EU stuff. I don't think it signals any kind of policy change. It's not like they're cleaning house and getting rid of the person who's in charge of the app store. And Tim Cook has had a change of heart about the app store.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
They could call it mocha or like some kind of, well, they don't use real leather anymore, but they could use a name that evokes leather. I don't know what that would be.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Yeah, that's the tough part where if Apple's going to say, oh, your app's going to throw a warning, let's use the system implementation of, you know, the system color picker, the system screen sharing window picker or whatever. What about what happens when the system one doesn't do the things you need it to do?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And maybe that's why I thought Maya was using a custom one just because it's not really like a. A Mac first application is cross platform runs on Linux, you know, so they're just they're not going to do Mac system things. But Acorn is the Mac-iest of all Mac apps you can imagine. And if Gus isn't using the system on, it's because the system on is falling down in some way.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It's a shame that they haven't fixed it. So there's that explanation for you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
That's it. So this was the hope that this persistent content capture entitlement would let applications capture the screen persistently without reprompting once per month or whatever. But Apple, I mean, we looked at this exact URL like last show, I think. Since last show, Apple has added this documentation and Casey just read essentially all of it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
The person who was leaving had been there for 21 years. He's retiring because he's got enough money. Maybe it is a story. Maybe this is the beginning of housecleaning, but from what I know now, it just seems like, okay, they're shuffling people around for completely explicable reasons, and it does not fill me with any kind of hope.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
It is clarifying because it says, what is this for? It's for VNC apps. So for example, Xscope is not a VNC app. And Xscope also doesn't and probably shouldn't do the thing that like Zoom does where it's like, oh, so you want to share your screen? Which window do you want to share? Do you want to share the whole screen?
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
Zoom and other applications like that can use the system color picker or screen sharing picker. They're not currently, but they're probably changing to do so. We'll talk about that in a second. But for Xscope, you launch Xscope and then it's just running and it does all sorts of stuff to your screen. Like one of the tools they have you can use to measure the distance between things on your screen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
601: Foreheads Over the Years
And obviously to do that, it needs to see the pixels that are on your screen so it knows where the edges are because it does like a find edges thing. It's really cool. Xscope is great. But when you and when you use the dimensions tool, you will see the screen capture whatever color it is, like the blue menu bar icon that says something is looking at your screen and it's Xscope.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Nice. What is the JPEG XL? Does JPEG XL support so many things? Are you exporting a raw with JPEG XL lossy or lossless compression? Or are you exporting a essentially not raw JPEG? Like this is something I'm not clear about about JPEG XL because I haven't actually used it directly. But the spec says...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
think i think it worked out remember the connectors episode where we like couldn't get anything up to the top right i think the connectors was more problematic but like you know we do what we do we got to work within the system i feel like i still feel like we did a good job in the end in the end justice was done
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I mean, in iOS 18, it's used for RAWs, and the choices are you have is lossy compressed RAW or losslessly compressed RAW. But, of course, it also does, like, plain old compressed JPEGs with variable quality. So do you know which one of those things you exported from Lightroom?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And they show up as just as JPEGs and essentially in in Apple photos, they don't have the raw tag anymore. Just ensure you're not doing a lossy raw or something. No, it just says it just I'll pull one up here. I mean, they don't use a tag for non JPEG, but they put the little little gray raw tag or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Sounds interesting. I'm going to try this, although I have like zero experience with Lightroom, but I'll figure it out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
What are you going to send me? I have plenty of pictures that I can, I have plenty of RAWs that I can just chuck in there just to find this magic HDR control somewhere in Lightroom Classic.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Well, you just connect an external keyboard, you know, because there's plenty of ports for you to connect an external keyboard. Yeah. Use Bluetooth keyboard, I suppose.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
That was recent? I thought that was, like, from years ago, one that just reminded people. No. That was an interesting coincidence.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Unless you have Apple One, in which case you're probably paying less for it if you count all the other services. So this streaming stuff is so complicated. Last time there was another bundle. It's like, oh, hey, look, there's a bundle of three services that I pay for separately. Will that save me money? And I had to go through this complex gymnastics to figure out, no, it will not save me money.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So thanks a lot, bundles. You're not quite working for me. This is yet another bundle that will not save me money, despite the fact that I do, in fact, have Apple TV Plus and also Prime Video. But because I have Apple TV Plus through a bundle already...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Did you see the rankings recently? I don't know if it was speculative or based on real numbers of the viewership or the number of subscribers to the various streaming services. I was kind of surprised at how well Apple was doing and how poorly Peacock was doing. Peacock Plus or whatever. Obviously, Apple isn't at the top, but it's solidly mid-pack.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
eight-part panoramic documentary event quote for apple tv plus apple and boxbox previously worked together on a pro surfing series called make or break i had no idea this was this was a thing i wonder if that's all the you know like the 3d cameras that people were reporting thinking it's for some vision pro thing i wonder if that's all part of this uh documentary and i also don't know what the heck a panoramic documentary event is is that apple vision pro we'll find out i guess nobody knows
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I think it's caused some amount of success because I think it really does. In fact, what I was thinking is if we did change it, we should change it so F also requires all three of us to agree.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
which we said on the show, like we said that, you know, he's, he's a good player, but now he's over here and all his good playing buddies are back over there. So he's not playing with them. He's playing with us.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Yep, Anthony Johnson wrote in to say that the maritime report I was thinking of that me and Merlin have talked about in Rectifs is called the Shipping Forecast. Anthony says it's a national institution broadcast every night on Radio 4. There's even a dedicated BBC site that promotes it as a sleep aid. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Drift to sleep.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And so many people were offended by my suggestion that, you know, that's the type of thing that could be taken over by AI because it's a very sort of
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And then we just work in the middle part. Because if you get to those extremes, then you really need everyone to agree. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
affected kind of voice reading just basic information about weather and so on uh and you know it's such a beloved institution they couldn't believe it could uh even suggesting that it'd be taken over by a machine is offensive and i said maybe it already has been you would never know
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
This is the UI that I could not find before because Marco suggested it, and then I looked for it, and then I had to follow up, and I said, I looked for it. I couldn't find it. I guess it's not there. Maybe it's just a pro-only feature. No, it was there. It was just cleverly hidden.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I mean, one, these controls being split up in all sorts of weird places is not great, but two, it continues to frustrate me that you can't even get to these controls unless you have the AirPods, like, essentially connected to your phone and in your ears at the time. Um, and the other thing is like, so this is under like, you have to look at the press and hold thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And then for the left and right AirPods, and there are separate sub menus for the left AirPod and the right AirPod, because I assume there's your specific instructions down there, but the noise control selections, whatever you do on the left is mirrored on the right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Because I kind of wish that it was the opposite, uh, that you could do them separately because then you could have the left ear, like every, every mode would be one click and hold away. You know what I mean? You'd have two on left ear. Yeah. and two on the right ear. So no matter what mode you're in, you'd always be one tap away. I guess you could be two taps away. But anyway, it doesn't matter.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's a bad UI for multiple reasons. And one of them is if you go into the left ear and change some stuff, when you go into the right ear, well, look, those changes you made in the left ear are mirrored there, but only for the noise control section.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Anyway, this is all moot because since all the promotion of the adaptive mode, I have now, as we stated last time, it is now a mode that's in my rotation. So I have them all turned on. Including, by the way, this is my fall update for my AirPods. My AirPods 4 with noise canceling. One of the reasons I have all four in my rotation is because I discovered a use for off.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Other than trying to save battery when I'm in bed at night at the end of the day and I don't have my things charged, right? Turns out that if you go out to walk the dog and it's kind of chilly and you put a hat on, the hat rubs against the microphones that are used for noise canceling and makes a terrible... You know, like it amplifies the noise. You get used to it. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So transparency, transparency, adaptive and noise canceling are a no go when wearing a hat. So off has found a very important role in my life now. I'm very happy for that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Yep, this is from Michael Burke. He says, the issue with global keyboard shortcuts requiring a modifier other than option shift only seems to apply to apps using Carbon's register event hotkey API, which doesn't require the user to grant any special permissions in order to work. There is another method that can be used to track global key presses, which is part of the NSN
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
NSEvent framework, nsevent.add global monitor for events, which I've used, by the way, but it requires the user to grant the app accessibility permissions. Even though the Carbon API has been deprecated, it's stuck around since there's no true modern API that doesn't make you show a dialogue, and a lot of popular packages for global keyboard shortcuts are based on it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It makes me wonder if anything that's part of accessibility, I believe, is essentially not allowed on the Mac App Store, which like, Moom 4 isn't on the Mac App Store. But I think things are on the Mac App Store that do do the register event hotkey. This is not exactly an instance of an issue that has come up a lot recently, but it's kind of related.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
The issues that come up, which is kind of a lot in the context of screen sharing APIs, but there's other things at macOS like this as well, where Apple will deprecate some old API, usually some carbon thing, but even just some older whatever, some old API, right? They'll deprecate it and say, you should use the new API. And the problem often is, guess what?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's true, but nevertheless, at the same time... I mean, if that was the case, I would have been arguing to change the rules after the iPhone episode, but I wasn't. I accepted. That's just the way it turned out. Indeed.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
The new API doesn't do everything the old API does. can do and if your app required like that one thing that the old API did that the new one doesn't do you literally can't use the new API so you're like so well so what is my app dead now like the old API works but it's quote-unquote deprecated so you're just like now on a timer like okay how long until this API is gone is removed and
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
you know puts up scary warnings and there's no modern replacement that's very frustrating in this case it seems like there is a modern replacement but it requires i mean require accessibility permission seems extreme like you just want your screenshotting app to be able to bind to command shift 2 to take a screenshot like a tech sniper or something guess what you have to ask for accessibility you can't be in the mac app store because you can't ask for accessibility permission there
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
B, you have to ask for accessibility permission, which is massively powerful. And you're like, I just want people to be able to take Command Shift 2 to take a screenshot. I have to ask for it. And then C, you have to guide them. Go to system preferences. Go to security and privacy. Scroll down to accessibility. Scroll to find my app. No, there's no way to search or filter.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Like, this is a bad situation on the Mac. Like, the way they're handling... The way they're handling security and deprecations in macOS is really coming to a head here. Like, it's fine to deprecate old APIs and replace new ones. It's fine to increase security, but there's these sort of complete sort of cul-de-sacs of badness where it's like, hey, you deprecated the API that I was using.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
You didn't make a replacement, and you're slowly making everyone's life miserable. Like, I can't be in the Mac App Store. My users are getting more and more dialogues. They're blaming me. There's nothing I can do about it. And the supposed replacement either doesn't exist or it exists, but I have to ask for accessibility permission.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
There really needs to be some sort of, like, counsel related to macOS and say... look, before you deprecate an API, let's make sure the modern equivalent does what people want. And before you require people who used to be able to do something with no permission to ask for the biggest permission there is in the entire operating system, maybe consider whether that's the best thing to do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
frustrating very frustrating i mean i myself have filed a bunch of feedbacks for modern apis that either do things that used to be possible with old apis or were simply never possible but seem like reasonable things to do and i'm like i just want this one little corner it should like you can give it a special permission but make the permissions more granular the option shouldn't be you can't do this at all or you must ask for complete access to everything on their system there needs to be lots of middle ground there
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Yeah, I felt like passkeys got short shrift because we had a very specific question about passkeys and migrating to them, and we never really said why the hell would anyone...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
ever like why were you asking us have you used passkeys what are you using them for blah blah but we didn't say why would anybody use passkeys what the hell is the point like why why would anyone ever be motivated to go through any kind of process that we were describing uh and we're not going to go into the technical details of passkeys but just sort of the the the f's and b's as they say the features and benefits so one of the biggest and first ones is unlike with passwords
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
no private info is ever sent to a website so if you log into a website or an app or anything else with a username and password your username and password are sent to in some form or another to the service or they're sent to the app they're given you're giving your private information to code that you did not write you're giving your private information to the application to the web page to whatever right and then presumably does something safe with it and checks it if it's right or whatever you know
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It doesn't even have to transmit it. It could do all the hashing locally or encrypt it locally, but whatever. You are handing over your private information. That doesn't happen with passkeys. They're more like SSH keys where the private thing is never given to another piece of code. You are given a thing, which then you sign with your private thing, and then you chuck the other thing back.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So you're only ever sending public information to another entity. And related to that is you, the user, don't make the choice of what to send where.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
With passwords, you make the choice, even if the choice is like right clicking and picking autofill or like allowing autocomplete or whatever, like you are choosing to enter your username and password somewhere in a web page, in an app, wherever it is. You choose to put it there. And when human choice is added to that equation, you are vulnerable to phishing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Because if someone could put something in front of you that you think is a place where you should put the password for service X, and you put the password for service X there, but it was a phishing attack, and really that's an enemy website, you've just given, you've transmitted your private information to this bad party.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Passkeys don't work like that because passkeys never ask you to decide when you should send your passkey to a thing. You cannot send the passkey for apple.com to someplace that is not apple.com, right? That's not a choice you have to make. That's not part of the flow. Again, if it's a security problem and there's some way that they can trick...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
ios or mac os to send it past you to an incorrect place that would be a security problem but it's not your fault because you didn't you didn't make that choice phishing relies on essentially social engineering can i trick the user into thinking this is the place to do this and it happens to everybody i recently saw a thread i'm asking on where someone said i literally do cyber security for a living and at the end of one day i was really tired
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And I entered a bunch of my private information in the form that I thought was legitimate because it looked just like my, you know, intranet, whatever page. And I totally got phished. It can happen to literally anybody. There is no amount of vigilance and care and expertise that can prevent you from falling victim to phishing. That's why we want to take the human out of the equation.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Pasky says, you don't ever have to make that decision. We cryptographically determine if this is the place we should send this. It will never get sent accidentally to the wrong place. Right. And then finally, we're talking about transferring and like what happens if my phone goes in the ocean or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And we will get to import export in a second, which was which I mentioned as sort of a thing that had not yet been solved. But just to make it clear, most of the platforms, including Apple's that deal with passkeys at all, have some form of end to end encrypted cloud sync. So it's not like the passkey only exists temporarily. on your phone or only exists on your Mac or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's integrated into iCloud Keychain. Once you get a passkey, if you have iCloud Keychain enabled, it's everywhere on all your Apple stuff. So if you create a passkey and then drop your phone on the ocean a day later, you did not lose your ability to log into your stuff. That thing is synced through iCloud Keychain. It's available as long as you still have access to your Apple ID.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
That's been there from day one. Cross-platform sharing, like, hey, but what if I'm... That's fine if you have Apple devices, but what if I have a Windows PC? What if I have an Android phone? How does that work? That is a little bit more difficult, although Apple does have iCloud keychain sharing thing and browser extensions for Windows.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
But, like, it's not a great cross-platform solution, depending on what your platform is. If you're using Linux, I don't think Apple has any great integration there. I think there's some way to get that. They're not like passwords where you can just copy and paste them from one place to the other, so there needs to be some kind of integration.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Which leads us to, and I mentioned import-export, what if you don't want to use iCloud Keychain because it's so Apple-centric or Apple-slash-Windows-centric? You wonder if you want something that's, you know, you want to use a different system to deal with your passkeys. And I said that it's not like 1Password or whatever, you can just export a CSV or something.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
That's because that just puts all your passwords in plain text. They wanted to come up with something that's more secure. And lo and behold, the Fido Alliance, which is the group that is responsible for passkeys that all the big companies are members of, including Apple, recently announced a new specification for doing import-export in a secure way.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
We'll put a link in the show notes in the 9to5Mac story about it. Reading from that article, it says... The new specification aims to promote user choice by offering a way to import and export passkeys.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
The draft of the new specification establishes the Credential Exchange Protocol, or CXP, and Credential Exchange Format, or CXF format, for transferring not only passkeys but other types of credentials as well. The new formats are encrypted, which ensures that credentials remain secure during the process.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I mean, that's always the case. I mean, as I explained in the episode, I intentionally... You can't do all of them because there's too many. We focused heavily on a subset, and we ignored lots of other ones. And, you know, you can't... The thing was two and a half hours long. We can't put any more in there, right? And so which ones would you have us drop?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
1Password, which worked with the FIDO Alliance on the new specification, has already committed to supporting the new passkey import and export formats as soon as they become available. Other companies such as Dashlane, Bitwarden, NordPass, and Google also worked on the draft of the new specification.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Although nothing has been said about Apple, the company is also part of the Fido Alliance and was one of the first to introduce Passkeys in 2022 with iOS 16. When it comes to the Apple ecosystem, Passkeys are synchronized with their Apple devices via iCloud.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Users can authenticate with Passkeys and other devices by scanning a QR code with their phone, which is Apple's current janky method of like, what if I can't use my phone to authenticate because I'm trying to do it on some other system? You can... make it bring up a QR code and scan it with your phone and it will do some magic, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
But yeah, there's import export format against and draft format. People are commenting on it. But once this becomes available, it will essentially make your collection of pass keys and other stuff portable so that if you ever decide I don't want to be in the Apple ecosystem anymore, you can securely transfer your pass keys from one
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
system to another people still complaining about this because they're like i just want it to be exported into a file that i can deal with but this is sort of like you need like two things involved here icloud keychain and something else that understands this and so you're never you're never just dumping a bunch of files dumping all this info to a file that you can just save and store away somewhere it's always like the receiving end has to initiate the thing and the sending end has to agree and there's a handshake and it securely transfers from one to the other there's no sort of middle way to do it and
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
to the point where the people who are responsible for this spec are saying, if somebody makes a client that allows you to dump out the info and doesn't have it immediately imported into something, but allows it to just sort of sit in a file on disk, they may disallow that from being part of the system because they don't think that's something you should be allowed to do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And this has people up in arms because they're like, I want a plain text file on my disk that no one controls that has my stuff in it. Or I want to be able to print something out on a piece of paper and put it in a safe. And if I can't do that, the standard sucks. Everyone has different requirements for this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
for what makes them feel comfortable about security uh but i think for most people who absolutely do not care about any of the things i just described uh passkeys will someday be a superior alternative to passwords we're just not quite there yet because they're still kind of fidgety and weird and every website does it a little bit differently but hopefully we'll get there someday
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's 01. I don't know. They make it lowercase to try to not confuse it with zero, but their naming is terrible. This was from an overtime on, I think, last episode. We were discussing if open AI has any kind of quote-unquote moat. Do they have any secret sauce that other people can't copy, or are LLMs a commodity, and 01 is their new model that...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Supposedly does fancier reasoning to try to arrive at better answers, and it can partially explain its reasoning. In the overtime, we were discussing open AIs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
stern position on people trying to discover how o1 works by doing prompt injection and like you're not allowed to look inside the box it's our super trade secret if anyone else knew they'd be able to you know compete with us but we have the special sauce anyway um i'm sure completely coincidentally apple ai's researchers recently published a academic paper about uh things like uh open ai's o1 um
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And I guess everyone would say, I'm not going to ruin it, but I'm sure everyone would say, you should have dropped all that stuff in the middle. But that was a fruitful area where people on the show had strong opinions. So I thought it was important that we kept it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
uh reading from the decoder uh which is not the decoder podcast of the verge is a different website the hyphen decoder.com a new study by apple researchers including renowned ai scientist sammy ben geo calls into question the logical capabilities of today's large language models even open ai's new reasoning model 01 i will put a link in the show notes to the paper uh there's a thread on x from one of the uh from the team leader of the people who wrote the paper
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
He says, overall, we found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models, including open source models like Lama, Phi, Gamma, Mistral, and the leading closed source models like the recent OpenAI GPT-4.0 and O1 series. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching. So fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by up to 10%.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
this is from the quoting from the paper the performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered like they're asking in math problems like word math problems and if you like change the name of the kids in the word problem it gets the answers wrong right change sometimes changing the numbers right changing it from like one to five or whatever it will get the answer right with one and wrong with five uh or whatever
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
uh back to the thread on x we can scale uh data parameters and compute or use better training data for five four llama four and gpt5 but we believe this will result in better and pattern matchers not necessarily better reasoners uh and there's more on the same paper from gary marcus we'll link to his blog post in the show notes as well uh i think anybody who knows anything about how the work would have said oh of course it's not doing reasoning it's just you know it's
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Speaking of spicy, Marco loves the memes with spicy. Spicy autocomplete is one of the things people call LLMs, that it's much more like compressing data and searching it, compressing textual data or whatever and searching it than it is like any kind of reasoning thing. That's how they work on the inside. but you can't just assume because that's how... Well, everyone knows that LLMs don't think.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Look at how they work on the inside. That's not thinking, right? In scientific endeavors, even if it's something that you think, quote-unquote, everybody knows, okay, then prove it. And how do you prove it? Devise a way to test for the thing that you think may or may not be true, run the test, and publish a scientific paper about it. That's how this works. And even for things that are like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
boring like you know making a paper about something that oh everybody knows that it's common sense well common sense is not proof you have to actually test the idea you need something you need an idea that is falsifiable and then you need to test it and then people can argue did they test what they think they were testing Can I do a better paper? This is the scientific process.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So I love seeing this because it is something that people talk that I've certainly talked about is like, oh, well, everyone knows that they're not really thinking they don't have any kind of reasoning or whatever. But you can't just make that assumption.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
You have to actually test it and you have to actually come up with a way that you think correctly tests for the thing you think you're testing for. And I'm sure there will be follow up papers to say, well, actually, this paper didn't quite get at the heart of what the problem is or whatever. So you can you can look at it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's very readable if you just look at the examples and look at the things that they They did like, you know, giving it word problems and saying, OK, but if I change the boy's name from Billy to Timmy, now it gets it wrong. That is probably a good sign that it is not logically reasoning about this math problem, but is instead, you know, spicy autocomplete.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And because it is just pattern matching and doesn't understand the significance of any of these different things, changing the name is like, well, different pattern match. And I got the wrong answer because these things have no idea what math is. And that's just not the way they work internally.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
The other danger about this, by the way, is they're like, that's not how it works in my brain when I do the problem. Therefore, this thing is not thinking. And that's always dangerous because even though we think we know how our brains work, we are often very, very wrong. And we don't actually understand. We don't actually understand everything about how our brains work either.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
a it doesn't really matter how our brains work uh airplanes don't work like birds but they still fly really well right and b we don't always know how our brains work so you can't just make assumptions like that by saying well i know lms don't think because they work nothing like how i think my brain works when i think of this problem i don't do anything like that what the lm is doing as far as i know therefore lms don't think you gotta test it so a plus to apple people i
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
to doing what I think most people would consider a boring and pointless paper. But you need to do these things. You need someone to actually test the things that everyone just assumes are true to try to show that they are or aren't. So kudos to Apple for confirming something that I already believed. Wow. Or trying to. Again, more papers will follow, I'm sure.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Hey, you should take the consolation prize of the thing that you were rooting for. It's just one level different than what you wanted. It's so close.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And related to this, there's a series I always link to whenever we talk about LLMs is the three blue, one brown. They're called courses. I keep looking for playlists, but they're called courses somehow on their YouTube channel. There's a course on neural networks and chapters like five, six and seven are about LLMs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I'll put a link in the show notes to I think what is the most recent video in that series called How LLMs Might Store Facts. that tries to explore, like, given how we know how LLMs work, see previous videos with just a bunch of numbers and matrices, how does the information in them stored? I think the example they give is like, Michael Jordan plays blank.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
How does it come up with basketball, right? Where is that information stored in this giant matrices of number? How does that even work? Which is an interesting question because we're like, well, I know how it's stored in my mind. I just know that he plays basketball. Everybody knows that. It's so easy, but... Now I just look at these giant arrays of numbers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Where the hell is that information in these numbers? This video tries to explain it, and also it's, as you note from the title, how they might store facts. It's actually kind of difficult to tell because we're not particularly good at reasoning about giant piles of numbers. So take a look at that if you're interested.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's got a good, it's in a good tier. It's in a happy home. It's an injustice.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Is Google in favor of that? Do they want to be broken up?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I know you're surprised. The response is like, here's how the world will end if you make us split off Chrome, Android, or Google Play. It'll be bad for business. It'll be bad for you. Everyone will break out in a rash. Dogs will howl. Like, it's just, you know. I mean, it's so hard for me to tell because these things take so long to wind through the system or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I'm not sure I agree entirely. I think this is kind of one of those things where you meet somebody else's family. When someone from a family that doesn't argue with each other all the time meets someone from a family that does, it can be quite shocking. And I still think, despite the fact that you two have known me for over a decade now, you don't quite understand how...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Structural remedies were in play for the Microsoft DOJ case as well. And that ended up not happening and got partially overturned on appeal or whatever. I don't know how this is going to go down. The environment in the U.S. and I guess worldwide, the environment for these big tech companies is currently pretty negative. You know, the view of how much power they have and what they're doing with it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
is pretty negative right now. And so they are, they're facing cases and laws and regulation and many cases they are losing. And the people who are on the other side of it are making noises about like, we might break you up. We might say Chrome has to be a separate company or Android has to be separate or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's hard to even think about what that world will be like because we're so used to the status quo. Everybody is, right? It's just like, how could that ever happen? What would happen if you did that? And Google will gladly tell you all the bad things that would happen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It was an injustice, but it wasn't that one. Oh, stop it. If you wanted to listen to this. Listen to the episode to find out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
But it's kind of like the flip side is all the good things that would happen that we've been denied for so long because we just accept the status quo and we don't even think about what we're missing out on and the competition that we're missing out on. But it is notoriously difficult to...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
to do anything effective or good after you win any trust case right you can look at all the ones that have happened there's lots of good things that have happened lots of also terrible things and lots of backsliding and finding us back at the same place again so i don't know how this is going to turn out but uh it's interesting to see uh the rumblings revolving around google here it'll be amazing if like google gets broken up but apple gets to stay together i'm sure they would love that
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
You go to atp.fm slash join and you become a member and then members get access to all of our member specials, both the current one and all the past member specials of which there are like 25, 26 at this point.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Let's pause right here on this. This is the name of this new iPad Mini. The previous one, I believe, was iPad Mini, like fifth generation or sixth generation in parentheses, like with the Apple naming thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
i believe the name of this one is ipad mini parentheses a17 pro so they went fifth generation what sixth generation a17 pro go look at the comparator go look at the like uh apple.com slash ipad slash compare it's called the ipad mini parentheses a17 pro so first of all that's weird but second of all It's the A17 Pro. That is weird.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
As a reminder, this is the chip they put in the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max that was made on TSMC's N3B process, which was super expensive and only Apple was paying for it. And they, you know, immediately wanted to stop and move everything to N3E. And we're like, they're never going to use that A17 Pro chip in a phone again. The Pro chips never go anywhere.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
They put them in the 15 Pro because they had to. and the Pro Max, but we're not going to see it next year in the iPhone 16, and lo and behold, the iPhone 16 has processors that use TSMC's N3E process, which is newer and cheaper than the N3B process. We're never going to see that A17 Pro again. Guess what?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It looks like they had a lot of leftover A17 Pros where one of the GPU cores didn't work because the A17 Pros in last year's phones had six GPU cores and these A17 Pros in the iPad Mini have five. So maybe they just saved every single A17 Pro where one of the GPU cores didn't work and they saved them all up for what?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
would live on in the ipad mini yeah of all things in the ipad mini like that i am i am blown away you know i gotta hand it to apple they can still surprise me i mean and it makes sense when you think about like what do they do with the rejects i can think of something because if you throw them away like because i believe in on both the iphone 15 pro and the iphone 15 pro max they all had six working gpu cores so anyone that came out with one non-working gpu core what are they gonna do throw it in the garbage
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
no save it for the mini put it in a box for a year i don't know if that's enough like it was that sufficient to to work with the ipad mini and did they have to manufacture a bunch of new ones and a bunch of ipad minis actually have six working gpu cores but they just disable one of them or something like i don't know how that works but like this has got to be a cost like a shrewd cost saving measure because there's nothing about the ipad mini as we'll see when we get to the
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
that is like this is such an important product apple really needs to give it the pro processor from last no they absolutely don't like this just has to be a cost-saving measure based on like you know bind uh chips that they would otherwise throw away that's that's that's all i can think of that's the leading theory for this it makes some sense but it does it's total it's a total tim cook move like how can we economically make use of what would otherwise be a waste product but uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's really weird. The iPad mini is weird and not a well-loved product, not frequently updated. And as we'll see in a second, not really that well updated this time around either.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
But Apple's not saying as usual. Exactly. But they did list Apple intelligence as a feature. I guess Apple intelligence is now code for portable device with eight gigs of RAM or more.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
That's a quote from Apple. Supports smart HDR4 for natural looking photos with increased dynamic range. Increased over what? Like for the life of me, I was like, is there a new camera on this or not?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
because that thing that they wrote is that just a software thing and by the way all the features you read it's like hey you know all the stuff the iphone 15 pro had because it's part of the soc well now the ipad mini has it too because it's part of the stupid soc but like the camera i'm like hey did they replace the camera they wrote this is for apple's copy the sentence they wrote about the camera on this new thing and it has the word increased
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
well people will take issue with that but you know what i mean uh the good top gear than when we do the tier list so last last tier list we did was in june so it's been many months okay yeah i thought it was more recent than that by the way if you wanted to see all the specials even if you're not a member you can just go to atp.fm specials and that just lists all the specials obviously you won't be able to see much about them except for the title if you're not a member but you'll see where they are and they all have prefixes so if you just look for atp tier list colon something you'll see all of our tier lists
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And it says Smart HDR 4, but I think that's all compute stuff. So it's not clear to me whether the camera on the iPad mini parentheses A17 Pro is a different camera than the iPad mini parentheses 6th generation.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
They put new right in there. So the flash thing, maybe that is new. Yep.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
If you have really good vision. Did you look at the blue and purple colors?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's the type of thing, it's like the gold, where if you see one in isolation, you have no idea what color it is. Like, I need all the other iPad minis here so I can tell what color this one is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Yeah, we're going to talk about this in overtime, of like figuring out product mixes, spoilers for overtime. But that's kind of the situation with the Mini is like, There's just one. It's the Mini. There's not like a Mini and a Mini Pro. There's just one small one. So what do you do with the one small one?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
The small one can be cheaper because the screen is smaller and the screen is expensive, but you don't want to make it too cheap. So is it going to be like the Air? Is it going to be like the Pro? Is it something in between? Most people who are Mini fans are disappointed with this update because although we essentially listed everything that has changed about this device, it's not much.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
It's basically the previous, like everything about it physically is the same. Same size, same shape. The cases all work on it before they added two new colors. It's not radically different. It doesn't have face ID. It doesn't get any new features other than the new pencil connection thing. Right. Which, you know, granted does give you like the hover and everything. So.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
that is kind of a pro level upgrade to it, but it doesn't have an M chip in it. Like it's just, it's not a huge update. It's more like an internal spec bump with a couple of external things like the pencil added to it, but just the fans want more or more significant. And so much so that they're like, Oh, this is just a temporary holding pattern one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
They just introduced this one because they needed to update it. But, but you know, pretty soon there'll be the real iPad mini update. Don't hold your breath. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
like this this is not a well-loved product that gets lots of updates this is the ipad mini update for a little while i feel like especially since this one runs apple intelligence it's kind of important for apple to get more of its products to be you can buy this and run the feature that we think is going to be super important if we ever release it um so that's what dissatisfied uh the a17 pro is a weird choice for it but it is kind of like in the well you're not going to get an m chip
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Because they're expensive and they're bigger and hotter and take more battery life and your battery is smaller because you're a mini. And so you're going to get...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
whatever we have left over from the 15s and you're gonna like it and it'll be fine right but it's just yeah this is not all of apple's products get the same attention and the mini has historically not gotten a lot of apple's love but this is better than the one that it replaced and it does you know i think the if you really want like a small sketching thing and you wanted to have the new pencil and a better cpu this one does it for you and hey you can you
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Watch it summarize your notifications and erase people from pictures with it too. Soon. Eventually. But maybe by the time you download this. End of October is the rumor.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
All right. The rumor is like the 28th or basically the end of October, 18.1 is supposed to come out. So we'll all be living it soon.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Does the Apple TV already have 8 gigs of RAM? I forget what the RAM is in the Apple TV these days. I have no idea. I mean, you possibly could ship 8 gigs of RAM easily in the Apple TV, I feel like.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Or watch caliber, let's say, performance-wise. And by the way, the latest Apple TV apparently has 4 gigs of RAM.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Let me guess. It fills with water? The director is Edward Berger.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I think there's an app where you can look that up.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
That's one of the areas where it starts to diverge from, because lots of people have made this comparison, and it's somewhat apt, but not quite for everything you just said of watching a play, because when you're in the audience of a play, you could choose to look somewhere that's not where the action's happening, and plays also do things to guide your attention, like put the spotlight on these two people, but hey, what if you want to look over there?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Unless they have it in complete darkness, which is one of the things they do, you might be able to look at other people who are in a scene instead of just the two people who are talking. And people can have different seats in the audience, and they might have different perspectives. So you can have visible microphones and visible people holding up props or visible lights and all the other stuff.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
But... even a play, even if you're in the very front row, isn't full 180 because you're not literally on the stage. But obviously with Inversive Video, I was thinking when you were talking about the two people eating the snack, like you can make artistic choices like, guess what, Casey? You're the Oreo cookie in the middle of the table. Your head...
