🗣️ New ATP Member’s special: ATP Tier List: Storage Media 🗣️ Follow-up: Marco updates AutoSleep iPhone leather backs Suti PhoneBack Nomad Magnetic Leather Back HDR photos from big cameras Apple laptops can run without a battery connected XKCD: Ravioli-Shaped Objects You can soon get Apple TV+ on Prime Video Soccer corner “Drive to Survive” knockoff is coming (via Devon Dundee) On Messi/MLS popularity Shipping Forecast (via Antony Johnson) Enabling/disabling audio modes on AirPods 4 w/ ANC (via Scott Zero) John’s AirPods update GPX exports for geotagging photos (via Ryan Mikulovsky) Pedometer++ More thoughts on global keyboard shortcuts in Sequoia (via Michael Berk) NSEvent.addGlobalMonitorForEvents Passkey benefits Import/export is forthcoming Press release 1Password blog post Apple says “🤨” to OpenAI claims about reasoning Research paper Thread from Mehrdad Farajtabar More from Gary Marcus How LLMs might store facts Google breakup is a possibility Google’s response New iPad Mini Submerged Making of Submerged Vergence-accommodation conflict Ask ATP: How do you get started editing photos? (via Maxel Amador) What’s the point in performance cores if they’re not used? (via Scott Schuchart) Amdahl’s Law Members-only ATP Overtime: What is the right product mix for iPhone Max Tech’s iPhone 17 naming wishcasting Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP. Uncommon Goods: Get 15% off your next gift. Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
it really is a miracle that we did not kill each other during the recording of the last member special and that we are here recording a new episode of our normal podcast i think this is the closest we've ever come to killing each other can you think of a different time i don't know why you thought it was so uh so contentious i thought it was very calm and uh reasonable right up until the very end but still you gotta count the whole you gotta count the whole rest of the episode which was very long where everything went fine
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...
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
I'm sure I have been more upset with you, John, probably with regard to something car related and you're ridiculous.
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.
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
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
I don't know if I'd go that far. It was funny though. So after we recorded, it was either yesterday afternoon or perhaps this morning, I was thinking about how maybe we should change the rules. And very briefly, the rules for the tier lists are all three of us have to reach an agreement if something is going to be S tier. And remember, it's S is the best, then A, B, C, D, F.
And for something to go from A to S, the rule has been we absolutely, all three of us, must agree. And this has caused some amount of problems in the past. I think I do mostly concur.
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.
I don't think that's wise.
And then we just work in the middle part. Because if you get to those extremes, then you really need everyone to agree. Yeah.
i mean i understand the logic there i don't know if i agree and it increases the value of s and you know the d value of f i guess but i was thinking yesterday or today that all of a sudden all of connected's absolutely preposterous rules suddenly they're starting to make ever so slightly more sense you can't just you can't just end up chasing your tail and changing the rules all the time when you don't like how things go you know
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.
But yes, so we should probably specify what the heck we're talking about. So yeah, we said it was another tier list members episode, but we were ranking storage medium, or storage media, if you will. Storage media, yes. Yeah, and we were ranking all sorts of storage media. So I had been the...
inventor of the topic the creator of the topic but all i all i said was hey we should do storage media and then john took it and ran with it you listed a bunch of ones too i like i looked at your list when i came up with the things But John ran with it in a way that I did not expect, but I have no problems with. I thought you ran with it in a very reasonable way.
Some people, based on feedback, were not in agreement that you chose the right selections. I thought your selections were great.
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?
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.
No, no, no. I think you made the right choices. But there was a moment at which Marco and I were in devout, just complete agreement about one of the items. And John was not having it. And I don't know that I've ever been closer to quitting the show than I was at that moment.
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.
But it's not where it was supposed to be.
It's got a good, it's in a good tier. It's in a happy home. It's an injustice.
It's in an injustice. It really is. But anyway, so, hey, John.
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.
Yeah. If you wanted to listen to this, just absolutely out of control tier list. How would you do that, John?
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.
Yeah. And a lot of them are tier lists because I do find that based on feedback, they seem to be the most popular, but also they seem to just really be a laser focused way to get us to bicker with each other, which is nice as an occasional thing. Obviously, we don't want to make that everything, but it is quite funny.
And I feel like we have never been closer to the energy of the good Top Gear fans.
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
Yeah, we should put like a count on there because we've amassed enough that we should be proud of it. I'll have to talk to our web developer about that at some point. All right. So we should do some follow up. And Marco, hopefully you have some follow up with regard to sleep apps, maybe?
Not really. So everyone keeps recommending the same handful of them. And I assure you, I have seen them all. I have including, yes, yours, the one you were just saying, yes, that one, the one you're yelling at your podcast app. Yup. That one. I even saw the aura ring, which I've never even thought about a smart ring before, but actually the aura rings app seems to do exactly what I want.
I just don't really want to buy an aura ring. Um, so nothing against them. I just don't want to hold the device just for that. Um, I think what's, what's more likely to happen is I'm going to stop sleep tracking cause I'm just going to eventually find that I'm not getting enough actionable data out of it. Um, Or at least actionable info and through the very limited interface of the health app.
So I think I'm, you know, I don't love this pursuit enough to make this app myself. And none of the apps that I've seen out there do what I want in the way I want. Yes, even that one. Yep, you're yelling right now. Yep, that one. The one you're writing to me in the email?
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.
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.
It also, like the way it uses the emoji and not really like customing, it's a whole, I looked at that one. I tried it and yeah, it wasn't doing what I want.
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.
You've seen a million apps, and you've rocked them all. All right. Do you have any information about leather backs for your iPhone, perchance?
See, there I have better news. All right. So I now have, right here on my desk, I have all of them. The Nomad Goods leather back, Atom Studios, A-T-O-M Studios leather back, the Sooty one that I described last time in both leather, and then I also have the Sooty silicone one. The Atom one I only used for like half a day because it's incredibly thick.
