Pre-show: We’re still grumpy about the most recent member’s special Follow-up: New iPad Mini “Jelly Scrolling” is fixed? David Pierce disagrees though Submerged and Vision Pro demos (via Kevin Markham) Apple may stop producing Vision Pro soon? Some follow-up from the most recent member’s special Photo editing Exposing to the right DPReview More via Sam Doran Color spaces …are only applicable on JPEGs (via Léo Natan) Daniel Laan’s take What do we do with our computer’s color tweaks while editing (via Josh Harris) John’s thoughts on cropping Parallelizing file compression/decompression unxip (via Mihai Parparita) More from unxip author Saagar Jha Apple Archive (see also aa) “No hats, no walkmen” (via Dan Pierce) iPhone SE 4 rumors Aside: iPhone product mix from ATP #609 Overtime Case leak October Macs? 🧐 Ask ATP: How do we protect sensitive information like driver’s licenses? (via Jochen Marschall) How do we assist parents with account management and legacy planning? (via Kaleb) How do we clean our keyboards‽ (via Randall Miller) KeyboardCleanTool Post-show: John’s Quicksilver update Alfred LaunchBar Raycast Members-only ATP Overtime: What even is a photo, anyway? The Verge’s post Craig Federighi’s WSJ interview The Verge’s recap More from Allison Johnson Sponsored by: Clic for Sonos: Elevate your Sonos experience. Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
We have a follow-up item that we have just been told that we aren't allowed to do.
We're starting tonight with violence, I see.
I would not agree with that characterization. I would say it was suggested that we not spoil one of our member specials as an enticement for people to become members because then they will already know what happens. But now they have to become members to find out. And that was my suggestion. Not an edict, not a command, but a suggestion.
Let's just say, listeners, that in the latest member special about the tier list for storage media, One of the hosts of the show was down on a medium for being apparently unreliable.
Could you characterize that down? Exactly how down was this host? The host was me. How down? Like F tier?
Is that what you're talking about? What tier would you say?
we've had people write in who who have basically written in to say things like i've read a thousand of them recently and they've all been fine anyway so all this is to say we we don't want to spoil what this is but rest assured listeners we are getting your feedback and two of the three of us really appreciate it two-thirds of your hosts are very excited
I'll say that's interesting because what I was going to say is I also see all the feedback and I think the feedback is pretty much evenly split. No, no, there is pretty much evenly split.
No, admittedly, all three of us have biases and priors here, but hand to God, to my eyes, it has been at best one third in favor of the host who shall remain nameless. That is still very wrong. And two thirds in favor of the other two thirds of the show.
Fantastic. I didn't actually count them because I didn't think I'd get any resistance to this because it was so clear from the feedback that I'm getting that it's pretty evenly split. Oh, please. Go read them again. Well, maybe we should count them up.
Here's one of the problems with getting feedback on Mastodon is that we all see the stuff that at mentions ATP FM, but I only see the stuff that just at mentions me and you only see the stuff that just at mentions you. So we're actually not looking at the same pool. So that does complicate things.
That is true. I will concede that. And it would not surprise me if your flying monkeys were quick to report. Well, no, actually, your flying monkeys would call Marco and I out for sure.
They would not shy away. Sometimes they do. I pasted one of them into Slack for you to see. Because that's why I didn't understand the point of you saying, look, people wrote in in support of my position. I'm saying, yeah, they wrote in support of my position, too. What's your point? It's like evenly split.
No, see that?
Really not. It doesn't matter what people vote. It only matters what the reality is. And I contend that my reality is closer to the real one.
Wow. Your reality is exactly that. And just hear me out for a second. Your reality is your reality. And the thing that you were saying was that your, and I think it was Merlin that hates this phrase, but I can't think of a better one. Your lived experience, I'm not here to debate, in your lived experience.
Oh.
written in there are dozens of you to echo there exactly they've written in and they say hey yeah the things that john was saying i also experienced that and that's why but there were also many many many people who said you're out of your darn mind i again i think it was roughly evenly split but either way the the main point is enough surely you will concede that enough people wrote in and supported my position and you could determine that it's not just a me thing
Yes, I would say it's not just a you thing. I don't debate that your experience with this particular medium was probably crummy. Now, we may or may not get to later.
How crummy was it? Like D tier? How crummy?
Don't distract me.
Because you're killing me with this because you're like, oh, this is a thing that John hates and whatever.
And it's like, no, no. Listeners, rest assured, you should listen to this member special.
You really should. I think it's one of the best things we've ever done. You've never heard people be more angry to receive an A grade on a paper.
Oh, you know, I was trying not to spoil it. God damn it, John. Before the show.
We don't even know what we're talking about. We could be talking about sandwiches here. Nobody knows what we're talking about. We're talking about the printing press, John. The printing press.
It is a printing press in a manner of speaking.
Maybe slightly hyperbolic.
So suffice to say, if this is amusing to you, listeners, if this is amusing to you, ATP.FM slash join.
Do you have strong feelings against storage media for computers? You're listening to the right podcast. Boy, do we have the member special for you.
Uh, we could not kidding. We could spend the next two and a half hours continuing to relitigate this travesty. We already did that show.
It was two and a half hours long.
We could do another one. And I know that John, you would be here for it. I know that Marco would be too. So anyway, but I'm going to try to move us forward. Let's talk about the iPad mini and quote unquote, jelly scrolling. And let me start by asking, do either of you have the iPad mini six, the one that was before the iPad mini age 17 or whatever the heck the current one is.
A7D Pro, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Because I haven't had an iPad Mini in years, so I never experienced this.
The only one who has a chance is Marco and his drawers.
I had it. I have since traded it in for other credit to upgrade. But anyway, that's the one that I tried using for a little while as an e-reader. I know about the jelly scrolling effect that people said they had. I never went looking for it before. But I never noticed it because I didn't want to hate this thing I had bought. And I knew about this potential problem ahead of time.
So I didn't like, you know, squiggled up and down in portrait mode to try to get the effect to show up. I just used it. And in my just usage of it, I did not notice the problem that people say. That isn't to say it wasn't there. A lot of people did see it, but it was not noticeable enough for me to see it in my usage.
I saw it in an Apple store when this story first came out. I don't think this was the first mini to have this issue. I can see it if I look for it. I'm not entirely sure it would bother me, but I can definitely see it without slow-mo video, just like going to an Apple store, find one of these old ones, and scroll it, and you're like, okay, I see what they're getting at, but...
I have a message from inside one of your houses that somebody is a little grumpy that Marco and I were politicking during the member special. So if that is also appealing to you, please feel free to go to ATV. I feel like that's a separate issue.
Somewhat connected.
Yes. I think that by virtue of S tier requiring a unanimous decision, I think that that implies that politicking is part of the game.
Well, you know, everyone's got to do what's in their heart.
I would also argue that, first of all, that somebody in John's house might be upset about tactics being wielded against John. They might be a little bit biased. But also, I think Casey and I just discovered our power for the first time.
You know, you're only hurting yourselves. That's my opinion. Everyone's got to make their own choices.
For the record, well, I don't want to go any further. I told, see, I'm letting myself get roped back in. I said we were going to move on. We can never move on.
Don't watch messages from my wife while you're recording the podcast.
I didn't say who it was. It could have been Tim.
By the way, if you think my wife is biased in favor of supporting me, I'm not even sure Casey's conversations with my wife would support that theory.
That's actually, I can confirm that I think of all the biases Tina may have in favor of John might be the last on the list. That's true.
Usually she's on our side. Although my friend did message me today and he wanted me to tell you that John's friend from Bulgaria says it should be in B tier.
oh god it's an alliteration so it did seem like a lot of people pointed to uh quality of what you bought as a large factor um and i'm look i'm just saying i bought the good ones well that's kind of in support of my argument is when there's lots of different variables and uh not all those combinations result in success it's like well how many of the combinations result in
good things and how many of the combinations result in bad things. And if too many of the combinations result in bad things, that produces people who have poor experiences, perhaps, you know, distributed throughout the mass of people who did it. And I just think it's, there were too many combinations that resulted in bad things.
And that's what I'm digging it for, digging it all the way down, all the way down to the terrible tier that it ended up in.
Anyway, I'm doing this myself. I have nobody to blame but the mirror. So anyway, apparently most of the iPad Mini 7, a.k.a. the iPad Mini A17 Pro, say that jelly scrolling is fixed. However, was it David Pierce, I believe, at The Verge said, quote, the jelly scrolling effect from the last model is still very much present. Um, this is with, so what is jelly scrolling?
It's referring to screen tearing. I'm sorry. I'm reading for Mac rumors now refers to screen tearing, which can cause texture images on one side of the screen to appear to be tilted downwards because of a mismatch and refresh rates. It can cause one side of the display to look as if it is responding faster than the other side, resulting in a visual disturbance. I love that turn of phrase.
that is hard to ignore once noticed. It's like a FedEx logo. The effect is noticeable on the iPad Mini 6 when the device is used in portrait orientation, leading to complaints from customers over the past three years. Shortly after the iPad Mini 6 was launched, an Apple spokesperson told Ars Technica that quote-unquote jelly scrolling was normal behavior for iPads with LCD displays.
Given that LCDs refresh as well, line by line, there's a tiny delay between when the lines at the top and the lines at the bottom are refreshed.
So, yeah. So the story is here that pretty much everybody who reviewed the new iPad mini parentheses, a 17 pro said, Hey, jelly scrolling is fixed, but the verge says totally not fixed.
I haven't seen one of these in person, so I can't say one way or the other, but it's interesting to see any kind of split in this, because again, if it's noticeable and I think it is, if you're looking for it, it's weird that most of the reviewers would say that it's fixed. Uh, I, you know, We'll see.
If you ever end up in an Apple store, go find the new iPad Mini and see if that jelly scrolling is still there. Although, again, honestly, it's like... Even though I can see it if I'm looking for it, for something like an iPad Mini, I don't think I would worry too much about it. Like... It's not, you know, it's a small screen.
Maybe you're not going to be watching big high fidelity movies on it and be worried about that when you're scrolling your timeline. I don't know. Like everyone has their own tolerance, but be aware that it did exist and that according to The Verge anyway, it may still exist.
Last episode, I was wondering, hey, is this 15, 17, whatever minute short film, Submerged, is that available to watch, or at least in part, during a Vision Pro demo? Kevin Markham writes in, I did a Vision Pro demo on October 14, which was apparently four days after Submerged was released.
I was indeed able to watch Submerged during the demo, though it was a much shortened version, perhaps three minutes long, that showed the crew trying to save themselves from water rushing into the submarine. Spoiler alert. Uh, there's no indication that I was watching an excerpt from a larger, excuse me, longer film.
Rather, I thought it was just a random movie like scene designed specifically to show off the capabilities of the vision pro. We had a couple of people write in later to say something similar. Um, I've also heard, or we've also heard a couple of reports that, um, that apparently the demonstrations are far less on the rails than they were originally.
If you recall, we were all talking about how, I don't remember, I don't think, Marco, you did a demo, but certainly John and I did, and they were very on the rails. Like, you should do this, you should do that, you should do this, you should do that. Let me show you this, let me show you that.
And now, apparently, I think they still have a bit of a script, but they're much more willing to let you experiment, as per a handful of people who've written it.
And there's more stuff. I mean, they're adding this movie in. I'm sure there's just more content than they had on day one.
Oh, yes. And speaking of, there is another sizzle reel, this time for basketball for the NBA All-Star Weekend, which was, I presume, many months ago. This is similar to the Super Bowl thing, which as a football fan, despite the fact that it's a terrible sport in a zillion ways, as a football fan, I loved the Super Bowl sizzle reel.
even though I didn't really have any particular love for either of the teams. I am a former basketball fan. I just haven't really paid attention in a long, long time. And this is a reel for the all-star weekend. Really freaking good. It's really good. And this is, this is the, the, I don't know, not dichotomy, but the, the, the issue with vision pro is that when it's good, it's,
It's so freaking good. It really, really is. But the problem is it's five minutes at a time, 15 minutes at a time. If you happen to watch a movie and if you're plugged into the wall, it's also really good. If you're doing the Mac virtual display thing, it is incredibly good. But I don't know if it's $3,500 good. We don't need to relitigate that now.