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Your disembodied head is literally sitting in the middle of the table and you can look to the guy to your left and the guy to your right. That would be a weird choice, but you can do that. You can't do that with the play where your seat suddenly is in the middle of the actors, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
So there's lots of choices you can make, but they're faced with the same challenges as a play of like, hey, we don't know where people are going to be, quote unquote, sitting in the audience or looking in the audience. I guess they can place the camera where they want, but they don't know where you're going to look. So they have to dress it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
more like a play than like a movie where if you ever see a movie being made whatever the camera is seeing is reasonable anything that's a foot off of the camera it's like you know a guy from craft services eating a snack like whatever like this it can be anything you can see the whole set you can see all the light rigs you can see the tape on the floor you can see everything and
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
honestly these days you can put a lot of stuff in the camera too and just make someone erase it after the fact which is i'm sure what they did with submerged but yeah it's an interesting challenge and part of that challenge is like okay but when you're watching a play you don't suddenly get up and move 20 feet forward like they don't do that in a play they can't do that in a play you're in your seat but with immersive video they just take that whatever weird camera rig and they walk down the hallway with it and as you noted casey you're not walking down the hallway you're sitting on a couch
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
right but the camera is moving down the hallway and you may think well what's the big deal i see that all the time in movies i'm watching a movie the camera goes in the hallway i don't feel sick well you're not wearing a headset that wraps the image around your entire field of view and that i feel like does make a big difference
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I think a lot of people kept sending you the suggestion for Autosleep because your complaint that you voiced in the show was that they make you make accounts and they track you and they do all sorts of stuff. And everybody wanted to tell you that Autosleep has no tracking, no account, no in-app purchase, custom tags with history and filtering.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
I never would have predicted this. Who made this submarine? Never would have guessed. They should make it so water doesn't come in.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
That's version two where water actually falls out of the mask and goes into your mouth. You waterboard yourself. Cheesy peasy. Yikes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
And so your complaint about that one is just despite the fact that it doesn't do all those bad things that you were complaining about, still it doesn't work the way you want it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
All right. I just, that's the only reason I put that in there because people will not stop recommending auto sleep because they say it fulfills all your requirements. And it's clear that there's more requirements than just not being annoying.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Another tech angle on this is related to something that we talked about at length before and shortly after the abolition pro was released. Casey was talking about one of the ways that they were drawing your attention in this documentary.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
you know, narrative fiction thing in the Apple Vision Pro with immersive video is based on depth of field, what's in focus, what's out of focus to make you look at the thing that's in focus. That's the thing you can't do as easily or really at all with the stage play, because with stage play, there's someone standing close to you, someone standing far away.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
If you choose to look at the person standing far away, you will refocus your eyes and they will be in focus because you control your own eyes and you can look wherever you want. But the Apple Vision Pro and most other headsets have a fixed focal distance. So Casey can't look away from the main character, look at the background, refocus his eyes, and suddenly it becomes in focus.
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
That's not how it works. It is essentially a video that he is looking at. They chose the depth of field when they recorded the video, and even though they're playing it back in a fancy way, there's no way for him to focus on that. And that's interesting when it comes to narrative because...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I think a lot of directors, especially anyone who's worked in traditional video, would say, that's a feature. I need to be able to control what's in focus and what's not in focus. That's one of the tools in my tool chest to making video content. And if you take that away from me... How am I supposed to do anything?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And then they'd have to talk to playwrights and play directors and say, okay, well, how do you do this in a play? In a play, the audience can focus wherever they want. There are different techniques they'd use to direct your attention because they can't really control your focal distance. But if they did that in a movie, you'd be like, this movie looks like a play.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Why are there spotlights on people? Why are they suddenly in the dark when they're not talking anymore? The person gets sad, their head goes down, and now I can't see them anymore because they're in dark. That's not how the real world works. This is weird. Is this a play or is this a movie?
Accidental Tech Podcast
609: You're the Oreo Cookie
Obviously, we don't technically have the ability to make affordable, high fidelity headsets or AR glasses that allow you to change your focal distance. We talked about that Meta was doing a bunch of they have like two or three different prototypes of how to do that with motors and with other clever things that allow you to change where you're viewing your focal distance.
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We also talked about the thing that I can't remember the acronym for, which is like. Not being able, what was that thing called? You guys know what I'm talking about, right? The thing where because you can't refocus your eyes, it can cause discomfort. Oh, yes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, there's some acronym. V-A-C. Yeah, there's something we talked about, which is which is a like a thing when you're inside these headsets, you feel like you should be able to look over there and refocus your eyes. And when it doesn't happen, it can cause eye strain or discomfort or all sorts of other stuff. And there's there's an acronym for that we talked about in the past, right? Like.
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i operate normally and every time there's any contentious words you're like oh no the world is ending and i'm like this is just another day it really depends on how you were raised
Accidental Tech Podcast
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This is an interesting time here where we currently don't have the technology to do that, but if we did have the technology to do it, would we want to do it? Or would we disable that, for example, when watching an immersive movie? It's such an interesting time for this type of media that we should just try all the things, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Just in the same way that when movies were first made, they were very much like we just put on a play and stuck a camera in front of it, and eventually... And filmmakers said, you know what, we can do different things in movies than you can do in place, and let's do them.
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And we're at that point again, or close to being at that point again with headsets, because there's stuff you can do in a headset that you can't do in a quote-unquote regular movie. And if we can get to the point where we can also support variable focal distances, that's yet another step. So very exciting stuff. I'm glad to see them experiment with this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And then finally with AR glasses, that's another interesting place where it's like, well, with like AR glasses, you can change your focal distance when you're looking at the real world because they're just glasses and you're looking through them at the actual room, right? But you could put everything that is projected in a single plane and
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And so you do have to refocus your eyes on the floating window in front of you that's always two feet away. And then when you want to look at the thing that's 20 feet away, you have to refocus, right? So we already kind of have that variable focal distance by cheating by saying the real world is all the focal distances. And then the stuff we project is fixed focal distance.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So I do feel like we're taking baby steps towards refocusing. essentially more like the live theater experience of you can focus on anything you want. But yeah, I would love to see this video. You mentioned them having a blank check or wishing they could have a blank check. At 17 minutes, I don't think this check was very blank, but you know, it's better than nothing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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i've got a conjecture what have you heard my conjecture i don't know i don't think i've heard it from you but i probably have heard that same conjecture somewhere else we think that like uh you know there are things you might want to do with the vision pro on a movie set in terms of connecting it to other devices that aren't supported by the vanilla vision pro and they're like oh well we'll we'll hack in support for that but you have to use the developer strap to do so connecting it to monitors connecting it to video things all stuff like that that's my guess
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And by the way, the thing we were trying to think of, VAC, Vurgence Accommodation Conflict, for the probably fifth time, we will put that in the show notes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I wouldn't call that the main advantage of raws because if you use Apple Photos, all your edits are reversible. You don't have to worry about messing things up in that way. Raw gives you more latitude for the things you can change. But if you're using Apple Photos, which it sounds like Maxell is, don't worry about your edits. Edit fearlessly. You can always revert to original.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Well, so yeah, let me, I mostly agree with the things you said, especially that you shouldn't be editing every photo. Like that's madness. What you should be doing is going through every photo and chucking the terrible ones and finding the ones that you really think are good. And the ones that you really think are good, edit those. My last time I checked, I'm about at 10%.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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of the photos I take, I edit. And that's after throwing away the terrible ones, so it's obviously less than 10%, right? So I throw away the terrible ones. What's left out of those? One in 10 I essentially fave, and that is one that I will edit. In terms of RAW, I mostly agree with Marco, except I will say you should...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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have some raws somewhere if you have a dual card thing and you can put the raws on one card and mostly ignore them great but if you have a single card every once in a while take a raw once just to give you a feel for what does raw give me the other things don't it would be ideal if you could take both jpeg and raw and do what i do which is just deal with the jpegs except for for the for the 10 that are your favorites pull the raws for those because that will teach you when you're doing any kind of editing oh i can't get this photo to look right which i'll talk about in a second
Accidental Tech Podcast
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When you face that situation, you might say, let me look at the raw. And if you use a good app, you're like, huh, I couldn't get this JPEG to look decent, but this raw, I can get it to look good. And it will teach you the advantages of raw, right? So I would say don't ignore RAW, but absolutely do not shoot everything in RAW. Don't import everything. You'll be overwhelmed with data.
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It's just a waste of time. It makes your camera slower, right? But don't totally ignore it. So every once in a while, get a RAW just to start to get a feel for it. I'm only a little bit farther on my photo editing journey than Maxell, so I can't tell you like... how to go all the way to be super duper expert.
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And by the way, super duper experts who are, as Marco says, trying to become famous for their photography, they also don't edit every photo. Nobody edits every photo. Everyone takes a lot of photos. Only some of them are going to be good.
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What I would say to focus on first with the editing is the simple things like when you look at this picture, is there some part of it that you wish you could see that you can't? Is there something that you wish you could see that's like either completely black or too dark? Can you fix that with editing?
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Is there something in the picture that you wish you could see that's too bright or completely white? And can you fix that? If you have overexposed something, you won't be able to fix that. And you might be able to check on the raw if you can, but like that's undesirable.
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But if the sky is the thing that's overexposed and it's completely white and you don't care about that because the person's face is correctly exposed, like just those two things of like, is there something in this picture that I wish I could see that I can't? Does this photo look bad because, oh, I can't see that person's face. The dog looks like a silhouette and I didn't mean it to.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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The sky doesn't look the way I remember it. Figure out which controls let you essentially recover from the edges. When you captured this photo, you know, what we say about blowing out the highlights, that's when something is completely white and you can't get anything back from it. And you're like, oh, I wish I could see that. White tells me nothing. It's 100% white.
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I see nothing, but there was actually something there. Like there was texture to that clouds. It wasn't 100% white. Or this thing is too dark and I can't see the person's face. They just look like they're silhouetted. But when I was there, I could see their face. Can I fix that, right? That's where I would start with photos.
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And I guess that includes white balance too, because that's when you get into like, do these colors look weird to you? Does this picture look weird? That's something you can tell better sometimes when you're looking at all your thumbnails, like in the thumbnail view, we got this giant grid of thumbnails.
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especially if you have a bunch of outdoor pictures than a bunch of indoor ones, then you really see the yellowness of the indoor ones because lots of our indoor lights have a color temperature that is warmer than the sun. And a lot of people like that, which is why we keep doing it on purpose. I certainly do.
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But if you see the thumbnails together, you'll be like, oh, all these pictures look like someone peed on them. They're all yellow because they're indoor. Maybe when you're looking at them in isolation, you might not notice. And maybe you even want to keep them that way, but be aware that's a thing, right? So those are the places I would start. What's too bright? What's too dark?
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What looks like someone peed on it? That's a good starting point. The other thing that I will add to this discussion is part of the process of finding, you know, the 10% or whatever pictures that you like and trying to edit them. Is that you'll look at them and you're like, oh, this is such a great picture or whatever. And you'll try to do some edit to get it to look the way you want.
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And that process of editing will teach you how to take better pictures. Because you'll be like, oh, this picture would be so good, but I cut off this person's head. Or there's some obnoxious person in the background that I can't AI erase. Ruin this picture for me. If only I had taken it from a different angle. Or...
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I didn't realize that the entire background where someone's garbage can is would be in focus in this picture, and it would be such a good picture if that stupid garbage can wasn't in focus, right? The act of editing, the act of trying to rescue these pictures like, this is almost a good picture. What can I do to fix it? Can I crop this?
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Oh, I wish I'd taken... I wish I'd stepped back two feet because I'm missing something here. It looks like a light pole's coming out of this person's head. The process of editing...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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will teach you what to do next time to capture a better picture and i know you're asking about editing and marco touched on this as well but in the end editing it's too late you can only do so much with editing you want to capture good pictures that is this most important skill of photography is
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knowing when and where to point your camera that is the most important skill and i know you're asking about editing but the process of editing the process of trying to take a picture that you think is almost good and make it better and realizing what you can't do in editing even with ai you can't get you can't reframe it you can't point in a different direction you can't decide to use the flash or not use the flash every time you encounter that in editing
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That will teach you the next time you're out there with your camera what you want to do differently So that I feel like for me is one of the most important Parts of editing is not the process of taking a picture trying to make it better It's the process of learning what you did wrong when you were capturing the photo that you will avoid next time So the next time when you go to editing your job will be so much easier You won't have to crop as much you won't have to lose as much resolution.
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accidentally put the garbage can in the background and focus the light pole won't be coming out of the person's head that i think is one of the most important uh benefits of doing editing and it might it feels disheartening because you're like i'm doing all this editing and all i'm learning is that i can't make these pictures good it's nothing that my editing skills aren't good enough and honestly even if you get it to a pro sometimes you're like there's no rescuing this one it was framed poorly it wasn't exposed correctly you cannot make this a good picture
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That seems disheartening, but that is the process that will teach you to make a better capture next time.
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I think it's an interesting question because a lot of the times...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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in people's regular computing lives especially if they're using phones there's this question that i always ask make people think about is there anything you do with your computer that makes you wait and a lot of people will say honestly no like unless i'm waiting for an animation to complete like i don't do anything like my computer where i'm like come on come on this is taking too long because
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the magic of modern technology is a lot of times does not now people will say waiting they used to say waiting for a web page to load or like a cellular is bad waiting for something to load like lots of network related stuff but like if you really want to get down to it like is there anything you're waiting for the cpu for uh gamers would say yeah i'm waiting for to draw the next frame faster because i'm getting 20 frames per second on this thing and i really wish i could get 60 or whatever like there there are answers to this question it's not like we're like we have infinite performance and this is another interesting one
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This is a thing I think a lot of people who use just, you know, Macs and PCs find themselves doing, which is like, I asked my computer to do a thing. And because of the size of the data involved, like trying to, you know, do something with a 20 or 60 gig file, I'm waiting for it to be done. And I'm like, why? You know, I see a progress bar. I have to wait several minutes.
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Sometimes it's, you know, network related, but sometimes even just on a local thing, you're like, is this what's the bottleneck here? Is it, as we would say in the business, IO bound? Am I waiting for things to be read off of disk or written to disk? Is it CPU bound? And Scott is asking, my computer seems like it's doing nothing. It's chill. Like the fans aren't running.
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It's not using all of its resources. And yet here I am looking at a progress bar. Here I am waiting. I'm waiting for my computer and I don't understand why because it seems like it's got more resources that could be putting towards this.
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Um, if you are a computer science major or ever studied this at all, you will, uh, inevitably run into Amdahl's law, which is, we'll put a link to the Wikipedia page.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Um, it's often used in the context of parallel computing, which is what they used to call it back in the day when you had more than one processor, although now everything does, um, to predict the theoretical speed up when I'm reading for the Wikipedia page here, when using multiple processors, for example, if a program needs 20 hours to complete, you can tell how long ago this was written.
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If a program needs 20 hours to complete using a single thread, uh, and a one-hour portion of the program cannot be parallelized, then only the remaining 19 hours of execution can be parallelized. Therefore, regardless of how many threads are devoted to a parallelized execution of this program, the minimum execution time is always more than one hour.
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So it's basically saying there are some things that you can do in parallel and some things that can't.
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And even if you make the things that can be done in parallel happen instantaneously, which you're not going to, but if you can make them be done instantaneously because you deploy 7 million processors and there's no overhead to distributing the work to them, which also doesn't happen, you're never going to get it faster than the time it takes for those serial portions.
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Sometimes running a particular compression algorithm has parts of it that are parallelizable and parts of it that are not. And you're never going to make it run faster than the parts that are not. They are the long pole. They are the thing that you can't shrink. No matter how many more threads you throw at it, there are certain portions of it that you can't work on at the same time.
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Now, this particular task, compressing this, is this compression algorithm parallelizable? If so, is it is the thing that is running it in a parallel not devoting enough threads to it? This can happen, especially on macOS.
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There's lots of things that I've complained about this before where it's like there's a task and there's a portion of it that are parallelizable, but it is intentionally run by the program or the OS. in a way that it uses fewer resources. It's run at low priority. It's run at a low number of threads so that it doesn't make your computer feel unresponsive.
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But sometimes this is the only thing you want your computer to do and you want it to do it right now. I talk about like, you know, the photos. Please recognize faces now. Please analyze my photos now. It's literally the only thing I want you to do. I'm going to walk away, use all my resources to do it. And macOS and Apple's apps in particular are terrible at that.
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I'm going to guess in this case, the main problem is the right-click finder thing that compresses files has a cap on how many threads it will ever use.
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therefore is never going to go faster than that now it may also be the case that this this algorithm is not parallelizable sufficiently so more threads wouldn't help i don't know specifically but these are the potential scenarios one of them is just like theoretical like if you pick an algorithm you can't break into like 75 chunks you can only break it into like four chunks right there's it's you know there's not parallelizable past that because there's interdependent data interdependencies between the tasks and they need to communicate and synchronize with each other and there's serial portions then you're stuck but
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But specifically in Apple platforms, Apple is good slash bad about making choices for you that ensure that the system remains responsive under all circumstances by limiting the amount of parallel work that can be done. And you would like more options like, for example, past sponsor Backblaze that I use on my computer to back it up.
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it actually has a pop-up menu in the little like settings that says, hey, when Backblaze is running and backing up your stuff, how many threads do you want it to use? And the default is pretty low because you don't like, as we say in the ad reads, you don't even know Backblaze is running half the time. The default is like, just do your work. It'll back up your stuff behind the scenes or whatever.
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It's using a small number of threads to not disturb you, right? The way I personally run Backblaze on one of my computers is because I have a million backups running all day, every day anyway. I make Backblaze run only at 3 a.m. and I give it like 99, like whatever the maximum number of threads is. Obviously, there's a point of diminishing returns.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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You shouldn't give it way more threads than you have CPU cores. But I have a lot of CPU cores. I give it a huge number of cores. So it wakes up at 3 a.m., runs my Backblaze thing, and it runs it using every resource on the system. So much so that if I was to come downstairs at 3 a.m.
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and try to use my computer, I would notice that Backblaze is running because I've intentionally said, use it all, peg everything, go as fast as you can, and believe me, it makes a big difference because I have a fast internet connection, but just the process of finding all the change files, reading all those change files, and sending them up to fill my one gigabit upwards pipe...
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I need to be reading and sending from as many files at once as I want. Backblaze gives you that option. The right click menu in the finder for compressing files does not give you that option. So the answer, I think, in this case, without knowing anything about the compression algorithm or how parallelizable zip is, is that Apple is doing this to try to help you.
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And in this case, you do not want this help from Apple.
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And by the way, the reason it's looking at you, presumably, I don't know if it's using IR cameras, the reason it's looking at you to make sure you're looking at the road is because although it allows you to take your hands off the steering wheel, what it's trying to tell you is that at any moment, Marco, the driver of this car, we may ask you to take over. We may throw up our hands and say...
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Can't do it. Driver, human, you're up. And by the way, if we do that, it may be because something catastrophic has happened that we can't deal with. So you better be looking at the road because at any second, we may ask you to make a life or death decision. But anyway, for now, you can put your hands in your lap. It's fine.
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Probably on every other past. No, it was never special. Maybe. I think this one reached new levels for sure. Really? I really feel like the iPod one. I mean, Marco definitely seemed more aggrieved in the iPod one.
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I mean, for one for one thing, it is ever so slightly decreasing your minimum possible response time because now you have to move your hands to the wheel in a situation where something is emergent and saying you got to take over right now. And at least with Tesla, if it is correctly policing you and saying keeping your hands on the wheel. At least your hands are hopefully already on the wheel.
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But if they're on your lap or in your pockets or you're picking your nose or whatever you're doing, oh, time to take over. Now there is some fraction of a second where you have to correctly find and grip the steering wheel before you can begin to do the steering that you need to do at that moment. And that is probably not a good thing.
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I think the Nomad one looks better, too. But I know that the marketing photos on case websites are not always representative.
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Well, I mean, you mentioned that you have to have so much a higher level of trust. You, Marco, have to have so much higher level of trust. But I think a lot of the average people, what it will essentially do is make them so much more likely to...
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zone out and daydream and the thing that is looking at their eyes will say their eyes are still on the road but what they actually have is a thousand yard stare where they're not looking at anything their eyes are pointed forward ostensibly to the road but they're thinking about what they're going to make for dinner like these type of things the more it allows you to stop paying attention and zone out which you can totally do while still quote unquote looking at the road um
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the more likely it is that you're going to be in a bad situation when they suddenly ask you to take over. And so even though you're thinking like with your tech brain, like, oh, I need to trust this and so on and so forth, people are like, well, the car wouldn't let me do this if it wasn't safe. And it's just human nature.
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You'll be on the long trip and you'll be looking forward because the thing will have trained you. Hey, if you don't keep looking forward, the thing is going to bing at you and whatever. So you're like, fine. And your neck's just going to be pointing your eyes straight at the thing. And you're going to be like staring straight forward like that cat with the newspaper saying, I should buy a boat.
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And then you're going to, you know, go underneath the truck and kill yourself. Right. Like that's, that's the, this is the dangers that I'm talking about a million times. Don't ask humans to maintain vigilance when there's nothing for them to actually do until a split second later when they have to save everyone's life. Right.
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Either make them do stuff enough to pay attention or remove the steering wheel, and then it's all on the car to steer. And these in-between things, this is the terrible in-between thing that I don't know if they should be illegal, but I would never recommend anybody that I cared about to use whatever system makes them stop being vigilant.
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I think, Marco, you're probably still vigilant with this because already you're like, I got to trust this thing and it's wigging me out or whatever. So you're still vigilant at this point, but don't push that line. Use the thing that helps you have a more relaxing drive while still paying attention. And whatever level allows you to zone out,
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crank it back one right and that's an individual thing but honestly i think from the manufacturer's perspective it would be more responsible for these car manufacturers to not to like skip that middle part to say driver assistance nothing in the middle and we figured out
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you know full self-driving no pedals no steering wheel right but in that middle gray area i wish automakers would avoid they're not gonna because of competitive pressure pressure isn't because people do like it but it just seems like such a terrible idea i mean there's ongoing in this country uh nits investigations of tesla auto steer and all sorts of higher accident rates based on driver assistance or whatever and
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This varies from brand to brand, and everyone will argue that their brand does it better than another brand. And, you know, it is a fluid thing. But, like, this is something, like, you don't want to be a beta tester with your life if you can possibly avoid it.
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Even if the features ship, even if they don't have a beta label on them or whatever, you don't have to use every feature that your car has, right? Just, you know, be safe out there.
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Let me tell you, they do not like that at all. No, because this is like a – what do you call it?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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trust uh multiple times removed you have to trust the car and they have to trust you trusting the car and they don't know anything about the car and maybe they know anything about you if it's a stranger right so it's like can you imagine taking an uber and it's like a bmw and the person takes their hands off the wheel now you have to trust both this bmw and this uber driver you've never met in your life i mean you have to trust them anyway when they're driving but like
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At least their hands are on the wheel and you hope that they will do something sensible to save their own life, whereas they're zoning out while they're quote-unquote driving you somewhere. It's like, maybe I should just take a Waymo.
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Before you get to this, did you do anything special when you took the picture? Can you explain the picture-taking process? Was that just like there's no HDR features or support in your camera? Explain that part to me.
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because i think we are farther apart on those i don't want to spoil anything about it but i think we're actually pretty close together on this one but you you two just were united in disagreement about one level in the tier list single level i i really honestly think that we need to change the rules of the tier list as a result of this episode that's how that's how bad the the voting process was i
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And it'll be full of noise, but Lightroom has amazing denoising. One final question about Capture. Do you remember what color space you're using? Were you just using sRGB? What do you have your camera set to? I don't know offhand. I'm pretty sure I use sRGB.
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Yeah, the reason I'm asking is because you're about to go into HDR stuff, and I always wonder, is there something I could be doing on my camera to help out the HDR? And one of the things I do is I have limited choices on my cameras, but one of the choices I have is whether on sRGB...
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or adobe rgb adobe rgb i believe is close to the p3 color space but not quite the same but anyway it's a bigger it's a bigger triangle on that big rgb space than srgb and so i always want to give the biggest triangle to give myself the highest chance of hdr but anyway go on
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You know what? It's September, which means it's Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, which means we got to talk about St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. And we don't just have to talk about it. We want to talk about it because, hey, here's the thing. For the fifth year in a row, Relay is coming together with ATP, although, I mean, there's perhaps a distinction without a difference.
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Jude has actually got their own school, the St. Jude Imagine Academy, which is apparently sponsored by Chili's. It's their own school that spans from preschool through 12th grade for patients who will be at St. Jude for upwards of six weeks. And the staff has trainers trained in English language learner instruction, visual impairment instruction services, a librarian, a STEM coordinator.
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And so we saw that accessibility and other intro video. We saw Tim talking about Apple Intelligence and we get to Jeff Williams and the new Apple Watch Series 10 design. And I am on a every two year plan for watches. This is my year. We talked about this in the last couple of episodes. And going into this event, I thought I was going to get an Ultra 3.
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And we're going to talk a little bit more about that. But I watched the unveiling of the brand new design of the Apple Watch Series 10 that looked... like a thinner version of the existing Apple Watch, which is fine.
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So yeah, so it's basically the same as the other ones, but thinner. And as much as I'm kind of grumbling and snarking, genuinely thinner sounds great to me because the current Apple Watch is a little bit chonky. And I love the idea of having something thinner, which flies directly in the face of the whole intention of getting an Apple Watch Ultra 3. Because that thing is chunkier still.
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But in any case, it is thinner. It is a little bit bigger. It's 30% bigger than the Series 6. And they said at one point that you can even see an additional line of text and messages and news of all things, which I was like... Sure, guys, whatever. Has a slightly wider aspect ratio. And then they explained that it's the first ever wide angle OLED that Apple at least is releasing.
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They even have reading dogs who visit to read with the kids. I don't know how that works, but it sounds awesome.
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And it's 40% brighter when viewed at an angle. And this is one of those things to try to look on the bright side. Hey, that's a good pun. To look on the bright side, this is one of those things that I think is Apple at its finest, where they take a thing that is not great, but not an actual paper cut, and just make it better.
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Because, yeah, off-axis viewing of the current Apple Watch is not stellar, but it's never been to the point that I was like, oh, this sucks. But I tell you what, I'm pretty excited that my next Apple Watch, because guess what, it's not going to be an Ultra 3, that my next Apple Watch is going to be 40% brighter when viewed at an angle. I'm here for that, and that's pretty great.
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I don't know. Maybe they do. St. Jude has some really advanced medical practices. You never know.
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They really do. So, hey, the Academy helps patients keep up with their schoolwork back home while they're undergoing treatment, but also gives patients whatever they need at that moment. And you know what? If a patient isn't feeling great, then maybe they don't want to do math that day or whatever the case may be.
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For what it's worth, Quinn Nelson did a really good video on his reactions to the Apple event and spent a not insignificant amount of time on this and specifically theorized the exact same thing that you're saying, John.
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No, I don't believe it was confirmed. I think it was all suspicion, but like you're saying, but you two landed on the same conclusion, which is that this is LG tech. I believe Quinn said that it's LG that's providing the displays for the Apple Watch. I can't tell you if that's right or wrong, but I'm inclined to believe Quinn said
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And so anyways, he was theorizing that because LG is using it on their TVs, it's probably the same basic technology here on the Apple Watch.
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And maybe the teachers will say, all right, we'll skip math for today and we'll do something different. Or maybe we'll do math in a different way. We'll play Uno or something like that. And so they have kindergarten and high school graduation ceremonies. And if you want to see what those look like, you can actually go to a web search for St.
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In any case, so yeah, we've got this better screen. The cases are up to 10% less weight. It's 10% thinner than the Series 9. And then I believe it was Marco got a wish that you had been looking for. It is polished titanium that replaces stainless steel. Because Marco, you were a big fan of the titanium watch in the past, right? Or am I making this up?
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Jude High School graduation for a video of this year's graduating class, which is super cool. So, hey, you know, not only all that is amazing, but we are spending literally the entire episode talking about rampant consumerism. And Marco has come up with the patented and trademarked and copyrighted Marco Offset. Nice. In order to help offset our rampant consumerism.
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I am really genuinely very excited for this. I don't think this is something I will find myself doing often, but there's definitely been a handful of times that I've wanted to do this and I've been irrationally grumbly about the fact that I couldn't. So this is very exciting for me.
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So, Marco, can you describe the Marco Offset, please?
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I think that's right. For the Pro, yes, I believe that's right.
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You know, when I watched this event, like I'd said earlier, you know, I thought I was getting an Ultra 3, mostly because I'm just so sick and tired of worrying about battery life. And then somebody, and I believe it was Marco, although every time I say that it ends up being John, but I'm pretty sure this time it was Marco, said to me, you know, what you could do is just get the bigger watch again.
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And that would probably give you more than enough buffer to stop stressing about battery life all the time. Because I don't necessarily begrudge I don't begrudge putting the watch on the charger every night. I would love to do sleep tracking, but I mean, whatever. It's not a big deal to me. And I'm perfectly happy charging every night.
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What, what chaps my bottom is that with my current series eight, two years on, I'm not making it to nighttime unless I top it up at some point during the day.