So actually I took out some calipers and I measured all of these. For reference, like the bull strap regular leather case that wraps around the whole phone. is 2.6 millimeters the atom cactus leather back is 3.7 millimeters so it's like almost it's like you know one and a half times as thick as like a common leather case of the phone so does that come close to leveling out the camera mesa or no
It comes close, but it still doesn't. It still has these little ridges that push up that make little rings around the lenses. But it makes the phone feel very thick in the hand. It almost feels like you're holding two phones stacked. I know it's not quite mathematically that, but it feels very big. So I couldn't last very long with the Atom, so I ruled that one out.
So really, for me, the only two that I like are the Sudi leather and the Nomad Goods leather. The Sudi one looks way nicer. The Nomad one works better. Tell me more. So if you're going for looks, the Sudi one wins hands down. The texture of the leather is nice. The way that it has like a little black cover around the camera mesa, that looks nicer. The edges form like a nice slope up.
That looks nicer. The Nomad one, even though this is Horween leather, which is a nice leather maker here in the U.S., Even though it's Horween leather, it just looks very flat. The Nomad one looks cheap, even though it is actually a nicer grade of leather, I think. But it kind of looks very cheap and flat. It doesn't do anything special with the camera.
It has the hard plastic ridge around the camera. The Sudi one... The edges slope down into like a plastic gasket around the edge, which does look very clean, and it feels nice in the hand, except that it really doesn't provide any grip around the sides. The Nomad one goes all the way to the side and then ends abruptly in like a flat side, almost extending the shape of the iPhone's flat sides.
And because it goes all the way to the edge, you feel the sides of that leather with your hand as you grip the phone. And if you lean the phone, if you stand up the phone and lean it back, if you're, for instance, propping the phone up on a windowsill, the bottom of the leather will touch the surface.
Whereas that's not true of the Sudi because the edges are like, you know, kind of ramped up gradually with a little bezel. So the Nomad one, despite not looking very fancy, actually works the best. It's also substantially thinner. It doesn't matter that much, but the Nomad leather back is only 2.2 millimeters thick.
And the Sudi vegan leather one is 2.6, which is the same as that as that bull strap leather case. So the Sudi one is about the same thickness as a regular iPhone case, a common iPhone case. The Nomad one is goes from 2.6 to 2.2. So it's noticeably thinner.
So the Nomad one overall, even though I don't think it looks nearly as cool as the Sudi, it's the one I've been spending the most time with because it's the one that works the best.
I think the Nomad one looks better, too. But I know that the marketing photos on case websites are not always representative.
Yeah, and keep in mind also, like, the Sudi is a fake leather. The Nomad's a real leather. So the Nomad 1 will probably age better in the sense, like, it'll probably develop a nice patina with, like, you know, certain leather wear patterns. It'll get tackier. Yeah, it immediately got tackier, like, within a day of just, you know, having all my hand oils all over it.
So it is getting nice and tacky, but even, you know, the way that wear will happen on this...
natural or you know real you know cow leather tends to wear nicer um you know in terms of like little scratches that get kind of like re-oiled in you know certain like you know wrinkly patterns that develop with leather as we all know um that so the nomad one while it looks bad now i think it will age very gracefully um whereas the sooty one looks great from day one i don't know how it will age but it doesn't matter because the nomad one which works so much better
And what about HDR photos? Oh, this is some important follow-up. So we discussed a few months ago, I was trying to figure out how the heck do we get HDR photos in Apple's Photos app taken by like big cameras? Like how do you get your big camera to be an HDR photo in the Apple Photos app?
And we went through a couple apps that would like kind of set the right metadata fields and it was kind of hacky and tricky. It kind of worked, didn't work great, but it kind of worked. Well, I tried again this past weekend. I loaded a photo I had just taken. I loaded it into Lightroom. And this is, I guess, Lightroom Classic.
This is like the old-style Lightroom before the whole sync service thing.
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.
I was using pictures from the Fuji GFX100S, which does not have any kind of built-in HDR functionality. It was just a RAW file. I shot RAW. Just a RAW file. And so the way I expose pictures, almost always now, like if I'm going to be shooting RAW and I intend to edit them, I do what I believe photographers call expose to the right.
So the idea here is you usually will underexpose the photo in the auto exposure control on the camera by at least one EV. If there's going to be like a sun or a moon or a bright light source in the shot or near the shot, it will darken everything else so that the light source doesn't blow out the sensor and become all white.
So if there's like some sunlight somewhere, you don't want that to be all white. Modern sensors on big cameras are very sensitive compared to old ones. And so what you can do if you're shooting raw is in post-processing, you can bring up the level of detail from the dark areas. It's called shadow detail.
And you can usually bring that up a lot in editing without amping up the highlights too much and blowing out and making everything just white on the highlight side. So what you do is you underexpose when shooting raw so that the highlights don't blow out the sensor in the brightest parts because you can't recover from blown out white in editing.
You can't say, all right, bring down that white and put back the nice fine cloud texture that was up there. You can get a little bit of that back, but not much. So whereas you can bring up shadow detail in editing pretty far these days with good modern sensors.
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.
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...
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
That's interesting. I actually have never experimented with that. So I probably am just shooting sRGB because I think that's usually default. Anyway, I had the raw file in Lightroom. Modern Lightroom Classic has – over in the exposure area, it has an HDR thing you can toggle.
And what that does basically is expand the exposure range in the interface to give you this big section above where it was before. And so I was able to edit the picture in HDR in Lightroom. It looked great. I'm so happy with that. And then I thought, well, okay, how can I get this picture into Apple Photos and keep the HDR? Well, first I tried the regular old JPEG 80% quality.