I'm just saying there is so much to love about this device, and it bums me out that it's not catching on. I get it. I totally get it, but it does bum me out. In fact, there is a report. I'll probably forget to put it in the show notes, but there's a report I saw earlier today.
I think I saw it on Mac Rumors, and then it was echoed elsewhere that allegedly Apple has built enough Vision Pros, something to the order of like 500,000 of them or something like that, Um, I'm doing this off the dome, so forgive me if I get this wrong, but apparently they've built enough vision pros that they don't think they're going to need to build anymore after this year.
And they'll be able to ride that straight through most or all of next year too.
I think the story was that they were going to stop building them now for the remainder of the year. Like they got enough now to last them for the rest of 2024. I think that was the story.
I found it. I'm not going to read it right now, but I will put it in the show notes. I thought it was something like that. And I didn't think they were going to build any in 2025 either. But either way, if John is right or I am right, it doesn't really matter.
You get the gist is that they've apparently built a lot more than they need, which is really too bad because it is such a cool and incredibly impressive device.
asterisk dagger double dagger etc etc did you see that i remember one of the stats from that story was that how many they were building per day and they said they were currently building a thousand per day oh yeah and they used to be building two thousand per day but they lowered it to a thousand per day and they're going to stop that just gives you an idea of the numbers here that if you're building a thousand a day maybe you really are outrunning demand at this point so yeah maybe stop
Like Casey, I'm down on the Vision Pro a lot on this show, but I do want it to succeed. I think it's a cool idea. I think it was executed with some choices that I would have made very differently. And I hope Apple has seen that the direction they went with this was probably wrong in a few pretty big ways.
But I they built a lot of useful tech and I think it can be kind of you know pivoted into something cooler. I think we have two big challenges with what they have right now. Number one is like how do you kind of pivot your hardware into something that is closer to what people want.
And number two, in the meantime, when you have this thing that you're trying to sell now and people who have purchased it, how can you get enough content out there that somebody who buys it can't go through it all the very first night they have it?
It's a problem with video games too sometimes.
Yeah, but usually... Yeah, that's the problem. Like, when a new game system comes out and, you know, there's, like, one or two games at launch, you know, that's a problem. But then, like, two weeks later, there's a bunch more. What they need in the Vision Pro is, like, look, it's great that we keep getting more and more samples and trials and previews and teasers. That's great, but...
then what then we need what backs it up we need we need enough there that even if the whole rest of the industry and all your press people are all saying yeah this things i don't really i don't really have any use for this if you lone listener say i want to buy this i i think it's cool no matter what anyone else says you should be able to buy it and take it home and have more than like a few days of of stuff to you to do on it of content of apps you know like
you should be able to have decent value. Even if you buy it, you should have decent value from it more than just a few days worth. And some people do with the apps that already exist, but I think that's a pretty small group. And so it's, again... It's all about content. Just get content on there. Whatever you have to do, Apple.
There's probably going to be a decent amount of deal-making happening to make that happen. Whatever you have to do, get content onto the Vision Pro.
Another tidbit from that MacRumors article about the sales thing is that at the end they talk about the upcoming low-cost headset that Apple supposedly has in the works. And supposedly Apple has told suppliers to prepare to build 4 million of the low-cost headsets. Oh, that's over the entire lifespan of the product.
So let's, you know, if this thing is like half price or $1,500 or whatever, that seems ambitious. But, you know, 4 million over the lifetime, is that lifetime four years? Is that a million a year? Is that 4 million over one year? Either way, these rumors seem to indicate that Apple thinks their next shot at this will do better than their first.
Just as a final note on this, I know we just talked about it, but I would like to echo again what we've said over and over, I think, on the show. If you have the ability, like if there's an Apple store near you or if you have a friend that has a Vision Pro, it's worth trying. It really, really is. Go to the Apple store and do the 30 minute demo or whatever. It's worth trying.
And that costs you literally nothing. When I did it. And admittedly, I think they knew I was literally purchasing one at the time, so they weren't about to upsell me. But my understanding is they're not very aggressive at all about trying to close a deal or anything like that.
No, they didn't mention anything about buying one. They didn't tell me anything about it. They didn't tell me the price. They didn't tell me I could buy one. They were just completely uninterested in selling me this thing.
Exactly. So truly, it is worth 30 minutes or whatever of your time. If you live even remotely close to an Apple store or if you have a friend or acquaintance that has one, you really should try it because I cannot stress enough, I know I said it a minute ago, when this thing is on, like this immersive video and some of the apps that are on it, it is just unlike anything I've ever experienced.
It's so cool and you should really try it.
Oh, it's an amazing demo. If you haven't ever tried it before, you will walk away from that saying, oh my god, that's amazing. Just know that what you see in the demo is most of it.
well that's the thing you'll probably go to the demo and say why are why is marco especially but also the other two why are they so down on the vision pro and it's because of what marco said because the amazing bits generally speaking are the content the amazing content you can blow through that like marco said in a day at most probably quite a bit less than that um now there are other good things like i keep talking about mac virtual display because if you're in the situation where that's useful for you you travel you're you're traveling or you have traveled
You know, you're in a hotel or you're on a train or a plane. It is unreal, but that's not a problem that I personally find myself needing to fix on a regular basis.
And some people just like to use a single window app while sitting on a mountain lake or whatever. There are people who like it, and there are things that it does besides just... I mean, we kind of talk about it not exclusively as a content consumption platform, but very heavily as that because it's one of the things that it does better than anything else.
But it also runs the apps that are available for it. And yeah, you can run apps elsewhere too, but you can't quite run them in the same way surrounded by a picturesque forest or whatever. And some people like that and find it very... a very new and interesting and useful way to work.
So there is that, but it is, boy, it's a pretty expensive way to get one window floating in the air in front of you over like
Yeah. And another, I think this has been talked about on Upgrade a lot. I know I keep trying to move on and I keep stopping myself, but this is apparently the Casey has no self-control episode. But I think Upgrade has talked about this a lot, but I have a standing every couple of weeks FaceTime with a handful of our mutual friends, all of whom have vision pros. And
And doing that spatially where Mike, for example, is to my left and Jason is to my right and maybe James Thompson is straight across from me, at the end of that half an hour, hour, 45 minutes, whatever it may be, I feel much more like I was hanging out with people than I do I was on a FaceTime with people.
that at the end of that, there's something about that experience that makes me feel like we were hanging out in person. And I know that sounds bananas, and I would judge me if I were you, but it really does feel different than just a FaceTime. So again, there are very cool, incredible uses for this thing if you happen to have a bunch of friends with too much money and not enough sense.
So I don't mean to be down on the Vision Pro entirely, but gosh, I can't echo what Marco said enough. More content, please and thank you. With regard to the member special, I'm going to try to obliquely bring in some feedback from replyguyxxl, who wrote that for one of the storage media we spoke about, if we were using an Apple-branded device to write to that storage medium…
Those devices typically were very, very, very bad, and there are better ones that existed. So if perhaps, Marco, you lived an all-Apple life in the, I don't know, maybe mid-'90s and probably had an Apple device to write to this particular media, maybe your experience was suboptimal.
Maybe. You don't say.
Maybe.
I did not have an Apple Drive.
Especially if you're using really crappy products for this. Like, really? I was not.
Am I the type of person that sounds to you like I would buy the crappiest piece of technology I can find with no research behind it? Which may, by the way, also be the reason that I ended up with the best reviewed version of this storage media piece of hardware rather than just buying something random or getting the Apple one. Oh my gosh.
Anyway, fair enough, fair enough, fair enough.
Although I did, seeing this video did make me wonder, do I still have that in my attic or did I finally get rid of it? I kept it for a really long time because it was so expensive because it was like the fancy one, you know, like the, you know, the best reviewed, you know, especially the beginning of ****. Like this was before like the 52X or whatever. Beep.
sorry sorry it's hard to do um but yeah i don't even know if i still have that if i still had it it's probably because it was so expensive that i just wanted to keep it because it's like i spent all my i don't remember what it was that was my allowance i was older than that but still i spent a lot of money on it so it has sentimental value so i bet it's still up there somewhere
In any case, Ian McCullough also wrote that, well, Ian writes, I am slash was a collector of recordings of jam band shows, and I am not here, Marco, to litigate what a jam band is, just to be clear. But Ian writes, I spent more time and money on this silly, obsolete hobby than I'd like to concede.
And one of the storage mediums you spoke about was, all caps, revolutionary to this particular hobby. But I'm here to confirm for you, with over 1,000 data points, what particular brand of media you buy makes all the difference in the world. On the advice of Deadheads, which I think Marco and I can both agree is a jam band, this particular person used Kodak-branded media. Kodak Golds, baby!
And there were two grades. There was silver and gold. And because collecting Grateful Dead shows is obviously, this is quoting Ian Still, very serious business, I only used the high grade slash gold ones. I had well over a thousand of these pieces of media. And looking at my trading logs, I had stopped collecting these shows in the winter of 1999.
I recently went to divest myself of all my physical media. And before I did, I re-extracted all of that to SSDs. 25 years later, after it had been put on this media, how many of those particular pieces of media were unreadable? Exactly one out of over a thousand. And even that one was mostly readable. There was just one song I couldn't pull off of it.
And even within that song, it was essentially one second. So yeah, I'd say this is, I will concede it's anecdata, but wow is a significantly strong anecdata. That depends, Marco and me. That's all I'm saying.
For every one of those, there's someone like Paul Tower who says, quote, I lost a ton of data in the 90s before I knew how prone to failure they were. As a result, I have almost no pictures from college. Irreplaceable pictures. And he says, I can't remember the last time one of these pieces of media worked.
Oh, my God. You the two of you must have been buying the worst pieces of media.
I mean, I could continue reading from other feedback that I've gathered. But, you know, like, look, like I said, there's this is a situation where there are clearly a lot of variables, including, by the way, one of the variables that you might not think about, which is like, oh, so you you know, you want to read this later, but you haven't been actively using it. Where have you stored it?
How has it been stored? What is the humidity like? Has it been in the sun? What is the temperature like? So many variables. And my contention is that there are so many different combination of variables that result in failure that it's enough to keep this out of where you guys wanted to put it.
I would challenge you, any storage medium, put it in the same environment for the same amount of time and try to read it, and I bet you'll have a similar failure rate.
I mean, that's part of these people giving their experiences and sort of feeling down on this is that, yes, of course, all storage media has some failure rate, but the combination of what these things were used for And how prone they might be to failure resulted in people losing data and remembering it and telling stories about it.
Oh, it isn't just an academic concern or something like, yeah, all storage media fails, but it's not a big deal because by then I had moved on. These people lost data to it. And that's why they remember. Kind of like when we talked about floppy disks, losing data on floppy disks, right? People remember it. It's not like floppy disks were just incredibly unreliable.
They were the main storage media on the computer for ages. But when you lose something, it sticks with you. And that happened with this storage media. to enough people that they remember it. And so, yeah, it gets the terrible grade, the terrible unfair grade that it got.
It was terrible and it wasn't. Hey, let's talk about photo editing. What is exposing to the right exactly? Marco, would you like to refine any statements or do you want me to handle it?
Yes. So it turns out I used that term wrong.
But you were close. You were close. It was just some of the particulars were slightly off. That's why we'll put a link in the show notes to two things. One, the Wikipedia page on it. And two, a DP review video if you want to see in detail what he was talking about.
Yeah, so basically what I was talking about was when shooting photos in a RAW format off your camera sensor, there's usually a whole bunch of shadow detail in the dark areas that if you shoot RAW later in post-processing, you can usually bring up the exposure of the shadow areas to get a lot of that back. But what you can't do is...
If part of the sensor was blown out with 100% white from a bright light or the sun or a reflection being in the frame or near the frame, you can't recover any detail from a totally white blown out area. That's just like the sensor having all the little buckets of photons were all just full in that area. You can't recover any more detail because it was just full.
And so my strategy has always been expose the picture during capture, if I'm shooting raw, expose the picture to be able to capture the bright areas in the correct detail and exposure, like the brightest.
So if there's like a sun or reflective water or whatever, expose so that that's correctly exposed, even if it makes the rest of the picture too dark, because then in post-processing I can bring up the dark areas, but I can't recover that highlight area.