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It very well could be. I did look at the battery health and it was reasonable. I forget exactly what the number was. I want to say it was like upper 80%. I will say that I typically do a 30 to 45 minute workout. And by that, I mean like the watch is in workout mode for 30 to 45 minutes at least every day. And so I don't know if that makes a difference. But nevertheless, I am hopeful that...
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The Series 10, what with it being a two-year newer battery, a brand-new battery, will make a big difference. And so what I've done is I have pre-ordered a very unremarkable Wi-Fi-only Series 10 big-size Apple Watch for myself and basically the same thing for Erin except small size because that's what she prefers.
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And I'm hopeful that that will be at least good enough for a year, preferably for two years, because I generally – I don't think we've ever gone less than two years – On an Apple Watch upgrade, but maybe I'm wrong. And so that's what I've ordered. And I really set out to order an Ultra 3, but there wasn't one.
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And then Marco was in the back of my head, you know, just saying the big one will be enough. The big one will be enough. The big one will be enough. And I think, Marco, I hope and I think you're probably going to be right that I think that will be the difference I need.
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Oh, God, that's bananas. That's absolutely bananas.
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All right. This is probably in no small part my fault because this was a big watch year for me, but we have got to hurry it up a little bit. So I'm going to try to speed run the rest. We skipped some health stuff. So there's sleep apnea detection, which is extremely cool. I don't personally suffer from this yet, as far as I know. How would you know? But how would I know?
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And I feel like almost everyone I know seems to have sleep apnea these days. So this is very cool. It is not cleared-
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Yeah, because the blood oxygen sensor has been turned off. As far as we know, it is physically there, but it is disabled because of patent disputes.
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This has not been cleared from the FDA or equivalent organizations in other countries, but they expect clearance very soon and availability in 150 plus countries or regions this month, allegedly.
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For the sleep apnea thing. Then, yeah, like you said, no blood oxygen measurement in the side of the U.S., which is a bummer. We talked about size differences. $400 or $500. You can already preorder it. It'll be available on September 20th.
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Yes. And speaking of affording more, we have some more breaking updates. Victor Lung has decided to one-up even packet collision with a $10,001 donation. We're playing Price is Right rules right now, which is excellent. I put Victor's stickers in the mail just a couple hours ago. And then Guillaume Morel, I hope I got that right.
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um we already talked about the ultra 2 so let's move on to airpods 4 with kate bergeron uh this has the h2 chip a new acoustic architecture the smallest case ever and optionally which this was not made clear or i missed it during the presentation Optionally, you can get noise cancellation on the non-pro AirPods for the first time ever.
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Is that the turn of phrase I'm looking for? Anyway, we're all coming together to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital since 2019. The community has raised over $2.2 million. And actually, oh, breaking news. Oh, it's actually over $3 million, which is incredible. $3 million in the last five years. That's so incredibly cool. And that's thanks in no small part to all of you.
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I butchered it last year, so hopefully I'm making progress in a good way. They donated $13,141.59. I have no earthly idea what the significance is of the 314159. As soon as I said it out loud, I got it. Oh, see? That's movie magic right there. You got there. So anyway, we got there a little later, but better late than never. Um, so yeah, so thank you so much to them.
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The technical specs for the AirPods 4... The size and weight for the earbuds themselves are not distinguished. The weight is the same for both flavors of AirPod. However, as Marco, I think, had mentioned, the case is, what is this, like two and a half grams heavier for the AirPod?
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But the earbuds themselves, the dimensions are allegedly identical.
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Um, I've been in communications with Guillaume and they said, no, I'm good on stickers because you sent a bunch last year. So thank you. Um, and then just briefly, there have been two anonymous donations each with, this is not a joke. $100,000 each. Now, that is phenomenal. And almost no one has the kind of money to be able to donate that incredible amount, let alone two almost nobodies.
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To go back a quick step, I completely meant to mention earlier in the Apple Watch segment that they made a point of saying that they are preferring or they're prioritizing non-air shipping. And I really want to know, did they already send a whole batch of watches with a boat a month and a half ago? I think yes.
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No, no. But I mean, look at iPhones, for example. As far as I knew, anytime I've paid attention, those things fly oftentimes directly from China to your house. Obviously, they're hub and spoking their way from across the planet. But my point is, it's not like the beginning of the trip is noted as Louisville, Kentucky or something or wherever UPS's headquarters is. That is UPS or FedEx in Memphis.
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It starts in Shenzhen or whatever, and then you watch these things march across the planet and they go to Anchorage and they go to somewhere else and so on and so forth. I can't help but wonder, did they ship a whole buttload of these via a ship over a month or two ago to get them ready for release this coming Friday? I really am curious.
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Well, I was talking about the watch, though. That was when they said it was the watch.
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But here we are. Just to be clear, though, John pointed out that we should... talk or make clear that while if they are interested in stickers, please reach out, that does not mean that you have to donate $100,001 to get a sticker. The limbo bar, if you will, is currently at $13,141.60. That is your bare minimum for stickers at this time. So
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Yep, yep, very much so. So apologies for going back in time for a minute. Good news is we have a lot to talk about with regard to the AirPods Max. There are five new colors, midnight blue, purple, orange, starlight. They take USB-C. They're still 550 bucks. You can order them now. Moving on, AirPods Pro 2.
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I mean, I don't know. I, I see both sides of this. Like I am slightly disappointed by this. We're more than slightly disappointed by this update, but I was never in the market for these anyway. Um, but it's better to have something than nothing, I guess.
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All that being said, all of that is a tremendous amount of money. If you can just give five bucks, give five bucks. It really does help. I know it probably doesn't sound like it when we're talking about $13,000, but truly, even five bucks helps. Please go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP, and send a few bucks their way. They really do deserve it. And I'm actually going to St.
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God willing, I'll see you all on September 11th, 2027. All right, AirPods Pro 2, short, short version. No updates. Well, no hardware updates. No hardware updates. Big, big software updates. We're going to... Skip the first one. I'm going to come back to that. But they said that they're working with prevention awareness and assistance. We're going to skip prevention just for a moment.
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For awareness, they're doing a hearing test that has been, quote unquote, clinically validated. It takes about five minutes. Basically, you just tap the screen when you hear things, and it makes a personal audio profile we think.
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Jude next week in order to participate in the podcast-a-thon, which we will talk about on next week's show. All right, gentlemen. The rules of engagement for this are no follow-up, no soup for you, John. So we are going to dive straight into the September 24, 2024 Apple event.
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And it gets better because the prevention awareness assistance. So there's going to be clinical grade over-the-air hearing aid update this fall. Over-the-counter, thank you. No, I think you're right. Over-the-counter and over-the-air because it's going to be a software update. We're both right. Hooray. Por que no los dos. Anyway, this fall in 100 or more countries and regions.
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So you take that hearing test we just talked about and it boosts the specific sounds you need in real time. and they expect to receive that clearance soon. So let me repeat that. You can basically use these as hearing aids starting this fall.
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And I don't know, luckily, I don't have to know yet much about this, but my very limited understanding about hearing aids is that they are all impossibly expensive, or at least here in America, impossibly expensive. A lot of them, if not almost all of them, are rather trash, and it's just not very fun to get yourself a set of hearing aids. And now...
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You can just go to Best Buy or Walmart or the Apple Store, or not now, I should say, but soon, and pick up a set of AirPods Pro 2, do the compulsory software-related things like the hearing test, and then you have clinical-grade, over-the-counter hearing aids in your ears this fall. That is unreal, and I very, very much applaud Apple for doing this. This is extremely cool.
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And as always, I'm going to start to go chronologically, and we will immediately get sidetracked and go somewhere different. But we're going to start by saying there was a really good and really cute, very accessibility-heavy introduction video, which I liked. I thought it was very good.
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Then Tim spoke briefly about Apple intelligence, and then we dove right into Apple Watch Series 10 with Jeff Williams. And it's got a new, well, all right, here's the thing. Let me stop myself. I told myself I was going to ask each of you for opening statements, and I didn't ask you nor myself for an opening statement. I would like to interrupt myself and give an opening statement.
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This is now this is the prevention of prevention, awareness and assistance. And so, yeah, there's now a hearing protection mode or otherwise known as the Marco mode.
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I didn't know what to make of this event because I felt like it was twice as long as it should have been. Nothing really knocked my socks off, and I just left it saying, huh. But immediately I thought to myself, that doesn't make for a fun podcast to listen to.
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So I'm going to do my darnedest to try to look at the positive side of things because me just sitting here moaning about not being impressed by everything is not very fun. And there were some impressive things in here. But I definitely felt like this one dragged on in a way that Apple events almost never do, save game demos. And I just wasn't like...
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Yep, couldn't agree more. This stuff is all very, very good. And proud isn't the word I'm looking for, but I can't think of a better word. I'm really proud of Apple, even though I have no relationship with them, really. But I'm proud of Apple for doing these things because they're not easy. And in a lot of ways, they're not terribly glamorous, but they're important.
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And you don't often see a big, huge company do things that are important unless they're pretty much entirely self-serving. And yeah, there's some self-serving aspects to this. But this just seems like the right thing to do. And you don't see that a lot from big companies these days. So I'm here for it. I really dig it. We are sponsored this week by Tailscale.
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Tailscale is the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other wherever they are. Let's say you had a device in Richmond and one in Boston and one in New York and one in San Francisco and one in Europe and Australia and Asia. What if you wanted all those devices to talk to each other as though they were on the same LAN?
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What if you wanted your own personal, private, international, local area network? That is basically what Tailscale is. Tailscale is an easy-to-deploy, zero-config, no-fuss VPN. Well, Casey, well, hold on now, you say. I've heard all these VPN ads, and I'm not sure I'm keen on that. Well, ho, ho, I say to you, this isn't a VPN like you think. Yes, it's a VPN, but it's different.
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What Tailscale's purpose in life is is to make it completely transparent to your devices, to get to any of the other devices that you own. So it's like they're on the same land, even if they're across... continents from each other. It is truly amazing. Before I tried Tailscale, I was like, I don't know, what's the hype all about? Is this really that? Yes, it's that good.
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They can't pay me to tell you that. It really is that good. I use Tailscale every single day, and I mean that because it is incredibly good. You can build simple networks across complex infrastructure like... It is so slick, so fast, so easy to use. And what's great about it is their personal plan is and always will be free. So you can try out Tailscale for free. No credit card, no nothing.
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You get up to 100 devices and three users for free at tailscale.com slash ATP. T-A-I-L-S-C-A-L-E dot com slash ATP. No credit card required. Go check it out. Do me a favor, but really, do you a favor. Go check out Tailscale. It is incredible. Any of your devices talking to each other always, no matter what ridiculous network infrastructure stands between them, it's magic. I mean it. Tailscale.com.
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Thank you to Tailscale for sponsoring this week. All right, 90 minutes in. Let's talk iPhones. Good grief. Honestly, I don't think we're going to have trouble. I don't think there's that much to talk about. Yeah, well, I think you're mostly right, but we'll see what happens. I told you that I didn't want to be old man shouts at clouds, so I'm going to take the happy spin on the iPhone 16.
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Those colors look so good, and I am so impressed by them.
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No, the unhappy spin is me pissing and moaning about how I don't have it on the iPhone 16 Pro. That's the unhappy version. Oh, I see. The happy version, though, is these things look so damn good, and I am very jealous because I'm going to end up with an iPhone 16 Pro. But this year, and I'm not the first person to say this, this year more than any other year, I have been...
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yes, by the end of it, which is very unusual for me. So let's start with Marco and then John. If you have an opening statement, forgive me for almost railroading all of us. Do you have an opening statement, Marco?
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extremely tempted by the iPhone 16. And honestly, and I think Quinn made this point in his video as well, this is a really strong year for the iPhone 16 non-pro. It's really, really an impressive year for it. And if you were ever wondering if you really needed to go pro, and if you have a little more self-awareness than I do, because I will...
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Always and forever by the pro because I'm a fancy lad. This is genuinely such a good year for the iPhone 16. And gosh knows these colors are so good. They're so good. I'm so jealous of these colors because they're so great.
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So, hey, here's the thing. What's St. Jude Children's Research Hospital? Well, guess what? They are a hospital that does research, but they also treat kids. And St. Jude is really incredible because they don't charge their patient families for anything. The idea is...
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Big fan, though. Same. Absolutely same. I would rock the snot out of the ultramarine phone. I think Aaron would adore the pink phone there. And the other colors, teal is also very good. The white is very white and the black is very black. But the three colorful colors, and I agree with what you said earlier, John, about, you know, it's too bad there's not like a yellow or something.
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These colors are so good. I'm so, so into these colors. So very much so. But anyways, moving on. They say that it's got a 50% tougher than first generation ceramic shield. So I believe that's the front glass, right, that they're talking about.
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Yeah, right, exactly. 6.1, 6.7 inches for the 7.7 inches for the iPhone 16 Plus. It now gets the action button that the Pros had last year. It gets the fancy new camera control button. I'd like to come back to that in a minute, please. Yes. It's got the vertically stacked lenses like we discussed. It's got the same chip, basically. It's the A18, and we later found out.
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So we found out later that there's an A18 Pro, so there is a difference, but it's largely the same.
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yep uh and so i don't think we need to go into the specifics about the chip because we'll probably end up covering them in the pro phone but suffice to say it's almost the same um there's improved cooling in both non-pro and pro and so i guess this was john maybe maybe it was me somebody put in here this is directly directly from the so they said stuff new they said new cooling stuff about both phones this is a quote from the event video
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We updated the main logic board, centralizing the chip placement and optimizing the surrounding architecture. We also added a thermal substructure to dissipate heat made from 100% recycled aluminum. As a result, the iPhone 16 delivers up to 30% higher sustained performance for gaming. I'm here for this. This is excellent.
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We had Craig come back out and do a reintroduction of Apple intelligence, which does look good in theory, but none of it's coming.
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One quick note from the Apple intelligence section for those of us who still have young children of which that's just me on the program. I did think it was funny that they did the Australian cattle dog as the, what kind of breed is this? And that is, I think, or may have been construed as a subtle bluey nod, which I'm very much here for. So that made me have a good laugh.
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But anyways, then we move on to the camera and let's talk camera control. So this is a Sapphire crystal where there's many different things that you're doing with this one camera control. And again,
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There's a pretty good series of short videos on Apple's website for the iPhone 16. I don't think I can link specifically this section, but they have... What effectively amounts to a tutorial, which is four like very, very brief videos that are like three or four seconds each that show how it works. And it does make sense having never used it. And I think I'll adjust fairly quickly.
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But I agree with what you're saying. Also, if you look at the keynote at 58 minutes and about 18 seconds on the YouTube version of the keynote, they show that cutaway we were talking about earlier. And to my eyes, they are very clearly showing this thing depressing a little bit. So I do think it moves, as Marco had said.
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Well, I mean, we'll see, but I'm fairly confident. So anyway, so yeah, so I am super excited about the camera control. I think it's going to be really great. Is it the sort of thing where I must have this and, you know, any other iPhone that's ever existed is trash? No, of course not. But I think it does look really slick. And
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I love, like Marco said, that there is what appears to be pretty robust APIs for third-party use available day one. I'm very excited about that. And I think the only other thing with the 16 non-pro is that they've announced that there is now 25-watt MagSafe charging with an updated charger. Qi 2 can do, I think, 15 watts, if I'm not mistaken.
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And their bespoke MagSafe chargers can now do 25 watts with these new phones if you also get a brand new MagSafe charger, which is pretty slick. That's pretty cool.
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Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I totally skipped over that.
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Great. Yep, that is good. All right, iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. This was Greg Joswiak at night for whatever reason. It suddenly became nighttime when we did this section. 6.3 and 6.9 inches. Nice. The smallest bezel ever, or some people like to pronounce it bezel.
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If you're in a position where your child is fighting for their lives, then the last thing you need to worry about is, hey, how am I going to fund that fight? And so it is an opportunity for all of us, all of you that are listening and the three of us, to be a hero for someone. And you can be a hero for five bucks. You can be a hero by sending five bucks to St. Jude at stjude.org.
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And much better colors. This is still made of titanium. Grade 5 titanium, which, John, tell me, grade 5 must mean it's like one of the best grades, right?
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good to know uh with regard to cooling quote iphone 16 pro maximizes thermal capacity with a new machined chassis made of 100 recycled aluminum which is bonded to the titanium frame using solid state diffusion it's combined with a graphite clad aluminum substructure creating an innovative architecture that enables up to 20 improvement in sustained performance sign me up i mean marco just read that earlier but you can read it again that's fine
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Colors, black, white, neutral, and, drumroll please, desert titanium.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yep. Yeah, it's, you know, gray, gray, more gray, less gray, and brown. But anyways... Let's talk about the A18 Pro, which is the chip for the iPhone 16 Pro. This is a 20% faster GPU than the A17 Pro. It's two times faster at ray tracing than the A17 Pro. The CPU broadly is 15% faster and uses 20% less power than the A17 Pro. It has larger caches versus the A18 non-pro.
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It has programmable ML accelerators, which is very fancy. Advanced media features, a new video encoder, and an image signal processor.
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Let's talk photography. There's a 48 megapixel fusion camera at f1.78. It's a second gen.
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Indeed. So there's also the 5X telephoto is still 12 megapixels. But guess what, baby? It's on the regular size phone now, which means as far as I'm concerned, unless something weird happens in the next two days before I do a preorder, I'm coming back, baby. I'm going back to the regular size phone. No more huge phone for me.
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Yeah, I know. I mean, I honestly, I was thinking about it. I feel like I could do big phone again, but the thing that drives me nuts about this phone, which I love the screen real estate. I really do. Once I committed to the absolutely preposterous pop socket lifestyle, that it got fairly comfortable to hold.
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The problem though, is that for my hands, I can't go all the way across the phone and use it one handed. And I use my phone one handed forever. fairly frequently. And so that's what drove me nuts about it. And if I had bigger hands, I would perhaps stick with the big phone.
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But yeah, I'm going to be going back to the regular size this year because the whole reason I went to the big one was for the 5X, which was exclusive to it in the 15. But now in the 16, you can get the Tetra Prism in both phones. So I will be going back, crawling back to the regular size phone. Anyways, later this year, it'll be updated with a two-phase shutter. Marco, what the hell does that mean?
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You can change the photographic styles after capture, which is a new development. And I think that's mostly software, but nevertheless, it's a new thing.
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This is all very good. And by the way, this section was presented by Della Huff, who I feel like I had recognized from somewhere. I couldn't figure out where it was. And like two years ago on Analog, we had solicited good Instagram follows, and she was one of the people that somebody had recommended.
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And sure enough, I've been following her on Instagram for years, had no idea that she was this person at Apple. So that's super cool. We'll put a link in the show notes. Really great Instagram follow.
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um so anyway so uh with regard to photos you made brief mention of it a minute ago marco uh iphone 16 pro supports jpeg excel um all of this is reading from mac rumors now the iphone 16 pro models will support the jpeg excel file format according to code found on ios 18 apple did not mention jpeg excel support during the event on monday but this feature was rumored ahead of the of the launch it appears that the pro models will support capturing images in jpeg excel
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For video, there's 4K at 120 frames per second with HDR, which they're calling cinematic slow motion, which had a very cheesy but kind of funny little advertisement in the middle of this 90-minute advertisement. And you can also adjust the playback speed after capture, which is pretty neat. With regard to audio, there are four studio-quality, quote-unquote, microphones with a lower noise floor.
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You can now also, for the first time, do spatial audio capture during video recording. You can do audio mix in voice memos. I believe that's the right marketing term. Let's say if you had musical talent, which I don't, and you hummed a rhythm or a beat or something like that,
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Um, you could then put a second track on top of it and then you could like sing the lyrics and you can separate the two of them and it'll play back your, you know, your, your rhythm as you're singing the lyrics, but you can separate them so that you can hear only the lyrics. And I don't know, I don't know anything about creating music, but this looked super cool to me.
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Something like that. I don't know if it's still active.
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A handful of quick hits before we round everything out. $1,000 for the 128-gig Pro, $1,200 for the, I think it's 256-gig Pro Max, if I'm not mistaken. Pre-orders are this coming Friday. Pick up on the following Friday.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah. The iPhone 16 models, all the iPhone 16 models are equipped with 8 gigs of RAM for Apple intelligence.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Indeed. Then I had a small victory dance just for me. The millimeter wave 5G is still limited to the U.S. iPhone 16 models, but it's still there. There was rumbling and rumors that they were going to kill it in the iPhone 16, but oh, no.
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it's still there so reading from mac rumors all four iphone 16 models offer millimeter wave 5g in the u.s but other countries are still limited to sub 6 gigahertz 5g apple hasn't rolled out millimeter wave 5g in other countries because other countries largely have yet to widely adopt the faster speeds there are millimeter wave networks in countries like australia china and japan but it is not a standard that has been fully embraced in australia for example millimeter wave is only available in select areas of major cities like melbourne melbourne and sydney
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For me, my beloved, don't call it a park bench, picnic table is right near a millimeter wave tower. And I actually went there today, although I didn't use my millimeter wave iPhone 15 on it. But nevertheless, it is incredibly fast. I mean, I can pull like two and a half gigabits per second down to my cellular telephone, which is absolutely bananas. So I'm glad it's still there.
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All the iPhone 16 models sold outside of the United States still have a physical SIM card tray. I don't think that's terribly surprising, but it's a thing. American iPhone 16s do not have a SIM card, just like the 15s didn't. All of the iPhone 16 models support Wi-Fi 7, which will be excellent in three or four years when we all start getting Wi-Fi 7 routers and access points.
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Yep. The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max have the same feature set, excepting the display size and battery, which is exactly what I love to see. One of my favorite things, no joke, one of my favorite things is when there's parity between the two devices to the degree that there can be. And this year there is.
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And like we had talked about earlier, there's also to the degree that there can be parity between the 16 and 16 Pro, which mostly amounts to chips and buttons. There is mostly parity to the degree that we would expect. So I'm really genuinely happy about that.
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And then finally, iOS 16, Mac OS 15, iPad OS 18, and other updates will all be released on September 16th, four days before the new hardware's here.
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But it is a almost Christmas miracle. So look at that. And with that, I think we're good, right?
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Oh, sure. Sorry. So obviously none of us have ordered anything yet because as we record, we're two days ahead of time.
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For me, I'm going to be doing a natural titanium half terabyte iPhone 16 Pro, not Max. And I haven't actually figured out what we're going to do for Erin, but probably the same thing, maybe a 256 version for her. And that's going to be our order. Marco, what are you guys doing?
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Good for her. Even with the camera stuff, I'm actually surprised by that.
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Yep, agreed. And John, this is your year, baby. So what are you doing? Are you getting a Pro Max?
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And that can make you a hero for somebody. That five bucks can buy something for somebody, be that treatment, be that some healthy thing to eat or whatever the case may be. It makes a difference. So the other great thing about St. Jude is that they try to do the best they can to make as good a time as they can for their patients and their families. So St.
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Yeah, it's not the right scenario for it, though.
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Well, not only that, but the plug-in hybrid is not great for doing a multi-hundred mile... It's fine if you have one of the modern ones, but... Well, but even still, the plug-in portion of it, the battery electric portion of it, will be dead within 30 miles anyway, and you're not likely to find a charging spot.
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Like it's better than... Well, but in what ways is it not though? Because I mean, granted, I don't have near the experience with EVs that you have, but Aaron, I don't know if we even talked about this on the show. I think I mentioned it briefly.
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Yeah, so we don't have the time to do the long and drawn-out version of the story. But suffice to say, we got Erin a 2024 XC90, a plug-in hybrid XC90. So they call it an XC90 Recharge. And basically, the theory goes that it has roughly 30 to 35 miles range on pure electricity. And 90, 95% of the driving that she does is around town. And in a day, she'll typically go 20%.
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20 miles maybe and so hopefully that means we can barely ever use gasoline and on occasions when we're going on a long trip like if we were going to see a concert a few hours away then it's basically just a gasoline car all over again and we don't just we just ignore the battery entirely and we've had this car since mid-july it is as i sit here right now mid-september and it has over a half a tank of gas in it we've never filled it in it's been two months and
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And we've gone from here to Charlottesville twice. So it's worked out extremely well for us. I think the only difference to my eyes between the XC90 when it's not running the gasoline and a pure EV is that it's not as fast when you're not allowing the gasoline engine to kick in. Like a pure EV, it's a rocket ship fast always, even crappy ones.
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Like my parents' Chevy Bolt, which is a piece of trash. It's a delightful piece of trash, but it's a piece of trash. That thing is reasonably quick because it's pure electric all the time. The Volvo, if you give it too much juice, unless you're in pure electricity mode... it will kick on the gasoline engine, and then it is actually properly fast. But without that, it's not very quick.
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If I run on pure electricity and I floor it, it takes a minute to get out of its own way. And so that is different than a pure BEV, a pure battery electric vehicle. But in every other way, it doesn't shift. It's quiet as hell. In every other way, it seems to me pretty much identical. The only difference is the lack of a trillion torques from zero RPM.
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Yeah, very quickly to hijack your story. I think if we were to buy two new cars tomorrow, I think I would buy her exact same car again. And I would like to talk to you guys more about it another time. But I think for me, I should get the battery electric vehicle because I almost never leave the greater Richmond area in my car. And so...
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I think for us, for our family, it works super well to have this halfway step, to your point, in the family hauler. But for the other car, it absolutely should not be what I have. I love my car, but it should not be. I should not have a gasoline-powered three-pedal Golf R. What I should have is some sort of battery electric small car, maybe even a Chevy Bolt for that matter.
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Well, the roads around me don't lend themselves to bicycles, but in terms of distance, we do agree with each other.
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Wait. You didn't drive immediately to the nearest Enterprise at this juncture? That would be a two-hour detour.
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Oh my God, John, there exist other automobiles than Hondas that also work.
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Yes, I've driven a lot of 10-year-old cars that are not Hondas that get there and back.
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God help me, John. I don't know how we've lasted 10 years. The Pebbles are Vanos.
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It wasn't just the Vanos. There was the water pump. There was the drive train. There were lots of different things that almost killed that car. Thank you very much.
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Right, exactly. Anyways, no, there exist cars other than Honda.
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Whatever. There exist cars other than Honda. I swear to you, they do. They work. They really do. Not Fords, but they do work. Not Rivians. Not Volvos with pebbles. Mm-hmm. That's right. Well, again, the pebble doesn't matter if the serpentine belt ain't spinning.
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Me too. Well, I'm glad the concert was good, even if the travel was a bit disastrous there and back.
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Yeah, I don't know. I'm still going caseless, although I will say I have come crawling back a little bit to my popsocket. Oh, no!
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I know I have. It's terrible. I don't know what the issue is. Maybe it's because the back is so slippery, like we're both saying.
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yeah but i don't like if the case is you you so you don't want a case but you're gonna stick this i mean i know popsocket's compressed to be really small but once you're doing that just like try case or try try marco's back leather thing i was looking at them i'm probably about to have two that i don't want so you know am i gonna get a box hey you know my my uh my kindle charging port i think is on its way out so if you want to send a leather case padded in kindles let me know
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Thank you for watching. It's true. I use Tailscale all day, every day. I really mean it. It is incredible. So here's the situation. I have my Synology here at the house. I have servers that run at Linode, at DigitalOcean, some on this continent, some not. And I want to be able to talk to all of them, and I want to do it transparently.
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You can just pull the audio right through and use Overcast on your iPhone, even though it's sending the audio through your Mac. It is really well done, and I've been really impressed with it. And I don't think we had talked about it yet on the show.
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I don't want to have to worry about whether or not my Synology and my iPhone are on the same network. And I don't
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want to do port forwarding in order to figure out how to tunnel through the internet into my into my land at home i just want them to connect to each other securely and privately always no matter what networks they're on and that's what tail scale does i'm telling you folks it's magic it really is so what tail scale does is it builds a mesh network of all of your devices that again connect to each other securely and privately and it doesn't matter what firewall they're behind
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Almost always, thanks to the absolutely bananas acrobatics that Tailscale does, they can get a direct connection from one device to another. I've seen it. It's incredible. So what should you do? You should do yourself a favor. Not me. Do yourself a favor and go to tailscale.com slash ATP. T-A-I-L-S-C-A-L-E dot com slash ATP. Check out their personal plan.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Their personal plan is free and always will be because they are so confident, as they should be, that you will love it, that you will bring it to your workplace and say, you know what? This is so much better than what we've got. We should do tail scale at work. So that's why the personal plan is free. So you get up to 100 devices and three users for free, F-R-E-E, free. at tailscale.com slash ATP.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So please go and check them out. Again, they cannot pay me to say this. This is incredible software that I use all the time, all day, every day. Tailscale.com slash ATP. Thank you to Tailscale for sponsoring the show. All right, Marco, we have hopefully tons of suggestions from you since you've done all your homework about sleep tagging apps, about Windows anti-malware, about active transparency.
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So in the hours of homework that you've performed, can you tell us some results, please?
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I'm actually a little bit surprised. I really honestly am.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That's true, actually. I didn't even think about that. Yeah, yeah.
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There is an Overcast website, allegedly. Is there? May or may not last for long, but it's there.
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uh we were discussing a couple of notebook lm podcasts uh one of which was a regurgitation of one of your posts john one of which was a semi-regurgitation of your pasta recipe which i saw a handful of people asked for which i gotta chuckle out of um but apparently we we may or may not have messed something up can you explain what's going on here please
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No, you shouldn't, because there's going to be some sort of anti-Dave Matthews band something or other in there. Like, what was it that... It just wouldn't play.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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no i i will take issue with your inevitable jam band app and your anti dave matthews band hatred which is unnecessary but i do think this is your next app because it's a fairly simple i think or at least at a glance it seems like a fairly simple collecting the data is simple you can make an app that does that but then what does it do with that data how does it even present you the analysis that you want it to perform let alone how does it perform that analysis
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We're so good for each other. Yeah, but you should. Except you shouldn't.
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Yeah, I agree that it's definitely worth trying again. I had mostly sworn off of it after having a not great initial experience. And I do think it's actually that and conversation awareness. Neither of them are great, but both of them are better than I thought they were and better than I think they initially were.
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The one thing that I really dislike about transparency mode is that I want it to filter droning noise out completely. quicker. So as an example, I think it was yesterday, I mowed the lawn and I had transparency mode on.
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Oh, yes. I'm sorry. You're right. Yes. This whole time I'm in adaptive transparency. Thank you. So I had adaptive on when I started the lawnmower and it took a solid like three, four, five seconds for it to decide, okay, I need to filter this out. Is that a big deal? Of course not.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But I don't feel like it's really saving me that much trouble from just deliberately putting on noise canceling mode if I felt like I knew I was going to need it.