Keep as much as you can. Somewhere in there, I think there's even an option to say keep HDR in JPEG. And I tried that, and it didn't import with HDR into Photos app. But then I tried JPEG XL, our new friend. And when I export Lightroom HDR in JPEG XL and import that into Apple Photos on the newest macOS Sequoia, it works. It keeps the HDR.
And now I have real HDR photos shot with my big camera in Apple Photos showing the HDR perfectly.
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...
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?
I'm using just like the fancier version of JPEG compression in Excel. So I set them both to quality 80. And so it is lossy, but it's just, you know, it's similar to JPEG. However, I will say quality 80 on a JPEG, like the regular JPEG export versus the JXL export. The JXL one is less than half the size. It went from 23 megs to 11 megs.
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.
It has the dot JXL file name in the in the info panel. But then in the little like overlay in the middle of it, it says it has a little JPEG badge and does not have a raw badge anywhere on it. So it's treating it like a fancy JPEG.
Sounds interesting. I'm going to try this, although I have like zero experience with Lightroom, but I'll figure it out.
Yeah, I'll send you one. It's massive. It'll slow down your computer because you have an Intel.
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.
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All right. An anonymous Apple genius writes in, all Macs since at least the Intel days are capable of running without a battery connected. It's actually used as a common troubleshooting practice in the Genius Bar. Often swollen batteries, such as what Marco experienced, will cause issues like unexpected shutdowns or slow performance and can even cause the Mac not to boot in certain cases.
While not very frequent, we tend to see expanded batteries or spicy pillows, most commonly when the customers left their Mac connected to power for most of its life, similar to Marco's situation with his gaming PC. P.S. I know I said every Mac since the Intel days, but the one exception is the 12-inch MacBook.
It is a very strangely built machine and a complete nightmare for us technicians to work on. If you disconnect the battery and then plug in anything higher than a 5-watt adapter to let it trickle charge, you will fry the logic board. Most technicians avoid it like the plague.
Okay, honest question. How many 12-inch MacBooks could there still be in use? Yeah, I don't know. Because that keyboard was so short-lived, and the repairs were so expensive, and they're all out of warranty now.
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.
Why do you do this to me? Why do you do this to me? Well, that's right. Did you see, by the way, this is an aside, did you see XKCD yesterday? Yeah.
Uh, yes, the ravioli-shaped things. The entire world has sent this to me.
That was recent? I thought that was, like, from years ago, one that just reminded people. No. That was an interesting coincidence.
Clearly, Randall Munroe listens to the show. That's the only reasonable conclusion we can come to. Something like that. All right, so Apple TV Plus is now available as an add-on to Prime Video, which is somewhat unexpected.
So you can be in Amazon's Prime Video client or what have you, and you can subscribe to Apple TV Plus as another channel in there for the same money you would otherwise pay Apple.
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.
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...
anyway it's fine so you think apple is uh getting 100 of that money i don't know i don't know i doubt it but i don't know we have to wait for the court case to find out yeah right exactly no i mean and this this makes total sense like you know for apple is trying to get tv plus out there into the world get more people watching it apparently you know it's not super well watched which is a shame because there's a lot of good stuff there
So they were trying to get it out everywhere. And when you're in that kind of business of like a content service, it is in your best interest usually to make that service available everywhere. That's why they have Apple Music for Android, right? Isn't that a thing that exists now? I believe so. That's why Apple TV Plus clients are built into smart TVs now. Right. So they want TV Plus everywhere.
And the reality is, even if they make less money from the Amazon deal than they would selling it directly through some other means, it is worth it for them to have that everywhere. The same reason why it's worth us having our apps on the iPhone. So if Apple has to give Amazon 30% or whatever, yeah, that's reasonable. And for them, it's probably worth it. And that's why they do it.
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.
Nice. With regard to, and this is tangentially related to Apple TV+, with regard to Major League Soccer, one of us, it might have been John, had said, hey, okay, well, there you go. All right, Shaggy. Somebody had said, hey, they should make a Drive to Survive style thing for Major League Soccer.
And Devin Dundee writes in to say, Apple has commissioned Box to Box Films, the production company behind Drive to Survive, to document the season, this season of MLS, and create a, quote,
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
And then additionally, a lot of people wrote in with regard to Lionel Messi. I think I have that pronunciation right this time. And MLS being not very popular, which we had talked about last week. And the consensus that I gleaned from the feedback we got, there were a lot of individual perspectives.
But the one thing that seemed a pretty solid agreement is that, hey, Major League Soccer here in the States, just not the same level of play as over in Europe. It's just not as good.
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.
Yeah. It's a JV. I mean, the, the, the perspective that people who wrote us had was that it's the JV squad here. I'm, I'm not sure that's true or not. I mean, obviously these are incredible athletes and are way more athletic than I will ever be in my wildest dreams, but compared to what's going on in Europe, that seems to be the perception, whether or not it's reality. So yeah,
We have feedback with regard to the maritime report that you were talking about from a friend of the show, John.
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.
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
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
Aye, aye, aye. And then Scott Zero, I hope that's your real name. That's a great surname. Scott Zero wrote in with regard to disabling and enabling audio modes on AirPods 4 with ANC. So Scott writes, you can change which ANC modes are in rotation by going to settings, your AirPods, and then selecting one of the press and hold AirPods menu items for the left or right AirPod.
Uh, and you can, you see a thing that's, you know, tells you whether noise control or series, what, what that, you know, press and hold will do. Uh, and then you can choose their check marks for the different noise control things off transparency, adaptive and noise cancellation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
GPX exports. So we were talking about, hey, how can you geotag photos taken with a big camera, and what could you do about that? Ryan Michalowski writes, Pedometer++, written by a dear friend of the show, David Smith, that app is my go-to for recording GPS tracks for photography. I export its GPX and use the macOS app HudaGeo, H-O-U-D-A-H-G-E-O, for tagging.