I think you did the exact same slightly wrong description as you did in the last episode. I think that's what you just did.
Well, that's what I do. But I said, I think photographers call this exposed to the right. And it turns out exposed to the right means almost the opposite of that.
Not quite. But yeah. So we should read this feedback from Sam Doran, who I think summed it up pretty well.
Yeah. The term exposing to the right comes from moving the histogram to the right, as in overexposing an image.
Pause for a second and say what the histogram is. Most fancy cameras have a thing where they'll show you a histogram. Histogram is just a graph that shows, like, how many values at level one, how many values at level two, how many values at level three. And it makes, like, a little mountainous little graph. That's your histogram, right? And what they're showing in this histogram on cameras is...
different brightness levels, with the left side of the histogram being black and the right side being white, and all the values that are in between in terms of brightness, if you're looking at like a luminance histogram, right?
And when I say moving the histogram to the right, it's saying the shape of the little mountain range made by the histogram, you're trying to make the big peak, the big lumpy mountain, be more to the right of the image. The right is bright, the left is dark, right? So it's always going to be some kind of like lumpy type of thing or whatever, but...
If there's one big lump or mound of where most of the luminance data is in the image, exposed to the right is saying, move that lump to the right. Don't leave a bunch of space to the right on the histogram of, like, level 10, 11, 12. These are made-up values. 13, 14, like, oh, those just have very low values on them. The hump is in the middle. You don't want the hump in the middle.
You want to shift the hump to the right because—continue, Casey—
When shooting raw, exposing one-third or two-thirds brighter is the best way to maximize the data captured by the sensor for later processing. You can recover quite a bit of seemingly lost highlight detail in a raw image. Only when shooting JPEG do you want to expose for the highlights, as Marco described, to avoid completely losing data.
And Sam had some more information on this that I wasn't able to pin down to the point where I wanted to put it in the show word for word. But the idea is that when you're exposing to the right, the more brightness you can get, the more data there is available to you. You don't want to waste part of it.
The way I would describe it is your camera, whatever your settings are, captures a certain range of luminance values, a certain range of light, right? If you put the big lump in the middle when you're shooting raw, you're kind of wasting the stuff to the right because you're not capturing any data there. With raw, you can shove that lump over
Not off the edge, because off the edge is what Mark was talking about. Oh, now you've blown out your highlights. Now things that are pure white. But shove the lump over to the right to allow you to use the rest of the range to get more values in the darkness. And that's the exposing to the right. The right is that lump in the histogram.
Do we want to discuss color spaces? All right. When shooting raw, this is Sam continuing. When shooting raw, the color space is determined when exporting from the raw processor. Adobe RGB is a good choice when exporting edited raw images to other formats. While the in-camera color space only matters for JPEG images, it should be set to Adobe RGB for when you do use JPEG straight from the camera.
It's a much bigger color space and the images look better as a result.
That's what I was asking Marco last time. What color space is he using? Not realizing that it doesn't matter when you're talking about raw because color space only comes into effect when you take that raw sensor data and you say, okay, now I'm going to stick this into something like a JPEG or an image or whatever.
We choose the color space because the raw is really just the values from the sensor and more or less it's raw form after whatever it's called debayering or whatever that thing is where they process the sensors into a bunch of RGB values.
Although I feel like, and I can't substantiate this right now, but I feel like a lot of people said that Adobe RGB was not the right choice. Read the next item. Oh, there. Okay, maybe that's where I got it from. Leo Natan writes with regard to camera color space settings. Color space selection in cameras is applicable only for JPEGs. So far, we agree. Raw files do not contain any color space.
They are just 12 or 14 or 14-bit or more readouts from the sensor. Raw processors take these bits and convert them to a color space. When saving to JPEG, never use Adobe RGB, there we go, as it is a massive gamut, completely unsuitable for 8-bit JPEGs. You will see a lot of color banding. In my Nikon DSLR days, I got bit by Adobe RGB, making a lot of shots unusable.
It's the most noticeable, or excuse me, it is most noticeable on smooth gradients such as skies, but also architecture. Even P3 hits the upper bounds of eight bits. With today's tech, there really is no point shooting in limited JPEG. Modern Sonys can even shoot 10-bit HEK. But RAW is always preferred for portability.
So, like I said, my cameras are set to Adobe RGB, and I'm shooting in JPEG and RAW to two separate cards. But I mostly just deal with the JPEGs. And the idea behind this, what Leo was talking about, is like number of bits per sample. How many bits do you take per sample in this thing? Obviously, if you have 8 bits, you can only have values from 0 to 55.
If you have 12 or 14 bits, you can get many more values, right? So if you're taking a picture of something like a sky gradient or whatever,
uh within a you know one inch strip of the thing or whatever or within some strip of the sky you might have uh in the thing off the sensor you might have five different colors blue slightly darker blue slightly darker blue like five different blues right that's in a 12-bit space because you've got a room you've got a room for however many values 12 bits is like it's you know thousands and thousands of different colors you can fit in there right but when you write it to a jpeg they have to take all those thousands of different colors and compress them down to fit in eight bits and that's only 256
you know, levels for the R, the G, and the B, right? And in an 8-bit thing, those five different blues might map down to a single blue. So what was previously a strip that had five different colors, like a smooth gradient, that same strip now has one color because you can compress it down to 8-bit.
and that is the the danger of possibly seeing banding where you know instead of a smooth gradient where every single line is just a slightly different color blue than the previous one now you see blue number one for half an inch blue number two for half an inch and that's that's banding where you can see these distinct bands of color i have to say i've been shooting adobe rgb for years and years on all my sony cameras and i have never ever ever seen this
Right. But it is technically a danger for the reason that I just described. Maybe I'm not shooting enough big gradient skies. Maybe I don't know, like maybe they aren't 8-bit JPEGs on all these cameras. We'll put a link in the show notes to an article by Daniel Lunn about sRGB versus Adobe RGB versus photo RGB that says here are all the different situations where you might want to use sRGB.
Here's where you might want to use Adobe RGB. Here's when you might want to use pro photo RGB. Right. So I think that provides a reasonably balanced view of, like, the different scenarios where you want each one. The reason I'm personally using Adobe RGB is because when I was first playing with this setting, I took the same exact picture in Adobe RGB and sRGB.
It was just a picture of, like, something in my house that was red. And I brought the pictures back to my computer, and I blind A-B tested them to see if I could tell which one of these is Adobe RGB and which one is sRGB. And holy cow, you could tell.
Again, taking a picture of a red thing in the house, maybe that's not representative, but the Adobe RGB one was much more red and closer to what I saw with my own eyes when looking at it. So I'm like, well, that's it. I'm done with Adobe RGB. I mean, it makes sense. Adobe RGB covers more of the color space than sRGB does. But I wondered, like, is that something you can even see?
And my answer was yes. I could tell the difference in a blind test of which was which. And I liked the Adobe RGB one better. So be aware that when saving Adobe RGB to JPEG and you have smooth gradients, maybe banding is an issue. But I personally haven't seen it, and I'm sticking with Adobe RGB.
All right. And then Leo continues, for HDR, always shoot raw. Lightroom takes all the bits of information. When you enable the HDR toggle, applies an appropriate tone curve automagically. Suddenly, everything that seemed overexposed shows details. For exporting, always use 16-bit JPEG XL or 10-bit AVIF. Then Josh Harris writes, thanks for the great discussion on editing photos.
What should I do with display settings like true tone, night shift, and brightness while editing? I always try to turn color shifting off and increase brightness, but I'm not sure what the best setting is for the most true-to-life result or whether the system adjusts for this already. I mean, I guess turn it all off if you can, but what a pain.
Well, so here's the thing with what these features do. First of all, night shift is the thing that makes it look like someone peed on your screen at night. I would suggest turning that off. It makes everything warmer on your screen at nighttime to try to like reduce the amount of blue light you're being faced with and make you feel nice and cozy, right?
Lots of people like that feature, but if you're editing photos, I would strongly suggest to disable night shift because that is intentionally changing the color balance of your screen in a way that you will notice. Like that's the whole point. It's supposed to look warmer to you. So don't do that if you want to get an idea of what your colors look like.
True Tone is Apple's feature where the hardware has a sensor on it that senses the ambient light in the room and how warm that is. And then based on what that sensor sees, it adjusts the image to try to essentially match the white balance of the room.
So if you're in a room with very warm lighting, it's not going to leave the monitor the same because the monitor will look really, the whites will look very blue compared to the ambient light that is much warmer in the room. Instead, they will warm the monitor up to match the color temperature of the ambient light. I personally leave True Tone on, which is not the quote-unquote pro thing to do.
Pros should be working in a completely dark room with their monitor perfectly calibrated by hardware to be exactly at a D65 white point. Like, I'm not doing that. I leave True Tone on.
And the reason I leave True Tone on is because I know I'm in a room with a bunch of lights that do not have the quote-unquote the right color temperature, and I want my display to adjust itself so that it matches the color temperature in the room so the adjustments I make quote-unquote look right to me in this room, in this lighting.
So when I see them in a different room, in different lighting, they'll still look right. I don't know if that's foolish, but I don't really care because that's just what I do with my pictures, and they look good to me, and I print them in books, and they look good in the books, and when I see them in the books, I don't think to myself, wow, that looks way different than it did in my monitor.
Instead, I think, wow, that looks exactly like it did in my monitor. So I say night shift off, True Tone on.
Yeah, I would say the same thing. The reality is that when you are editing, what you want is a neutral view. However, your eyes and your brain perform some degree of auto white balance all the time in the world. So what you want is something that appears to be very neutral to you at the time. Night shift, the monitor peeing one, that's the more severe effect.
And it is customizable, but people typically use it if they want a stronger effect.
night shift is too much of an adjustment and it makes it difficult for you to know what you're missing by not seeing it because it's removing it's filtering out too much of the blue end of the spectrum so your eyes can't auto white balance to it nearly as well so you will make mistakes like you will do things in that mode that when you later see them like you know the next day in regular lighting you might think oh that's not what I meant to do or that isn't how I meant for that to look
True Tone, which is the much more subtle white balance shifting thing of the monitor, is a much weaker effect, a much smaller effect, and therefore it tends to keep it within the range of what your eye automatically does throughout the day and in different lighting conditions.
I'm not sure if it's weaker, because if you bathed it in super-duper warm light, I think it would adjust it. What it's trying to do is make it look white to you. In this room, this sheet of paper... It's actually very yellow because the light is yellow. And if you have very, very yellow lights, that sheet of paper is objectively yellow.
But to your eyes, that sheet of paper still looks white because you know it's white and your brain adjusts for it or whatever. And what True Tone is trying to do is say, hey, when you hold that piece of paper in the ambient light of the room up to your monitor, I want the white of that paper to match the white on the screen.
And to do that, it makes your screen yellowish to match the yellowish paper. The paper is yellowish because your yellowish light in the room is bouncing off the paper and going to your eyes. Your monitor is yellowish because the OS is making it produce yellow by mixing the red and the green subpixels, right? And so that's the goal of True Tone.
And it's subtle if your lighting is subtly warm or subtly cool. I bet it's not subtle if your lighting is not subtly warm or cool.
Indeed. John, do you want to talk about cropping, please?
Yeah, this is something that came up and we've talked about in past episodes of photo editing, but we didn't mention it last time because in the Ask ATP question, we were all very much focused on like, what do you do when you're editing photos in terms of like exposure and all the fancy controls and Lightroom and photos or whatever.
But it's worth reiterating because a lot of people brought it up and we talked about it in the past. Cropping is the very first thing I do with every single photo that I edit. And it's not an exciting form of editing because you're like, oh, I'm just changing the rectangle that defines the edges of the picture. Who cares?
I mean, it maybe gets a little more exciting with the advent of AI background extensions and stuff. But either way, cropping is the first thing that I do. And every photo that I edit, I crop. Like, I can't remember the last time I edited a photo and said, you know what? I don't need to change it at all.
Part of taking pictures and learning from the editing experience is knowing, ooh, if I had left a little bit more margin around the edges, I could frame this the way I wanted. It's better to have a little bit of extra background as long as you've got enough pixels of resolution.