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So I I'm still sticking with it for now and just messing, you're just kind of going about my day when I do have my AirPods in and seeing what I think of it, but I'm not sure I'm going to stick with it, but I do absolutely agree with Marco, especially if you haven't tried it in a long time, it's worth trying it again and seeing if it works better for you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It remains a mode in your lineup. All right, iPhone 16 can wirelessly recover from other phones using a phone-to-phone resuscitation. So this is reading from Ars Technica. If you've ever had an iPhone update go bad, you may have used recovery mode to resuscitate your device. A device booted into recovery mode can't do anything by itself, but it can be connected to a working Mac or PC with a cable.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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In that Mac or PC, you can download a fresh copy of iOS and all of your phone's related firmware to restore it to a factory default state. You'll need a backup to recover your personal data, but it beats having to take a trip to the Apple Store or send your phone in for repairs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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The new iPhone 16, 16 Pro models add a new option for phones that are in recovery mode, rudimentary wireless communication, so phones that need to be recovered can be placed near another iPhone or iPad and can be restored without using a cable, a PC, or a Mac.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Do you think that this is indicative of perhaps non-pro phones going without a cable at all? We've been talking about this for years, like, no ports, no ports! I don't think this indicates that that's where Apple's going, especially since the response from USB-C seems to be universal praise. But it makes me wonder. It makes me wonder.
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Although, actually, I don't know if we have a better time to bring this up, and I was thinking about this literally like half an hour ago, and so I'll just bring it up now. I am really, really enjoying, what is the official term for it? iPhone mirroring. I was going to say iPhone remote control, but iPhone mirroring.
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Yeah. Yeah, for what it's worth, I very rarely use a cable deliberately to charge my phone. The bedside charger is a Qi charger, and Aaron's bedside charger is a MagSafe Puck, the original version of it. Um, we do have a spare laptop charger that I just happen to have laying around, um, downstairs, uh, actually by our turntable.
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And so that's our, it with a cable, of course, and that's our, oh no, I really need a bunch of charge right now charger. Um, and obviously if I'm plugging into do debugging or something like that, but for the most part, both of us, both Aaron and myself, and she is very normie in a way that I think we can all agree on not, um, we almost exclusively cheat charge.
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I mean, it's just one data point or two, I guess, but for what it's worth. All right. End-to-end encryption is coming for iPhone to Android RCS messages. So if you recall in iOS 18, Apple embraced or adopted RCS, which is a better version of SMS that supports delivery receipts and things like that. Thank you. Thank you. Currently, not all RCS providers offer end-to-end encryption.
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Google Messages, which enabled encryption by default for RCS conversations last year, is one of the exceptions. Apple's proprietary iMessage system also features end-to-end encryption, but this protection does not extend to RCS messages.
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I have some. So here's the funny situation. The one... group chat, because I do exchange messages with individuals that are on Android, but not terribly often, but there's one group chat that I talk on maybe once a week, and that is Aaron's brother and his wife, so my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, and
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Aaron's brother, my brother-in-law, is on Android, has always been on Android, will likely always be on Android. But my sister-in-law is enlightened in this regard and has had an iPhone since I've been – since she's been part of the family. And so – And I think that's the issue. Yeah. So I haven't yelled at her yet to get on the update train, but I need to do so at some point.
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Yeah. I will say, though, that, you know, in the brief exchange that my brother-in-law and I had directly, it was definitely better. You know, I got a delivery receipt as an example, which was nice.
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Right. Yeah, I feel I don't remember which conversation it was in, but I do feel like I did receive one image that was not, you know, potato quality. And that was a extremely welcome improvement. So I was very happy to see that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Moving right along, Apple is still tweaking their screen recording app permissions, and they're further decreasing the pop-up frequency in Sequoia 15.1, reading from MacRumors. In the release notes for the sixth beta of macOS Sequoia 15.1 update, Apple says that users aren't going to see as many screen recording permission pop-ups for apps they regularly use. Quote,
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Applications using our deprecated content capture technologies now have enhanced user awareness policies. Users will see fewer dialogues if they regularly use apps in which they have already acknowledged and accepted the risks.
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John, can you tell us about hotkey registration in Sequoia, please?
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Who knows? And then Anonymous writes in and says, I just learned that on Select Max running Sequoia, there is USB-C liquid detection. I assume it works similar to how the iPhone does when wet in that it refuses to charge and pops up a dialogue warning you that the iPhone may be wet with the always inadvisable and baffling option to override and charge anyway.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I've encountered this warning before after using my iPhone while in a pool. I thought it was dry enough and foolishly plugged it into charge. I ended up just charging wirelessly for a day or two, a significant benefit of having MagSafe.
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Related to this, I was at a UVA game this past weekend and the ground was a little dewy, you know, had a little bit of moisture on it because it was a noon game because whatever, I hate noon games, but here we are. Anyways, I had a USB-C cable that I had let flop into the grass that I was using to charge my phone and
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and when i put it back in my phone it took a few seconds but all of a sudden and i can't recall if bluetooth audio playback had stopped at this point or maybe it had continued but all of a sudden i heard this like kind of distressing alarm coming from somewhere that was vaguely in the direction of both the speaker and also my phone and i eventually realized oh it's my phone i don't think i've ever heard my phone make this noise before and sure enough i picked it up and it was like
Accidental Tech Podcast
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For the love of God, your USB-C port may be wet. It was very upset. And so I immediately unplugged the cable and it was very happy again. But I had seen something like this maybe last year, but certainly on lightning phones. And it was far less aggressive. And it definitely, like I said, it made an audible alarm. Was it like the flash flood warning?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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it's similar not quite so traumatic but similar if memory serves um but but interestingly it did so even though i'm pretty damn sure the phone was silenced because my phone is almost never silenced excuse me almost never on loud um and so it made that noise regardless which i get you know if this is a potentially dangerous thing for the phone i get that it would you know override silent mode but it was very striking and very surprising
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I don't think so, but I wasn't looking that closely, to be honest with you.
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I mean lightning too, but definitely with USB-C. All right, so we have some breaking news from I think the day before yesterday as we record. Google apparently has to open Android up for third-party stores and a bunch of other things. And this is thanks to our quote-unquote friends over at Epic. Reading from The Verge.
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On October 7th, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling on Epic versus Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play App Store to competition for three whole years. Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, which is different. And it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps. I'm sorry, what?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Unless developers opt out individually. These were Epic's biggest asks, and they might change the Android app marketplace forever if they aren't immediately paused or blocked on appeal. And that's not all that Epic has won.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Starting on November 1, 2024, which is in, what, like three weeks, and ending on November 1, 2027, Google must also, number one, stop requiring Google Play billing for apps distributed on the Google Play Store. The jury found that Google had illegally tied its payment system to its app store. Number two... Let Android developers tell users about other ways to pay from within the Play Store.
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That sounds pretty cool. Number three, let Android developers link to ways to download their apps outside of the Play Store. Also very cool. And finally, number four, let Android developers set their own prices for apps irrespective of Play billing. However, Google cannot share app revenue with any person or entity that distributes Android apps or plans to launch an app store or app platform.
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They cannot offer developers money or perks to launch their apps on the Play Store exclusively at first. They cannot offer developers money or perks not to launch their apps on rival stores at They cannot offer device makers or carriers money or perks to pre-install the Play Store, and they cannot offer device makers or carriers money or perks not to pre-install rival stores.
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In Epic vs. Google, Epic successfully argued that Google had created such a substantial array of deals with developers, carriers, and device makers that it was nigh impossible for rival stores to spring up. By blocking these sorts of deals and proactively helping rival app stores, it's possible that some real competition to Google's monopoly could now arrive."
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Google will still have some control over safety and security as it opens up the Google Play Store to rival stores. The injunction says that Google can, quote, take reasonable measures, quote, that are strictly necessary and narrowly tailored and are comparable to how it currently polices, polices, polices? I don't know. The Google Play Store.
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Google will be able to charge a fee for that policing, too. Epic has repeatedly argued that Google should not be able to deter third-party app stores through policing, so it's likely Epic and Google will keep butting heads over this. Would anyone that we know deter third-party app stores through policing? No.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I used it all the time at first, I think in a small part because it was new and fun and fancy, but it is really convenient to be able to effectively, I don't think this is literal, but effectively VNC into your phone. and control it from your Mac. And it seems to do a pretty good job of mirroring the clipboard and stuff like that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, I wish I had had the presence of mind to reread the Stratechery articles that were about this and the Apple suit. Because I remember Ben saying he expected Apple to do better than Google. But for the life of me, I can't remember what the justification was for that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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We need a podcast to summarize it for us. Hey, welcome back, everyone. No, I find this very fascinating. And I also find it fascinating as someone who writes code somewhat for a living. Some of the requests that the judge is making, the amount of rejiggering and rewriting and just code that is going to be required to make this work, I just can't fathom it. Like, this is so much work.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, I hear you. I don't know. It's wild. I don't know how it makes me feel that I'm kind of pleased that Tim Sweeney's made all these changes happen. And, you know, I bet if we were to listen back or have a podcast, summarize our podcast for us, if we were to listen back to the episodes in, I think it was like late 2020, I
Accidental Tech Podcast
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about when Tim deliberately and Epic deliberately started taking third-party payments in their apps. They had clearly planned to get evicted from the app stores, both Google and Apple, and it had a whole site ready and waiting to go that they launched immediately after they got punted. I don't remember thinking of it fondly at the time, and I thought that they were being kind of pretty big turds.
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I would like to enter sports corner, please, which I know means I'm probably going to have to carry this whole thing by myself, but that's all right. There was an interesting article that a buddy of mine pointed me to earlier today. The title is Lionel Messi to MLS has been ruined by Apple's paywall. And I'm going to read you a bit.
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I tried to cut this down as much as possible, but I think we need to set a little bit of a stage here. In 2022, a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal was signed that kept most of MLS. This is Major League Soccer. This is America's premier soccer league. Anyways, kept most of MLS exclusive to Apple.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Fox and Univision would occasionally be able to air a game, but most of the league would now be behind a paywall. Apple's deal would eventually help incentivize one of the world's most popular soccer players ever to finish his career in America. As part of Lionel Messi's agreement with Inter-Miami,
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Messi gets a cut of the revenue from new subscribers to MLS season pass Apple streaming service for MLS games. As Messi's inter Miami goes on a historic run, clinching the supporters shield and award given to the team with the best regular season record. One has to question whether the league's deal with Apple has blunted the impact of one of the all time greats playing in America.
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Messi entered Miami's dominance. This season wasn't a major storyline that sports observers were paying attention to or covering. Highlights have appeared frequently on SportsCenter. Major online highlight factories like Bleacher Report and Overtime also haven't made much mention of Messi since he made his debut in 2023.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's hard for viewers to watch arguably the greatest soccer player in history during his run in the United States if the majority of his games are behind a paywall. There are no marketing partnerships of depth with the big dogs of sports media, and there's not much promotion done on linear television or even free online options like YouTube. It's a recipe for irrelevance.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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We don't need to talk too much about this, but I thought it was fascinating that here it is. You know, soccer slash football, we don't need to hear feedback on this, please. Soccer is arguably the most popular, maybe not even arguably, the most popular sport in the world. I think F1 and soccer, it depends on who you ask, but they're both up there.
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Anyways, one of the most popular sports in the world. And here is, I think, arguably the best quarterback
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current active player of the most popular sport in the world and nobody's paying attention i only follow certain sports and i don't follow them super closely but typically i'm aware enough that if something major is going on you know like my friend who had sent this to me someone will mention it in a group chat that we're in or you will call my attention to it or whatever
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Well, I'm just glad I could contribute regurgitation to the lexicon for this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I don't typically watch SportsCenter or anything like that, but these sorts of things bubble up. I haven't heard diddly squat about MLS nor Lionel Messi outside of Apple initially mentioning him every four seconds when the deal was still new. I don't know if you guys remember that. But it is fascinating to me that Apple…
Accidental Tech Podcast
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understandably to my eyes made a gamble that, that, Hey, let's bring the world's greatest player. Let's bring them into American soccer. Let's put a, you know, these golden handcuffs on him and let's make a great deal so that he will only be, you know, performing for us in so many, in so many words. And yet, because it's behind Apple's paywall, it seems like nobody at all is paying attention.
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And that just is totally wild to me. And it shows that even when you throw a bunch of money at a problem, that doesn't necessarily fix the problem, especially if you don't understand it very well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Well, I don't know, though. Is it that they couldn't get it or that they just didn't really try hard enough?
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Yes and no, because honestly, the NFL is easier than ever to get. Well, there's asterisks and daggers and double daggers there. But for broadly speaking, the NFL is easier than ever to get access to because it used to be that the only way to have access to what's called Sunday ticket, which is basically you get to see all of the football games again, asterisk, dagger, double dagger.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Um, you can see all the football games really easily. And it used to be, you had to have a direct TV subscription, which was a satellite cable for not a cable provider, but a satellite provider here in the States. Um, it was easier overseas, but here in the States, you had to have a direct TV dish. You had to have a direct TV subscription, et cetera, et cetera.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And now you can do it on YouTube TV, but it's something like $500 a year. It is astronomical, the price of NFL Sunday ticket. It is hilariously expensive. And because of that, I think that a lot of people will go to fairly stark lengths in order to avoid paying that money. And
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So let's just say I've looked into this and there are not a lot of great options that I've found, but it is extremely expensive. And I don't know how it would turn out if the NFL came off of terrestrial TV, but...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I don't think it would be that many, to be honest with you. Also, before I forget, real-time follow-up, it's not Lionel, it's Lionel Messi. My American is showing, and I apologize. I'm sure we've gotten a thousand emails and tweets. I'm sorry about that. But no, to come back to the NFL, I don't know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I think some of what's going on with the MLS, as you said, is just that Americans don't care about soccer. But I do feel like if this content was easier to consume, you would see more of it. So as an example... I don't pay much attention to the NBA, even though I would actually like to pay more attention to it, but I just never think about it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I don't pay much attention to the NBA, but I'll see interesting plays bubble up through one of several different group chats. I'll see it occasionally through Mastodon or If for some reason I do open Twitter, usually to look at a single tweet and then dismiss it, then oftentimes I'll see like a basketball play or sequence floating by. NBA Twitter, from what I gather, is phenomenal.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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There's so much that bubbles up. And I think a large part of that, and this is what this story is trying to say, is that so much of that is because it's easy to capture. It's easy to share. It's easy to get to.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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For the love of God, John, it was invented in Springfield, Mass. Jesus Christ.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That was a long time ago. Larry Bird? Oh, my God, you're getting older. You're getting older.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah. Right. I'm pleased that we had an actual conversation about this. I feel, I feel quite satisfied now. Thank you for indulging me, gentlemen. Oh my goodness. Uh, all right, let's move back to tech stuff or strictly tech stuff. Apple has said, or is being said, that Apple is no longer in talks to join OpenAI's investment round.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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We had already heard that they were not going to take a board seat, if I'm not mistaken, but now they're apparently not even investing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So reading from the Wall Street Journal, Apple's no longer in talks to participate in OpenAI funding round, expected to raise as much as $6.5 billion, an 11th hour end to what would have been a rare investment by the iPhone maker and another major Silicon Valley company. according to a knowledgeable person.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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The two other tech giants, Microsoft and Nvidia, have also been in talks to participate in the round. Microsoft is expected to invest around $1 billion, adding to the $13 billion it already has put into the company, according to people familiar with Matter. The funding talks aren't completed, and it is possible the participants' investment amounts could change.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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OpenAI is also in the process of overhauling its corporate structure from a nonprofit into a for-profit company. That change, which was encouraged by many of the investors in the round, you don't say, will be a complicated process for the startup. If it doesn't complete the change within two years, investors in the current round will have the right to request their money back.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And let's start with James Sutcliffe asking, will John be buying the new $700 Sony PlayStation Pro? And can you, John, give me the two-second overview on what makes the PlayStation Pro Pro and also $700, please?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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You know, with all of the redundant PlayStations, you could have bought at least one Xbox. That's something you could have done.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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All right. Justin Waring writes, has iOS 18's vehicle motion cues mitigated John's motion sickness at all? So to recap, and then I would like to throw in my two cents real quick. Vehicle motion cues is there's a bunch of dots, like circles, that are on your phone screen as you're riding in a car.
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and let's say you're holding your phone and the car starts to accelerate, those dots will move toward the bottom of the phone a little bit. And I think that the way this is supposed to work is for your vision to match what your inner ear is feeling.
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Because otherwise, if you're staring at your phone and nothing's moving, there's a disconnect between what your inner ear is saying is happening and what your eyes are seeing. And so it's supposed to allegedly help. And I don't recall if it's on by default or not in iOS 18, but I certainly had it on for a little while, I guess on my iPhone 16, I believe. And I found it so incredibly distracting.
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Can we talk about the camera control buttons on Apple's cases, John?
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And as someone who is not used to motion sickness, you know, I don't typically get motion sickness. I found it so distracting that it didn't take me very long to turn it off entirely. Erin also suffers from motion sickness when reading in the car. And I don't think we've been in the car very long with her as a passenger. So I haven't had a chance to ask her about this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Well, but this is the whole thing. What if you don't get motion sick now?
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You don't know that. You've never tried it. You don't know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Good to know. Oh, goodness. Neil McGregor writes, given the timescales that we think we know about iPhone hardware lead times, it seems unlikely that this generation of iPhone was really, quote, built from the ground up for AI. When do you think the first true built from the ground up for AI iPhone will be launched? What specifications will be the telltale signs?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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For example, a step change in neural engine performance on characteristic jump in RAM? Bigger battery for demanding workflows, custom compute beyond the neural engine, etc. The difference in this generation appears to be the RAM size, which I assume could be added to a chip design relatively late in the development, and it was likely to happen at some point anyway.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I get what Neil's saying here, and I don't disagree, but I don't know what I would look for other than a wildly beefier neural engine. I'm not sure what else would be a good sign to me.
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The one thing that drives me bananas about it is that all of the different gestures that I've trained for the iOS simulator are not the same. So as an example, to scroll in the iOS simulator, you have to click and drag, whereas in this, you scroll. And Command-Shift-H... in the iOS simulator is hit the home button.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Sharon Gordon writes, I'm wondering if any of you have made the switch and really started using pass keys. What are the pros and cons? Not just security wise, but convenience wise, is it difficult to transfer them to a new device right now? I'm in a situation where my two FA codes are an offy, which doesn't allow export.
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And I'm considering redoing them all and putting them in Apple's new password apps. passwords app, even though I'm a paid 1Password user. It's all getting a little confusing. Are there any articles you can recommend that really go over this, especially from an Apple ecosystem point of view? I have largely been ignoring passkeys. There's a handful of places I use them, but
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Generally speaking, I don't. And that's mostly because of a similar ignorance. And also, I don't feel like I have a good understanding of how sharing a passkey would work, if such a thing is even possible. But there are some things that Aaron and I, like, let's take Amazon as an example. Aaron and I, you know, both use the same Amazon login. And I don't know, I genuinely don't know.
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That's not, you know, a figure of speech. I truly don't know how that would work if I were to switch my Amazon login, for example. to a passkey. So I am here for you two to tutor not only Sharon, but me as well.
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And in this it's command one of all things, which like fine, it's an easier gesture, but it is so wildly different than what we're used to. So as an iOS developer, it's kind of a pain in the butt, But in every other way, it is freaking great. And it'll even pull through audio, if I'm not mistaken. I've only done that like once or twice.
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But I genuinely, I'm not just saying this because you're sitting right here, Marco. I genuinely think that the Overcast macOS app, as long as you're running on an Apple Silicon Mac, hi John, is actually pretty good. But if you don't fancy that, or for some reason you can't install it on like your work computer or whatever, but you can do the iPhone mirroring thing,
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yeah if you well it's one dollar less yeah if you double the ram and storage it is double the price of the base model mac mini that's amazing and i wanted to break down we talked about this before and we didn't say they don't want to go into numbers but here let's go into numbers how does this work out so the base model is 599 okay that's 16 gigs of ram 256 ssd when you do the ram upgrade to 32 that is plus 400 dollars
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that's adding 16 gigabytes to the base 16 at $25 per gigabyte. And you may be wondering, how much does that cost for real? Not an Apple Fantasyland. I tried to find something comparable, same speed RAM to the best of my knowledge. And I was super fair with this because I'm comparing it in this case to Crucial, which is a name brand, 32 gig LPDDR5X 7500 memory, right? But this Crucial thing,
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It's an entire printed circuit board with associated capacitors and resistors and multiple chips and, oh yeah, also the two NAND chips. When you upgrade the RAM on the Mac Mini, it's just two different RAM chips that are soldered into the package that the SoC is on. It's not a whole other circuit board with its own associated circuitry coming with it.
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It's not a separately packaged retail product. All right. So anyway, this crucial 32 gig thing is a retail product. And it costs $174.99 on the crucial.com website, which I'm sure is not the cheapest place you can get it. Doing the math on that, Apple's RAM upgrades are 6.5 times more expensive than buying a separate retail packaged printed circuit board complete memory module.
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And this is one of those LP, low pressure compression attached memory modules for like a laptop or whatever. So this isn't even apples to apples. Apple is just taking two RAM chips and putting in two different ones. It's just, it's insane. So 6.5 times more expensive. The SSD upgrade to 512, you go from 256 to 512, that's a $200 upgrade.
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And that's adding 256 gigs at 78 cents per gigabyte, which sounds cheap, but the actual retail cost per gigabyte of this type of storage is 12 cents per gigabyte. And again, an extremely fair comparison. A Samsung 990 Pro, one terabyte PCIe 4.0 SSD. The price per gigabyte is 12 cents per gigabyte, which is once again, amazingly, exactly 6.5 times more expensive for the Apple upgrade
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than a separately packaged retail product that has its own printed circuit board, a whole bunch of other support chips, a heat sink, a box, everything associated with it. And when you do an SSD upgrade on a Mac mini or any of the other Macs, you can see people do them on YouTube. They will desolder the two NAND chips that are soldered onto the logic board.
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It's just two NAND chips and they will buy two bare NAND chips and solder them in place. There's a whole bunch of other stuff you have to do to get the OS to recognize it or whatever.
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But what I'm saying is the components that you are getting for this additional $200 are so much more minimal than the components in this standalone retail product printed circuit board that yes, also has NAND chips on it, but a bunch of other stuff from Samsung name brand 990 Pro. It's ridiculous. 6.5 times more expensive. So again, that's $400 for the RAM. $200 for the SSD.
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Total upgrade price, $600. So you got your base Mac Mini. You want to bump it up from 16 to 32 and from 256 to 512? Or do you want an entire separate Mac Mini? Like, if you could somehow harvest...
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The two 50-sync gig N chips that come with the second Mac Mini and somehow harvest the SSD, so the stuff that comes with the other Mac Mini, and then throw away the rest of it, it would still probably be the same price. It's ridiculous. Anyway, yeah, so the Mac Mini with 32 gigs of RAM and 512 SSD is $1,200 or double the price of the base model.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That's what we mean when we say Apple's upgraded prices are ridiculous. It's not like they're just a little bit more expensive. When I say like six times more expensive, I'm not exaggerating. That's literally what they are in the most generous possible comparison. If we actually compared like what is the retail price of just those NAND chips, I couldn't find that.
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So I had to go for a Samsung 990 Pro to get the price per gigabyte, but... be assured that the actual retail difference in price is probably more like seven or eight when you get down to apples to apples. And then obviously the wholesale price that applies for this is, you know, one 18th of that, but whatever.
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And the storage, at least you can buy external and tack it on and deal with that, which is annoying, but at least you can do it. But the Ram, there's not really any option. If you, it's, you know, it's, The RAM is soldered on, and it's also a part of the SoC package.
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So like I said, I've seen people do SSD upgrades by desoldering and resoldering, which is an incredibly difficult operation to pull off and requires a lot of expertise and skill and the know-how to get the OS to recognize it. But at least it's possible. But I've never seen one attempt it with the RAM. So yeah, you're kind of stuck.
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So yeah, if you missed it the first time... We did test prints of the Pixel Ones, though, by the way. We did test prints of the original Pixel One, and then in this store around, the new addition to the Pixel is you can get it on sweatshirts, and we didn't know if it would work on that, so I saw a picture of a sweatshirt test print, and it seems just as good as the other style shirts.
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Apple being weird about the color things. And it's kind of sad that you used to be able to do it, but now you can't.
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So sometimes it's the case that Apple is just not offering certain sizes in certain products for whatever reason. Like there's, you know, too many combinations of products. They decide, like, I forget what are the ones off the top of my head, but it's like one of them doesn't come with 32 gigs of RAM on the laptop, but it does on the mini or vice versa or something like that, right?
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But for the storage size, we don't know this for a fact, but it is reasonable to assume based on the M1 and M2 and M3. The M series SoCs have the SSD controllers on them, essentially, and they have limits on the number and capacity of NAND chips that they can address.
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And it is reasonable to assume, again based on the plain M1, M2, and M3, that the M4 actually can't address more than two terabytes, given current NAND sizes and number of chips that it can address. but the M4 Mac Pro can. So it's not like Apple is refusing to let you buy a plain M4 Mac Mini with 8 terabytes.
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I believe it is probably the case that it literally can't address that given current NAND sizes. So keep that in mind. And, you know, there are plenty of places where Apple subdivides its product line based on, you know, capacities that don't really make any sense. And it's just a way of minimizing skews and finding the ones I think they're going to make the most money on.
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But yeah, we don't get them in our hands, but we do at least, if we're nervous about it, we get a test print and take a look at it.
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But the plain M series very often in the past have just simply not been able to address as much SSD space as the larger ones. And that is almost certainly the case with the plain M4 as well.
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Unlike what we'll talk about in the after show, there is some really good news in the world of Apple and Max, believe it or not. We talked about it when they had, what was it, Mac Week? That's what we could have called it. We could have done a pun on the publication that you two probably never read.
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Anyway, when they released all those Macs on the iMac, the Mac Mini, and the new MacBook Pros with the new M4 processors, and we talked about how great they are. Now, since that show came out, there have been sort of preliminary, unconfirmed, uploaded Geekbench benchmarks for the M4 Pro and the M4 Macs in various devices.
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This time is always so weird because technically these things shouldn't be in people's hands, although some plain M4s were shipped in Russia a while ago. But anyway, they're showing up in Geekbench. When people get their retail products in their hands, Geekbench sort of incorporates all the measurements and they end up on the leaderboards or whatever. But for now, if you explicitly search for...
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the CPUs by the Mac identifiers. You can find results. We'll put links in the show notes so you can look at the results for yourself. Again, they are preliminary with a few number of data points, so take that for the grain of salt. And as I always say, Geekbench, like all benchmarks, may or may not be representative of anything you care about.
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Making a good representative benchmark is very difficult. In the end, what you care about is, does it do the thing that I need it to do faster than my old thing? Whatever that thing is. Are you rendering things? Are you compressing audio? Are you compiling an Xcode? Whatever it is that you're doing, all you care about is how fast does it do that?
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But things like Geekbench try to be a representative benchmark for the various parts of the computer so you have some way to compare it. So here they are with all those caveats in mind. There's some amazing stuff going on. We've talked before about the M4's single-core performance being amazing. We only really had measurements of that in the iPad Pro because that was the only thing the M4 was in.
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But anyway, now the plain M4s are out. The M4 Pro has the same amazing single-core performance as the M4, but a little bit better because it's probably clocked higher and has better cooling. So M4 Pro is reaching... $3,900 in the single-core Geekbench benchmark. And how does that compare to its predecessors? That is a 26% increase over the M3 Pro.
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It is also a 26% increase over the M3 Max because single-core really doesn't change. Pro, Max, whatever, like maybe they'll be clocked higher or maybe they have better cooling for sustained throughput, but single-core is usually similar. This was true back in the Intel days too, by the way.
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Very often, if you wanted to get the fastest single-core performance, you would get, like, an iMac or something with a smaller number of cores because the big, like, 24-core or 12-core or whatever it was back in the day, the big multi-core thing that was in the Mac Pro had lower single-core performance because they couldn't clock those single-cores as high because the chip was just so big and hot.
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But anyway, single-core is still great. Versus the M2 Ultra. which is the fastest SoC that you can get in the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, the M4 Pro single-core performance is 41% faster. Multi-core. Now we start to get interesting. Multi-core, remember the M4 Pro is 14 cores. It has 10 power cores and 4 efficiency cores. Multi-core is 22,000.
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That is a 48% increase over its predecessor, the M3 Pro. The M3 Pro made some very different choices. It was the 6-6 arrangement, 6 efficiency cores, 6 power cores. So it's bound to not do as well in multi-core. The M3 Pro was just plain aiming for like, I guess... Better low power performance for lots of non-demanding jobs, but Apple has changed it to mine. It's mine.
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The M4 Pro is really cranking it up. The M4 Pro's multi-core performance is 8% faster than the M3 Max. So now it is better than the previous Max chip. Oh, and by the way, the M4 Pro's multi-core performance in this one really hurts. 6% faster than the M2 Ultra.
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Remember we're talking about the M4 Pro here. This is not the best M4 chip. This is like the middle one. There's M4, then there's M4 Pro. Its multi-core performance is better than the M2 Ultra. That's bad. Wow. That's real bad.
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This is a great problem to have. This is what happens when you don't update your chip for two years. Yes, it is. Right? I mean, M2 is old. Obviously, you can just look at the number, M2, M3. But the M4 Pro, and by the way, this is not reflected in our shirt sales. No one wants to buy an M4 Pro shirt. You should. The M4 Pro is crushing it this generation. It is most improved.
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The other degree of difficulty on that one is that so, you know, as people know who hear us complain about this all the time, the more colors you put on a shirt, the more it costs due to the way screen printing works.
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And granted, part of that is because the M3 Pro was so weird and different in how it arranged itself, which is why you get that big jump. But just forget about the M3 Pro and the 48% jump from the M3 Pro. It's better than the M3 Max. It's better than the M2 Ultra in multi-core. It crushes them all in single-core too, by the way, but it's still better in multi-core.
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So what the hell is the M2 Ultra actually even good for? When you go look at memory bandwidth, again, huge jump over the M3 Pro, so it's 70% faster than the M3 Pro, because the M3 Pro actually went down in memory bandwidth from the M2 Pro, I believe. But it is 50% slower in memory bandwidth than the M3 Max. So that's where you're spending your extra money.
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And it is 200% less memory bandwidth than the M2 Ultra. So if memory bandwidth is your concern, the M2 Ultra still is twice as big. And by the way, the memory bandwidth is 273 gigabytes per second. And then, you know, the M2 Ultra is 819, right? The metal score, that's like the GPU benchmark, mostly the GPU benchmark that you care about.
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I didn't even look at the OpenCL one because Apple does everything in metal these days. Metal score is 110K. That's 41% faster than the M3 Pro. That's 40% slower than the M3 Max, and it's 100% slower than the M2 Ultra. So... Why would anyone want an M2 Ultra at this point? Well, really, you shouldn't.
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But if you have one, take heart to know that you have double the memory bandwidth and you are twice as fast as the M4 Pro in GPU benchmarks. But boy, if you have one of those older, beefier CPUs or SoCs, it's bad when the mid-tier M4 is kicking your butt in a lot of ways. So anyway, we go to the M4 Max. The M4 Max is the first... Personal computer chip in Geekbench to break 4,000 on single core.
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So obviously you've got a rainbow stripe colors on the ATP logo, but the pixel shirt, all of the stripes and all the letters also have shadows, which is a darker version of the same color. It's brutal. But anyway, pixels. Yeah. And by the way, speaking of the pixels design, which people, this is only the second time we've sold it and people seem to like it.