To export GPX from Pedometer++, go to Workouts, select a quote-unquote workout, then swipe all the way to the bottom to Export as GPX.
Yep.
All right. We have a little bit more information about global keyboard shortcuts, John.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
All right, let's talk about passkeys. There are a bunch of benefits to passkeys, which we didn't enumerate last episode as a result of an Ask ATP, if I'm not mistaken. So, John, do you want to take us through this?
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...
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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
Do you want to tell me about AI moats and open AIs? Is this 01 or 01? I always get it wrong.
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...
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.
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
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
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%.
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
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it's the example I always give is like.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it was a very interesting video, as all of them are. All right, and then finally for follow-up, Google breakup may be on the table, says the Department of Justice lawyers.
Reading from The Verge, now that Judge Amit Mehta has found Google is a monopolist, lawyers for the Department of Justice have begun proposing solutions to correct the company's illegal behavior and restore competition to the market for search engines. In a new 32-page filing, they said they are considering both, quote, behavioral and structural remedies, quote,
That covers everything from applying a consent decree to keep an eye on the company's behavior to forcing it to sell off parts of its business, such as Chrome, Android, or Google Play. Then Google has a response, which we will also link in the show notes, which is exactly what you would expect it to be.
Is Google in favor of that? Do they want to be broken up?
They do not, John.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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Breaking news, as of yesterday, I believe it was, there is a new iPad Mini. It has an A17 Pro. It used to be an A15. It has a five-core GPU instead of six.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
The iPad Mini. This was the biggest shock of this, like, for me, because obviously, you know, we're nerds about this kind of stuff. Like, I was convinced, I said on this show, of course that first three-nanometer process was dead. Of course they were abandoning those chips.
I said on the show like two or three weeks ago that we would see the A18 non-Pro chip being used all across the Apple lineup in kind of lower-end, less expensive products that nevertheless needed Apple intelligence compatibility. Never did I think that the iPhone 15 Pro processor...
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
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
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
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.
Indeed. So continuing along, there is Apple intelligence, which implies that there's eight gigs of RAM, but we don't know that.
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.
Indeed. It sure seems that way. Let's see. There's 10 gigabit per second USB-C, which is up from 5. There's Wi-Fi 6E, up from just plain 6. The cellular is now eSIM only. It supports the Apple Pencil Pro and the Apple Pencil USB-C. It used to be the second-gen Apple Pencil and also the Apple Pencil USB-C. We have a storage bump from 64 to 128 as your base, with 256 and 512 available.
The 12 megapixel wide back camera supports HDR4 for natural looking photos with increased dynamic range, says one of the websites. And we don't know if that's better or worse.
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?
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
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.
Who knows? But it does have a new True Tone flash. That's camera related. So that's good.
They put new right in there. So the flash thing, maybe that is new. Yep.
There's new blue and purple colors that join Starlight and Space Gray.
If you have really good vision. Did you look at the blue and purple colors?
This is like, you know, kind of like, you know, you walk by a can of paint and you kind of smelled it and kept walking. Like, it's that kind of color. Like, there's not a lot of the color in the color.
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.
I need a deck of iPad mini cards. It comes with a braided USB cable. There's no charger in the EU. You can pre-order it right now and it'll deliver on the 23rd, which is a week from today, actually. That's a weird time. Usually it's Friday, but it's this coming Wednesday.
Nothing about the iPad mini is ever normal. Not even the ship day.
You know, I used to be such an iPad mini mega fan years and years and years and years ago, and I haven't had one, golly, since maybe the first or second Retina one. It's been a long, long time. And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with it. It is a very neat device, and I've understood the new ones in particular, like even before this one, to be really great. But I don't know.
I just don't have a place for that in my life, I don't think.
I think that what killed the iPad Mini for me was text input. Once the iPad started having really good first-party keyboards that stuck right on them and were available for them, that to me radically improved the utility of iPads in general for me.
And then when I briefly tried an iPad Mini last year as an e-reader and quickly found I was very frustrated by the lack of good keyboard options for it. Um, so for me, you know, for my purposes that the keyboard is what did it, but a lot of people do use them. I think the, the challenge the iPad mini has always had is in trying to figure out whether it should be a higher end device or not.
Um, you know, certain, certain pros and enthusiasts use it and just wish for more pro features, which I think is interesting that it got the Apple pencil pro support that that is interesting here. But with that exception, it seems like nothing else here is particularly pro in terms of iPad nomenclature. So it still is kind of, you know, basically a smaller, slightly worse iPad Air in many ways.
Yeah. And that's fine. I mean, but even then, they didn't even give it the CPU. Again, it's weird. It's always been a weird balance. Usually it is more low-end than people like. It is usually more expensive than people want it to be. And as a result, I think it has a hard time figuring out what exactly it's for.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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.
I still am getting a decent amount of utility out of the notification summaries. I'm actually really enjoying it. Are you on the beta?
Is that why?
Yeah.
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.
And ultimately, I think this shows the fact that Apple updated the iPad mini. That tells you, wow, they're really trying to bring everything up to Apple intelligence capable specs. Except for the HomePods. Well, yeah, that's never going to happen. You know the things you talk to all the time? Those ones? Yeah, they remain a product in the lineup.
But yeah, I think anything that can reasonably have Apple intelligence compatibility is going to get upgrades. So I'm expecting, I mean, I don't think we've really seen how it gets into TV OS yet, but I bet Apple TV with an A17 Pro or A18 something is probably not that far off.
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.
Yeah, I don't think it's that big of a problem. But we're going to see probably the low-end iPads getting an update sometime soon, I would expect. The rumors are that's getting pushed off. I don't know why, but that was the last rumor. I mean, to me, the biggest question is how the heck they're going to do it with the watch and the HomePod.