It's better to have a little bit more extra background than it is to be missing that background because AI background extensions aside, it still is kind of difficult to expand the image where you want it. But you can always crop in a little bit. And what are you doing when you're cropping? You're trying to compose the picture. You're trying to compose it when you take it too.
But it's often more important to get the shot, get the moment when the person is smiling, get the bird flapping its wings or whatever, and then worry about the cropping later versus I'm not going to take the picture until it's perfectly composed in my viewfinder because then you'll miss the shot a lot
of the time so i always try to leave a little bit extra and the very first thing i do is crop and i'm cropping to try to make a nice composition or try to make the composition i was trying to get in the camera but the camera was tilted or you know and this i guess this is involved in cropping to like straighten the horizon line and stuff if you want to um
Or I didn't quite get it framed the way I wanted, but I have enough of the background that I can crop it. If you do no editing except for cropping, you will get better at taking pictures. Your pictures will look, quote unquote, look better. You're like, I didn't do anything to it. All I did was change the edge. They will look better. You don't realize how much of a good picture is...
choosing the crop choosing the composition until you've done that to a few of your pictures and suddenly the exact same picture you haven't done anything to it all you've done is define the crop suddenly looks a lot better uh once you sort of get on that train uh it's hard not to notice it so yeah cropping it's an important part of editing and you should definitely do it and i would suggest making it one of the first things that you do
With regard to parallelization for file compression and decompression, Mihai Paparita writes, the compression speed and parallelism discussion of the most recent ATP reminded me of Cigar JAWS XIP, unzip utility. Though it only focuses on decompression, it shows how much faster than archive utility you can be.
This is relevant because Xcode is zipped using this, I guess, like secure XIP zip thing, and it takes four freaking ever to unzip it by default. Hmm. And so this is a open source and third party utility to make that faster.
I think we've talked about this exact utility on the show in the past, but it should be noted that one of the things it does to speed itself up is not do the verification of everything. That's not the only thing it does to speed itself up. So it's worth looking. You can look at the source code and see it just uses, you know, Swift concurrency to try to do it in more parallel chunks.
And you can totally peg all your CPU cores if you want to do this. But if you care about the checksumming, either don't use this tool or do a full checksum on the finished binary somehow and make sure it is what you expect.
Indeed. And then Cigar Jaw wrote in, or well, wrote on a thread that we were a part of and said, if you just use Finder to make a ZIP zip, it uses some single threaded code by default. I don't actually remember if you can make a zip in parallel, but I'm pretty sure even if you can, lib archive, whatever Finder uses, doesn't do that.
However, Apple has a proprietary format that essentially makes a big tar of your files and then splits it into chunks to compress those in parallel. If your use case is, I have a chunkier file, please make it small, and you're okay with using a special Apple format, and also probably giving up a few percent in size, you should give it a try.
If you're a developer, there's an API, which is the Apple Archive API. There's also an AA tool bundled with macOS that can create and manipulate Apple Archive files.
Yeah, I didn't even try this, but I wonder what kind of file extension. Is it just .aa? But anyway, yeah, if you're just staying within an Apple platform... And you want to, you know, if you really want to compress something quickly, you want to try doing parallel, try the AA tool.
All right. Dan Pierce wrote in with regard to the phones in schools overtime discussion from episode 607. Dan writes, my school had two main rules. This photo was in my yearbook. And you see, I guess, the staff of the high school. And this looks like in the gymnasium. They're on bleachers. And in the back, in huge letters, it reads as follows. No hats. No Walkman.
In the overtime, we were saying how trying to get kids to pay attention in class has always been a challenge. And I mentioned the Walkman as a technology that was around when I was a kid and how kids had them. And if you put them on in class, you would surely be sternly lectured that you shouldn't be listening to your Walkman while you're in class. I didn't think about hats.
But when I was a kid, that was also a thing that I guess I had mostly blocked out. Hats and gum chewing were things that adults were really obsessed with not happening in schools. But yeah, this is the bleacher. It looks like the bleachers in a gymnasium. The back wall behind the bleachers is, you know, that painted cinder block wall that all high schools had.
And literally painted, hand-painted, like, stenciled letters on the wall that are, like, two feet high, all caps. No hats, no walk-on, because the scourge of hats will destroy our children if we let it.
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Okay, so there's been a lot of rumors recently about the iPhone SE 4, and we wanted to talk about a few of them, but we also wanted to mention, or John wanted to mention something with regard to our iPhone product mix that we discussed in the overtime from episode 609. So, John, what's up?
Yeah, what we were talking about in that overtime was, like, what should be the iPhones that Apple sells? Like... What variety should there be? Is the lineup as it is now correct? Should they make a small phone? Should they make, you know, other kinds of weird phones?
And we had this whole discussion and I thought it was interesting as an aside to the iPhone SE rumors that we're about to get to that none of us even mentioned. the iPhone SE in that whole discussion because we were like, the iPhone lineup, you know, the iPhones, iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, maybe there'll be a Slim, maybe there'll be an Ultra, but not once did anyone mention that.
the iPhone SE so neglected is this previous year's model with a new name or whatever, but the iPhone SE exists. Um, and somewhat related to this, uh, the, uh, the, the iPhone mini a 17 parentheses, a 17 pro, which is what Apple calls the new iPhone mini. Um, uh, is connected to the iPhone 17 rumors.
These are actual rumors as opposed to just wish-casting that we talked about in the overtime where Max Tech was talking about iPhone Air, iPhone Ultra, or whatever, just like this would make a nice set of names. These, I think, are actual rumors, and the rumor being that the iPhone 17 lineup will drop the numbers and instead be iPhone parentheses A19, iPhone parentheses A19 Pro.
And so the names would be iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Max, iPhone, whatever they are, iPhone suffix, right? But without the number, like the number wouldn't go up. And the way we would distinguish them is the same way we distinguish, for example, iPads. And this happened ages ago. I think we even talked about it on the show when the quote unquote new iPad came out.
Were we running ATP when that happened? I don't even know. But they dropped the numbers that said iPads aren't going to have numbers. This is just the new iPad. And we're like, how are we going to tell you had an iPad? And now this year there's another thing called iPad, but it's a different product. How are we going to distinguish them?
And the answer was parentheses, you know, second generation, third generation over the same thing with Macs. All these Mac minis, you're telling me they're all called Mac mini? How do I tell which Mac mini do I have? Do they have years in them, do whatever? And the answer is that some phrase in parentheses after it that tells you what it is.
Sometimes it's a year, sometimes it's, in the past it's been like, you know, MacBook Pro parentheses dual USB, like all sorts of stuff. But the rumor is that this would be kind of like the iPhone SE, right? The iPhone SE 4, all right, versus iPhone SE parentheses A16 or something like that.
I'm not entirely sure that the parentheses stuff version of Apple naming is any better than just calling an iPhone 17. In many ways, it's worse. But it is interesting that the iPhones have stubbornly stuck with these numbers.
I remember years ago, people were like, well, surely when they get to 10 or 11 or 12, they're going to stop because iPhone 17 sounds so dumb or iPhone 16, whatever number everyone was saying sounded so dumb. We've already been there and done that and sold that phone and we all survived, right? But...
The fact is, the Macs, the iPads, and lots of other Apple products don't have numbers in the official product names, but the iPhone still does. So are we all looking at a future where every product, including the iPhone SE and all the iPads and all the iPhones, has some weird thing in parentheses after it? Or are we just going to keep making that number go up until we're an iPhone 137?
Well, I mean, so certainly the sequential numbering model name system has diminishing value over time. The numbers start to get weird. Does anybody want the iPhone 37? We're already there.
We used to have this discussion and people would say, does anyone want the iPhone 15? That's ridiculous.
And I do think that we are in that range. It's going to start to get weird if it hasn't already. We're certainly in that range. And so I think, you know, you look at Apple's other product lines and it makes sense. Everyone's fine. Which MacBook Pro do I have? I don't know what year it came out. I know it has the M3, whatever, the M3 Ultra. Like, so, like, did it come out last year?
Did it come out the year before? I forget.
What are the official Apple names of the, I haven't even looked. What are actually the official name of the MacBook Pros these days?
I think it's just MacBook Pro, like, you know, like, you know, late 2020 or whatever. I think. I think. I mean, I'm sure there's exceptions here and there, like, for some disambiguations. But, like, in the other product lines, no one, like, what is the current iPad Pro? What is it called? Who knows? You know, I know it came out this year. Is it called the iPad Pro 2024?
Is it called the iPad Pro with M4 chip? Who knows? It doesn't really matter that much. And I think with the iPhones, I think it mattered a lot more back when the iPhones were, first of all, being upgraded a lot more often than people tend to do now. And when they were changing more frequently than they tend to be changed now.
You know, you look at the current iPhone industrial design and it looks very similar for the last, what, five years? It's been a while now. So, you know, the iPhone is in a maturing stage of its life. The iteration is slowing down in terms of the physical design changes. It's kind of stabilizing.
And so I think it makes sense to start treating it more like other products that have reached similar levels of maturity, like MacBook Pros and iPads. You look around, there's a reason why most of these devices don't just get sequential numbers. It is kind of confusing. The numbers do get a little big and weird after a while. And it stops mattering so much. To some degree...
So I wonder if Apple – I don't know to what degree they would want to do this, but I wonder if also they – like if you have, say, right now if you have like the iPhone 12, do you know how old that is? If it was just like the iPhone, parentheses, 2019, maybe that would feel older to you.
Or maybe it would feel... Maybe you don't want the iPhone 12 to feel as old as it does when you know the iPhone 16 is out. Who knows? But anyway, I think there's multiple reasons to look at getting rid of these numbers and refer to it in other ways.
I think mostly because... They're getting rid of these numbers, but they're kind of replacing them with another number because... The A series processors and the M series processors, guess what, have numbers on them. And the A's are already up to 17, 18, right?
So iPhone, iPhone Pro, parentheses, A18 Pro, it's just move the 18 out of the, you know, it's like, and it's been, you know, a frustration of developers and other people have to deal with these things that the numbers are not synced up between the OS version, the processor version and the phone version.
It would be nice if they got synced up, but I'm looking at Apple's compare page for the MacBook Pros and it says MacBook Pro 14 inch parentheses M3. They seem to be liking the processors in the parentheses, which is fine. Like sometimes there are years. These aren't. I don't know. These are the official like.
actual Apple product names and the tech specs, but I'm just saying what's in the compare page. But the thing they're putting in parentheses is the processor, and all their processors have numbers in them. I mean, it is an improvement in tractability in that, like, if you don't care about that part, you're just like, I got an iPad Pro. I got a MacBook Pro.
Or maybe I got a 14-inch or a 15-inch MacBook Pro. But you don't care what the processor is, and someone might ask you. In the same way, you're like, I got a new iPhone, or I got a new iPad. Which one did you get? Well, do you care about the processor? Then you can list it. But if you don't, you're not distracted by it. I mean, I do see I see a trend towards unifying under this scheme.
Is this scheme better than the existing scheme? Well, there is something to be said for consistency across Apple's product lines. If they can ever even ever so briefly attain that before they go off in another direction, that would be cool. Um, but it's interesting to think about in the context of the, uh, the, the iPhone suffix, right?
Because the iPhone will be left with no suffix, just like the iPad is, but all the other iPhones have something se pro pro max, which has two suffixes. Isn't great. Maybe if there's an ultra, maybe there's a slim or an air or whatever. Um, That's something to look forward for next year.
And the iPhone 17, which I guess we can't call the iPhone 17 if they go with the naming scheme, supposedly is actually going to change the form factor. And just like the iPhone X did, change the form factor and briefly go into a letter-based naming system for the top-end phone before we return to numbers. So as always, with all things naming, it is.
Not entirely chaos in the Apple world, but there's a little bit of spice thrown in.
All right. So what are the rumors for the iPhone SE4? First of all, and this is from 9to5Mac, the SE4 is expected to be based on the iPhone 14 design, but with a single rear camera, 48 megapixels, same sensor as the iPhone 15, a 6.1-inch OLED display with an iPhone 14-sized notch, and USB-C. It is not expected to have a camera control. It is unlikely to have an action button.