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I believe the M4 was already like the top single core performer, but the M4 Max has a bunch of ratings in there like 3,900, 4,000. So single core is even better than the M4 Max. Why is it better? Is it just because it's clocked higher? Is it just because they had better cooling? Is it just because someone got lucky on a run or put it in an ice pack?
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Again, unconfirmed preliminary reports, but just no. Single core on the M4 is like the best in the entire industry. And these are chips that are in laptops, by the way. And iPads. You can go... You can go search Geekbench for like, what if I want to buy a really big, really hot, high TDP Intel desktop CPU? Surely that is faster. And the answer is no, it's not. You can search the results.
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Again, it's just a benchmark, but single core is amazing. So the M4 Max is 29% faster than the M3 Max and 46% faster than the M2 Ultra. On multi-core, it's 26,000, which is not much higher than the M4 Pro, but still it's 27% faster than the M3 Max and 24% faster than the M2 Ultra. And then memory bandwidth, it's 546 gigs a second, 33% faster than the M3 Max, but 50% slower than the M2 Ultra.
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And then in metal, 24% faster than the M3 Max and 15% slower than the M2 Ultra. So the Max... Continues a pace from the M3. M3, the M4 Max is, you know, just a steady upward climb. But because the M3 Pro took that diversion into not quite being as fast, it's got this huge boost.
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Yeah, so if you've got an M2 Ultra and you bought it back when it was new, there are still some things that it does better. But it has been handily surpassed by the mid-tier laptop chip in single and multi-core performance. That is just, I really hope this whole thing with the Pro series is just an anomaly.
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They don't plan on doing this because you can't release a bunch of Pro products, never change the price, and then not update them for two years. Otherwise, you're going to get embarrassing things like this. I mean, if they just keep up with this pace, the phone chips will be faster in every measure as well.
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But it's a great time to buy a Mac, and it's not a great time to want to buy one of the desktop Pro Macs because they have fallen behind.
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There are rumors to that effect. And the main rumor that we talked about before is about the... The reason I mention this now is because I hope we'll find this out by next episode. Someone needs to get an M4 Max and cut the thing open and show us what the die looks like. Because remember on the M3 Max, someone did that and they said, hey, look, there's no interposer.
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You can't take two M3 Max and stick them end to end and make an M3 Ultra. uh and that seems like it was true because apple never did make an m3 ultra and maybe it's because they never planned to and they didn't put that interposer on the m3 max and you can't stick to them end to end so when someone gets an m4 max they need to cut that sucker open and say hey
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Is there that little strip in the bottom that looks like the silicon interposer where they take two Maxes and stick them together end-to-end? Because if that's not there, what that means is either Apple's never going to make another chip better than the Max, or when the M4 Ultra or whatever comes out, it won't be two Maxes stuck together.
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Getting lots of emails from people saying, hey, when are you going to sell the insert shirt we're not currently selling again? And I don't have answers for them. Maybe someday we'll sell a particular design again. But we just have so many products. We can't put them all on sale at the same time. So my advice to you is if you see something you like, buy it or maybe buy two.
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But as the rumors suggest, it might be an entirely new chip that is just simply... even bigger than the Max, but it is not made up of two Maxes. And that would be smart, because as we've discussed in the past, putting two Maxes together, you end up with a lot of wasted stuff that you don't need doubles of, right? You don't need doubles of all the media encoders and all the other stuff.
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It's more efficient to make one big honking chip More expensive. Much more expensive, potentially. But more efficient in terms of bang for your buck out of the... Not bang for your buck. Bang for your square meters out of the silicon area. For your buck, it's probably worse. Because the bigger you make the chip, the more expensive it is to get one out that works. So I'm looking forward to that.
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As soon as someone cuts one of these open, we'll know if we're in for a surprise. But if someone sees an interposer, eh, it's just two M4 Maxes stuck together. Which, to be clear, would be great, but boring.
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Yeah, I give that a pass. I mean, like, it's amazing that they went back and updated the M2 Air in addition to the M3 Air to be 16. They could have updated neither of them and just waited for the M4 Air in the spring to go to 16, but it said they went back two whole product lines. They just didn't go back to the M1 and upgrade it, which is fine, right? No problem with that whatsoever.
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I hope this is a developing story because don't you think it should be super prominent on these product pages? Like, don't buy this keyboard.
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if you don't if you don't have at least 15.1 that seems like something really important it's not like there's some special feature that gets enabled by having 15.1 it's like the basic functionality of the input device so like if you buy a magic mouse and you come home and you connect it to your computer that's running let's say sequoia 15.0 and the scrolling doesn't work you take it back to the store and say this mouse is broken they say oh you should have known when you bought that mouse it requires 15.1 you need to update your os
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That is super weird to me. Is it because of the USB control? Backport this, Apple. Provide an update at least to 14 and 13.
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Because who knows when it will ever come back. Some things we've only sold literally once. Some things we will probably never sell again since there's such narrow interest. Some things come back once every three years. So yeah, don't just assume, I'm not going to get it to sale, I'll get it next sale. Maybe it won't be for sale then.
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Who knows? Why don't they just work out of the box? It's literally the same keyboard, but with a USB-C thing. I'm sure there are third-party USB-C keyboards that you can buy and just plug into a Mac, and they just work. Yes. Like through some generic keyboard driver. But the Apple-branded one... That's why I couldn't believe this story, and I thought it had to be a mistake or whatever.
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So I hope by next week it'll be like, oh, that wasn't really true. It was just some other issue or whatever. But this seems...
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ridiculous to me so be aware as of as of the time this story was written which is uh granted october 31st uh people were buying the new keyboards and mice and discovering that they don't work right unless you have mac os 15.1 or later but not too much later because the 15.2 beta doesn't work either
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I think there's a little tiny 5, a little tiny light gray 5 in a square laser etched on the metal part of the USB-C connector as a further eye test of old people. But yeah, last time we said these cables are expensive because they have little chips on them, but apparently under one meter, no chips.
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Apple itself says this is a passive cable, so it's just a very well-constructed, well-insulated $70 one-meter-long Thunderbolt 5 cable.
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The only thing we always sell is obviously our logo shirt with our plain ATP logo on it. But everything else is a rotating collection. So if you want them, get them.
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Yeah, it's better enough that seemingly all the reviewers, except for the one from The Verge, said, oh, it's cured, no more jelly scrolling. But if you watch it in super slow-mo, you'll see it is just much improved, but it still exists.
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And a lot of the theories people have with the old ones is like, oh, they need to take the video controller and attach it to the screen from the top instead of the side, because when they do it from the side, it ends up driving the display in a way such that one half of it doesn't update as fast as the other half, and you get the jelly scrolling and yada yada.
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So they opened this thing up and said, what do they do to fix the jelly scrolling? Did they do all those things people suggested? The answer was no. It's just exactly the same as the previous one. The hardware looks the same. It's in the same place. It's connected the same way.
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So maybe it was just 100% a software fix or there's something about the fix that isn't detectable by iFixit, something inside the chips that they can't see or something. But yeah, what a weird situation. Like this complaint about the iPads existed for so long and they've seemingly... all but entirely fix the problem without changing the hardware in a way that I think it could detect.
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Yeah, that's such a weird thing. Like far be it for me to argue for fans, but the Apple TV had a fan that I couldn't hear. And when they got rid of the fan, it's like, oh, great, they don't need the fan anymore. But apparently they did. If you're running games on it, the fan apparently helps.
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So these passively cooled ones that seem to be constructed much more cheaply than the much more expensive ones that had the little tiny silent fan inside it. Yeah, maybe those were the good ones. So yeah, I guess that's another fork in the road for them. If they want to pursue gaming performance, they probably need to bring that fan back.
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um so you know we have lots of other ways to play games but it is frustrating as nerds to see something like this that can have the ability to play really great games and just for kind of crappy reasons doesn't really get there yeah and that's that's the fork in the road that apple has uh do you want to keep making the apple tv have better and better socs in it if so to one end uh and even just taking away the fan like maybe you know makes it cheaper fewer parts you know no potential fan knows though again the old one was silent
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but it makes it a worse gaming platform. Like I said, last time I tried to play a game on the Apple TV, there are games that play perfectly fine on the Apple TV. It's surprisingly powerful for its size and cost, and they were taken away from, like, they were no longer available. I'd played them on Apple TV before, and now they weren't there anymore, and that's not a great experience.
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I can't remember the last time that happened on any other gaming platform or console. Like, it's not even like it was available on an older version of Apple TV. It was just it was removed from Apple Arcade or it was removed from the Apple Store or whatever. That's frustrating. I'm not expecting it to play super-duper fancy AAA games with... I'm not expecting it to be a gaming PC.
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But for the games that do run comfortably on it, it's nice that it runs games. I think it should run games. And it can run them comfortably with its current size SoC, but Apple's mishandling of games ruins that. And going forward...
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Until we get to 8K or something, there's not really much reason to double the power of the CPU and GPU because it can already play all your streaming apps without breaking a sweat. So, yeah, what is Apple going to do with this device? I assume they'll just keep upgrading the SoC just because they don't want to keep manufacturing the old ones.
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And at a certain point, it's just less expensive to, you know, turn off the or stop paying for the seven nanometer line to be manufacturing chips and just take the five nanometer ones or whatever. but I personally hope they keep increasing the SOC because I believe there is a potential future in it as a casual game platform for the television.
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I prefer it to... I certainly prefer it to buying a Raspberry Pi and hooking it up, and I prefer it to having to log over one of my big game consoles because right now it's the only gaming thing I have connected to my big TV, and it's just there for brief casual game sessions or a few particular games that are available on Apple TV, but... Yeah, we'll find out when they release the next one.
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Find out what they do. Have they made it more powerful? Have they made it more expensive? Have they added a fan or is it just status quo?
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It's not an easy thing to do. And when he first sent this, I replied and I said, that sounds like the way you did an SMC reset on T2 Max, but actually that particular finger twister is slightly different. We'll put a link in the show notes to that one. So even though it sounds like something you might've heard before, it's different.
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And Daniel said he tried it while listening to the show just to make sure it works. And sure enough, it does. So it is complicated and it can be done. Lots of other people are like, why do you have this problem? Just turn on the screensaver.
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Because if you turn on the screensaver, like with a screen lock, the only way you're going to do anything damaging to your computer is if you accidentally fat finger your password into the lock thing or touch the touch ID thing with your fingerprint. So...
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this is not that big of a problem but if you really do want your computer to be off it is frustrating that it keeps turning itself back on so if you if you want to fix to that problem this will apparently work i do wonder what this is doing like that's why i was like oh no is this doing an smc reset is it going to reset some firmware things is it going to like turn on the boot chime when the boot chime was off have you noticed any ill effects casey from trying this
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Yeah, they should just put this, like, instead of these weird, you know, key combo and things and holding stuff, just put it in, like, the recovery thing or put it something, like, they have a place where they have, like, the so you want to do a weird thing to your computer, like, when you boot in recovery mode or you hold down the power button or whatever. Put this there with a GUI or something.
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Or add a feature to macOS. Maybe they'll get to it eventually that just says, I'm going to clean my keyboard, lock everything up. And I guess they would probably just say that's the screensaver, but... Anyway, like the boot chime, right? So on Macs, from the very first Mac, when you turn them on, they would make a chiming sound, and Apple has changed the chime over the years.
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And then eventually, they added the ability to turn off that chime. And that used to be like a firmware setting, but now there's actually a GUI for it. That's a perfect example of something like some people don't want their Mac to make a noise when it boots or restarts or whatever, and some people do.
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Some people don't want their Mac to turn on when they just hit anything on the keyboard, and some people do. Make the default what you think the majority of people want. And for everybody else, put a little tiny switch buried somewhere in system settings. We'll find it eventually.
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predict this i'm not in the the world of seeing who's going to get acquired by apple and image editing apps but some people in that world said oh yeah they expected this for a long time pixelmator is highly regarded company with highly regarded products that have received awards from apple in the past i don't know how many awards they've gotten but i think it's multiple um Uh, they're good apps.
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Uh, they are Mac apps. I believe, uh, at least Pixelmator is written with AppKit cause it's that old. Um, and I'm not sure what their other apps are written in, but they're good apps. They are Mac apps. Uh, they are award winning. Uh, I think I own all of them except for maybe the iOS one, uh, cause I mostly do the stuff on my Mac.
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uh and apple bought the whole company and apple being apple they're not going to tell you why they bought the company other than giving you remember they can statement they have like a text expanded shortcut that says apple buys small companies from time to time and blah blah blah blah like they never tell you like what they're buying it for but for those of us out here who like and use uh some of these apps you're immediately worried and saying
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What's going to happen to Pixelmator or Photomator or whatever it is that you're doing? Obviously, the press release says no changes are planned at this time. But the big question is, did Apple buy this so they could continue developing the Pixelmator family of photo editing apps? Did they buy this so they could incorporate that functionality into their own Apple Photos apps?
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Or do they buy it just as an acquihire where we don't care about your apps. We just want the people because it's really hard to find excellent Mac developers. Hey, there's a bunch of excellent Mac developers. Let's buy the company as a way of hiring all the people in the company and put some golden handcuffs on them that says their Apple stock doesn't invest until X or Y number of years.
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And then just allow Pixelmator and Photomator to just wither on the vine and eventually stop working. Which one of those things is going to happen? I don't know, but... I'm kind of not happy about this acquisition.
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Yeah, so if you are a member, you have 15% off discount code that is on your member page. Go to atp.fm and log in and go to your member page. You'll see the code there and you can copy and paste it into the little promo code field during checkout. Or if you are logged into atp.fm when you go to atp.fm store,
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, well, we have a couple of examples. One from recent history and one from ancient history. The recent history one is workflows. Apple bought workflows. Workflow. Workflow, sorry. Singular. And incorporated it into the OS and continued to enhance it. It's shortcuts now. And they didn't just like, oh, we'll fold it into the OS and then just like never update it again.
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They've continued to work on shortcuts. It has sort of become an essential headlining feature of their operating system. They essentially bought from a third party and they didn't just like, you know, obviously shortcuts, the app went away, but I'm not sure that's workflow. The app went away, but it was pretty quickly replaced by shortcuts. And it's for the people who liked workflow.
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I think they also like shortcuts. So that's probably the best it could possibly go. If Apple buys you and decides you're going to be part of our existing system. platform, right? We're not going to continue to sell you as a third-party app. You're literally going to be part of iOS or you're going to be part of an existing app like Apple Photos or whatever. That's like the best it can go.
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and click through on any of the products, we will autofill your discount code for you, just so you don't forget it. But anyway, it's on your member page if you want to copy and paste it. 15% off. Totally worthwhile to use that. If you are not a member and want to become one, just so you can save 15% off, you can easily make up the cost of membership with the amount that you save.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That's normally not how it happens. Most of the time when Apple buys small companies, whatever they were making is never seen again. Now, the bad story about pro apps is Apple, many, many years ago, went on a series of buying sprees, buying up all these pro applications to essentially make its own pro suite of stuff. Final Cut Pro was bought from Macromedia, maybe. They bought Shake and Motion.
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Logic, I think, was purchased. Aperture, I forget if that was purchased or they just purchased the people who were writing it or hired them. But anyway, they had a bunch of pro apps that they were making. They used to sell for a lot of money. And one by one, Apple has lost interest in those pro apps. Aperture went away. Shake went away.
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I think they sold something called Color as a color correction. They sold these things for hundreds of dollars trying to sell them to professionals, and eventually Apple was like, we're losing interest. Final Cut somehow has survived, barely. But a lot of the other ones went away.
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And so now when Apple buys an app like Pixelmator, any youngster who's like, wow, they're going to make a Photoshop competitor. It's like, look, been there, done that. Apple had a brief moment where it's like, we're going to make apps that compete with Adobe. and they gave up.
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It's not because the apps were bad or terrible, but Apple stopped putting money into the development of them, and you will never compete with Adobe if you do that. Adobe will continue to put money into Photoshop. So if you're going to compete with Photoshop, you can't make the app once and ship it and say, huh, isn't it great?
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Maybe we'll update it again in six years, but we're not going to tell you. That's not how to compete. So Apple needs to decide, do you want to make pro applications at all? If so, you could make a Photoshop-ish competitor product out of the Pixelmator suite of things. But if you do that, anyone who's old enough to remember Aperture and so on will go, eh, no thanks.
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Apple doesn't seem like they're really committed to this whole pro app thing. I'm not going to switch my whole life to their platform and get all on board for it. Just when I'm just when the finally the good version of aperture comes out, it's the last version and they're never going to make it again. And now, you know, I'm screwed.
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So there's that sort of past trauma of pro apps, which makes anybody over a certain age look at this and say, there's just no way. They are going to continue shipping and developing Pixelmator to the degree that the Pixelmator company was.
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You know, Pixelmator, the company, was making new versions of Pixelmator Pro, improving it over time, adding, you know, when the AI features came around, Pixelmator Pro was one of the first apps to have it. They have a really good, like, you know, equivalent of Apple's cleanup tool where you, like, scribble over something to erase it or whatever. That's one of the first things I bought it for.
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It's great at, right? In addition to just being a general purpose photo editor. I cannot imagine Apple deciding we want to be in that business. We're going to keep developing Pixelmator Pro. And even if Apple did that, everybody with a memory is looking at them and saying, I think I'll take a pass.
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Go to atp.fm slash join. You can join for one month and get the discount and be done with it. And of course, we also have ATP gift memberships, which you can buy for someone else. in your life who you think might want to be an ATP member.
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I think I'll stick with insert whatever they're using now, whether it's Photoshop or Figma or any other of the big apps that compete in that realm or something smaller like Acorn where you're like, I don't want something that big and complicated or whatever.
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Now, if Apple does take the guts of these apps and try to shove them into photos, again, especially with additions of like the cleanup feature and everything, does that mean Apple's not going to take Pixelmator's AI cleanup thing? And maybe spoilers for overtime, we'll probably talk about some of these features and how they compare later in the show.
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Or like if you look at the feature list, will they say, okay, well, 90% of these overlap. So which one do we take? Do we throw away all the photos features for adjusting levels and curves and saturation and brightness and brilliance and all those other things and highlights and shadows or whatever and swap them all out for the Pixelmator Pro equivalents? Or do we do 50-50?
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Or do we just delete the entire code base of Apple Photos and replace it with Pixelmator? And how does that work across platforms?
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like i don't as great as pixelmator pro is unless photos is going to become a pixelmator pro caliber image editor i don't want them to take the subset of features that are in pixelmator that are in photos and extract them from pixelmator pro and shove them in photos because as a user the result of that is the next version of photos i get has all the same features but it's
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code that was ripped out of another app and shoved into an existing app and it's probably buggy because of that not because it was buggy when it was pixelmator pro but now they're just like ripping the guts out and shoving it in there and from my experience it's not any different did you add any new features well no but now they're pixelmator powered does that make a difference to me are they appreciably better than they were in photos like
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I don't understand this, which is why when I look at it as an acquihire, you said they probably wouldn't have paid all these potential millions of dollars for developers. But there is something to be said for exactly how difficult it is to find good Mac developers. As we've said many times, I'm not sure how many good Mac developers there still are inside Apple. Let alone out there in the world.
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Or if you're a member, you'll see a link that lets you send that link to somebody else and say, hey, buy me ATP membership for my holiday gift or for my birthday or for whatever. So those are also available to you right now on the store page and also on your member page.
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And so this is just like a unicorn where it's like a group of dedicated hardcore Mac developers familiar with Apple's platforms who are actually good at making Mac apps. I think Apple does probably want those people. But yeah, it's probably too much money to just pay for the people. So I really don't know what they're going to use these apps for.
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on your stuff i mean it seems to me like it would it would be more than that that this is more of a test again we don't know the actual numbers we're just guessing because people are saying like oh they they wouldn't have needed to submit it for regulatory approval unless it was over some amount like apple to be clear no one announced how much this acquisition is for so we don't actually know so that is an unknown
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Another angle on this is how people are saying it's like, boy, if Pixelmator can't make it as an independent Mac software developer, how can anyone? Because they were so good at what they did. They were, again, award winning. They made amazing apps. Everybody loved them. And they can't survive as an independent company. And I don't think that's the case.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I think they could survive as an independent company. But when Apple comes knocking with a giant bag of money. If you want a giant bag of money, you take it. Like everyone has their price. I don't think Pixelmator was like, at least I hope, or if it was on the verge of like financial ruin, it was mismanaged because they made really good products with a not too big company.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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They should have been profitable and sustainable. I think they were profitable and sustainable. But Apple can solve that problem by showing up with a sufficiently large bag of money and saying, you know. So I don't think this is a condemnation of the Mac market.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's bad for the Mac market because I liked them being an independent company that caused Apple to have to compete and caused Adobe to have to compete and gave me an alternative to an Adobe subscription. I loved it when they were independent. So I feel for the people who are like, oh, that's one of our last great –
Accidental Tech Podcast
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independent Mac software developers gone because they got absorbed by Apple that does suck but I don't think it says anything about the viability of making good software for the Mac I think if you make good apps like Pixelmator did and sell them on the Mac platform you can make money if you do so in a way that doesn't require like 10,000 engineers or whatever the hell Twitter used to have right so overall I think this is bad news it's bad news for me because I like Pixelmator Pro it's bad news for the Mac market
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Because I took a great player off the table. It's bad news for Apple's awards because who are they going to give them to now, right? But maybe it's good news for a bunch of really good developers inside Pixelmator.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It just tacks on to the end of your current subscription. Now, gift memberships never expire, so you can just hold them and not redeem them, but you can also just redeem them immediately. They just add time to your subscription.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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This is what we kept asking. What is Apple going to charge for that? They're like, oh, it's free for the first year, but now it's free for another year. And now it's like, yeah, we're part owners of the company. So I guess this will continue to be free. Like it's not like this is one way to resolve it. It's, you know, we keep saying like it's difficult for
Accidental Tech Podcast
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them to charge for this emergency type feature and we came up with all sorts of schemes and how they could like charge for it but retroactively after you've been saved right so they'll charge you at the time of using it but if you live through the thing you can send you a charge or something but it's like actually maybe we'll just invest 1.1 billion dollars and get a 20% stake in the satellite company and this is one of those situations kind of like tsmc and other things where it's like
Accidental Tech Podcast
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you can shop around for somebody who has a bunch of satellites circling the earth or around the earth if they're stationary. But anyway, there's not a lot that there's not a lot of options, right? There's, there's this, there's Starlink, I guess, like how many choices do you have? And if you're Apple and you want to essentially protect yourself from,
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Both by making sure that you can continue to offer this feature on your product because there's a lot of iPhones out there. And so you need a significant amount of capacity potentially. So you want to say, we don't want to stop shipping this feature. We build it into our phones. We want to keep shipping the feature. You can sign a contract with them or something.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But an even better way is to invest in the company and become a part owner. And now you have much more control over what they do. And you want to lock that up because if some other company comes in before you and buys them and kicks you out and now you can't make contracts with them or you have to deal with Elon Musk, which no one wants to do, that's bad for the company.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I think there is a sane limit where it'll always just keep adding time, but due to a limitation in Stripe, if you add four years of membership, or maybe it's longer than that, maybe it's seven years of membership... We can't, we won't continue your membership after your gift memberships run out because Stripe has a limitation in the way we're handling recurring subscriptions.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So this seems like a relatively smart investment. Although I do have to say $1.1 billion seems a lot for a feature that I personally view as one of those like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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cool like off in the corner features of an iPhone it's great that they have it but it's not something hopefully that everybody uses every day I know they allow you to text from it now but like how it's really just for emergencies and for people who find themselves in an area without coverage and they still want to text people like that's what this is for
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So it is a boon for them to put it in their products, but it's not as strategic as say, you know, investing in someone to make silicon chips or like a new factory in Arizona that we might talk about in the future or whatever. So it is a lot of money, but I guess space equals a lot of money.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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They're never going to do that. They could charge you retroactively. But the thing is, these satellites, as amazing as they are, they're never going to be...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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a major part of data communications on phones because there's just not enough bandwidth right it's not like hey you won't need a cell provider you'll do everything over satellite i don't think the global star satellite network even with this 1.1 billion dollar investment has any hope of becoming like a replacement for the cell network that now apple doesn't need carriers because they do everything through satellite setting aside the speed of light delays and all that other stuff or whatever
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So what I'm saying is this is an investment purely for the types of things they're currently doing. There's no future scenario where this has some amazing new use that we're not even thinking of. It's never going to be high bandwidth.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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low latency like it's not gonna they're not gonna stream apple tv over to everybody's phones like that's just not gonna happen this is purely for uh you know when you absolutely need to connect and there's no other option outer space right and that is a very it's a great use case and it's an important one and it adds value to their products but it is never going to replace any existing thing they do so maybe 1.1 billion is just pocket change from apple so maybe it's not a big deal but uh
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And again, with them investing in the company, maybe Apple foresees other companies wanting to do the exact same type of thing, whether it's a car company or, you know, Android phone seller that also wants to have the same sort of SOS type capabilities, powered satellites. If Apple is a part owner in the company, they get a share of that profit as well. So maybe it's just a smart business move.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, there's just not enough of them. I mean, as many as there are there, and there are too many Starlink satellites, but as many as there are, there are far more cell phone towers in the United States and they're closer to you. Those cell phone towers are much closer to you and they're way, way more of them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Anyway, you will always just add time. The only difference is at the end of seven years, we won't continue your subscription. You don't have to do that manually. But anything less than seven years or whatever the ridiculous amount of time is, we will just add, we will just continue your subscription, your paying subscription after your gift subscription runs out. So yeah, gift membership.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Uh, so that is, it's going to be difficult to compete with that, with things that are flying over you in space.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So the Ming-Chi Kuo one, I don't know if throwing this aside about the 2025 one is like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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reinforcing a past rumor or how well sourced it is but the cheaper vision pro is what we talked about in the past that's why this is a change of rumored plans again this is all rumored but the plan that we heard about was oh they're not going to make another high-end one first they're going to concentrate on the cheaper one and the cheaper one should be coming and we talked about maybe like 1500 and how can they make it cheaper and blah blah blah and the cheaper one will be coming like next year or something right and now the rumors have changed say you know that cheaper one 2027
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So it's like, OK, well, if that was the only rumor when I first read this, I'm like, oh, that's not good. Because if the cheaper one is going to be the next one and the next one is going to be in 2027, that means we'd be stuck with the original Vision Pro until 2027 with no changes. That is grim. OK, but here comes this other rumor.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's like, and that means if the cheaper one is delayed to 2027, all we have is the 2025 version, which is basically today's Vision Pro upgraded to an M5. And that's not bad, honestly. Remember, the Vision Pro is M2. Upgraded to M5, maybe it'll have an R2 processor in there or something. Presumably with the same screens and probably around the same price or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But that is a better Vision Pro. The rumors are that it will be able to do Apple Intelligence because it will have more RAM. M5 is going to be massively better than the M2. Same resolution on the screens means it'll be breaking less of a sweat while doing all of its stuff. Maybe it'll even get better battery life. That's a... second version of the existing Vision Pro.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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The cheap one being delayed sounds real bad, but if they have the essentially upgraded Vision Pro in 2025... I think that does show basically the minimum expected level of commitment to the product. Again, ask Apple about the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. Apple's commitment to its various products sometimes wavers, but not having another Vision Pro product to 2027 is just untenable.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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People would forget that it exists, right? And of course, they'd be selling the M2 model for $3,500 until 2027, which is ridiculous because by then, like the Apple Pencil would have more CPU power. But yeah, an M5 version in 2025 actually doesn't sound that bad to me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, I mean, I think it's just what you have to do for the people who already want a Vision Pro to not feel like they should, to not be repelled by the fact that it still has an M2 in it, right? You want it to get better, you know, on some reasonable schedule. And so this is sort of just, think of it this way. It's just maintaining the existing product. It's not making a new Vision Pro.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's not making a Vision Pro successor. It's just like, hey, the existing Vision Pro, every once in a while we do need to update these things because they get old.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And pushing the cheap one out to 2027, to me, basically reads like they couldn't figure out how to make a cheaper one in 2025. We talked about where are they going to get that cost from? What components are they going to remove and scale down? And you can rip out the eyeballs in the front, make the case out of plastic, try to put a cheaper SOC in there, but like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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those screens, if those screens don't get cheaper and Apple has limited control over that, there's not a lot of components you can totally remove and not a lot of ones that get cheaper. So I think they just did the math and said, we can't actually make
Accidental Tech Podcast
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a substantially cheaper vision pro even though they i'm sure they want to because again if you're gonna if you're gonna move the needle at all this market you have to do something and one of the things is make it way way cheaper and maybe they just said we we can't do it or we could make it you know if i make it three thousand dollars and thirty five hundred who cares like that's that doesn't do anything so hopefully in 2027 they think they have promises from their part suppliers that will be able to get you screens that are good that are half the price of the current screens and you'll get rid of the front facing eyeball screen and
Accidental Tech Podcast
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you'll put an m5 processor in 2027 which will be plenty fast but it'll be like a two-year-old chip by then like i think that's what that rumor means and then german's rumor about glasses that offload their stuff to the phone yada yada like that will obviously happen eventually but i have trouble seeing how unless apple is just going to like throw another like dart at the dartboard and say hey people sell products like this like the x real ones where it's just glasses and it's just like another way to have a screen why don't we try that
Accidental Tech Podcast
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sure you can i guess but like that's not even in the vision pro family is it because that's just basically like screen on face that thing's not going to be watching your fingers for tapping and and doing all it's like it's not it's not a vision pro it is a way to look at movies on your on the plane in glasses that are smaller and lighter and cheaper and i don't i mean i haven't actually ever tried any of those products i've seen lots of reviews of them the things that are