I guess the HomePod is, especially if they make another big one, the HomePod is a large, expensive enough product that you could probably find a way to get one of these chips in there cost-wise. The watch, that kind of hardware just doesn't fit in the watch yet.
The HomePod has a watch CPU now, doesn't it?
I believe so. I don't know if we ever got that confirmed, but that was the rumor that it used a watch CPU.
Or watch caliber, let's say, performance-wise. And by the way, the latest Apple TV apparently has 4 gigs of RAM.
There you go. But yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of updates to products that usually kind of fly under the radar. We're going to see a lot of updates to them to just bring them up to minimum spec to run Apple Intelligence. And that's overall, I think it's a very good thing. I think we're going to see a nice refresh throughout the whole lineup.
All right, so Marco, I know that you've definitely done your homework on this. There is a new, about 15, 17 minutes, something like that, a short film that Apple has released exclusively on the Vision Pro. What did you think of Submerged, Marco?
I didn't do my homework.
All right, I'm going to have to see you after class.
No, I mean, look, I've decided rather than continue to insult Division Pro as a platform, I'm going to enjoy it to the degree that I have time and to the degree that it's worth prioritizing in my life. And right now, I'm doing a lot right now in my life, and so it's just not earning its time. I'm not sitting around alone thinking, what should I do tonight?
ever like that that never happens like i'm doing work i'm doing family stuff i'm like there's always something i'm doing so this is this is not a product in my lineup right now but it from from what i hear it sounds interesting for you know what's going on with this uh with this with this movie
Yeah, so this is, shoot, I already forgot the director's name, but he did some recent Western movie, I think. Oh, this is already going on to a great start. But, hey, that's all right. Basically, this is a 15-ish minute film about a World War II submarine, which, you know, something bad happens. I don't know. Can I spoil it? Should I spoil this? I don't even know what's appropriate.
It's a submarine movie. Of course something bad happens. Well, right.
Let me guess. It fills with water? The director is Edward Berger.
thank you, who I think had just won an Oscar or something like that for one of his films.
I think there's an app where you can look that up.
Yeah, there is, but I'm not looking at it right now. Nice plug, though. I appreciate that. Anyways, so this is... It is unlike... It is unlike pretty much anything I've ever seen. So a lot of the Vision Pro stuff so far has either been CGI dinosaurs or let's tell a three to seven minute story about something or maybe 10 minutes tops. And it was more documentary style than it was anything else.
So as an example, I don't think we've talked about it on the show, but they came out like a month ago with a four or five minute sizzle reel on the most recent Super Bowl for American football. It's incredible. As someone who enjoys American football... This was an absolutely phenomenal, like four or five minutes sizzle reel, but again, like a documentary.
And to my knowledge and my recollection, as I sit here now, slightly sick with a cold, uh, I don't recall any other like scripted thing that has happened on the vision pro and certainly not anything that they've described as a scripted short film, which is how they describe submerged. And this is a 17 minute short film that is obviously scripted.
It's acted and it is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly cool. And I think one of the things that I find most amusing about it is trying to understand the language of the film and how do they leverage this medium to still accomplish the same thing that any filmmaker generally needs to do. So, for example, how do they point your attention at something? And one of the ways they do this...
is with incredibly shallow depth of field. Perhaps an incredible close-up of somebody's face with very, very shallow depth of field. So even if you try to look around, there's nothing else to really see. It's all blurry. And sorry, I don't know if I actually said it clearly, but this is immersive. So you get 180 degrees. You can look around and tilt your head. And so...
Even though, in some cases, the depth of field is as you would expect, and as such, the extras that you really can't focus on in a traditional movie, you can turn your head and you can go see what that extra's doing. You can turn your head and go see what the other extra
is doing and you know that's the whole idea and I'm doing Foley work on purpose which is going to drive Marco nuts when he edits but but nevertheless but the point is that you know even the extras have to be acting always in a way that I think is not typical for an extra because they couldn't they might not be the extra they might be the star just because I turned my head that way
Similarly, all of the audio in all of the lighting, it kind of has to be on set because unless it's behind the camera, you need to be able to, you're going to be able to see it because you can look around. You can look down, you can look up, not a lot, but you can look down, you can look up, and you can look 180 degrees side to side.
And so all the lighting and all the sound pickup kind of has to be there. And in fact, in one of the scenes, I'm not going to spoil the story as much, but in one of the scenes, there's two people sitting around a table having a snack, basically. And you end up zoomed in on the star of the film. And the other person is behind you based on the way the set is, right?
Because you're basically, the camera's kind of floating above the table, if you will. And you can hear Dude Man eating behind you, right? Because that's the way surround sound works. And so that, you know, they could obviously have the pickup behind the camera. But for anything that's happening in front of the camera, you know, you don't want to be able to see a microphone.
And you don't want to be able to see the lights and whatnot. It's incredibly, incredibly weird in a good way. And it feels like you're there. Not that you're participating in it necessarily, but in a lot of ways, it feels more real than anything I've ever done before. A couple of examples of this. they do move the camera from time to time.
They don't have the same problem that that MLS thing did where there's just constant cuts, constant, constant, constant cuts. There are cuts, but they're much better, much fewer and far between. Not unlike the football one I was talking about a minute ago, the NFL one.
But there's, there's occasions where they move the camera and once or twice they kind of like just take what would effectively be a couple of steps forward. Although clearly the camera's on like rails or whatever. Um, But there's a couple of times they're moving the camera like quite a ways, like a solid 15, 20 feet, which what is that, like three meters or something like that? No, more than that.
Anyway, four or five meters. And it feels slightly off-putting. Like, John, you would absolutely hate this because your body is telling you you just moved, but yet... or I guess your eyes are telling you you just moved, but your body is saying, no, I'm still sitting here. John's out. Yeah, right, exactly. It's not off-putting to the point that it was bad, but it was weird.