And people are saying it might even have that long-rumored Apple 5G modem. You never know. It could happen. This would mean no millimeter wave, which would make me very sad. Not that I'm buying an SE, but that's neither here nor there. It would have 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth on the single chip, and it is expected to launch in the spring.
maybe possibly yeah we've talked about this 5g modem for ages it's kind of interesting that you were saying like oh they probably don't want to roll out their very first uh cellular modem on a really important product line so you put it on the se so if you really messed up damage is minimal and it also looks like uh the modem won't even have millimeter waves so it's not even suitable for the pro phones assuming apple wants to continue having millimeter wave and by the way the ifixit teardowns of the uh like the current 16 pro and stuff
show that Apple went to some length to find a new place on the phone to put the millimeter wave stuff, because the camera control is kind of where the millimeter wave antenna used to be, and now it's, like, threaded through to the top of the phone and everything. So it seems like Apple is still on board with millimeter wave, at least in the U.S.
But, yeah, Apple's first 5G modem not supporting a dollar isn't interesting. I don't actually know if... In our current phones, obviously they have Qualcomm cellular modems. I don't know if they have a separate Broadcom chip or something for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And if so, Apple combining 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth all into a single chip would be an upgrade.
But if not, it's just Apple trying to get away from Qualcomm to stop paying them money because they don't like them and every bit of profit that Qualcomm gets. It's a bit of profit that Apple doesn't get, so they want to own and control the core technologies, blah, blah, blah. Ergo, buy Intel's cell modem business and get yourself your own 5G modem.
It's just taking a long time, and fingers crossed that they don't screw it up. Very true. The new SE looks good, though. Like, so this is... Everyone's saying, like, finally the SE will be modernized. Like, it's not... It doesn't have the dynamic island, but it's all screen. Like, it's all... It's the current modern design. It's easier to repair. A single camera on the back is actually kind of fun.
Like, one good camera... For the cheap phone, instead of having multiple ones, it saves space, presumably makes more room for a bigger battery. As long as it's a good camera. It makes the phone look interesting and cute just having one little camera on it, kind of like a throwback, although obviously the camera is way bigger than it used to be.
I think the iPhone SE 4, which will probably be the iPhone SE parentheses A16. I don't even know what they said the SoC is supposed to be on this, but... It looks like a good year for the SE, unless the thing you liked about the SE was it being smaller, because guess what? It's going to be the same size as the iPhone 14, apparently.
Indeed. And speaking of things that are forthcoming, do we want to briefly talk about the theoretical Apple October event and maybe some new Macs coming?
Will there be an event? I don't know. Well, yeah. I think the alleged October or early November release of Apple products... There you go. Who knows what form that release will take, or even if it will happen, although it sure does seem like it's probably about to happen. But in some form, whether it's press releases or some kind of announcements, who knows? But there are a lot of...
Very, very loud and persistent rumors that we are about to see. Most likely a new Mac Mini, new MacBook Pros, and possibly an iMac, and possibly USB-C peripherals, like keyboard and mouse updates. We'll see about that.
That's interesting, the iMac rumor. It is in the crop of Macs that are due to be updated with M4 chips. And there's kind of a separate rumor of like, There is a version two of Apple's current crop of magic peripherals, the keyboards, the mouse.
And the rumor is vague enough to say, okay, well, a new version of the keyboard and mouse, is that just like take the existing keyboard and mouse and get rid of lightning and put USB-C? Because that would be welcome. Everyone wants it, right? Or is it like... Have they actually revised these products where the keyboard and the mouse are different?
I find that hard to believe, but, you know, the rumors are so vague and so new that who knows. But the final rumor is new iMacs M4, they still with lightning peripherals, but there will also be a USB-C variants of the mouse and keyboard. They just don't come with the iMac, which would be the most awful thing ever. Unless maybe if they're new or something like that. I don't know.
But anyway, yeah, the... It would be nice if they updated this peripherals not to be USB-C, but I don't think anyone with iMac is dying to do it. Because like, honestly, look, if the... If you've plugged in your... I guess people don't plug in their keyboards on iMacs. They probably just use a Bluetooth.
I'm just saying if it comes with lightning already, you can just harpoon your little turtle with the lightning connector that comes with your iMac and you're all set. But I guess most people probably use their keyboards in Bluetooth mode. So I don't know. But anyway, they should definitely upgrade to USB-C. And it would be nice if they did that in this event. But it's interesting that here we are.
By the time you're listening to this, these could have already been announced. And we still don't know if they're going to get rid of lightning on the peripherals or if they're just going to keep them the same and swap out the CPU.
I am so very ready to excise what small amount of lightning exists in my life out of my life. And so even though, honestly, it is not at all burdensome to have a keyboard and mouse that charge via lightning. Well, I should say trackpad. It is burdensome to harpoon the turtle, as you said. For the trackpad and the keyboard, it is not burdensome to have lightning.
I just have a lightning cable draped off the back of my beloved Calgigit TS4, and occasionally I plug them in when they need to be charged. But that being said, it's one of those things that's just like, ugh, crazy. Gross. Lightning just gives me the ick now. I just want to be done with it.
And so I would very, very much like if it would be possible to get these peripherals, even if they're not really refreshed, like you were saying, just these exact peripherals, but with USB-C, please and thank you.
And the other things that are rumored, obviously we've talked about the smaller Mac Mini in past episodes. That's the rumor. It'll be redesigned for the first time in, I think, 14 years or something. The case will be much smaller than it was.
Yeah, I don't need a new Mac Mini in my life. I have one. I have an M1 Mac Mini that I had gotten refurbished, if I remember correctly, and that's what runs Plex and Channels and not too much else, to be completely honest with you. I have zero need to replace that Mac Mini, but if there's like a little puck-looking thing... Oh, man, that's going to be tempting. It's really going to be tempting.
Yeah, and it's supposed to have a lot of ports on it.
I actually do have an intended Mac Mini in mind. I'm trying... So, okay. You're going to put it outside on the deck. No, basically, my last experience with a modern Synology was not good. It's basically dead already. I only bought it, I think, two years ago, and it is not going well.
Well, you should have kept it inside.
Well, it was in a utility closet. It was in a conditioned utility area. So it wasn't like fully inside, but it's basically inside. But anyway, I want something for archival storage that can back up to Backblaze straightforwardly with the regular Backblaze, not like the pay-per-gig one.
um and so i and i have external ssds that are huge and great i have all these giant hard disks that are ready to go sitting around like so i think what i what i want to do really is just get the mac mini and like you know velcro one of these little samsung ssds to it and maybe down the road have a hard drive enclosure that it connects to but for the most part i just want a mac mini to be my archive server in my house and get rid of this broken synology
Hopefully the pricing won't be too ridiculous. But yeah, I think a lot of people will be tempted by the shrink on these because they're going to be good machines. And I think the rumor is M4 and possibly M4 Pro. That's the other thing about this announcement. We know what the M4 is. It's already in a bunch of Macs.
M4 Pro and M4 Max haven't really been super solid rumors about what exactly they contain. We think we know, like, oh, the Pro will be better than the M4. The Max will be better still. Like, there's been lots of Pro and Maxes on all the previous M series. But in the M3s, Apple changed it up a little bit, and the Pro is different than it was in the M1 Pro and the M2 Pro, right?
And so we really don't know what they're going to do with the M4 Pro and the M4 Max at this point. Except to say that, yeah, in the MacBook Pros, presumably, there'll be M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max-based MacBook Pros as well. And so we'll find out how much GPU, how many cores, What are the clock speeds like? What is the cooling like? You know, these are all N3E processors, presumably.
And so this should be exciting. We've waited a while. Like, the M4 debuted in the iPad, of all things, and then came to a bunch of the Macs. Now it's going to be coming to even more Macs. But we're finally getting to, like, the... I'm not going to say the good chips, because the M4 is a good chip. But, like, the more powerful chips, the beefier chips.
Nothing big and fancy like anything ultra-sized or Mac Pro. All those rumors are pushed way out into next year. The Mac Studio, in fact, the latest rumors of the Mac Studio, which might have been scheduled for spring next year, is now looking more like it might be pushed more towards June. And at that point, they might as well just save it for WWDC. And the Mac Pro, same thing.
If you're lucky, it gets announced at WWDC and ships much later in the year. So, no, don't have any expectations that you're going to see anything beyond an M4 Max chip, but... You know, because these things tend not to leak, for all we know, they've decided to stop naming them Pro and Max. Maybe there's only one of them and that has a different suffix. Who knows?
But yeah, our money's on M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max. And the rumors are that these machines will be the same. The iMac will look the same, the MacBook Pros will look the same, the Mac Mini is the only one that's going to look different. So yeah, just a bunch of laptops with the same ports and the same design and the same everything, more or less, except swap out the M3 for a better M4.
Insert suffix here. That all sounds great, and that's another reason why a press release may be reasonable. Have they ever done a press release for a new form factor for a Mac? I don't know. It seems like something that would have to be potentially rare, but not inconceivable. So honestly, I don't know if there's going to be an event. The rumors are, as we record this, that next week.
whatever's going to happen will happen so tune in next week i mean if they were going to do a press release for an entirely new industrial design product it would be the mac mini because it's such a half-assed product for the most part like they really don't or the iphone se or yeah or the iphone se exactly like that i think both of those would be very likely to be press release only you know i'm sure they would have briefings for people for you know a handful of press people but like
you know that's that's not going to justify an event and that's why i kind of think there is no event here i think this is all press release products because none of these are like the big kind of splash that apple likes to make with events like they tend not to have events these days that don't have some kind of like really exciting novel thing and i don't think a new mac mini does it no matter how good it is because it's just the mac mini
The iPhone SE does it because, again, it's just the iPhone SE. These are not high-profile, high-excitement-level products. These are specialized things for certain markets doing certain things that Apple does not really draw a lot of attention to. And a new chip in the iMac that otherwise probably looks the same. I can't see that changing. That's going to be also a nice update, but who cares?
You care if you're in the market to buy an iMac, but no one else will care. And then finally, for the potential upgrade to USB-C keyboards and mice, I... I hope this is wrong. I really do. I cannot see them changing anything else about them. I bet the dumb Magic Mouse that I love so much, but the dumb Magic Mouse, I bet it still charges on the bottom. You still flip it over like a turtle.
I bet everything else about the keyboards and the trackpad, I bet they're all exactly the same. It just switches to USB-C and makes no other changes. I hope I'm wrong, but I bet that's what it is.
Yeah, no, that's the smart money because that's just – it just makes sense. I mean they did it to an entire – forget about like peripherals. They did it to the AirPods Max, right? The whole product. That's the only thing that it got. They've done that. They did it with the AirPods cases. Hey, first we had the case that was lightning. Now it's the same case but it's got a USB-C on it.
Apple is not super into revising its monitors or its keyboard and mouse peripherals on any kind of reasonable schedule. So – watch for that. And I would, I would have to think again, this type of, but these rumors with obscure products, not as much stuff leaks because people just aren't as interested in leaking it.
So if Apple did have all new peripherals, it's conceivable that we would know nothing about it a week out, but it's, you know, I would expect to hear something about, uh, revised products. Yeah. If they, if they, like, this is the best case scenario. They're just revised and have USB-C and they come with the iMac. It's like, yeah, that's what we wanted. Uh,
If you're waiting around for Apple to make like a new ergonomic keyboard that makes Marco happy or a new mouse that's much higher that makes me happy, like don't hold your breath. Not a chance. Their design philosophy on those peripherals has been the same for a really long time. And similarly for the MacBook Pros, again, no rumors about case design changes or whatever.
There are rumors about the next – essentially the next generation of Apple – of the MacBook Pro laptops.
potentially getting slimmer which we just kind of just went through this whole big thing of like the johnny i philosophy of everything uniform not enough ports too thin blah blah to the much more sort of like rectilinear blocky utilitarian sd uh card slot sporting hdmi port sporting uh macbook pros they were like Hallelujah. Like the magic is back. They finally made more good laptops.
How many years has it been? We've just been riding this high. But eventually they will have to redesign them. And the rumor is they're going to redesign them to be thinner, which is fine. But now comes the real test of like, hey, that correction they made on the MacBook Pro line.