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Glasses with usually cheap, not very good-looking screens inside of them, but it's certainly a way lighter weight way to look at a movie on a plane, for example, than strapping on a gigantic Vision Pro headset. They don't look like glasses glasses, but they look like... dorky big computer. They're kind of like, remember those things you had, Marco, like the Bose? Yeah, the audio sunglasses.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Yeah, they're bigger than that, but not much bigger. Nothing compared to a Vision Pro, and they're way cheaper, and they look worse, and it's like, okay, that's a product that exists. Seriously considering, though, this is a German rubber, so I can't totally dismiss it because he's usually got pretty good sources, but... I don't know how Apple would try to sell that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's like, hey, we make this Vision Pro thing that does all sorts of amazing stuff, but nobody wants it because it's too expensive. Do you want a worse experience and lightweight glasses?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So the tech's just not there yet. I mean, I feel like the things like X-Real and stuff are kind of like, let's meet, let's take this product and meet the tech where it's at today. And, you know, is the tech there to do something with the Abolition Pro? Not at a reasonable price and a comfortable thing. So what can we do with today's tech?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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that makes a product that is actually somewhat attractive and useful. So cut out everything you can't do well and just, you know, oh, I just want to watch movies on a plane and I don't want to do it on a laptop, right? So that's where you get these glasses. And I'm not sure if that product is super successful, but it is really cutting down and saying, we'd prefer to do much more, but we can't.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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We literally can't. The tech is not there. And no matter how much money you spend, it just gets bigger and bulkier, heavier, and it's not like the balance is off. So where is the sweet spot with current tech? It's kind of like Palm OS versus the Newton, right? Palm was worse, right? But the Newton was too big, too expensive, too heavy. It did so much more than Palm. This OS was so much better.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Didn't matter. It wasn't as good a product. So the X-Reel, I feel like, is trying to find that type thing. But with Apple investigating this, unlike with the Apple Watch, where they're like, oh, we introduced this product. It's basically like a little tiny iPhone. And it can do all these things. And then they found out the things that people want to use it for.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But the platform didn't really have to change radically. It was still called Apple Watch. It still ran WatchOS. Obviously, they changed WatchKit to whatever the successor was. But, like, in general, you could still call it Apple Watch, and it was fine, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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With them coming out with something like this, like the XREAL thing, which doesn't watch where your hands are, doesn't track your eyeballs, doesn't let you use your virtual Mac, like, is that even the Vision Pro platform? Does it even run VisionOS? Yeah. Can you sell that as a vision with no pro suffix? Or can you say, actually, this is the Apple Studio Display eyeball? Is it just a display?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I know, but that's what I'm saying. Would they even try to connect it branding-wise and computing-wise? Would it even run apps? Or would it just be a screen? I'm not going to say when you get it so wrong like they did with the Vision Pro, but if you decide... let's try a different Avenue. And then Avenue is sufficiently different from the one you tried before.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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You do have that question of like, wait, are we rolling out a new platform? Like, is this, is this a new platform? Are we going to try to say that this is the same platform? They kind of did that with like the, the home accessories. Granted, they have no screens and people don't really know it's running audio OS or running a variant of TV OS or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It's kind of hidden, but like they had that same thing as, and then we'll see when they do with the, the home device that is room with the screen. Like it's, is that a new platform? Are we going to just pretend that's the same platform as the HomePod and the HomePod mini, even though that platform has changed a lot under the covers? Like the thing with the screen, what platform is that?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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What app does it run? Like with the whole backdoor of like, It's not really another platform. It's just a thing that runs iPad and or iPhone apps, right? Like Macs run iPad apps. Vision Pro runs iPad apps. Is the Mac and the Vision Pro an iPad? No, but that's the way for us to take a platform that actually has apps for it and shove it onto other platforms that don't, right? It's so weird.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So this, I mean, this is just a rumor. They're considering it or whatever, but like... That'd be the thing I'd be watching for here.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Not so much the product that they roll out, because, again, there's a bunch of existing products on the market like this, and I don't think they're setting the market on fire, but they are certainly cheap enough for someone to buy as, like, just an impulse purchase for, like, a toy, and people seem to like them, and they're cool. Is it better than watching a movie on your laptop on the plane?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I kind of like watching video on my OLED iPad. A cheap pair of glasses is honestly not going to have the image quality. as my very expensive OLED iPad does. But then again, it's private and it's smaller than an iPad and it stays with me wherever I look.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So it does have some advantages, but I think Apple is going to, if they pursue this, they're going to have some very difficult decisions to make about what exactly they're doing. And the thing I suggested before of saying, this isn't a platform, this is a monitor. That is kind of like sidestepping it all and just saying like, look, it's a monitor. We'll update it every six years.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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It comes with an A13 inside it. It runs a variant of iOS, but basically it's just a really cool screen that goes on your face. It's no power button. Yeah, exactly. And that is saying we are not ready to do AR, but we are ready to put screens in your eyeballs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Or the right approach for this time. The right approach for this time and for this current state of technology. I think Apple should continue to pursue the high end because that's how you eventually get to the good version of that. But it's too expensive now. So what can you do with existing tech? What is the Palm Pilot version of this?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Again, with this rumor, another thing leaning in the direction of it being more like a monitor is they're basically saying offload computing to the phone. But you don't want your phone doing that much heavy lifting in service of projecting an image onto your glasses, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But if you just ask it to project video, if you're watching a TV show or a movie or a YouTube video, well, there's hardware decoding for the video, and that is actually one of the lighter things that your phone can do. It doesn't have to show the video on its screen, so it's saving on battery life on not lighting up its screen, right? It's using the battery that's in your glasses.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But it's doing networking. It's downloading the video, or if it's already downloaded, it's streaming it off the SSD. It's decoding the compressed video. It's sending the image, right? Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Anything more than that, where you're asking the phone to like track objects in 3D space and do stuff like the Vision Pro does to make like a stable floating window in front of you, your phone battery is going to get slaughtered. I mean, hell, the Vision Pro with a huge battery that's bigger than the iPhone itself, two hours battery life.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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No one is going to want to sacrifice their phone battery life. That's what I was saying with the Orion glasses where it's a separate puck or whatever. It'll be that way for a while yet because what we ask these glasses to do in the sort of maximal Orion or Vision Pro type feature set,
Accidental Tech Podcast
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is just too computationally expensive it will burn your phone's battery and no one wants to spend their battery on that but if it's just watching video i think people would people for first of all we know people will use their phone battery for that because they literally watch movies on their phone on the plane and that's lighting up the screen and sometimes they're using the phone speaker which blows my mind because you cannot hear anything on planes but anyway people do it you hear them on the on the the subway they've got their phones they're blaring audio they're watching video it's rude but it also kills their phone battery but they do it that's what they want to use their phone battery for
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But yeah, a glasses device that uses the phone for compute, I think the correct balance would be, hey, phone, all you got to do is networking and video decoding, and then you just project to me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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That's like a phone accessory. That's like an attachment to your phone sales. And by the way, with the Apple Watch SE example, that's kind of an example of what I imagine Apple's currently planning to do with the big expensive Vision Pro, because today's Apple Watch SE is massively more powerful than the original Apple Watch, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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What they basically did was, let's just keep making Apple Watches until we can make a cheap one that is actually way more powerful than the first one that we rolled out, just due to the advance of technology that Screens are better. The battery life is better. It's thinner. It's lighter. Like they just waited many, many, many years.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And lo and behold, we have an Apple Watch SE that didn't have to go like the ex-real rumored route of saying like, we got to make a cut down version of it. It's got to compete with Fitbit. They're like, no, we'll just keep making Apple Watches. We'll just keep plugging away. An Apple Watch is an Apple Watch. There's no platform bifurcation. There's no limited version. It does certain stuff.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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We'll just patiently sit here because, as Marco pointed out, the first one wasn't, with the exception of the gold one, thousands of dollars, right? The first one was in the ballpark price-wise. And they just did like they did with the iPhone. Mature the product. Start diversifying the product line. Eventually, you can make a pretty good Apple Watch for cheaper and just keep iterating on that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And lo and behold, the Apple Watch SE now would have been amazing if you had taken it back in time to the original Apple Watch introduction. I think Apple would love to do that with Vision Pro. They're just... many years away from getting there. But in the meantime, the Vision Pro is so much farther away from the bullseye than the Apple Watch was, I can imagine them considering things like this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Again, this is just a vague rumor that Apple is seriously considering it. And Apple was so slowly, even if they did roll it out, I'm not sure how they'd do it. But when I pictured it in my head, I pictured it as an iPhone accessory That is essentially a monitor that only has enough smarts to communicate with a thing that is rendering the video. And that's basically all I use it for.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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And for that purpose, Casey, when you're like, oh, I want to play and I want to take out my Vision Pro from my giant backpack and put it on and be that guy. Even if the video quality, the image quality wasn't quite as good as a Vision Pro.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I think you might prefer these little monitor for your phone things to watch a movie on a plane simply because they're so much smaller and lighter and the thing itself would be cheaper. And you just, you know, if the image quality isn't quite as good, that's fine. It's still better than watching on your tiny phone screen on a tray table.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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We didn't talk about it last time, but it's in the front, which is interesting. So here's the thing about the headphone jack. I don't think there's any perfect place to put the headphone jack on a computer the size of the Mac Mini. Because you can make an argument for the front. You can make an argument for the back. You can probably make an argument for the side.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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I bet somebody can make an argument for the top because that thing is so little. You can put it in so many different places. It's, you know, people who want a clean setup, but they don't want to see that wire. They'd rather have the wire going from the back and underneath the desk and, I don't know, snaking up through some other thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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People want it on the front because they're constantly plugging and unplugging it. People want it on the top because the Mac Mini is on a little thing next to them and they have good, easy access to the top.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Uh, if it's underneath your desk, all the, this changes, but so they had to pick somewhere to put it and they pick the front, which is so much more defensible sort of front and top are so much more defensible on a giant tower computer because it's just so hard to reach around the back of a giant tower computer, especially, you know, like it's, but the mini is so small, it could be literally anywhere on anybody's desk.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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So I kind of feel for Apple in choosing the placement. Uh, but anyway, they chose the front and I don't think you'll see a lot of pictures in Apple's PR photography, uh, showing a wire connection to the Mac Mini anywhere in the front, let alone a headphone wire connected to the front. But there it is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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People like the back, too, because they don't want to see the wire. Well, it depends what you're plugging into it. You're right. So you don't see the wire. It's like, I never unplug it. I just want something plugged in the back. Like, say you have it hooked up to some other, like, bigger, more complicated piece of audio equipment than just headphones. It's like, I don't want to see that wire.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Like, imagine if, I don't know, you explained to me they have, like, headphone amps or something. I don't even know what...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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Uh, for anyone who's listening to this, who is, uh, on the opposite side of us and somehow managed to make it this point, uh, congratulations on your hate listening. Um,
Accidental Tech Podcast
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No, they just want to hear the rest of the things we say so they know exactly how much they should hate us. But, like, I bet one of the things you're thinking is, like, this is so overblown. Oh, you're so sad because your team lost the Super Bowl. Who cares? Like, get over it. Oh, you're depressed. That's ridiculous. Like, what's the big deal? To try to explain, like...
Accidental Tech Podcast
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You know, we're saying our real feelings here, but you may think our feelings are ridiculous. But to try to explain why this is different, like I'm old enough to have lived through the election of many presidents that I didn't want to win the election. Right. I've lived through many Republicans. I didn't want any of them to win. They did. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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kind of things you can connect to that jack but if it's something permanently connected and it's not your headphones like it connects to some other box that connects to a thing that connects to your headphones or connects to big speakers you wouldn't want that connected to the front because now you got to like immediately turn the wire around and have it go backwards like it's just so dependent on what your setup is what you're going to have plugged in there and how often you're going to plug and unplug it but
Accidental Tech Podcast
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None of them felt like Trump, you know, term one and term two. And there's a reason for that. Like this, this is different. All the people, all the people in your life, you see like, oh, you're so sad about the present election. Get over it. Why is it a big deal? Why are you so sad about this? This is worse than it has been in my lifetime for presidential elections.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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When George W. Bush was elected twice. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe he was elected the first time. I couldn't believe he was elected the second time. Why are we doing this again? Are you kidding? We learned nothing, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
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But it was not as bad as this because George W. Bush, for all his faults, and there are many, and for all the terrible things his administration did, and there are many, had sort of minimum baseline level of humanity and at least an attempt to pretend to care about the duties of the presidency and the people who live in the country. And the whole thing with Trump has been like, there is no floor.
Accidental Tech Podcast
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He doesn't know anything. He doesn't want to know anything. He doesn't care about anything. It's like trying to decide who's going to fly your plane and like, I don't care if this person knows or cares anything about planes, knows what a plane is, has ever flown anything before, cares about any of the people on the plane, doesn't actively want to kill everybody on the plane.
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None of that matters, right? Trump is just like the bottom. Like, I can think of worse people to be president, but it's hard. And it's below the baseline. And so for people on our side, when we see him elected not once but twice, we think, you know, how many millions of our fellow Americans think this is acceptable? And we're sad about that.
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Yes, obviously we're sad about all the people who are going to be hurt and, you know, and killed and have terrible things happen to them under his administration. But a big component of the sadness of both elections is all of us thinking we're in this country with these millions and millions of people who think this is acceptable for the presidency. Right. Like that. It's it's not a good feeling.
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Can you imagine if you are on the other side of this? If the Democrats elected somebody who said we should kill all puppies, there was a big thing on that platform. We should totally kill all puppies. And that person was a, you know, had murdered their wives and was convicted, but got off on a technicality. So, you know, the murderer and he said we should kill all puppies.
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He's not actually killing all puppies, but he thinks we should kill all of them. And we elected him president. Wouldn't you be sad thinking millions and millions of people think it's OK that the person who wants to kill puppies and killed his wife should be president? You'd be like, really? The puppy killing guy?
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Like, I know he hasn't actually killed any puppies yet, but he said he wants to and he's going to really try to. That's okay. And we were like, well, but forget about the puppy killing. We'd like the other parts, but like, wouldn't you be sad thinking that so many of your fellow citizens think that's okay. And I was ridiculous.
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Like, Oh, Trump doesn't want to kill puppies or whatever, but like, it's the same type of deal. Like there's just a minimum level of care and humanity and, and knowledge that Trump does not pass. And it's hard living in a world where you think that's okay for a lot of other people. It's hard thinking all the bad things that he says are okay.
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Like you can say, well, I don't believe in all the things he says. I just like him and I just ignore all the bad stuff. But like at a certain point, knowing that your fellow citizens are on board with all that, not on board with it being done, but on board with saying the guy who says all that, he's my guy. I don't think he's ever going to do that stuff, but the guy who says all that, he's my guy.
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That's a sad feeling. A sad feeling to know your fellow humans, forget about citizens, your fellow humans think this is good. And knowing that you're in the same country with them, subject to the same laws, under the same government... And you have to deal with the consequences of their vote. And again, that happens all the time. Sometimes your person doesn't win.
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Then's the break. I guess if you don't like it, you can get one of, you know, USB audio connection and use one of the back USB ports. So you have options, but it's difficult to choose where to put the ports. And I just think it was interesting for Apple for so long, really not pretty against ports on the front of their computers.
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I did not feel like this when George W. Bush won, when George H.W. Bush won, when Reagan won. I was always young then, right? It didn't feel like this at all. This feels different. This feels worse because it is worse. That's why some people in your life are really sad right now. Maybe they're special snowflakes and they should just get over it and not be sad or whatever, but it is worse.
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We feel worse. So I, whatever I posted this morning, I'm asked on like national sex, say your stomach day. I didn't feel like this in any other presidential election when, quote unquote, my person didn't win. This is different. This is worse. And, you know, we know what we're in for and it's going to be bad.
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And I feel like the, you know, if you look at all, if you study history and see what it takes for a governing system to be sort of broken apart and broken down so that what was once sort of a functioning society that tried to raise the standard of living for everybody and do better over time becomes the domain of dictators and warlords. And I mean, it happens all the time throughout history.
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Like how, how did these societies end up in a situation where there's like one super powerful person who's like oppressing everybody and doing terrible things and everyone else is suffering? How do you end up at that situation?
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And the whole American experiment is to try to design a system where that's harder to do, but people are constantly trying to find a way to break down that system, to break away all the things that are keeping us from becoming like a lawless, becoming from Mad Max, right? Like just a warlord state, right? And we've made progress. If you look at like, you know...
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Casey's reading the power broker and learn all about, uh, as a side effect, Tammany hall and all like the, the political corruption machines where politics was just a way of like, it was basically like street gangs essentially. And when you got elected, you gave money and jobs to the people who supported you and like, you know, graft and, and bribery. Like that was, that was, was the system.
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And that was a bad system. And we had reformers who said, hey, this is no way to run a government because it lets like the people who are loyal to the political machine. It was like organized crime essentially, but that was the system of government. That's bad because the citizens suffer and it's the same reason having organized crime families battle each other is bad.
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Even if they're not killing each other in the street, they're hogging all the money and good stuff for a small number of people and everyone else suffers. Let's reform the system. Let's add laws and ethics and try to have a different way of governing ourselves. It doesn't involve patronage and graft. And that took years and years of reformers battling to try to make our system better.
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Now, even the tiny Mac mini has not just the headphone port, but other ports in the front of it as well. The Mac studio has an SD card slot in the front of it, plus ports. It's a brave new world.
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That's the example off the top of my head because I'm listening to the Power Broker podcast too and I've read the book several times. But that's history, not just in America, but over the entire world. It's difficult to make a governing system better. that is resistant to people chipping it away.
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And if you don't constantly resist that, you end up with a small number of very wealthy, very powerful people living really great lives and everyone else suffering. And... The American system is currently in a regression where we had all these things that we're trying to be sort of bulwarks against that terrible thing happening that are being eaten away slowly but surely.
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Citizens United, all the Supreme Court justices letting the president do whatever he wants as long as it's part of his official duties, reversing Roe v. Wade, like... You know, installing judges who are loyal to Trump instead of the law. Like, all the checks and balances that we had are being chipped away in service of bringing us back to essentially Mad Max and Warlords.
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Which, by the way, is not a good system of government for the general citizen. Right? It's that whole... thought experiment of like, pick a time in history that you want to travel. You have a time machine. You can travel back in time to any point in history. Pick a time in history. The only wrinkle is you don't get to pick what role you have in that society when you land in it.
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So you say, I want to go back to Roman times and I'll be like Caesar. It's like, oh no, you don't get to pick to be Caesar. You are just like a Roman slave. Now do you want to go back to the Roman times? Everyone wants to be in whatever time in history they glorify, assuming they'll be at the top of the hierarchy, right?
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An actual good functioning society is one where you would say, yes, I do want to travel in time to that society, and you can randomly place me anywhere in that society, and I'll be fine because there is not an underclass that is trod upon by the upper class. And in America, we are unfortunately going in the other direction where we are.
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chipping away the institutions that try to make life better for everybody in service of making life better for a small number of people while everyone else suffers. And part of that is convincing most of the population to vote for you to do that by feeding them information that makes them think that what they're doing is in their own interest when it really isn't.
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And we will obviously disagree on that, but every time I even think about the idea of, like,
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talking to somebody and trying to convince them of my political position i think of like the the uh the concept of trying to you know speaking of going back in time i'm gonna go back in time to the 1800s or uh in america and trying to convince somebody that women should have the right to vote i don't think like i if you really want to understand like another depressing uh thing that uh people are upset about um
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Like, do you think you could go and convince somebody that women should have the right to vote in the 1800s? How difficult would that be? Presumably you believe it. You're a modern person. You're like, of course women should have the right to vote. It's stupid, right? Now go back in time to the 1800s and try to convince literally one person that that should be true.
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And everything you say, they will have a comeback to, and it will just, your brain will explode. You're like, but, but, and they'll be like, it's ridiculous. Women should vote. What's next? Dogs voting? Doesn't make any sense, right? That's how a lot of us feel trying to say maybe don't vote for Trump. But people did it.
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And trying to convince them makes my brain explode in the same way that trying to convince someone in the 1800s that women should vote would explode. There's nothing you can say to convince them. They have a completely sealed, completely logical, completely sensible, functioning, like Margo said, worldview that does not include the idea of women voting.
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It took, you know, decades and decades of people fighting for it for us to finally get that done. And these days, I often think that we would never get a constitutional amendment to give rights to a minority group just because our current system of government has been so degraded that that will literally never happen because as long as one side doesn't like it, it's never going to happen.
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Anyway, I've rambled on too long. I just wanted to explain, try to explain to the three people still listening, why people you know might be sad in a way that doesn't make sense to you and seems dumb. I understand why it seems dumb, but I want you to know that It's not just people overreacting or being overly dramatic.
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For those of us on this side of the aisle, the two Trump elections feel different. I think they should feel different to any other human being. And I think across the globe, they do feel different to most human beings, but not apparently for half of the voters in this country.
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Well, that's the Apple TV problem, and I bet it's true of the Mac Mini, too. If you connect cables to all the things in the back, power, a bunch of USB, Ethernet, those cables, the force on those cables, the stiffness of those cables, already may be, like, tilting your entire Mac Mini, like, on an angle off of the surface. Yeah. Or, like, pulling it to the side.
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You try to align it so it's, like, parallel to the side of your desk, and you let go, and it just slides another two degrees because the cables are too stiff. Yeah.
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cable like it's so small compared to the strength i have the same problem with apple tv pucks like sometimes you can find a place in your entertainment center where it sits just fine but sometimes it just wants to move because i mean hdmi if you have hdmi and you've got really thick hdmi cable uh it's a problem uh i don't know maybe you can just everyone every uh mac mini should come with like a custom made exactly the same uh proportions as the top of the case like tungsten slab that you can just put on top probably not good for cooling though no
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Everyone was just waiting for them to turn it on. Then they released a chart saying, AVIF handily beats JXL and removes support. And we'll put a link to the chart in the show notes. The entire web responded, saying, in fact, the chart showed the exact opposite. In everything above quality 55, which is where the vast majority of images saved are, JPEG XL handily beat AVIF at every point.
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In fact, JPEG XL isn't optimized at those low quality levels because it's not really usable. The Google team that works on JPEG XL is in Europe, and the team that works on Chrome is in California. Well, either way, from the Chromium bug tracker, request, reopen JPEG XL issue. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. You may already be receiving images in this format without even realizing it.
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Major cloud delivery services already offer JPEG XL as an option to browsers that support it. One cool feature of the default JPEG XL encoder, CJXL, is that you can get to select an effort level from 1 to 10. If time isn't a critical factor, the encoder can spend more time optimizing file size. If not, you can compress them as fast as JPEG at the expense of some size.
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Here's a beta version of a tool we developed for the upcoming JPEG XL website that shows the relationship between distance, effort, quality, and encoding speed.
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90% of the children at risk of developing cancer live in low- and middle-income countries. That is unacceptable to St. Jude, and you know what? It's unacceptable to us. So that's why St. Jude launched St. Jude Global. That way, every child with cancer, no matter where they live, and also other catastrophic diseases, by the way, they have access to quality care and treatment. So when I was at St.
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Moving along, we need to talk about the FTC's non-compete agreements ban, which, if you recall, the FTC, Federal Trade Commission, said here in America, hey, you can't have non-competes anymore. That's not fair. To which a federal judge said, hold my beer. Reading from The Verge,
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A federal judge has blocked the Federal Trade Commission's ban on non-compete agreements that make it difficult for workers to join their employers' rivals or launch competing businesses. The ruling prevents the FTC's ban on non-compete agreements from taking effect on September 4th, which is today, though the agency could still appeal the decision. On August 20th, U.S.
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District Judge Ada Brown in Dallas, Texas, ruled that the antitrust agency exceeded its statutory authority to ban practices related to unfair methods of competition, saying the non-compete agreements ban is, quote, unreasonably overbroad without a reasonable explanation, quote, and would, quote, cause irreparable harm, quote. To whom, Judge Brown, to whom? I love that.
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It would make us harder to retain talent if we couldn't legally handcuff our employees by telling them they can't get a job at the same industry for some arbitrary amount of time. Get out of here with that nonsense.
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It's so gross. I dislike it so very much. Moving along, though, apparently more governments would also like in on pooping on the App Store because Spain has launched an investigation to Apple's App Store. This was in July.
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Jude in April, for the PlayLive Summit, they brought several different people on stage, and some of them were survivors and St.
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Reading from MacRumors, the National Commission of Markets and Competition, the CNMC, this week announced a probe into the App Store, citing concerns that the company might be imposing unfair trading conditions on developers who distribute their applications to the platform. The investigation was initiated ex officio, reflecting the significant economic influence of app stores in Spain.
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Apple's practices could constitute an abuse of a dominant position, which is prohibited under Spanish competition laws and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, TFEU. Additionally, India has an antitrust probe which finds Apple has abused its position in the apps market.
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Reading from Reuters, an investigation by India's antitrust body has found that Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system, engaging in, quote, abusive conduct and practices, quote, a confidential report seen by Reuters showed.
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The Competition Commission of India, or CCI, has been investigating Apple since 2021 for possibly abusing its dominant position in the apps market by forcing developers to use its proprietary in-app purchase system. And then going for the trifecta, the UK has entered the chat.
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Reading from 9to5Mac, a UK antitrust investigation into Apple is officially closed, despite finding the company to be at fault after the regulator missed a legal deadline. Whoopsie-dipsies. However, a case seems almost certain to be reopened under an upcoming law,
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Jude patients, some of them were family members, and the number of stories that we saw, actually not just on stage, but just in general with the people we met, the number of stories we saw where it was something along the lines of, I am in some foreign country, I have done everything that my country knows how to do with regard to either my cancer or my child's cancer or my brother's cancer,
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So it is time for everyone's favorite tradition, which was a genuinely excellent idea that Marco came up with a few years back. This is the iPhone 15 exit interview. Marco, would you like to introduce this?
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and we were at wit's end. I mean, we were basically given a death sentence, and then somebody thought, you know, let's call St. Jude. Let's see what happens. And the number of stories that, you know, there's all these different ways these stories started that somehow or another involved really dire circumstances, but every single one of them ended with, we called St.
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Aaron did get a 15 Pro, not a Pro Max. So I've used it some, obviously not as much as she, in the same way that John has used Tina's some. But you are the only one of the three of us that has actually used it full time.
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Jude, and within hours, within hours, we had plane tickets to go to Memphis, Tennessee, and they didn't have to pay for it at all, because St. Jude pays for it all. So in order for St. Jude to pay for all these things, we ask for you to donate whatever you can.
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Yeah, just to jump in really quickly, like Marco said, I knew this was going to be an improvement for sure. I didn't realize how vast an improvement it was going to be. It is so empowering. It's a bit dramatic, I think, but I can't think of a better word for it at the moment. It's so empowering to look at any of my devices, asterisk, And any cable I have nearby and say, yep, that'll work.
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And maybe it won't be as quick as I want, be that data or power. But one way or another, anything can charge anything. Just the other day, on one of the final pool days we had before our little community pool had closed, a friend of ours came and she has an iPhone 15 Pro. I guess as well. Yeah.
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Cause it's USB-C anyways, she has an iPhone 15 pro and it was near death because she had forgotten to charge it the night before. And I didn't have a charger with me, but I had my fully charged iPad with me and I had a USB-C cable in the car and I, said, hold on, I know what I'll do. And I went and I grabbed my USB-C to C cable from the car, plugged iPhone into her iPhone.
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And sure enough, she slurped her phone, slurped up some of the charge from my iPad, which was totally fine. Having anything, being able to charge anything, again, asterisk, et cetera, et cetera, is so great. And to your point, Marco, not having to carry 44 different cables is so nice. It's just, it's so wonderful to not have to care if the thing I need to be charged is the computer, is the
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And actually live on air in just a minute, we will have my favorite and least favorite moment of the year when I somehow ruin my donation and it becomes a joke for the next year. So we're going to do that in a minute. But hey, there's one other reason you might want to donate or one other excuse perhaps to donate, one other justification for donation. And I like to call it the Marco Offset.
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Yeah, John is very unwell. And I didn't find this out, or we didn't find this out until, I don't know, two minutes ago. So if this episode is only 15 minutes long, it's because we're taking pity on our good friend. And if it's hugely long, then it's like every time I feel unwell. So we'll see what happens. It is September, which means it's Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
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I use mine for camera. And I know that many would call that a kind of a novice or noob approach because there are many other ways to get to your camera, most of which are fairly quick. But I don't want to have to think about it or have to worry about swiping in just the right way that it actually listens to me and swipes the way I want it to go from the lock screen.
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And so for me, I love having the camera as my action button action. And I use that at least daily. I don't personally think I would use the flashlight quite as much, but hey, that doesn't mean you're wrong at all. If it works for you, that's all that matters.
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I don't know that I would be lost or anything without having the action button, you know, in a future phone if for some reason it went away, but I definitely would miss having it for sure. And maybe one day I'll use it for something more advanced. But yeah, I think the action button also gets a thumbs up from me for sure.
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I feel like I didn't pronounce any of that with all the letters and the words, but here we go. We're doing it live. So I'm going to vamp while I pull up the official ad read and tell you that, hey, there are a lot of children that are unwell, and that's not okay. And a lot of them have some flavor of cancer, and that is also not okay.
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You know, it's funny you bring all this up because I do agree that throttling is an issue and that the thermals are not stellar. But I would actually say, to my estimation, this was a mild improvement over past years. And, you know, when I'm using my phone at the aforementioned pool... I think it was the 14 Pro. Maybe it was the 13 Pro, but I want to say it was the 14 Pro.
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That bad boy was so dark, I could barely read it pretty much always. Whereas this one, it definitely gets dim, and noticeably so. But I feel like not only would it recover quicker, but it didn't get as dim as either the 13 or the 14. So while I don't disagree that we do... I think we do need improvements, and I hope for improvements...
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I actually thought that this was a slight improvement over years past, although not a great one.
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It doesn't feel like that's the case, but you very well could be right.
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I slightly disagree with you there. It is just gray, but I do think it's a cool gray, like a neat gray. But I do mostly agree with you. If you'll permit me to just carry on since I've already interrupted you. With regard to the 15 Pro Max, I don't hate the size. I don't hate the size. And I do like having a little more real estate.
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Um, it turns out that if you have a phone this big and your hands aren't freakishly large, a pop socket is pretty much compulsory. Um, I have been thinking long and hard about what I will do if the Tetra prism five X lens comes to the pro to the pro, but not pro max phone.
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So if the iPhone 16 pro gets the five X lens sitting here now, I think I'm going to go back to the smaller one with the, the, the human sized one.
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Right. And sitting here now, I think I was just a tourist, but I say that with little to no conviction. And the thing that frustrates me so about the big phone is that for my hands, for my body, it's really not a one-handed phone for anything more than swiping vertically. And even still, if I'm using one hand, I must have the pop socket out. And I actually have come around on the PopSocket.
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I don't think it's a bad thing at all. But I think in a perfect world, I would rather go back down to the standard size phone, presumably stop using a PopSocket. I mean, we'll see what happens. And being able to use my phone one-handed because it really is uncomfortable to use these giant phones one-handed. And And I just really dislike that. I miss being able to use my phone one-handed.
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And I think what would happen is I would get the smaller phone, if this is the way I go, I'll get the regular-sized phone, and I'll say, man... I do miss that screen, but oh boy, is it nice to be able to use my phone when handed again. And so I think ultimately that's going to win the day, but we'll see what happens now.
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Now that I've shown that I can show myself, that is that I can handle a big phone. If there is some sort of big phone only feature that I feel interested in, like compelled by, then I'll just stick with the big phone. Now the current rumors are that I don't think that's going to be the case because But if it is, I don't think I would begrudge, for lack of a better word, getting another big phone.
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But sitting here today, I don't think that's what I want to do. That being said, the 5X lens, I am very glad that I went for it and that I got it. There are definitely times that I want to be between 2 and 5 for sure. And I think, Marco, you were... not whining about this, that's not the word I'm looking for either, but you were concerned about this before it came out.
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And I think it's a valid concern. There are definitely times that I want an in-between. And in a perfect world, I would want one half, one, two, three, and five. And I know that's nuts and that's not going to happen, but that would be excellent. But I stand by getting the big phone for the 5X lens.
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I really do feel like it gives me reach in scenarios that I wouldn't have gotten nearly as good a shot otherwise. And I don't want to give that up. So if for some reason the regular size phone doesn't get the Tetra Prism lens, I will almost certainly stick with the big phone.
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Having never had a big phone before, a lot of people would say that, oh, the battery life is infinite, not unlike the Apple Watch Ultra. You know, battery life is forever. It's amazing. No, or at least not in my experience. I don't feel like it's demonstrably better than the regular size phones. Maybe I'm using my phone more now. Maybe I'm a banana. Maybe I'm off my rocker. I don't know.