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?
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.
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...
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?
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.
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
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
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
Yeah, it really, really does. And another moment that was just incredibly striking to me is, okay, slight spoiler, water enters the submarine. I know Mark was especially surprised.
I never would have predicted this. Who made this submarine? Never would have guessed. They should make it so water doesn't come in.
Yeah, they should work on that. But water enters the submarine, and at some points, the camera gets a little bit submerged.
And I watched it. The Leonardo DiCaprio gif.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I watched it the first time, and I didn't notice this, and I re-watched it this morning just to have it fresh in my mind for today. And I noticed in myself that as the camera was about to go underwater, I kind of took a breath. Like, not a...
Kind of breath, but like a, you know, it was just subconscious that I felt like I was about to be underwater, so I should breathe in a little bit.
That's version two where water actually falls out of the mask and goes into your mouth. You waterboard yourself. Cheesy peasy. Yikes.
But that's just indicative of either how gullible I am or... how incredibly immersive it is. And the story, like, I'm a sucker for submarine movies, for sure. And the story, there's not a lot you can do in 15 minutes-ish. And it was good for a 15-minute story. But I think, like, I was listening to Upgrade, and Jason and Mike, I think, were more impressed by the story than I was.
But in terms of an exemplar, you know, an example of what media and film could be, Oh, it's so cool. And I've hung around Todd Vaziri enough that, like I was saying earlier, the vocabulary of it is, I think, very fascinating. And how do you accomplish... directing attention? How do you accomplish keeping the visuals clean so you don't have craft services hanging out just barely off screen?
How do you accomplish all that? It was incredibly, incredibly cool. And the story wasn't that moving to me, but the experience was really moving. And I have no idea... if Apple is letting people watch this at an Apple store, I would presume not.
Um, but if, if that's such a, or if you have a friend with a vision pro, um, you know, which said differently, if you have a friend with more money than sense, um, then you should definitely watch it. It is very, very neat. And even if you don't have a vision pro, there's a five minute ish making of, which I think is on YouTube. I'm not a hundred percent sure of that. Um,
I will try to remember to put it in the show notes, but I might forget. But there's a five-minute making up. Certainly, it's on Apple TV+, and that is not immersive. That is just a straight-up regular old video. And that was incredibly cool, too, to see how they did it. And this is... This is what I want Apple to do. I want them to, I presume, write a blank check to say, go do some cool shit.
And that's what this is. They just went and did some cool stuff. And they apparently built a gigantic submarine set. I'm probably exaggerating, but I thought they said that they built half of a submarine or something like that. And it does look like The Making Of is on YouTube, so I'll put a link in the show notes. But it is incredibly, incredibly cool, and really unlike anything else.
And again, I think I started to make this point, I got myself sidetracked. But all the other stuff that I've seen, even though I've really liked it, the sports stuff, the nature stuff, like the elephants and the rhinos and whatnot, the The Flying Around Hawaii. All of those documentaries were incredibly cool and in some ways moving in their own way.
But this is so wild to me because this is 100% synthetic in the sense that it is constructed. It's scripted. And I think so much cool stuff could be done with this. And I hope so very much that Apple continues to pull this thread and continues to do this because this is the kind of stuff that, to me, and maybe a MetaQuest could do this. I don't have any experience with those.
But to me, the only device I have
that can experience something like this is the vision pro and it's these moments that make the otherwise occasionally silly otherwise stupidly overpriced vision pro just seem so very worth it and so marco even if you don't watch the whole 17 minutes you know after you find the vision pro and then charge the vision pro and then start the vision pro and do software update on the vision pro
After you do all those things, as much as I'm snarking, I really do mean it. It is worth giving it a few minutes of your time because it is really, really cool.
No, and this, honestly, this sounds great, and I do want to watch it sometime soon because the Vision Pro desperately is starving for good content. This is good. This is it. So, you know, the more of this, the better. We're going from nearly zero, so every single additional bit of good content helps. So, yeah, please, more of this.
And they're learning, right? Because, like, that MLS thing, granted, that was a documentary, but the MLS thing, it was the one that was, you know, the quick cuts all the time and it was terrible. Then the, the NFL thing was way better. All these documentaries are getting really, really, really good. And this is again, like another step above. It's just so cool.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Convergence, convergence, conflict.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
A couple other very quick things. The first time I watched it, I watched it with my AirPods Pro 2. This is not the ones with the, you know, instant audio or whatever it is, the lossless audio. I forget what, you know what I'm thinking of, the one with the USB-C case. My case is still a lightning case. It sounded incredible, as you would expect.
However, this morning, I just watched it with the audio pods, whatever you call it, on the, you know, straps of the Vision Pro. still sounded phenomenal. Those things are stunningly good. Now, granted, if I was watching like a, you know, two hour movie, I would probably feel over time that, okay, maybe this isn't as bassy as I would want or something like that.
But for just quick stuff like that, I cannot overstate how good the audio pods are. It's really quite surprising.
And then also very quickly, in that five-minute making-of video, I wanted to call out – and I think I did this on Mastodon, but I wanted to call out here – I'm curious if anyone who's listening happens to know – I've seen a lot of conjecture, but I'd be curious if anyone knows – that whenever they show people watching back what they had just filmed on the Vision Pro, which they do a lot in this making-of video –
Every Vision Pro I saw, which maybe I missed one, but every Vision Pro I saw had the developer strap. But none of the developer straps were plugged into anything at the time. So were they actually using the developer strap the whole time and they were just not showing it for the purposes of this making of? Was it just that Apple happened to hand them developer strap-equipped Vision Pros?
I'm really curious what that was used for. So if you know, I don't need conjecture. I've heard all the theories. But if you know, you can tell me. I'm not going to tell anyone.