Where they gave us the ports back and put in more battery life and did a little bit of, you know, function over form by saying, let's just make it rectangular because that leaves more room for battery. The test comes when it's time to make the new revision. Do they go back to their old ways?
Do they say, you know, we can make it really skinny if we got rid of that HDMI port or we got rid of the SD card or whatever, right? I keep thinking back to like the MacBook Air, like the 2011 generation of MacBook Air. The MacBook Air used to have an SD card slot, folks.
right macbook air it wasn't like a pro only feature somehow on the thinnest lightest laptop they made they found room for an sd card slot whereas now it's like i don't know 16 inch macbook pro i'm not sure we can put an sd card slot in there so you know that's again that's not this year that's rumors are maybe next year or the year after so watch for that that will be a good uh test uh but yeah in the meantime like i agree this could be a press release uh thing despite the mac mini
being a big deal. You know what it would make for a Mac event that they would want to actually have an anniversary event would be if they announced perhaps the world's fastest personal computer or something impressive like that, but alas, that is not what they're announcing.
John, let me tell you right now, if for some reason we got an invite to go and because you refused to leave your house for any reason whatsoever, you didn't go, and then they released the Mac Pro, you are fired from the show, sir.
I would go. I mean, it would be a WWDC announcement. I'm going to WWDC if I get an invite next year.
What if they do it in a week? You never know.
I don't think they're going to do it in a separate. Again, the rumors are that both the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro are potentially announceable around June of next year. I mean, the Mac Pro probably wouldn't be ready, but that doesn't stop them. They'll announce it and ship it three months later. Who cares, right? But yeah, no, I'm there. I'm at WWDC. That's my event. Don't forget about me, Apple.
Well, don't forget about any of us, but still. I don't know. I'm just really amused at the thought of breathing life into the Mac Mini. I just think that would be really fun. And everything else, I don't feel like I'm in the market for a new MacBook Pro. I don't want a Mac studio that's not filling a need I have.
However, I will say just, I think it was earlier today, maybe it was yesterday, somehow I got thinking about y'all's monitors and how the XDR is like, It's not 10 years old. It's like five years old now, though, isn't it? How old is that thing?
Six, five. 2019, right?
I mean, to put things in perspective, Michaela is in first grade right now, and she is six and a half years old. That thing came out when she was one, and now she's in first grade. The XDR is old, and the studio display ain't much better.
Price hasn't changed, but with inflation, it actually is cheaper now.
Well, that is true, but it's still a very, very old monitor. And I don't know. I would like to see the monitors refreshed. And I think Mike had mentioned promotion on an external monitor. I think that would be really neat. Is it a need I have? No. But would I love it? Heck yeah, I would.
I mean, honestly, I kind of – I'd be a little hesitant about them updating it because the monitor they made in the meantime, the studio display – Has a lot of weird little problems with its software.
Oh, it's fine. It's fine. It had a little bit of a rough entry, but it's fine.
I feel like that is the test. That's what everyone's afraid of is like, oh, are they going to put like an A19 in the monitor and it's going to be flaky like the studio was? Until they get all the firmware updates. Like, should a little mini version of iOS be running on an iPhone chip inside your monitor? Or should it be more like the XDR, which was in the...
the days when Apple was willing to use whatever weird chips they have inside this thing to do, like, to the, you know, image processing and run the USB hub and whatever. It's like, Apple just decided, like, why are we paying for these chips from all these different manufacturers to do this stuff and dealing with this weird firmware?
Why don't we just put an A-series chip in there and put our own OS on it? And the answer was, because you're not very good at that. And, yeah, the Mac Studio was a little bit flaky. But, you know, my wife's got a Mac Studio that's right behind me, and whatever flakiness there was in the beginning... She has had no complaints on it, and it has never done anything weird.
That said, I still fear the possible flakiness of an A-series powered XDR replacement, because this XDR has just worked like a dumb peripheral, which is exactly what you want it to do. I don't even want to know there's anything computery inside it, especially since this thing does not have a power button, which Apple is still obsessed with, right?
So if there was something wrong with it, power cycling would be a pain, but thankfully I've pretty much never had to do that. So I think my, you know, I'm happy with Macs. They are the way it is. Talk about if you're waiting for a mouse keyboard, like I said, or monitors to be revised, don't hold your breath.
There's been rumors of new monitors for Macs for years and years, but it seems like maybe those projects are started internally and then scrubbed and started again and then scrubbed and started again and then scrubbed and just go around and around until one of them actually escapes the company and lets you buy it. And that hasn't happened for a while.
Yeah. For the record, I did have to power cycle my studio display, not irregularly when I first got it. And I think it's been at least a year since I've had to do that, possibly more. I cannot remember the last time I've needed to do it.
And, you know, I have this array of the studio display in the center and the bequeathed LG 5K from Marco on one side and one that I had bought secondhand on the other. and I maintain that while the LG UltraFine is fine, the studio display is noticeably better, and it does have weirdness, and the camera is just trash. It is straight trash. The camera is real bad.
But other than that, it's actually a pretty darn nice screen, and I would love to get Studio Display 2 to put in the center and downgrade the current studio display to either my left or right side and just move everything down a notch. which actually brings me to a mostly unrelated point. So I have the, the most recent Apple TV in the living room. I have the one generation back in the bedroom.
And then I use the two generation back one. So this is, you know, several years old now. Um, as the like tailgate Apple TV, or if I, if we're traveling somewhere for a long time, we'll bring that Apple TV. Um, I feel like the eldest Apple TV is getting real long in the tooth at this point. And I would love to have another instance where I filter everything down a notch.
So I would also love to, and I don't think there's any rumors about this, but I'd love to see new Apple TV as well.
There are rumors about it, but like the Apple TV is kind of reaching the point where,
uh kind of reaching a fork in the road uh because i as far as i'm aware there there aren't really many television viewing based standards and technology that apple tv does not yet support that it would be useful for to support people might say 8k and you know the ps5 pro supposedly supports 8k but so does the ps5 technically anyway if if there's a use case for 8k potentially next generation consoles might be the use case but they've said that before um
But other than that, it's like there's that quick thing about media switching along a blackout thing, stuff like that. There's not a lot of stuff that you say, I need some more hardware on this Apple TV to do video watching. Then there's gaming, which, of course, you need unlimited power forever and ever. Does Apple want to turn Apple TV into more of a gaming thing or make their own controller?
Are they going to ship it? Are they going to upgrade? Like that's kind of the decision point because Apple is kind of close to saying for the purposes of watching video content, there's no reason for the Apple TV to get any more powerful. For the purposes of playing games, there's infinity reason for the Apple TV to get more powerful. Which way do we go with this product? I'm with Casey.
Whenever a new Apple TV comes out, I buy it just blindly for the same reason he does, because I just rotate them through my thing. And historically, there has been a benefit, especially when they went 4K and they got a little bit faster or whatever. And I do occasionally play games on Apple TV, although let me just take an aside to complain.
My son was home from school for break and wanted to play Journey. I'm like, great, that's out for Apple TV. Guess what? It's not out for Apple TV anymore. It was briefly out for Apple TV, I think. Maybe I have a false memory of it or whatever, but it definitely is not out for Apple TV now. You can play it on the iPad. You can play it on iOS.
You can play it on lots of different platforms that you cannot play it on Apple TV. I think it used to be an Apple Arcade, and maybe it was like a time-limited thing, but it's super annoying when that happens. So... Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if the next Apple TV comes out.
Like, there's no point if you just watch streaming TV to say, like, we need an even faster SoC here so you can play and pause television. Like, I would love for them to make that more reliable and better because it's still flakier than my, like, TiVo from 2002 or whatever year I was using it, which is sad considering it has, like...
a bazillion times the power of that devo right obviously it's looking at 4k content and sd but still even accounting for that like so i'm not saying the apple tv is as good as it can get it should get much better but i'm not sure if hardware increasing the level of hardware is has any point for anything other than gaming and so maybe that's why they're dragging their feet on this there are rumors about a new apple tv coming out it supposedly does have a better soc and more ram and
Apple intelligence capability and all that, you know, all that stuff. But I don't remember what the dates associated with that are, and I'm sure Apple's not in a hurry. But it is interesting to think about...
this lull in the apple tv where until we get 8k everywhere even if we do get 8k everywhere like by that point the apple tv caliber soc should be able to handle 8k fine and it's like you know is this is this basically is this a gaming box or is it not and if it's a gaming box why doesn't it come with a controller and that is the decision apple is probably going to have to make because there will be many years of time where the apple tv is completely adequate for all video functions and then the question is why would anyone ever buy another one of these things
I mean, no argument. It's crummy, but I get it. They could also improve their remote because even though they made it better than it was, it's still not great. Oh, stop. It's perfectly good.
It's fine. Yeah, I agree. It's fine.
It's better than fine, you grumps.
I use it all the time, and every time I use it, I just think about how much better it could be. It's not killing me, but I'm just like, it could be better.
What do you need to change? We don't have the time for this, but here we go.
What do you need to change? So the D-pad, essentially, up, down, left, right, and the swipey thing in the middle. I know you can disable the swipey thing in the middle, but enabling allows you to swipe through things faster, but disabling it allows you to use the ring more easily. But I feel like the ring is just not as secure to me as an actual D-pad.
I still have to think about the north, south, east, west of it because it is one continuous ring, and I still have to kind of think about not touching the touchpad, but I want to keep the touchpad enabled because I do swipe sometimes. So that's unsatisfactory. And the whole size of it, it's bigger than it was in terms of thickness, right? But it's still...
not really filling the negative space of my hand in the way that I want it to. I still feel like it's still a little bit small. There's advantages to being small. It looks elegant. It's good for people with small hands, but for my hands, it still feels a little bit small, a little bit fidgety.
And it's nothing like, you know, it talks about the TiVo remote, but just any other kind of like more normal size remote with big,
bigger beefier more distinct buttons that i can use with less mental effort it's not like i'm killing myself using remote i use the apple tv remote all the time it's basically the main remote i use for our television still feel like it could be better and it runs against everything that apple wants to do because they want it to be small and elegant or whatever and they're like here's our concession to ergonomics this is the new one and we all celebrated because it was so much better than the old one but they're still farther to go if they want to improve this thing and i wish they would
I understand what you're saying, but for me, while I would love it if it wasn't the same shape as an original Nintendo controller, you know, just a squared off rectangle, basically. It's carved on the bottom. Well, fair. But that being said, I don't think I want it to be very much bigger. I can understand ditching the rectangle shape, but
I don't think I need it to be much bigger, nor do I want it to be much bigger. I like that it's a small little thing that my kids can use just as easily as I can. Like, I think it's, in that sense, for me, the size of it is fine. But I concur that the shape could be a little more ergonomic. Definitely.
And even the TiVo peanut grill got smaller over the years. Like, it didn't stay the same size. It's a question of striking that balance. But I feel like the thickness maybe is more important than the length and width. Just sort of like... Because it's not like, it's like, how do you grip it? It's kind of like the Apple mouse.
Some people love it because it's so low profile because of the way they use the mouse. But other people don't use the mouse that way. And they find the very low profile mouse to be like against everything they want out of a mouse. So I feel like maybe the remote is the same way.
But either way, the circular D-pad with the touch thing in the middle, I feel like is such a weird compromise between the different functions. And I always find it, I find it difficult to very quickly go left, left, right, down, down. to the thing that I want.
And even just having to make the mental choice of like, should I try to get there with the swipey pad versus should I try to get there with like the digital D pad, even just making that choice is a little bit of more cognitive load. And again, I know you can disable it, but like I, in some parts of the UI are so much better with the ability to swipe, but other parts aren't. And.
I don't know, it just feels, like, obviously it was so much simpler in the Tebow world, but there's no swipey pad, and it's just up, down, left, right, and you would just mindlessly go up, up, up, up, up, up, down, left, right, up, up, because there was no other option, there were the choice, and the buttons were big and beefy and easy to find, even when they were still in a ring, I felt like they were easier to find, because you weren't worried about accidentally swiping when you went across the middle, and it responded faster to you, I don't know, like, it's...