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But I don't feel like the battery life was night and day better. I really don't. But I do think, to echo what Marco said, the USB-C, four thumbs up from me. The titanium, two thumbs up. I do think that the natural titanium is a good color, but I concur that the rest of the colors stink and it looks like they're only going to get worse.
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But yeah, I mean, all in all, I really do like these phones a lot. I really have enjoyed it. The one thing I will say, and I will say again, and I've said this for the last several years, the front screen is too easily scratched. I scratched the snot out of this thing. I have no idea how.
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It's so badly scratched that I am genuinely thinking I might become one of those lunatics that puts a screen protector on their phone because this thing is scratched to hell. And I hate that. I hate it. And normally, I would just go to Apple and use my AppleCare repair incident, and I'll probably try to do it to see if they'll do it.
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Yep. So here's the thing. When we rally for a common cause, we become more than a community. We become beacons of hope for all. Yes, that is a little bit silly, but it's true. It's really true. So please join Relay and ATP and donate to St. Jude this September for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. You can go to
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But last time I tried this, they were like, oh, it's not damaged enough tough nuts. And I'm just barely honest enough that I don't just throw the thing on the ground in front of them and say, how about now?
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I'm saying. I didn't do that last year. I don't plan on doing it this year. But it is very tempting.
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Yeah, I genuinely don't know. And these are not small scratches. Like one of them is semi-horizontally. That's what I'm saying.
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No, I don't. It's got to be me. I'm not saying it's not my fault, but darned if I know what it was. And I've been rolling mostly caseless this year because I never really found a case I loved. I adored, what was it, the peel case? I think we talked about this when it was new. I adored the peel case, but they had a cutout for the action button, which I could not abide.
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And to the best of my knowledge, they never revised it. What was the one that they sent out?
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Yeah, and I have nothing against the Peak Design case.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I really loved the peel case so very much, but I could not abide the lack of anything for the action button. But I will say, in the defense of the glass, and actually David Schaub in the chat just reminded me of this, I have dropped this thing case-free a handful of times, not dramatically, but a handful of times in situations where I was like, oh, here we go.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Oh, well, at least I'll get a new screen now. But I've dropped it by accident a handful of times, and it's been no worse for wear, which I do appreciate. But golly, can I please have a less scratch-prone screen? And I think
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
stjude.org slash ATP to just go straight to the donation area, which is what we're about to do, the three of us. Or if you want more information or if you perhaps want to start your own campaign, you can go to stjude.org slash relay. So S-T-J-U-D-E dot O-R-G slash A-T-P to just go straight to the donation. So now the three of us are going to do our annual donations. And here's the thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I mean, I am glad it's shatter-resistant for sure. And I do think you're right that this is a problem I can fix with a screen protector. And I think the more I think about it and the more I talk about it, the more I think I am probably going to not have to, but choose to do that for the next one. So if you have a screen protector recommendation that you swear by, please reach out via Mastodon.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Don't email us because it's too much to email, please. But I would love to hear from Mastodon or Threads for that matter, a screen protector that you enjoy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I mean, you're not wrong. But, well, this is a problem for Casey in a week or two. It's not a problem for Casey today. But yeah, in the grand scheme of things, I really enjoyed this phone, and for no other reason, I think I would be all in because of USB-C, and everything else was just a bonus.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
We always say we're going to do the gentlemanly thing of agreeing on exactly how much we're going to donate. And I believe, as with past years, we had agreed on $7,000. But we can never do that because we're all just difficult. So the question is... who is going to be the winner by donating the most, but also sticking to the gentlemanly agreement of $7,000.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
So in past years, I should have looked this up. In past years, I think I've done $7,001 or $7,001. I feel like... That isn't enough. But I want to stick close to the $7,000. And so I am going to, as we speak, I'm going to say payment details. I'm going to see if I can Apple Pay this. And I'm not going to tell you quite yet exactly what I am going to do. I have to add an address. My mistake.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah, I mean, I have a Series 8, and so this is going to be a very expensive September for us because we're going watch and phone. We are on a two-year plan on watches and a one-year plan on phones. I feel like my complaints about the watch are the same as they ever were, which is to say the battery life is just straight-up trash at this point.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Well, that's the thing is I think a year worth of Apple Watch battery is fine in my personal experience. Two years, not so fine. And that's been a real bugbear for me to the point that between Marco's friendly brow beating and also my friend in Richmond, Brad, just got a like a month or two ago.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
got an apple watch ultra 2 or whatever the current one is and he will not shut up about how good the battery life is on this thing and at this point i think i am probably going to hold out until whenever the next ultra update is and if that's next week perfect that'd be preferred but if not i will try to hold out as long as i can and if i can't i'll probably just commit to the existing one but
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
So it's been so frustrating. And if I don't top off my watch at some point during the day, it will typically die sometime after dinner. And I'm just sick of it. I'm just over it. Now, also, part of this is also influenced by the fact that I have the little watch. I have the 40 millimeter, whatever the little one is.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah, I forget what it is now, or what it was in Series 8. But I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of always having to worry about my watch's battery life. And so next time, it's going to be an Ultra.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Before you move on, and if you'd rather table this for later, we certainly can, but I would also be curious to hear what the status is of Adam's Apple Watch. And I don't remember what generation that is, but we've been kicking around the idea of getting Declan one for an upcoming birthday. And I'd be curious to hear what your year or two on review is of that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
You're going to have to wait while I do that. But my thinking is... that I need to do just a little bit more. I'm hoping that's not a bad choice. And I probably shouldn't be telling you this while I'm on air because now Marco is probably just tripling his donation, which honestly I'm okay with.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
And so we are part of Relay and we're also partnering with Relay. We're partnering with ourselves. I don't know. Just go with it. So we, Relay, have raised over $3 million over the last five years, starting in 2019. Wow. It's bananas. It's absolutely bananas. And because of that, Relay is going to have their name put on like this... It's more than a plaque, but put on like this board in the St.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Oh, all right. I should look, but I'm not going to. I promise I'm not going to.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
That is true. I am going to be really annoyed, just in principle, if the hardware, at least, for the blood oxygen sensor is not on whatever these new watches are. I'll be lightly annoyed if it remains disabled, which I expect it to, but I'll be really annoyed if it's incapable, you know, if this patent dispute ever gets fixed, if it's incapable of doing any testing or measuring.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
All right. I'm hitting the Apple Pay button right now. Done. I donated $7,001.43 because 143 is short for I love you. One letter, four letters, three letters. And that's for Aaron. And so if we lost, it's really you being mean to Aaron is what's going on.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
All right, let's do at least a little bit of Ask ATP if we can. PG&E Delenda Est. I love people who provide these kooky usernames and no real names. Anyways, Marco, it's not even Halloween, for goodness sakes. Marco, how hard is it to maintain server compatibility with clients that are still going to be on the last iOS 16 or below builds of Overcast? Are you doing that thing?
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Oh my gosh. So the final donations from ATP, me and Aaron coming in last at $7,001.43. Then John Syracuse at $7,017 even. And then Marco and Tiff swooping in to take the lead, comfortably take the lead, I should add. Marco, how much did you two donate?
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Mark Robinson writes, when a podcast says follow us on Apple Podcasts, it really helps the show. Does listening through Overcast do that as well? Does Apple register that follow in a way that counts and helps the show? Also, how does it actually help the show?
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah, this is awfully large inflation. I mean, this is ridiculous. It shall not stand, but we can't get upset.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Oh, I do, and I can't believe you haven't gotten the car serviced yet.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Like, no argument. And I am disappointed by this just peripherally because you were so in love with that car when you first got it. Yes. And as much as I will always and forever make fun of the god-awful color choice you made, it was, is a great car. But I don't think you have a lot of really good options, especially for a battery electric vehicle.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Now, if you wanted to go back to like a Range Rover or Land Cruiser or whatever the hell it was you had before, then maybe. But if you're trying to go battery electric, what could you possibly get?
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
No, but what of these cars? Like I don't think there's anything battery electric that either of these companies sell that would work for the beach, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it is really kind of you to listen to us make this pledge. I know this is taking a long time, but honestly, sorry, not sorry, because it's worth it. So thank you so much. We really appreciate you. And again, I will reiterate, just because we donated $7,000 and change, some of us almost $8,000, even though we did that, you can donate $7. That's fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I'm really sorry to hear that. And what you said a moment ago, that you're not sure if it can reliably get you to your destination.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah. No argument. The moment any of my cars have gotten to that point where it's not, it's no longer an inconvenience, but a genuine concern that you might not make it. The moment that happens, I'm out. I need a new car in, or even if it's a new used car, that's fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
But I need something different because I cannot, well, maybe cannot is a bit dramatic, but I refuse to be in a situation that if I need to get somewhere in my car that I am rolling the dice more than you always are as to whether or not I'll actually get there. And at that point, I'm out. So if you're me, you're already looking for something new.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
And it doesn't even matter if you can get this into a service center before November. It's already the nails in the coffin. You're done.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
We're still happy about that. Don't let us lead you any other way. We're still very happy about that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yeah, you know, honestly, if it were me, there is no question I would be going and renting a car.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I know it turns your stomach to think about, well, probably renting a car, but I know it turns your stomach to consider a gasoline automobile. But it is okay to slum it with us regular humans for the purpose of one weekend. That's 100% what I would do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I don't think you need to buy anything, but I do think you need to rent something for this trip to go see Goose.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
No, it's not that bad at all. In New York, it might be. Well, okay, that's fair. We rented a minivan for a week. And I think it was like $300 or $400. And that was a week. And it was unlimited miles, et cetera, et cetera. Now, granted, we are in Podunk, Richmond, Virginia. We are not in effectively New York City.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Yep. So please, stjude.org, S-T-J-U-D-E.org slash ATP. Thank you. Let's do some follow-up. Mac Mini redesign updates from Mark Gurman. So Mark had announced some expected Mac Mini redesign changes and whatnot, and then has gone back to the well and has clarified a bit. So Mark writes, the M4 Pro version of the Mac Mini will have five USB-C ports.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
But I think it'd be more affordable than you expect if you're willing to slum it with a regular human car rather than some like Tesla or some other weirdo BEV or something like that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Obviously, you do you. You're a grown-ass man, but that's what I would do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
No, I wouldn't feel foolish about that, personally. I get what you're saying, and I think... Foolish is not the word I would use. I would feel dejected that it's gotten to this point, but I wouldn't feel foolish at all. But you're doing what you can to make what should be an enjoyable weekend enjoyable. And I love you like a brother. Well, no, in a better way than that. I love you, but...
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
No, this is what I'm saying. I think I'm not doing you favors because I'm wholeheartedly in agreement with you. It's time to sell the car. Unless you can get it fixed by some miracle in the next week or two and you don't have a series of further problems, it's time to sell the car. Full stop. And I hate that. I hate that that's the case because I was there with you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I saw with my eyes how happy that car made you. Even after I broke it for the first of what turned out to be many times. But...
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
i saw how happy that car made you it does not give me pleasure to say this to you this is not the normal like atp ribbing like i i genuinely think as your friend you need to sell that car because it is it is forever tainted it has its scarlet letter it is forever tainted in your mind and i don't blame you i don't blame you at all you could always get version two of that car where they consolidated the 17 control units down to two or whatever yeah that's true too yeah it's an option
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Oh, here we go. Are they really worse? Now I'm coming back to ATP ribbing. Are they really worse, Marco? Are they really? All right. Well, I'm sorry. Please keep us updated with how this turns out, both in a friendly way and because I think it'll be good for the show way.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Three on the back, two on the front, like the Mac Studio. That model will also retain an Ethernet port, good, HDMI port, good, and headphone jack, sure. But prepare to say goodbye to the USB-A ports found on the current Mac Mini.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Jude campus for all the corporate and personal donators that have just gone above and beyond. And that's super incredibly cool. And so... What we are doing is we're trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. St. Jude does incredible, phenomenal work, and they do it in such a way that it affects people all over the world. So St. Jude is headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. Now we're going to get everyone writing to us about how wrong we are, but here, you know, you can't win them all. Then Mark continues, I've also been told that the computer's power supply will be internal. This was a big deal because they're saying, you know, the new Mac Mini is going to be roughly Apple TV sized.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
And although the Apple TV does indeed have its power supply internal, which is to say you just plug in a cord. There's no brick involved. But, you know, that's kind of a computer, but not really a whole computer. And so people were justifiably a little worried that perhaps this wouldn't be the case with the Mac Mini.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Maybe it would go more like the current iMacs, which have the brick on the outside. But no, apparently the PowerSpy will be internal, which I am very happy about.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
As far as I know, they're not. Now, I do take a little bit of offense at you saying Bluetooth sucks. Maybe I'm a Bluetooth unicorn, but I really don't see the issue with using Bluetooth peripherals.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
except you don't have to have a dongle, which is great.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
16. I'm sorry. Thank you. Brian writes, I was at Apple's 1996 Worldwide Developer Conference where Gil Emilio, I got that right this time. See, it's Gif, not Jif. Anyway, made the announcement during the keynote that all future Mac models would ship with a minimum of 12 megabytes of RAM up from 8. As I remember, that announcement got a standing ovation from the developers in attendance.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
I will be there in a couple of weeks when Relay does their 12-hour podcast-a-thon. You can watch me melt into a puddle over the course of those 12 hours as I do everything I can to raise more money for these six children. But Here's the thing, St. Jude has treated children from all 50 states and around the world.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
And then apparently after ruminating, and this is years later, I think, after ruminating about my recollections of the WWDC keynote, I'm no longer confident in my description of the response as a standing ovation. Oh, this was, I think, that Brian had written us a little while later.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Anyways, instead, the enthusiasm of the applause was more along the lines of, we were expecting the next RAM jump would be to 16 megs, not 12, but hey, we'll take it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
We did a lot with a little back then. All right. Cigar Jaw writes with regard to the screen recording badge on outgoing video. Excluding the screen recording badge from outgoing video is actually possible, but it requires the full access screen capture API rather than the window selection one.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
The way it works is that the screen recording badge is an extra child window added by the system that you can mask out while streaming. I didn't know that. The additional API is required since the window picker lets the system handle the selection, then it hands you the frames, and this includes the recording badge by default.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
Removing it requires assembling the window list yourself, which is quote-unquote more sensitive.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
With regard to JPEG XL, this is the alleged new codec that Apple's going to be embracing. Well, it's not that new, but Apple's going to be embracing it, which is new. Kelly Thompson writes, support for reading JPEG XL images has been available on Apple platforms since last year. They work in Safari preview photos and all the apps like Pages and Keynote. Here's the kicker, though.
Accidental Tech Podcast
603: Too Smart to Move
You have all that beautiful dynamic range, but preview and Safari don't support HDR images of any type quite yet. Safari supports the HDR video, but not stills. Obviously, HDR images work great in photos. It's a weird state of half in, half out. JPEG XL has been jointly developed by Cloudinary, which I'd never heard of, and Google. For ages, JPEG XL support was behind a flag in Chrome.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And so the reason why these are the things you should put in, like this is sort of the bottom line, sum it up for me, is how much bigger did the battery get? And yeah, I did the math on like how many milliamp hours or whatever, but you really want to know percentage-wise. And this is all versus its predecessor.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So it's 16 versus 15, 16 plus versus 15 plus, 16 pro versus, you know, it's directly versus their predecessors because there are direct predecessors for all these phones. It's like, what percentage bigger did the battery get? And then for that increase in battery size, what percentage better is the battery life? And Tom's Hardware is in a position to do that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They put the numbers in for these different phones because presumably they ran the same test on all the 15s that they did on the 16s. And they come up with the number that's representative of whatever they're... Test is. So in all these cases, the battery got some percent bigger, but the battery life increased much more than the battery size increase.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So, you know, again, the 16 Pro got a 10% bigger battery, but 30% bigger battery life. That is huge. And then I put the absolute values here. Like, what does that even mean? So the increased battery life in terms of wall clock time for the iPhone 16 is an hour 38. For the 16 Plus, it's two hours and 15 minutes. 16 Pro is three hours and 14 minutes. And 16 Pro Max is four hours and four minutes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
These are not small battery increases like, oh, you get extra 10 minutes to 30 minutes. Again, how representative is this Tom's Guide test? Like, is it light web browsing? Is it representative of how you use your phones? But...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They made all the batteries bigger by a significant percentage, and the battery life got way bigger than the percentage increase, and you will feel those for most of these things, because they're measured in... Only one of them is a single hour, and all the other ones are in multiple hours. And this brings me to the next topic.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I have a 16 Pro, which apparently gets 30% better battery life than the 15 Pro did, which equates to an extra 3 hours and 14 minutes of battery life in Tom's test. What I did after having my phone for a day or two was I put on the 80% battery limit. I said, I don't think I need to charge this thing to 100%.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So in the battery, this is the first time I've had a phone that supports this setting because my 14 Pro didn't support it. So I went into battery or whatever and I said, never charge yourself more than 80%. And then for the next several days, I intentionally did not charge my phone during the day, even though I could have, like I could, plug it in when I'm doing dishes or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I intentionally didn't do that just to see, is 80% enough to get me through a regular day? And right now on a brand new 16 Pro, 80% is more than enough. Intentionally not charging like I normally would during the day. And so I'm currently on the 80% plan. And there's been lots of debate about this. People saying, oh, that's a waste. You're never getting the full capacity of your phone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You should charge it to 100%. Don't worry about it or whatever. But if I don't need to charge it to 100%, I am, you know, making my battery last longer, especially since I keep my phone for two years than if I did otherwise. So that's my plan.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And we'll put a link in the show notes to some sort of anecdata from Nick here who had like a survey of like 100 people and said, hey, are you charging to 80%? And if so, you know, how's it going for you or whatever? I think this is something people should at least consider might be a possibility for them. And you know, everyone knows your own life.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
If you're on a commute and you have no place to charge during the day and you barely make it through 100%, charge your 100%, like by all means. But I thought I could make it with 80% and so far I can. And so I'm going to keep it there. And if it turns out I can't make it with 80%, I'll probably crank it to 90 and then go up to 100.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And we'll see at the end of my two years how my battery life is doing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, it's like a slider. Maybe you can even go by fives. I don't remember. But yeah, it's like a little slider bar in the settings.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And on laptops, people always recommend this, and I forget to write it down, but there are programs for the Mac that give you even more control over this, not just the OS things. What is that one called? Maybe it's Coconut Battery. Maybe it's something else.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
There's a bunch of Mac OS programs that let you do the same thing for your laptop battery and choose what you want to limit to and do all these fancy stuff with it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I was trying to remember what happened if you reverse the polarity and I misinterpreted the, or misremembered the, uh, the iFixit video that was explaining this. So David wrote in with the corrections.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, so it's like the sticky gunk. Apparently there is sticky gunk and you get to choose where it's left and you don't want it to be in the phone. So that's why you have to be careful about the polarity, but it will not like re-stick.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, I'm sure that's what it was. Like I always, I'm doing it like the phones are arriving at people's doorsteps that day. Right. And so it's the worst possible time to do it. But yeah, Verizon is apparently very bad at this. And by the way, I think Eric said he did it in two different states. I think one like Massachusetts and Iowa had the same problem.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So yeah, the moral of the story is even if you get an unlock phone from Verizon, if you get it on day one and you try to do activation, good luck.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Marco's got the same case. We can both talk about it. But yeah, I got the leather bull strap case with the open bottom on it. We'll put a link in the show notes. This is the one that has a hole for the camera control, as do nearly all but not all third party cases. Previously, I was using the Beats case, which I talked about on the earlier show, and so here's my review of the Bullstrap case.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Leather is nicer material, as far as I'm concerned, than the Beats case. I do think this one, the corners had some wrinkles on them that's a little bit unpleasing, but, you know, it's a... Artisanal product to everyone is a little bit different. Everything about it is the same as my iPhone 14 Pro case, obviously, except for the camera control cutout.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Marco talked about the Peak Design camera control cutout, which had sort of like a sloping on all sides to get down to the camera control, and that was not pleasing to him. Bullstrap has decided to try to avoid that problem, which I think is smart of them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
By not making it so there's like sloping things on all sides, so you have to kind of shove your fleshy finger into this little valley to get to the thing, they decided one of the sides is not going to exist. So if you look at the phone from the front, it's just a regular, you know, you see the case going all the way around. But if you look at the phone from the back, you see
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
part of the sidewall of the case has been notched out, right? So it's not symmetrical. It is not a symmetrical hole in the side of your case. There is a wall on the screen side, then there's the hole for the camera button, and there's no wall on the other side. Like basically the bottom of the case just comes to an end and that's it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And it's not really, it doesn't really center the camera control either. So it's interesting. It feels flimsier on that side. It feels like there's a gigantic notch taken out of the side of the phone because there is a gigantic notch taken out of the side of the phone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
The sort of little stick or pole or whatever that is the front of the sidewall over the camera control seems delicate and fidgety and creaky. And I just generally hate this. I don't like it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
the hole in the side of the case at all i can get to the camera control i can press it but it is annoying to do so and now i also i'm going to leave this on the phone because i'm like i don't know if i can handle this maybe i'm gonna go back to the beads case but after having it for like a week or so i've decided the advantages of the leather the grippiness of the leather
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
outweigh the terribleness of this hole in the side of the thing. So I'm going to keep this on until or unless it breaks. But as of right now, what I am looking for is basically this case, a leather case with an open bottom, but with... the pass-through camera control. And third parties, I think there's like two or three or maybe four third-party case manufacturers that do have pass-through.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
One of them I saw doesn't even use the quartz thing. It uses a piece of plastic with a bunch of little copper wires going through it to do the conductance thing. Look, whatever you got to do with third-party cases, but I'm out here saying, Bullstrap, Ryan London, and then the five other manufacturers who apparently sell this exact same case for differing prices...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I know you had to do the thing with the hole on day one. You couldn't, maybe you couldn't, like everyone else had to too. I get it. I bought your case at great expense. I'm using it on my phone. But please, somebody, somebody out there, make a leather open bottom case. With a quartz pass-through for the camera control. That's what I want.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And until then, I'm just going to have a gigantic wound in the side of my phone that I feel every day. And it makes it slightly less satisfying. Marco, what do you think of the Bullstrap case?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Do you agree that their decision to omit one of the sidewalls surrounding the camera troll makes it more comfortable to you than the Peak Design version of the whole?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But look at the other side of the camera control. There's no wall there. You mean like the back of the phone? Yeah, yeah. There's not equal size walls on the front and the back of the phone in terms of surrounding the camera control. Do you see what I mean?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
By the way, if Apple made an open-bottomed silicone case, I would probably be using it instead of the leather one because I don't have so many problems with getting it out of pockets, and I'm desperate to not have this giant hole on the side of my phone. It feels like a chicken pox scar.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I'm so afraid they're going to be like, ah, we'll do that for the next phone. This phone, tough luck, right? I really hope that they come out with version two. It's like, we couldn't have it from day one, but now everyone knows how to do the quartz pads through. So here's like, I'll buy a second case ball strap. Just put it out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You know, I don't want to be like, well, we could never figure it out for the 16 line, but for the 17, we'll have the quartz pads through. That doesn't help me because I'm not getting a 17. Yeah, I hope they do. I hope they do.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I really hope they update these cases. If not, I don't know what I'm going to do. If that little delicate thing does break, what am I going to do? Go back to the Beats case? Buy a second one of these at great expense? Honestly, because all I get on Instagram now are ads for phone cases, as you can imagine, I'm really seeing...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
how many different people sell that resell this exact same ryan london bull strap like i forget what the other brand sr recently like at least three or four maybe even five different brands that are clearly selling the same case that some manufacturer makes in china somewhere right and so we say oh bull straps leather is good it's not bull straps leather what they do is stamp the little bull thing on it and put it in a pretty box and sell it to us for way more money than everyone else does which is fine like whatever i'll take it you know they were the first one to ship so that's why they got my money
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But please, somebody out there, open bottom. I'm asking for a lot. Nobody cares about open bottom but me, right? Open bottom leather quartz camera control. Otherwise, I'm going to be using this weird scarred case for two years.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It wouldn't actually be that hard, but the problem is most we'd ever be able to sell, assuming we sold this as a product to our listeners, is like a few hundred cases at best, right? And no one's going to manufacture anything with those kind of small numbers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
That's probably why these companies are not going to make a new case, because they have to pre-order like millions, not millions, but like thousands and thousands of them to get whatever good price they get on them. And they can't afford to say... you know, let's design a whole new case and buy a few thousand of those. They have to sell through all these ones that they made and paid for.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And then by then it's time for a new phone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, I think a chicken hat is a little bit easier to manufacture than something that has to be precisely fit around an iPhone.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And we still had a lot of fit complaints about the chicken hat, let's be honest. Well, the good thing about the chicken hat was, first of all, the manufacturer that was making it for us was in the U.S. and had a short turnaround time. And second of all, we had a prototype, which is my actual chicken hat and the chicken hats we sold.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
If you lay them down on top of my actual chicken hat, they pretty much nailed it. I bought several of these hats that we sold and I have the original and I can just lay them on top of each other. They're constructed the same way. They're the same size, like pretty much down to the millimeter. Now, again, they ended up being too small for a lot of people's heads.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Because my chicken hat is too small for a lot of people's heads. But what you got with the chicken hat was exactly what we were selling, which is as close a clone as possible as we could get to my chicken hat. And so I think we did a pretty good job with that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But yeah, trying to do something like that with a complicated product like this manufactured not in the US with six months turnaround time, not going to happen. But somebody out there, somebody, somebody, please. Find this manufacturer in China that's making these cases for all these. If they sell one with a quartz pass-through on it, somebody buy 10,000 of those and start selling them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I will buy one. And then step three, profit? I don't know.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
This is the danger when saying, like, we're reimagining the experience of retail. You always picture in your head that what you're going to be doing is not accepting sort of the status quo for all the bad things and saying people just accept X, Y, and Z are just the way stores have to be. Well, we don't think that way. Everything's on the table. We're reimagining the whole experience.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But if you're not careful and you just stick to that philosophy and you're like, you know, we're reimagining the experience, what you can end up doing is removing some of the good things and reimagining them to be way, way worse.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And one of the good things is if you walk into a store and they have a product in stock, you can give someone money for it and then walk out of the store like you can buy it. Like, do you have this product? Is it in stock? I'm here and you're here and the product is here. My money is here. Let's make this happen.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
in an empty store and when they say to you no please make an appointment on the app and the first appointment is two hours from now that is reimagining the retail experience so you are following your philosophy of reimagining the retail experience but for the worse that you get into just ridiculous territory like i would you know we've complained that even the whole like oh there are no lines is an example of reimagining that maybe
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, like, it's just, as I pointed out, it doesn't value the customer's time. They drove to the store, came to the place, brought their money and their wallet, and they want to, like, look at it and buy a thing, and you're like, no, make an appointment for two hours from now?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
That doesn't value the time of the person who made the trip to do this, especially if the Apple store is, like, far away from them. It's not acceptable.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So one night of that, I'm like, okay, well, that's not the answer. This is like the equivalent of the shoe bomber. 25 years later, theater mode still doesn't let the alarms go off.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Remember that app that Merlin always talks about and makes fun of? Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, when you are in Washington, you sleep worse.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
How many farts does Overcast let you hear?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You know, you've got to up your fart game if you're going to compete in those leagues. Obviously, yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I mean, we started out with fart apps on the App Store, and we've come full circle now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Oh, by the way, this all sounds familiar to you listeners because we talked about this in episode 297 of ATP when I set up my AV setup, including probably the exact video that Marco was looking at and me recording on my phone in slow motion and seeing the waveform in iMovie. So we'll put a link in the show notes to that episode of ATP and also to the two apps slash videos that I used for that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I mean, you still have to make the choice, like I said, in episode 97. Then you still have to decide, all right, so when the little bar is in the middle in the video, should that be just as the waveform goes from silent to not silent? Should it be the peak of the waveform where the volume, the amplitude is the highest? You have to make all these judgment calls.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But I can tell you from experience that no matter how you make the judgment calls, as long as you do something reasonable, you can get it so close to being perfect that you won't notice it anymore.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Oh, well, that's fun. Like a real malware or a sarcastic malware?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I just shouldn't write it. The tricky part of that is when you get down to these kind of timings, that the time between when a photon hits the camera and the time when an app...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
registered that that took place is probably a handful of milliseconds and you have to account for that and it might vary from phone to phone so that's a little bit tricky i'm guessing that's a that's probably less than a frame of of time maybe i mean but like again maybe it varies by device like it's not something that comes up normally like when you're recording video or something like that like oh how much lag is there how much lag between again photons hitting the lens of the camera and a program that is watching for that knowing that that happened but
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
uh but yeah it would definitely be better than the than doing it the manual way which is very annoying uh and you know why marco was using final cut and when i was using my movie is because you need a visual representation of the audio you need to be able to see a waveform and i don't think there at least there was no apps that i knew of on the phone that did that that were not like full-fledged video editors and honestly i'd rather just do it on the mac so i was recording videos coming back to the mac opening the video in imovie
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
watching the slow motion thing going frame by frame seeing where the waveform is and then adjusting the you know the uh delay until i dialed it in and i did that in 2022 and haven't touched it sync and it's been great so i believe in you mark you can get over this hump
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
yeah no and the tricky part for you is like i don't know maybe it's not tricky maybe it'll be the same but like what you hope is like you get some scenario where you're tweaking it right and you get it say you get it right there you're like okay it's right is it right for all video sources and all output types and all like for example if you did it through airplay does that apply to things you play on apple tv does that apply to things you watch over regular tv if you have like any other video source connected if you have a video game system connected like
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You're hoping that you'll be able to configure this in one place and it will apply to any picture that ever shows in your TV. But you have to be careful of where you're doing it. Like, for example, if you're doing it on the Apple TV, it's not going to apply when you're playing a video game because the Apple TV is not involved.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
If you're playing like Nintendo Switch or something, it's not going to be involved in that. And so now you have a second place where you have to dial it in. And this is one of the places where it comes in handy to have something like a receiver, which is the central meeting point for all the audio and the video.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And that's where I made my adjustment and everything that goes on my TV screen goes through my receiver and my receiver applies the delay. And so far, so good for me.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, but the TVs also have latency as well, so it depends on which, adding more latency, and you've got to kind of match them up. But the audio advice video, it's a YouTube video that I use to do my adjustment, has helpful labels on the plus and minus sign where it says basically like, it says audio early, increase the delay, and then audio late, decrease the delay.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But bottom line is, once you have something that you can measure on, you just push the delay to the maximum or minimum value and see which side of the zero it's at, and then you know which direction you need to adjust it to. You know, get it in. Mine, I think, was on, I can't even see in this picture, it's too blurry. Mine was like 120, is that milliseconds? Maybe it's milliseconds.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So the answer to your question of, like, I don't understand why Apple doesn't pay this, one of the rumors is that it's because the CEO was being unreasonable and would just not accept any kind of reasonable offer.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And this hedge fund thing here, like, again, I don't know any truth to this, but some of the things I've heard swirling as people speculating was that, like, oh, this hedge fund is actually – the hedge fund and the shareholders and basically everybody who's not the CEO were, like – Massimo, take the money. You've got you won. You've got Apple over barrel. They have to pay you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Maybe they're even offering to pay you. We, as the people who are either current shareholders and board members of the company or speculative shareholders who want to invest these hedge fundings or whatever, we think if you let us be in charge of the company, we could make you more money because we wouldn't be dummies like your CEO and we would just take the Apple money and make us all rich.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And so... I don't know if any of that is, if that's just speculation or rumors or whatever, but it sure looks like from the outside that there may have been one person and one person only who is stopping this from being resolved with large amounts of money. And that was the founder and CEO. And he is out. Uh, and there's more from Matt Levine and Bloomberg. If you want to read about this, um,