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
Yeah, I mean, and I've heard similar guesses before. The most common one would be, like, file transfer. You know, like, could you get file transfer onto this thing faster that way? And I don't have a good answer.
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.
All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Maxell Amador writes, your recent member special episode about photo workflows inspired me to take a look at my own photo editing pipeline. Hopefully you use the three of us as cautionary tales. I shoot with my own iPhone 16 Pro camera and a Canon Rebel SL3 and sometimes an old film, Canon AE-1. Me too. Me too. Me too.
Should I shoot JPEG in RAW on the Canon or even the iPhone? Should I try something like Pixelmator Pro or stick with Apple Photos Editor? Should I avoid RAW completely since I'm such a noob? How does one get good at this? I missed the auto-enhance feature on Apple Photos and generally... Excuse me, I messed with the auto-enhance feature on Apple Photos and generally like the results...
But that is a big no-no with photographers, as it can overexpose or make some weird edits based on machine learning, maybe? I do generally enjoy photography as a hobby, but it seems daunting to me. I appreciate any tips for a very, very basic start to taking photos and editing them.
This was genuinely written by somebody named Maxell Amador, but it could have been damn near word for word written by me. So, gentlemen, I don't care which one of you it is. Maybe we'll start with Marco, but tell me, what do I do? What does Maxell do? What do we do?
All right. So Maxell says, in general, should I be editing every photo I take? No, definitely not. You will never take photos again if that's the restriction you're putting on yourself. So number one, I think you have to ask yourself, what are you trying to get out of it? Are you trying to be a professional photographer?
Are you trying to become a person with a large following on something like Instagram? If the answer to both of those is no, then what you're trying to do is just make your photos nicer for yourself and your family and whoever else you're sharing them with, maybe. But that's...
That dramatically lowers the bar and removes a lot of the like stress angle from a lot of it because if you're just editing photos for mostly for yourself, not for public sharing, which by the way, that's what I do. Like I hardly ever share photos anymore on public social networks, but I all the time will take photos and I'll either enjoy them as myself.
Just, you know, like part of the one thing I decided to do recently is I've talked about how part of the reason I have big cameras is just to shoot pretty landscapes that I see. And what do I do with those landscapes? Not much. I usually just make them my desktop wallpaper. Like that's it. Like it's my desktop wallpaper.
And I recently decided, you know, I like having photo printers and we have all these blank walls in our new house. Why don't I fix this problem? Why don't I get a couple of frames and put my own landscape pictures in them and hang them in my office? Nice and easy. And so now I have another goal. I'm going to pick out a few pictures to hang in my office. Now, this takes editing.
But the editing that I will do to those pictures is literally just like, what will make this look good as a printed picture to my own eyes? And what will make this make me happy to look at? That's very different from how should I make this photo perfectly edited so that people will like me on TikTok or whatever.
If you're going for public honors and praise that way, that's a very different thing from just make this the way you like it. So I'm going to focus the rest of this on making it the way you like it, because frankly... I don't have the skills to do the public praise side of it. That's not at all anything I know anything about. So first of all, should you be editing every photo? No.
You shouldn't even be keeping every photo you take. So I once heard that the secret to good photography is large amounts of bad photography. And the idea is take a bunch of shots because some of them are going to work, some of them aren't. If you're going to start searching how to improve your photos, editing is kind of down the list from other things like composition and lighting.
Those matter a lot more. But we're talking about editing in this question. I get that. This is a song about Alice. So should you shoot JPEG plus RAW? Hmm, depends. Should you be using, you know, Lightroom or Apple Photos? I mean, it depends.
When you're dealing with the very early days of editing, most of the edits you're going to want to do are fairly subtle changes to what the camera or the iPhone will be doing automatically. You don't want to get into like really ridiculous stuff when you're getting at the gate.
You want to do subtle changes and you want to just play with some sliders and see kind of what is going to be pleasing to you. Where I would suggest you start is exposure and white balance. Now, exposure includes multiple things. That isn't just like the main minus one, plus one kind of control. It's also things like highlights, shadows, and contrast. I kind of lumped that all in with exposure.
I know it's probably wrong, but I don't care. What you want to do, you know, start out, the very first edit you should do is get the white balance right. Now, iPhone photos usually will do this for you pretty well. You normally won't have to adjust much. If you are shooting with an external camera and you're shooting indoors, you will almost certainly have orange pictures.
The cameras have gotten better over time. Or blue. Yeah, or blue, depending on if you have the wrong setting. But if you shoot with auto white balance indoors on a camera, your pictures will probably end up orange and you should probably adjust the white balance somewhat. And that's what you're looking for is subtlety, subtle tweaks.
The advantage of shooting raw is that a lot of these tweaks become lossless. And so you can then later on, when you realize that you're terrible at editing now and everything you did now is garish, you can go back and re-edit your favorites and kind of tone it down a little and use your new skills.
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.
good point yeah fair enough um so anyway yeah raw basically gives you a lot of headway but i i think so max i'll ask should i avoid raw completely since i'm such a noob i think maybe yes i think maybe avoid raw at first simply because raw files are you know by definition less processed so they start out in a much worse state usually and need a lot more in editing to to look good but
Also, they are huge, and they are cumbersome, and they are more slow to edit. They take up more resources. And so what that might do is discourage you from editing or shooting. And that's the last thing you want. So what I do... I mean, this is... Let's see. Maxell, you said you have the Canon Rebel SL3 and the iPhone 16 Pro. I don't know anything about these.
Does that have a dual card slot by any chance? Can you do my trick? But anyway... My trick is JPEG on one card, RAW on the other, and mostly never even use the RAWs and just import the JPEGs. You can do the same thing on one card, just a little bit more work. But anyway, I strongly suggest just deal with the JPEGs at first.