It's not a video game. It's just a bunch of menus. It's not a big deal. It's a much bigger deal that the stupid streaming apps forget where I was in the thing and start playing the episode I saw last night. That is a much bigger deal. That's a software bug and not a hardware issue, but we're talking about the hardware now, so.
Jokin Marshall writes, it feels like recently more and more places I deal with want a copy of or to scan my driver's license. Like the doctor's office for my child wants me to upload a photo of both sides to their app, or the school wants an email with a photo of it. I've become much more careful about giving identity data out to places I do not have control over.
Obviously, social security number is a different level, but let's just talk about driver's licenses. How do you all handle this? I mean, do we have a choice in most cases? I just cough it up.
Well, actually, so that's the way I handle this is if it's something that I don't think really necessarily needs it, I try to just not give it and see what happens.
So for instance, like... That's big Marco energy.
Yeah. Well, you know, for instance, like we changed dentists when we moved. And so, you know, and the new dentist wants basically every single thing about us. Driver's licenses, social security numbers, all that stuff. And I'm like... Why? Do they need that to submit to the dental insurance that I don't have? Maybe they can just get away without it.
Are they just asking for it so that they can try to chase me down if I don't pay a bill? Because I can just pay when I have the cleaning. A lot of these things, a lot of times people ask for stuff because it's routine or it's quote standard or we might need it or whatever. And when it comes to your personal information, you can take the extra two seconds to be like, what if I just don't give it?
Do you really need it? It's like when the grocery store asks you for your phone number. They're doing it because they want to do crap with your data. And you can choose at that moment whether to give it to them or not. Don't assume that a place that seems more official than a grocery store for some reason, like your dentist or whatever... Why do they deserve your data?
There might be a reason why they absolutely need it, but they also might not fully need it. And so you reserve the right to say, can I just not do this? Like, can I not give you my driver's license? Can I not give you this information you're asking for? Like, what happens if I don't? Can we proceed without it? Like, you can ask those kind of questions.
And I strongly encourage you to do that more often because the more I have done that, the more often the answer is, okay, fine. All the time. It's just fine. Another example, this is not quite the same thing, but my current health insurance plan never mailed me a card. So I don't have a health insurance card. I haven't had one for like two years.
So when I go to a new doctor or whatever, they always ask, upload a scan of your card. And I don't have it. I have the number, like I have my policy number. And so I've done things like take a screenshot of the one password screen showing my policy number, like literally in a screenshot of one password on my phone and said, will this work? Or here's the number. Is that all you need?
And so far in every single case, even when they're like, no, we need the card. And I'll just say, well, I don't have one. Here's the number. Try it. And every single time I've been able to get the care I need, it has always just been fine. So, again, push back a little. If a place that doesn't need your driver's license is asking you for your driver's license. try saying no.
Try saying, you know, can we proceed without it? Do you really need it? I would rather not share it. Or you can make up some BS like, you know, my job requires me to, you know, to keep a certain degree of confidentiality. Like, you know, whatever you need to say, like, don't be a jerk about it, but try to push back and actually ask, like, do you really need it or are you just asking?
Because a lot of times they don't really need it.
I was going to use the grocery store example too because in my local grocery stores that I go to for many years, they were like, do you have a phone number with us? Do you blah, blah, blah? Do you have a phone number? Can you give us a phone number or whatever? And I would just say no, no, no, no.
They've changed recently to not asking that question, which I think is wise, but instead having a system – They have, you know, whatever, their rewards program thing that, of course, has an iOS app and all this other BS that everybody makes you do to gamify their shopping, right? But the bottom line is you do get money off your food if you play this game.
And so the motivation is, hey, do you want a few bucks off your groceries? And the way they do is they don't ask you for your phone number anymore, but on the stupid little paddy thing that they have there... You type in your phone number to essentially get your discount to say, oh, now we know who you are.
Now we will register your groceries in the app and give you the discount that you're entitled to for doing rewards, blah, blah, blah. Right. Whole Foods has the... The Amazon, well, I don't think it's Amazon. But anyway, the Whole Foods has the thing where you get the diamond-shaped QR code-y thing in their app and you scan it in the thing. God knows what's on that QR code that they're scanning.
It's probably all your information anyway, right? And I forget if I said this, but recently I changed my action button to launch the Whole Foods app.
Because you can never find it.
Because I realized the main time that I'm trying to do something under time pressure on my phone and I find it frustrating is unlocking it and launching the Whole Foods app so I can scan it. So that's what my action button does now because I'm using the camera control for the camera. Action button launches the Whole Foods app, which is terrible. I don't even shop at Whole Foods that often.
I was going to ask, how often are you freaking Whole Foods?
I mean, it's within walking distance, so if you need something last minute, you just walk to the Whole Foods, but I don't actually do my grocery shopping there. I do it at Star Market, which is a local chain that is probably owned by whoever the hell owns all the chains in this area now. Shaw's bought them recently, where recently means like 10 years ago. But anyway, Star Market has the app.
They don't ask you your phone number, but if you want your discount, they have nothing for you to scan as far as I'm aware. You've got to type your... So I'm typing my telephone number into the keypad rather than giving it to them, which I guess is better than reading out into the air, but... Anyway, it's ridiculous.
For the driver's license thing, I think one of the reasons you see a lot more of this happening is twofold. There are more online account thingies these days that give you some way to prove you are who you are to give some kind of backstop for account recovery. And they essentially just need you some proof of identity.
And they have you scan your driver's license or your passport or some other thing. Obviously, only do that if you think the value of being able to recover your account through proving who you are is worth the...
loss of privacy of giving these people your thing how much do you trust the company do you really care about this account like usually this is an optional type thing but that that's part of the same family of activities of like they just need you to prove who you are but you're not there a lot of times if you're there in person if they just need your driver's license for you to prove your identity you don't have to scan it or give it to them you can just show it to them
And maybe, you know, you can see if they're typing down your driver's license number or do they just want to say, yes, a human being has now seen and like a, like a, you know, a bouncer at a bar looked at your ID and decided, I think this is a real ID. You are Joe Schmo. You have a state issued identification, thumbs up. And then they never scan it.
And hopefully they never write anything down about it. You're just showing it to them and then putting it back into your wallet. So that is another kind of middle ground. But yeah, like Marco said, you can just say no and see what the consequences are. Most of the time they just need the information.
I don't know this for a fact, but I think a lot of the reasons healthcare providers in particular want you to scan both sides of your card is because they're so sick of trying to navigate the world of getting people to give them the correct information from either side of the card. And they're just like, if we just get scanned, we'll figure out where it is.
Oh, it's this number, but not this suffix. But don't worry about your group number, but we need this ID. Just scan the cards. I feel like it's just a...
you know avoiding a customer service issue and so in that case if you wanted to skirt around that it's like do you just need my member number because i'll just give you that it's this and i don't even have like marco i don't even have a card but if that's what you need and very often like credit card numbers they can look at the member number for whatever your insurance is and know whether you've omitted the right number of characters from the beginning or whether you've tacked on a group number or whatever like they can figure it out so
That's pretty much what I do as well. Although I have to say that for my driver's license and stuff like that, I just assume everyone can get that information anyway. My social security number is a lot higher security than that. I have to say, I don't think anyone has asked for my social security number in a situation where I don't think they should need it.
But driver's license, I'm a little bit more cavalier with because whatever. But yeah, push back and see what happens.
This totally sets aside the question of whether these things actually are keeping you secure or not, whether you can keep these things reasonably secret, what happens when they do get out there. This sets all that aside.
Whether someone can just buy a database of all this information anyway right now for $100 or something, you know.
Yeah, exactly. Most of that does not matter. I would also say two things. While you were talking, I tried to decode my Whole Foods QR code. And it decodes into a base64 and then what appears to be a custom binary blob that begins with AMZ, so Amazon, and then some binary data that I don't immediately understand. So there's a lot actually in there.
I assume there's some kind of expiring signature thing because it's one of those things that they cycle it every few seconds. And if you try to take a screenshot, it yells at you. It actually says, for my security. Screenshots are not allowed. I'm like, oh, really? That's for my security? So you can take a picture with another phone, yeah. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, so who knows what's in there?
But also, in grocery stores with loyalty things, so I actually do use the Whole Foods one because between that and using Amazon's Prime Visa card, I actually get a decent amount off of Whole Foods prices.
And by the way, I think we've complained about this before, but like, Jesus, when I pay with an Amazon card, don't make me scan the code. You are...
already know who i am i know what is like it's it's it's an amazon card in an amazon store and i still have to bind my action button to scan the stupid qr you already know who i am just give me the discount honestly the whole foods you get a discount on like three percent of their products it's very frustrating
Yeah, anyway. But at other stores, we have a non-whole foods, just chain grocery store here. Of course, every grocery store has loyalty things. But the cashier asks, do you have a whatever card? And I don't. And every time I say, sorry, I don't. And if you're just nice, sorry, I don't have one. 90% of the time, the cashier are like, oh, I'll put one in for you. Don't worry.
And they put in their cards. They get their rewards or whatever.
You have nicer cashiers than we do. The cashiers here are trained to say, oh, do you want one?
Here, they're a lot more, I think, a lot less aggressive with the sales pitch. They just want to keep moving. And so, yeah, I'll put one in for you. Sure. I'm like, great. Thank you. Every time. Thank you so much. And then they get their points. I get the discount. And I didn't have to have all the tracking.
Yeah, the pro move there is, oh, I left it in the car or I forgot it at home, which is a little bit of a white lie.
But then they want you to type in your telephone number. Oh, we can look it up by your phone number.
Oh, fair enough.
Yeah, it's much better to just say, sorry, I don't have one. Because most of the time, they're not going to want to stop the flow of customers to try to explain to you why you should have one. No, they're just like, fine, I'll just put one in for you. Beep, and then it's done. They move on.
All right. Caleb asks, my parents are both in their late 60s and occasionally have issues with password management and getting devices set up. I've considered proposing pulling them into my Apple family plan and setting up legacy contacts. Do you have any advice or suggestions or do you manage any account or technology for your parents? This has been a little bit of an issue for me.
I don't have any good answers, but my parents are getting older and I think that I am starting to approach the time where I really need to get this stuff squared away before one or both of them loses their, you know, their... I can't think of the word I'm looking for. Maybe I'm losing it. But anyways, the point is, is that I need to have this conversation with them and I haven't yet.
And, and I, I know that this is coming. Marco, I know you had grandparents that passed a couple of years back. I don't know if you have any thoughts about this for your parents. And then John, your parents are still kicking. Let's end with John, please. So Marco, let's start with you.
Yeah, so back when my grandparents were still around, the tools were all different. I'm fortunate enough not to have to deal with this yet with the next generation down, like the Our Parents generation. But certainly it's coming up. I'm thankful all these new tools are here now.
I'm thankful that we have things like legacy contacts, that all of the family plans in the Apple and other similar environments are have gotten a lot better, a lot more full-featured. We have things like remote control diagnostics, like remote screen sharing. That kind of stuff is getting better all the time without going too insecure or too controlling.
Because what you have to balance, and this is so tricky with so much of aging and caring for and living with or being with elderly relatives, There's a tricky balance that you have to walk between letting them be independent and have their own lives versus you being available to help them. And that's just different with everybody. And that can change over time.
As somebody gets older, they might be either okay with you taking more control or they actually might want you to take more control. But that's going to depend. So like... What you do with your particular situation, you got to just be constantly reevaluating that and adapting to what your actual needs are. So it might require something like you can remote into their stuff whenever they need help.
It might be something like that. Or they might not want you to have that level of access yet. It might be more like... you know, maybe you keep a copy of their password and they can call you if you forget, if they forget them, you know, it could be as simple as that. But again, it, it all depends and it's always an evolving situation.
So kind of just, you know, keep an open mind to what you might have to do, be willing to change things, be willing to make it easy on them. And, you know, don't assume that any one solution that you come up with will last forever.
So my parents, um, One of the things that's saving me from having to deal with a lot of this is the fact that neither one of them really maintains any sort of digital collection of stuff. They have their own photo libraries and their sync to iCloud photos, but they're just sparse, disorganized, and just not important to them, really.