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607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
We'll find out in the coming weeks and months if, oh, suddenly there's a Massimo deal between Apple and Massimo and they get a lot of money. We'll see if that happens. It seems like, again, from the outside looking in, it seems like finally the way is clear for large amounts of money to change hands.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But if he gets kicked out and still we go years and years and Apple still can't enable this feature in the U.S., then I'm out of ideas.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
This has really shaken up the tech press world over the last week because— And I don't understand why. Well— I mean, I'm sure people have had that take, but I said, I agree with you that this is like the tech press is all over this, and people are like, oh, my God, it's this, it's that. But, like, honestly, people, like, there is no new anything here that changes anything as far as I'm concerned.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
you know i don't know man it's working no i disagree rebrands work like that's that's why people do them because you you can hold on as much as you can to the old one but the rest of the world moves on and listens to it like they work no i i the renaming i think it's going better than alphabet for sure because everyone just keeps calling them google but like the the whole meta renaming was about the metaverse which bombed and so now they're just a company who doesn't want to be associated with one product called facebook and so they rename himself meta it's fine but like
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
The metaverse still is not a thing, and they're the leader in glasses, but they were before they renamed themselves, too, because they bought Oculus.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
That's not the conclusion I drew. I feel like you're getting defensive for no reason.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Here's why I think this is a non-story and I'm very disappointed in the press for how they've handled this. Ever since we've been talking about this topic at all on the show or in the Apple world or in the entire tech world. Everyone has known that some kind of glasses thing would be amazing. But it's too bad we can't build that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And years ago, when the rumors were about Apple's headset thing, it was like, Apple's not going to do a headset. They're going to do glasses. Because they know headsets are big and clunky and crappy. And... Tim Cook would just constantly, anytime he's asked about this for years, he'd be like, we're interested in AR, not VR. We're all about augmenting reality.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Have you seen all the AR features we've added to our phones and iPads over the years? We don't want to be closed off inside a VR headset. We're all about augmented reality, right? The reason Apple was into that, it's not just like, oh, Apple thought AR would be good. Everybody thinks AR is good.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Everyone thinks glasses where they can let you magically see the world, but also stuff laid on top of it is a great idea. It's in science fiction books. It's in our culture. It's baked into everything. And that is an Apple strategy from day one. When we eventually heard, actually, Apple's going to ship a VR headset.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
This is big companies, you know, it's hard to make sure that things are communicated across groups, you know, across years, across different hardware platforms. So it is interesting to know that the design initially, at least according to this person, was sound. It just sort of got the soundness kind of got lost in translation.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You're like, well, what about all that stuff that Tim Cook's been saying about the glasses? And the basic consensus was, well, nobody can make the glasses. So Apple's going to ship something. And what they did ship was their attempt to say, you know, in typical Apple fashion, super expensive VR headset. But look, we do it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
One of the reasons it's so expensive is we're trying to give you that AR glasses experience of like, look, the pass through is magical. It's like you don't even know you're looking through cameras or whatever. But of course, it's not an AR thing. You're not actually looking at the room. We're just applying technology and money to try to get something out there
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
that has some desirable attributes that are better than the competitors that we try to spin as a computing device and blah, blah, blah. You get into the whole thing. But the bottom line is Apple didn't wait until they could ship glasses. They shipped a headset that they kind of sort of tried to push in the AR direction, but wasn't really that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And setting the Vision Pro aside and all its failures or whatever, that's what they did. But at no point during this did anyone say Apple doesn't think AR is the future, or they shouldn't have said that. It was just simply the fact that no one has technology to ship something that looks like what the Vision Pro looks like, but is a pair of glasses that you can see the room through.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
That doesn't exist, right? So here's Facebook, and they're like, they come out with this thing. Now, first of all, AR glasses have existed for a while. There was Magic Leap. There was the HoloLens 1 and 2. It's very difficult to do this. Obviously, the screen technology is not great. They come out with their thing and they're like, look, it's glasses that you can see through.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But it doesn't really change anything about everything I just laid out. Everyone knows glasses are going to be awesome someday. Everyone also knows we can't actually currently do them. And I would say a $10,000 device that doesn't look as good as Division Pro is an example of not being able to do them. I mean, like... It's not... You can't ship this to people. It's not a product.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And it's not even as good... It doesn't even look as good as Vision Pro in terms of the graphics, setting aside the room that you're actually looking at or whatever. Right? So this is the type of thing I would imagine that Apple would have and say, well, we can't ship this. It's not a shippable product.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
The only difference is Facebook says, well, okay, we have something that's not a shippable product. Let's show it to the world to try to basically get our investors off our back because we're spending all this money and they think we're just burning it because the metaverse didn't happen and we're just selling a bunch of quest headsets and why do we keep burning these billions of dollars?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And Facebook's got to come out there and say, this is why we're burning billions of dollars because we think someday we'll be able to make something like this only good and shippable. And as Zuckerberg says, we have a line of sight on that. If they had come up with a product that you could buy that did this stuff, maybe we could say they're ahead of everybody else.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Apple couldn't find anything that they could ship, but Facebook could. But they can't ship this. It's not a shippable thing. And even if it was shippable, certain attributes aren't even as good as Vision Pro fidelity-wise. So I don't think this is anything other than Facebook trying to get some good press out of a thing that is essentially on par with what everyone else has in the industry.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But everyone knows that it's not shippable. And when Apple has something that's not shippable, they don't talk about it. Right now, since we know nothing about what's going on inside Apple, it is possible that Apple at some point three years ago.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And eventually they shipped a thing that was supposed to be hack proof, but was in fact hackable.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
diverted all of their resources in division pro and left their glasses efforts dying on the vine and facebook really is ahead of them but we don't know that just like we don't know anything about what goes on inside apple so we can't say by facebook showing us this prototype they're ahead of apple apple's never going to catch up apple doesn't have glasses like this we just don't know the answer to that question i would imagine that if apple if you went into an apple lab and wanted to
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
get the same experience, although they might not look as nice as these with the little frame around them or whatever. You could probably get something similar if Apple had continued their AR thing, but we don't know if they continued it. If you look at this product, though, one of the things that it does seem to take from Vision Pro is the idea of eye tracking and pinching as your interface.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But interestingly, it doesn't use cameras to track your hands. It uses the little wristband. This is something that Apple could maybe see how that works out, try the prototype, see how it goes if they haven't already been trying this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
choosing how you are going to do eye tracking and pinching uh is kind of like an implementation detail versus deciding eye tracking and pinching is how you should interact with things like in other words they're not saying orion it comes with quest hand controllers quest hand control is great for games maybe not so great for what you would imagine you would do something that's more like a pair of glasses these things seem to have like the wristband has like a little electrical conductor sensor thingies
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
that catch your nerve signals or whatever. It's a nice way to do it that doesn't require you to have line of sight on your fingers and doesn't require like these glasses frames to be bristling with even more cameras that are tracking where your fingers are as opposed to the ones that are just tracking your eyeballs.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
but anyway like i don't like people saying this and say were there people out there who were like previously i didn't think augmented reality glasses would be a good idea but now that i've been able to try a prototype i do think they're a good idea i suppose there are people like this but like read a sci-fi book we all want magic glasses that you put them on and they cover the world with information and you can see all the things and your walking directions go like that and as we said there's a name tag over people's heads and there's that whole story about like the put the ray-ban glasses that do like image lookups for people and like docks them as you walk around you
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, that's the sci-fi future, dystopian and utopian, that we're all talking about here, right? And there's gonna be a lot of problems with it, but first things first, we gotta figure out how to get the screens, and by the way, the way these things work is they have a little tiny screen that projects a little image into the lenses, and the lenses try to bounce
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
the image from the screen off of the lenses and into your eyes so they focus on the back of your eye. And yes, that is as annoyingly hard as you can imagine it is because it's not like you can put a big mirror in there because that would block your view of the outside world.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So these wave guides are essentially taking the image of a tiny little screen that's projecting from the side on an angle into the lens And internally bouncing it inside the last lens until it exits the lens at just the right angle so it focuses on your eye, it is as complicated and apparently very expensive to manufacture as you would think.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And in the end, still doesn't have the fidelity of, you know, a very expensive closed-in VR headset where you don't have to worry about all that business. You can just literally project the screen right into their eyeballs because you're not worried about them seeing through it to the outside world. Final thing I'll say about this is the...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
The way the hardware is implemented, having the little, I don't know, puck stick thing where the compute is, is, you know, if you want something that's like glasses, don't put all the computer stuff inside the glasses, right? So they didn't. They put the computer stuff inside a puck.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And I've seen a lot of people look at that puck and say, well, the future is going to be that puck will just be your phone. Maybe the distant future, but the near future, no. Because in the near future... A, you're not going to want to literally destroy your phone's battery by getting two hours of AR glass on this thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And B, the hardware that you would want to put in that puck is going to have to be... It's on the ragged edge of what's possible. It's going to have to be so purpose-built and so, like... high-end for a portable thing, phones have to do so much different stuff.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They have to have their cameras and the battery life for that, and it's for web browsing, all the Wi-Fi radios wherever, and this is a purpose-built device that the first one of these that actually ships somewhere needs to just be a thing that feeds these glasses. Eventually, yes, why have a separate thing, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But that's going to be when we have so much excess computing capacity that it's no problem for our phones to do. And I would say today, it is not no problem for our phones to do what that little puck is doing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So I suspect whoever gets to be the first one to ship something like this, and again, arguably Magic Leap and HoloLens already did ship something like this, albeit a much lower fidelity without the same Apple Vision Pro inspired UI, it's going to be a separate puck. And I think it'll be a separate puck for many years, which is fine and is the right move.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And it is much better than hanging off a giant computer with a metal case off your face like the Apple Vision Pro does. But for now, I would expect there to be a puck.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Oh, yeah, and Marco was asking how to tell the difference between the two of them. Someone wrote in to say that the new ones have braided cables and the old ones don't. I'm not sure if that's true, but that was a suggestion from a listener.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Now, we'll find out in a few years when the, you know, or many years when the tell-all things come out and it's like, oh, Apple abandoned AR because someone was convinced that there was no way they were going to do it within the next 50 years, so we should stop. And they didn't see these silicon carbide lenses coming or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But I would hope that inside Apple, all the technology you just saw Facebook demonstrate was also known to them and had been expanded with them. And they realized that for the next X number of years, It's not a viable product, so they're going to try this Vision Pro thing, and it's not going great for them. But I don't think philosophically...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I don't actually think there's a philosophical difference when it comes to the long-term view of AR between Meta and Apple. I think they both believe glasses of the future, and they want to get there as fast as they possibly can. The only difference is, how does that manifest? For Facebook, it manifests with tech demos of $10,000 headsets.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
For Apple, it manifests for saying nothing and shipping an entirely different product that they can actually manufacture and hoping that works out.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I don't fault them for being impressed by a cool tech demo. I fault the people, and it's not Ben, Ben knows what's up, but it's other people saying basically like, this shows that Apple is going in the wrong direction and Meta knows what's up. They're both going in exactly the same direction long term. They both have VR headsets, albeit very different ones, right?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And I think they both have AR headsets. It's just that Facebook is showing you theirs that they can't ship and Apple is not showing you theirs that they can't ship. You know what I mean? And again, we don't know that's true. I'm speculating because Apple doesn't say anything. But like the people who are citing this as like a condemnation of Apple has dropped the ball.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They've taken the eye off the ball. They shouldn't be bothering with VR headsets.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
meta is also bothering with vr headsets there's a difference in strategy there which we've talked about at length between how they're doing with vr headsets but vr headsets is what we can make now and you know they have differing opinions about how to do that but that's the difference in their strategy is like apple has taken one direction in vr and and facebook's take the other a difference in the strategy is not that meta thinks ar is the future and apple does not that's insanity and that's what i can't handle from free you're like at
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Apple doesn't think AR is the future, but Meta does, and Meta is showing Apple how it's done. No, that is absolutely not the case, based on public statements from the CEO of the company.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Pretty big space in a bag, actually.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It doesn't take up a lot of length and width. I wonder volume-wise if it would actually be the same as a very thin screen. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Yeah, I think your point about the Vision Pro being like, oh, we can't do AR glasses, but just if you get used to this as a platform extension, like if we build this platform over many years inside these stupid goggles, this platform doesn't look that much different than the platform we would build for AR glasses. And I'm sure Meta is doing exactly the same thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They've got the Quest headsets, which are, you know, addressing a different market in a different way.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But whatever interface and APIs and compatibility they're building up there, even though they don't emphasize pass-through as much, I would imagine that as they extend into AR glasses, it will be an expansion of their existing VR platforms, if they're smart, rather than just saying, oh, here's all new platform. Nothing you did on the Quest headsets is applicable at all to this.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I hope they don't do that. Now Apple, I think has a little bit of a headstart in this because their VR headset is so focused on pretending it's an AR headset and the quests are not. Even like I said, down to the choice of how to do the UI, Vision Pro does eye tracking and you use your fingers to like pinch and do stuff, right? so does Orion, but Quest does not.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Quest does not lean that heavily on that type of interface. On the other hand, Quest uses the wristband instead of cameras to track, but still, like, the whole idea of, like, how would you want to use... sci-fi type of AR glasses. You probably wouldn't want to have hand controllers because that kind of defeats the purpose of like, oh, they're just like regular glasses. You put them on.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Where do the hand controllers fit in that? So it's going to probably have to be, well, how do I do stuff? Well, how about if you looked at it and did gestures with your hands? And then it's just a question of how do we implement that? Looking at stuff, eye tracking, that seems to be obvious. Just with your hands, you could look at your hands with cameras. You could have a wristband.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You could do both at the same time. You could use your Apple Watch. There's all sorts of platform synergies. I think I heard Ben and Gruber talking about what if your Apple Watch was the nerve-checking thing, and what if your phone was the puck for the glasses, and it's like... yeah, maybe eventually let's hold your horses now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Because like I said, I feel like AR glasses are going to be so close to the edge of what's even possible for so many years that there's going to have to be dedicated hardware for it. And like I said, you wouldn't want to destroy your phone's battery on this. Like,
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
it's not okay but it is the status quo that the vision pro gets like two hours of battery life right orion gets two hours of battery life your phone you do not want to have two hours of battery life so let's wait on this let's it's you know it's ten thousand dollars doesn't look as good as vision pro the battery lasts two hours right we'll get there eventually but but yes there are platform synergies that apple is well positioned to take advantage of but apple is not going to show you their ar glasses demo things
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
until they actually have a product they can ship. And we've been talking about Vision Bro and we haven't been like, oh boy, I can't wait until next year when Apple ships the glasses. No, we don't think that's coming next year. And guess what? It's not coming next year from Meta either. Despite Zuckerberg's, we have a line of sight on that. I'll believe it when I see it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Again, you should look at it on a surprise. I haven't seen many people talking about this. HoloLens and Magically, whatever the hell the other thing's called. There have been AR glasses that have shipped as actual shipping products over many years from both Microsoft and Magically startup.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Uh, and they didn't look great and they weren't popular and they made slightly different choices, but they have existed. So it's not like we don't know like real shipping products that you could buy with less than $10,000 worth of money that would let you see the room and also see images projected on it. Many of them have existed.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It's just like the people looked at them and said, they're not very good yet. And even Orion, I mean, it's the best, it's the most impressive that anyone has seen outside of, you know, development labs inside Apple or wherever, uh, But still, it's like, okay, but this is not... I can't buy this. And if I could, it would cost too much money.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And even if I could, even if it didn't cost a lot of money and I could buy it, it still has limitations compared to, let's say, the best images you can see inside Vision Pro or whatever. So... We'll get there eventually, but I really think this is a perhaps very shrewd PR move from Facebook to satisfy the people who are upset that Facebook is spending billions of dollars on the metaverse.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So I don't know if this is just a little... You can do an experiment and use your finger versus covering it with a piece of cardboard or something. That's too much work.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And they have to say, no, no, we're not spending millions of dollars on that thing where people with no likes talk to each other in meetings. What we're actually trying to do is this. And we haven't actually done it yet, but let's show you what we've got so far so you know we're not just making the Quest 3S and we think that's all we're doing with these billions.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Do they need to do that to the Vision Pro? Is it selling so much it needs to be tamped down? Yeah. I mean, you're not wrong. Like, look, look, if they're Osborne-ing anything, they could be Osborne-ing their own, actually, you know, well-selling, the quest heads. I don't think anyone sees a product that they can't even buy.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And like, no one who's playing Beat Saber is like, I want those $10,000 glasses where I can't play Beat Saber. No, like it's a tech demo that shows how close are we to AR glasses? And the answer is closer than we were, but still not really that close. Anyway, back to your VR stuff. If Vision Pro had been selling like crazy, I can see how this working is like, like you said, like a...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Hey, stop going gaga over Vision Pro. That's not the goal. The goal is this, and we're closer to it than Apple, but I don't think they need to stop Vision Pro from selling. I don't think there's any juggernaut that needs to be tamped down.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So the real hardware folks are finally getting to give us the hardware answers that we crave in these next two items. The first one is something that we talked about when these phones were announced is based on the specs that Apple gave, it was like, boy, the A18 and the A18 Pro seem very similar.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It'll be canceled in five years. Don't worry about it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I would be worried about what you're about to do causing that to increase, but it's so clear that those people never listen to our show, so it's fine.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And some people were speculating that the A18 might be just a binned version of the A18 Pro based on like, oh, you know, the A18 Pro has six GPU cores and the A18 has five. Maybe they're just binned. And I went through all the differences on the announcement show and the differences were many besides just the GPU cores.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And I was like, technically, it could technically be a binned one, but there's so much that is different about the A18 Pro that it seems it would be totally unprecedented for them to be intentionally disabling so much of the chip. So now we have actual die shots of someone who cut the A18 and the A18 Pro open, and lo and behold, they are different chips.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They missed the whole thing about hiring someone to do it, which is like the key to this whole article.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They look pretty similar, but they're not the same chip. So no, the A18 is not a binned A18 Pro. They're just two similar chips, and you can... Look, this is from chipwise.tech. You can look at their die shots. And then Fabian Hausler also put in like a sort of a markup interpretation, labeling the parts of the chips to see what they are, and then put in an M4 for reference as well.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
to that to quote a famous line from a nerdy show uh the line being maybe i use too many monkeys maybe they use too many cliches when they train this llm because wow there was like the whole thing was just how many different cliches can we work in at the same time it missed the main point of my article which is not a great i mean you would think people think oh llm is great at summarizing
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Not if you miss like the main most important point. Even when they were parroting back the beginning in the part of whatever they trained it on, I was like, this is the part where we're going to go over the article. They did not get the crux of it.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And when they sort of did verbatim the example I had in the middle, they missed the important part of the example, which was the similarity between typing a prompt and then typing an email to an artist who makes it for you. They omitted that entirely. And the only two examples they had were typing a prompt and you making it yourself. And that's not, there's nothing interesting. Oh my God.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Anyway, this was a bad podcast that if I heard a person doing a podcast like this, I would be to quote another famous line, Woody Allen, whatever. What was this? Was it Annie Hall? You know nothing of my work. Boy, if only life were really like this. Old people know what I'm talking about. Anyway, yeah, they know nothing of my work. The LLMs did not get it. It's a shame.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And they talked in circles a lot. And they use so many cliches. And it's obvious that they've trained on a lot of information surrounding AI and stuff, which is not surprising. So they can riff, freeform riff on it. But as an example of trying to look at an article and talk about what the article is talking about, they fail.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
As an example of natural sounding voices speaking text generated by an LLM, these things are actually pretty okay. You can still tell if you've heard a few of them because there's kind of a sameness to what they do. But honestly, there's kind of a sameness to what a lot of humans do in certain things anyway.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Well, but I think that the actual content is very similar to the actual content of text that comes out of an LLM. When you type in the chat GPT and it gives you a big answer and you read the text, it's coherent, right? That's the whole point. That's why people are always so impressed by it. That's why it fools so many people into thinking that it's actually intelligent because the text is...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So A18 and A18 Pro, two separate chips.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It makes sense. The sentences join to one another or whatever. Now, maybe the sentences are filled with made-up stuff or whatever, but the sentences themselves join. So I think the most impressive thing about these is taking that text that you would see in ChatGPT and then reading it in the style of a podcaster with the same ums and oohs and pauses and emphasis or whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And that is the more impressive thing from my perspective.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Or like what a news anchor or a host or, I don't know, a presenter you would call them in the UK, what they're asked to do, what part of their job is, is to fake interest in things that they have no interest in. Because if you're like a news anchor, you can't have interest in every news story.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But it's your job to pretend that you are interested in this bake sale or the school budget committee or whatever. Like your job is to make it sound interesting and engaging. But you as an actual newscaster –
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Can't possibly be interested in all those things, which is why we read newscasters, for example, as having their interest or like I put them on a morning show and they're talking about, oh, so you won the pie competition. Tell me about that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
We know they're not actually interested in the pie competition or the fact that these people won, but it's their job to pretend they're interested, which is why they read is fake to many of us. But morning shows are popular. People like seeing that. And so that artificiality is essentially what we're paying those people for. And it is a service that people like to consume.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And I think this provides the same thing in that we listen to it and we're like, okay, well, there's no actual person who's actually interested in anything here. But is it that much different than the hosts of Good Morning America feigning interest in the world's biggest ball of yarn? I don't think it is. Right.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Well, now you're getting into things where accuracy might be required and I would be wary about that now.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Did you hear that Facebook's going to – one of the things they're proposing or slash implementing is in the Facebook, like, I don't know, the news feed, the feed that is personalized for you where they take stuff from your social network on Facebook where they also throw stuff in your face that they think you might be interested in based on what they know about you.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And then the third leg of that stool is going to be, and also we will AI generate stuff that we think you might be interested in. Oh, yeah. Because the old way was like, stuff from people you follow who are in your network. And then it was like, but also stuff that are algorithm that you might think is going to be interesting. But all that stuff is stuff that presumably humans were creating.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And now it's like, you know what? There's a third leg, which is stuff that we create out of thin air based on LLM stuff. And we'll put that in your feed too. And to Marco's point, do you think people... will notice that that is not different than the stuff they're being algorithmically fed and the stuff that is from people in their network.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Like, depending on what this stuff is, lots of things created by humans have that same look and feel. And if Facebook AI generates something that's, unbeknownst to you, is specifically for, like, you or a tiny slice of the population, but it looks just like the thing they fed you from People magazine...
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
As far as you're concerned, you'd never be able to distinguish the AI-generated – like the average person would never be able to distinguish the AI-generated content from the real people magazine content because they are really kind of at the same level. And they both fulfill the same need.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
The problem, of course, is if the AI-generated thing is just completely made-up BS that is filled with lies or, for example, a podcast discussing an article that misses all the major points of the article. That's not great, but maybe people won't notice. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And yes – That part isn't new, by the way. Like, they've been able to do people speaking like this – And obviously the text from LLMs, that's all been around for a while now. The new thing that I think is impressive about this is understanding of the podcast format. And I know it sounds silly. It's like, how do I make a podcast out of this?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It's clear that this has been trained on how podcasts are structured right down to like, hey, we're going to talk about this article. First, we're going to talk about like we'll give you an overview of the article. Then we're going to get into some of the details. And then after that, we're going to spin off into a more freeform discussion on ideas from there.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Like that is the structure of a podcast discussion. And that's what this model knows. And if you haven't heard voices like this before, you're impressed by the intonation or whatever. But previously, this same type of voice would be saying things, but it wouldn't sound like a podcast because it would just be like, look, we can make this voice.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
recite this passage from the book and it sounds very expressive and it does ums and ahs and aren't you fooled by it like this is the whole like origin of all the deepfake stuff is out there but this one is like how i mean i guess they just fed it the transcripts or the audio of podcasts however they did it it definitely gets the the structure and the vibe of a podcast uh despite the content being terrible
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
John? But that's the thing about all these. When Casey was saying he listened to one that was about a topic he didn't know about, that's the danger of these. The whole thing of LLMs is like pets and many other things. It's so easy to fool humans into thinking that there's a spirit living in the tree or the chair or whatever. We will personify anything.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And so it's so easy to fool us into thinking... That's a real person expressing real things and blah, blah. And it's the worst when this the content is in it has no rhyme or reason other than just a bunch of statistical probabilities. And so you end up listening to a podcast about a topic you knew nothing about. And at the end of it, your head is filled with completely false.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
information because the accuracy of the podcast is not really important at all and you're like well it was a person saying it to me so I really totally believe it so I guess that's the truth and it's like no not even close and that's why that's why I feel like it's the utility is
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
potentially somewhat limited it's like we talked about the uh summarization of notifications once you rely on this or like studying for a test once there's like a once there is a measurement to to like that you compare against like okay but the summary of my notifications has to be accurate otherwise it's useless okay but this study guide needs to tell me the correct capital of minnesota because when i enter it on the test if it's wrong i can't say well that's what the llm said
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Because there actually is a right answer. And the purpose of this study guide is to let me know the right answer. The purpose of the study guide is not to fool me into thinking that this is a good study guide. Because I thought that right up to the point until I took the test. And so I would say podcasts are somewhere in the middle. Like, do you care if this podcast about avocados is full of lies?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I bet there's plenty of real podcasts about avocados that are full of lies. Maybe it doesn't matter. But... Right until you get to the point of like even something as simple as, oh, iPhone, summarize my notifications. And that's not accurate. The stakes are still low. But suddenly now you're mad. And now you're not impressed by the intonation and the ums of the voice that was reading the thing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
You're like, well, what the hell? If you're not going to be accurate about the summaries of my thing, I'm just going to turn this feature off.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Well, like I said, podcasts are somewhere in the middle. You're not being tested on them. And in the end, you knowing false information on avocados isn't that big a deal. But like notifications, that's an annoyance question of like whether you're annoyed when it gets things wrong. But like study guides.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Now we're starting to get into like it actually kind of matters if it gets it right, because I don't want to study incorrect information. That's just going to make me mad. And then, obviously, you crank that up into, like, you know, let this LLM control the surgery machine. Yeah.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
For you as an app developer to try to make the summaries better?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I hope that's true, and I know Apple probably says that the A18 is the minimum chip that can run Apple Intelligence, but I don't think the neural engine, the A18, is actually any faster than the 17 or maybe even the 16. When we're looking at the T-flops or whatever, I forget if there was a big difference. Obviously, the GPU is slower, the CPUs are slower, whatever.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
But by doing like the spotlight thing, that feeds into their semantic model on the phone and everything, right? No, not yet. It doesn't. It might someday. I know, but you've got to do it. It's chicken egg.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And by the way, we talked about this on past shows. You can disable those summaries both on an individual app basis and I think also globally if you don't like them.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Oh, you know I'm going to. I'm the one who asked my three different voice assistants the same questions all day. You know I'm going to. But I just question the utility for people who aren't doing what I'm doing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It just seems to me that RAM is the real limiting factor. Because it's not like you can't run Apple intelligence on older chips. It will just obviously be slower. The limiting factor that would make it so you literally can't is RAM. But, you know, practically speaking, they might just say A18 is the minimum spec going forward. And, yeah, these chips tend to live on for a long time.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
If someone wrote like this, this is like top of mind because my daughter is doing college essays.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And the ones that live on are not the pro chips. So, yeah, A18 hopefully is in our future. I mean, I'm saying hopefully because I don't want them to, like, historically the HomePod line has not received... the cream of the crop of chips.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I'm the first person to ever think of that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And expand on it in the most kind of like, you know, what is this whole thing about low heat? I expect them to start quoting thermodynamics.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And even though A18 is the, you know, maybe it's Apple's current minimum spec for Apple intelligence due to the RAM associated with it and whatever stuff they claim about the minimum speed required for the GPU and neural engine and CPU, I can see them shipping like, for example, that robot arm thing with a chip older than the A18. I hope I'm wrong. I hope they don't do that, but we'll see.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Someone needs to feed this model more podcasts where they trash something because they're already so positive. Absolutely.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It's like trying to download Minecraft mods.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
It just like, it makes things worse. It's the magic power of like making anything worse by having those people try to explain it. But see, there is a market for like, talk to me about this thing for a few minutes. Nobody wants that. They just want the recipe. You know, even when they go to the recipe, they don't want to hear the big story. It's like, just give me the ingredients and the directions.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I fixed it, took apart the AirPods 4 painfully, because they do not come apart easily. And here's what they had to say in a video we will link in the show notes. Both versions, talking about both versions of the AirPods 4, the ones with and without ANC, both versions have the exact same system and package or SIP housing the brains.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
In fact, they said, we won't be tearing down the AirPods 4 with ANC because the only difference between the two earbuds appears to be a single outward facing microphone, the ANC version having a bigger, beefier mic. So we'll, you know, link to the video and you can look.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
these products as far as ifixit can tell are identical right down to the number of microphones the only difference is the airpods 4 with anc one of the microphones is bigger than it is in the airpods 4 which if this is true i mean obviously they can't tell every single minute component but they can tell the sip they can tell they can count the things that are in it they have whatever this weird scanning microscope thing that shows them all the guts or whatever
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Like, now I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, why didn't Apple make the hardware the same? Like, they estimated, I don't know if it's a sarcastic thing, estimated it as a $2 part that's the difference between them. And I guess maybe that adds up. And they said it's a $2 part, so maybe the one on the AirPods 4 is a $1 part, so it's a $1 difference.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
I suppose when you're making millions and millions of things, that $1 really does add up, so they should make them separate, but... wow, like these really are, you know, for the $50 difference, you get a different case, which we'll get to in a second, and you get a slightly bigger microphone in one of the places. Pretty amazing.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
Oh, that's an interesting point. I mean, again, it could also just be that $1 difference that, you know, I don't know, iFix's offhand comment, $1 or $2 difference times millions of AirPods is millions of dollars. So there's that.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
So they kept the guts of the case the same too, except for obviously, I mean, the case itself I think is different because it's got holes for the speaker. So there's one hardware difference. And the second one is, hey, there's a speaker behind those holes.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
And so, you know, for the $50 for the AirPods 4 with ANC, you get one of the microphones is bigger in each earbud, and you get a single speaker component that is not, and the three holes that it talks through in the case. And that's it. Everything else about them is the same. Good profit margins on the high-end product. What else is new from Apple?
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
They didn't have a summary table. I made a summary table. They just had a bunch of numbers.
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
and and that's the that's the thing like when these people do reviews it always boggles my mind that they're they spend all the time to do these tests they do all this hard work and they have all these measurements and they put them in a bunch of tables and it's like you gotta you gotta do the final step which is like like sum it up tell me what this means don't make me do the math which i had to do for all this to find out the actual important information
Accidental Tech Podcast
607: The Structure and Vibe of a Podcast
No, you didn't yell at Tom's guy enough. Okay, I see.