And it'll make everything faster and lighter weight and smaller and lower impact. And that's what you want as you're getting into this because you're going to make a lot of bad choices. And the last thing you want in the learning process is to slow down your iteration and the cycle, and you don't want to discourage yourself.
So basically, you get good at it by learning what each of the controls do in the editor. So... The best thing I can say is just kind of start sliding some around and look at what they do with the picture and you can see. So like when you move the highlights up and down, you can see, oh, it blows out the sky versus trying to unblow it out. You move the shadows up and down.
Oh, all the dark areas get lighter and you can see more detail, but it raises the noise floor. You can play with the exposure. You can play with the contrast, see what looks ridiculous, see what looks more calm.
kind of just play with it and and i i would say like just try to yeah try to learn what each of those sliders does by experimenting with it and then however you think you might want to edit a picture dial it back a little bit afterwards like yeah go nuts with the contrast make it look really cool and then dial it back to like half of what you did and that that's probably better so anyway all right john where am i wrong
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%.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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?
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...
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
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
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.
The lighting will be better. You won't
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
That seems disheartening, but that is the process that will teach you to make a better capture next time.
Those are great answers. Thank you, gentlemen. Additionally, we have Scott Shuchart, who writes, I'm trying to compress three large-ish files, about 20 to 60 gigabytes each, using the Finder, and they're taking forever. According to Activity Monitor, Archive Service, which I assume is a compressor, is running six threads, but only using between 95% and 140% CPU.
This is in a MacBook Pro M2 Pro with 10 cores. Nothing else significant is happening. And it's plugged in with no fan noise. Why can't it spin up at least three performance cores to get this done faster? What are these chips for?
I think it's an interesting question because a lot of the times...
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it's basically saying there are some things that you can do in parallel and some things that can't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
And in this case, you do not want this help from Apple.
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I've discovered a feature on the BMW iX that I didn't even know it offered and is quite interesting. So most high-end cars these days have some kind of feature
what what tesla called auto steer back in the day some kind of like lane keeping plus radar cruise control so that if you're driving on the highway and you just want to stay in the lane that you're in and stay you know an appropriate distance from the vehicle in front of you the car will drive itself for you in that context as long as it can you know see the lane markers and stuff like that
So I knew going into this car that BMW had some kind of system that was very similar to this and that it worked pretty well. I tried it briefly during the test drive and it was fine. So I now have more time with it. And I, I learned, you know, as I was driving, I kept seeing as I would engage the system that works very similarly to Tesla auto steer, I would engage it.
And, you know, you like keep your hands on the wheel and everything. And then it kept saying in little text below the indicator that, Assist plus ready. And I thought, well, that's interesting. What's ready that I'm not already doing? Eventually, I figured it out. Assist plus is like Tesla auto steer. However, you take your hands off the wheel and just leave them off. And so it's hands-free.
And I think it seems to be using cameras or something to look at me to make sure I am paying attention to the road. But it is otherwise hands-free. And so you can just put your hands in your lap. I mean, insert joke here, but you can just put your hands down.
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...
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.
Yeah, be chill. It'll be fine.
see you may think like i thought when i first learned that i could do this i thought well how different could that be from what you know the tesla auto steer version of it is just like well you have to have your hands on the wheel because it's like sensing whether you're applying any kind of resistance or touching the wheel or anything but if you if you take your hands off for like you know more than you know a few seconds it'll start yelling at you saying put your hands on the wheel i'm like well how different can that really be because
When you're doing that, you're just kind of loosely resting your hands on the wheel, but letting it steer itself so you're not really applying any pressure. You're just kind of loosely resting your hands there. Let me tell you, it's very different when you don't have your hands on the wheel at all. I don't think I like it, and I don't think it should be legal.
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.
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.
Right, and you're going 70 miles an hour down the highway when this is happening. Yeah, how many feet have you covered during that fraction of a second? Right, exactly. So, like, let me tell you, it is so unnerving. Because, first of all, okay, so you take your hands off the wheel and it activates and it lights up and everything. And you're like, okay, well, what do I do with my hands?
I know, insert joke. But, like...
what like there's not like you have to keep looking at the road if you look away too much it'll go boom driver discretion detected then it'll start yelling at you and i assume it will disengage after a while if you keep doing it but i haven't gotten to that point but like and and honestly the funniest thing about it is that the first time during any drive that you take your hands off the wheel and therefore engage assist plus
it shows this giant disclaimer, like this two-paragraph thing on the screen. Do you die? It's not our fault. That you have to dismiss. But it's like, well, I have to look away from the road for a few seconds to dismiss this tremendous wall of text that you show me every time. It's like the tutorial level that teaches you that it's watching where you look.
right but yeah it was so like it's really unnerving because like the tesla auto steer and and the rivian to some degree tesla was a little worse but like what what those taught me is these kind of systems mostly work but occasionally make mistakes
Where they might steer me a little too close to a divider or the car in front of you might merge into your lane and it might react a little slowly or a little bit harshly or whatever. And so what I learned is sometimes you give little corrective feedback with the steering wheel while using these. But when your hands are in your lap, you can't really do that.
And so even though the BMW system so far, whether my hands are on the wheel or not, has not given me any reason to doubt it, it seems very good so far. I've only done local Long Island highways so far. I haven't been off the island yet with it.
it seems very good so far so i trust it so far but the level of trust you have to have to just put your hands in your lap is so much higher than having your hands still on the wheel because like suppose it tries to jerk the wheel really hard and you know left or right if your hands are on the wheel you'll catch it really quickly and possibly even physically prevent it from doing that but
If your hands are in your lap, it's going to make that full movement before your hands even get there again. So I kind of want... And what it's gaining me is... I'm not sure what.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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.
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.
By the way, you know who is even more weirded out by this feature? The passengers of the car when you're using it. Yeah.
Let me tell you, they do not like that at all. No, because this is like a – what do you call it?
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
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.