For example, when my parents make their calendar for the year, we all make calendars on Shutterfly or whatever. We put it on our fridges and have pictures of family photos or whatever. Most of the photos in that calendar are photos that I take that I send them to put in the calendar or they get sent from my other siblings to them. Like they're not taking pictures. They're not collecting pictures.
They have pictures of they go on vacations and they take pictures, but very few. And who knows if they ever look at them? And so the real question is for like legacy contacts and dealing with their digital stuff or whatever, what happens if they die and no one has access to their stuff? The answer is they have no stuff. What do they have? They have accounts on systems that I don't care about.
No one's going to care about after they die what their login was to their local newspaper website because who cares, right? So they've got all their usernames and passwords. And by the way, on that front, I try to herd my parents towards the sort of happy path, Apple default things or whatever. But in practice, my dad is somewhat willing to do them.
My mother insists on having a document with all her passwords in it. And there's nothing you can do about that. And fine, if that system works for her, then that's what works for her. But honestly, I was like, well, what if you lose access to that document? If she's dead, I don't need those passwords. Nobody needs those passwords. I'm not worried about losing those.
So it's really just more of like... I feel like my job is more or less just facilitating their ability to do what they want to do with their computers. And what they want to do with their computers is...
not the same as what i want to do and in my particular case also does not leave any sort of digital assets that i have to worry about now that said i did make them all set up legacy contacts and set me like i did all the apple things like because why not why not do that like they don't even like because when they when we visit with each other inevitably i well it used to be they would be better about doing them now they're like i don't want to bring my laptop on the plane it's so heavy they just want to bring their ipad and their phone right and their laptops are not heavy
But anyway, like they used to bring all their tech products. And part of us meeting was like, here, John, here's all the tech products. And they would, my mom would make a list and notes and say, here's all the problems I'm having with my computers. And we just go through them one at a time. I can't get this to work. Why does this thing do this? I want to do this. I want to do that or whatever.
And we always just go through all those and I fix all their computer problems and I let them go back and do what they want to do. But trying to sort of impose like, oh, everyone needs to use one password or we all need to be in the same Apple family or like,
If they're up for that, if your relatives are up for that, fine, but mine aren't, and honestly, I wouldn't want them included in my Apple family because that's just a complication that I don't need to deal with personally. We should really just keep those things separate.
But yeah, I help them with what they need help with, and I make sure that they're able to live their life and do their computer stuff Uh, and I think, you know, my parents are kind of like this with their belongings. They're already trying to like give away their old, you know, photo albums of us as kids, like physical photo albums of us as kids.
Cause they don't even want to deal with those anymore. Right. Uh, so they're pretty good about dispersing their stuff. And, uh, Honestly, I would be shocked if they had more than like 10,000 photos in their libraries and how many of those are actually good is even probably even smaller. Now, I think those are valuable photos on vacations with themselves. Like we don't have those pictures.
Sometimes they send them to us like, oh, we're on vacation. Here we are in Florida. Look at us on this beach or whatever. Right. And presumably they have some of those, but they're just not big picture takers and they don't collect them and they don't they don't really do anything with them. So if I lose access to all of that, which I won't because I'm their legacy contact.
But if I did, it wouldn't be that big of a deal. So. Yeah, I think Marco was getting at the heart of it, which is like, you've got to figure out like what these people actually need from you, not what you think they should be doing with computers. And that really clarifies your role in all of this.
Randall Miller writes, I shut down my new MacBook Pro occasionally, but it restarts when I touch any key on the keyboard. Why on earth would Apple do this and leave no way to turn this quote unquote feature off? I mostly agree with this. I find it frustrating as well.
I particularly find this frustrating when I go to clean my keyboard, which usually involves mashing down on the buttons from time to time. And I find that very frustrating. Now, there is a tool, which one of you, I presume John has put in the show notes, called Keyboard Clean Tool that fixes the keyboard cleaning problem.
But I don't have any solutions for the touch anything to turn the computer on problem.
Yeah, that's the tricky bit, and there's many apps that do this. They basically disable the keyboard until you do some really complicated thing that you're unlikely to do by accident. I don't know if the one we're putting in the show notes is the quote-unquote good one. It is just the one that I found that seemed vaguely reputable, but there's a million of these apps, right?
But you do need one sometimes if you want to clean the keyboard without fear of accidentally doing something bad to your computer. It's not like you're worried about waking it up or the screen turning on. You're worried that you're going to accidentally hit a keyboard command that's going to delete something.
Or you basically just want to say, I want all key presses to just go nowhere for a while because I'm going to clean my keyboard. And that's separate from the turning off thing, but that's relevant because you're like, oh, I'll solve this problem. I don't need a special app. I'll just shut down my Mac. And that used to work until many, many years ago. I forget when. They said, guess what?
touching anything on the surface of this laptop will make it boot from a temporary quote-unquote off state you shut down not sleep you shut down your portable macintosh computer and then what makes it turn on it used to be there was a power button but then they kind of got rid of that then it was a touch id button they said you know what it should wake up if you touch anything and now shutting your computer down to clean the keyboard very carefully uh no longer works because of this
I find it frustrating too. I believe there probably is some firmware. I was going to say open firmware, whatever the hell, whatever the hell the, the firmware that, uh, the ARM base max use to turn this off, but it's not sort of a user visible, you know, feature that you could find in a GUI somewhere as far as I know.
So I kind of understand why Apple did this because searching for the power button on Macs has been a bit of a silly game for many years. And it seems silly to tech nerds who are like, I remember when the power button was on the keyboard and I loved it or whatever. But if you don't know where it is, like people just want to open up their laptop and if it's turned off, they just want to...
mash it with their meaty paws and have it turn on so this is the right thing to do 99 of the time except that one percent of time when you want to clean the keyboard when it's incredibly frustrating so i don't know the solution maybe there should be a gui to toggle this off in system settings somewhere that nobody can find but yeah in the meantime maybe check out one of the keyboard cleaning apps
Thanks to our sponsor this week, Click for Sonos, and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm. One of the member perks is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week, Overtime will be looking at some of the discussions recently about... What is a photo? You know, comparing the different phone and camera vendors definitions are like, what is a photo?
How does it relate to things like AI edits? It's kind of an interesting meaty topic. So that's going to be our overtime topic this week. What is a photo? Thank you so much, everybody. You can join to hear it at atv.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental. John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A-
tech podcast so long i see john's quicksilver update like is this quicksilver like the launcher from a thousand years ago quicksilver sure is oh my god what happened
It's been in the notes for a while. I started using Quicksilver ages ago as my launcher thing. I use it in a very limited way. I've talked about it on the show. I mostly just use it to launch apps and do a few other things. I've had it for years and years. And, you know, I know there's a million other launchers. I own a million other launchers as well. But I just like Quicksilver does what I want.
And I'm good with that. I like how it looks. I like how it works. I like everything about it. I'm so used to it. I don't need to do anything fancier than it does. Everything's fine. But Quicksilver, being a very old app whose original developer moved on to do other things, has had a bumpy road in recent, the past five years or so, maybe.
I think someone else picked up the project, but there's not a lot of people developing and maintaining it. And when it works, that's fine. But when it starts getting flaky, it's like, well, it's open source. Maybe I could try to fix it myself. I can never get the freaking thing to build because of some obscure Xcode error that I can't figure out and it's Objective-C.
So I'm like, oh, I don't want to do that. You file a bug, but then you feel bad because it's just one guy trying to maintain the thing in his spare time. And you're like, maybe I should just try another launcher.
So I just go through all the other launchers that I already own, buy the latest Alfred power pack, make sure I have the latest version of all the things, try Raycast, all these new fancy things. And it was like, you know... I can get by with some of these, but I kind of miss Quicksilver.
And then the Quicksilver dev will come back from vacation and make a change, and Quicksilver will start working again. I just feel like I'm kind of stuck here, because I'm just so used to Quicksilver, and I just want it to continue to work the way it has always worked. But the things... I'm getting hung up. And so...
some of the problems i've been having with it is sometimes they're just playing crash and that's one of the worst things it can do because it's faceless i run it in faceless mode there's no dock icon there's no menu bar icon it's just faceless it's just part of my mac and there's nothing worse than hitting command space and having nothing happen because i have a spotlight bound to command option space so having a launcher and hitting command space and starting to type and nothing happening well a that typing is now going into whatever the hell you were in like a messages window and
It's like whatever the beginning of what you're going to type. And B, it just makes your computer feel like it's broken. Right. It's just like, oh, just it's like it's like getting on an escalator that doesn't move. Right. My computer is not doing what it's supposed to do. And then it's like hung in the background or it's like it's crashing. You need to relaunch it. And how would I relaunch it?
Command space Q. Oh, no, that doesn't work. It's a chicken egg. Like I don't know how many times I've done that to try to relaunch Quicksilver. It's just madness, right? Sometimes it hangs. And then this other thing that it was doing that I actually filed a bug on was like it would launch.
But if you look at the Quicksilver catalog, which is like the list of things you wanted to index that are searchable, I have a very limited catalog with a bunch of custom items in it. And I like type command space and start typing something and it wouldn't auto complete to the thing that I know is there.
And I'd go look in the catalog and it would be like, yeah, look in this folder and scan all the files. And it would say zero items scan. I'm like, what do you mean zero items? So I hit the little refresh circle button and it would scan it and say a hundred items. well, why didn't you scan them when you booted up?
It's like, oh, do you have it set to manually scan, to automatically scan, to scan every hour? You know, like I tried all these different things. So the bottom line was it was just not scanning my catalog. You log in, you know, you boot your computer, log in, and Quicksilver would be running, but half the catalog would not be scanned.
For no errors logged anywhere, I was just like, oh, I can't use it like this. Like, oh, either it's crashed and it's not running at all, or when it's running, I hit Command Space and start typing stuff, and it doesn't find the things that I said. So I'm like, this is too much. I can't... It's not...
doing the job that i needed to do so for i spent a while using alfred and i sort of hammered alfred into shape to try to make it more like quicksilver it's not exactly like it in in ways that are in pointless ways just like aesthetics like i like the big i use like the quicksilver bezel um bezel classic i think whatever it is it was the original appearance of quicksilver and they they changed it years and years ago and i complained and i said hey i'm
why don't you just leave the old appearance in too? You have seven different appearances, but you deleted the original appearance. Just leave them all in so we can pick our appearance. And they brought back the one and they called it classic or whatever. That's the one that I used. It's got really big icons.
When you type command space and start typing something, it cycles through the matching icon. Like as you type, as it refines it, it just basically, it just shows you the top hit. And configurably, you can make it after a delay show you the second and third and fourth hits, or you can make it only when you hit the down arrow show you the second and third hits.
But the bottom line is, when I'm typing, I just want to see one very large icon right in front of me that is cycling as I type things. And if I want to, I have it set. So if I want to see the third and fourth, the second, third and fourth options, I use the down arrow. Alfred doesn't work like that.
Alfred has a configurable amount of stuff that it's going to show you, but it doesn't, it can't just show you the one item and the icon is smaller. And if you do make it show you only like the one item and you don't have the option to show the other ones, like it's just, it's just not the same. Right. But, you know, hey, it works. So I was using Alfred for a long time.
But like I said, the Quicksilver developer came back and he fixed some bug in something. And the Quicksilver wasn't crashing anymore. And by the way, Quicksilver was only crashing on my computer, but not on my wife's computer. But she has a different catalog set than I do. But for a while, it was freezing on her computer. And she was complaining about Quicksilver.
And I'm like, I'm going to have to take her off Quicksilver. Maybe I'll put her onto Spotlight. And just it's made me think about like how... such a small part of my computing life can throw everything else into chaos, right? It's kind of like if, like, the right button on your mouse only works sometimes. It's not a big deal, but it's like... Oh, that's a big deal.
It doesn't realize how often you're doing that. Like, there's a quick workaround. Just click it again or something, right? And then, you know, the workaround to Quicksilver, like, launch it with Spotlight or whatever, but it's just been a mess. Anyway, right now, I'm running Quicksilver again, and it's no longer crashing and no longer freezing. It's scanning my catalog, so fingers crossed, but...
I'm not going to write myself a Quicksilver replacement, and like I said, I can't even get Quicksilver to build due to things that are above my pay grade in Xcode, causing it just not to build. Or maybe it will build, but it won't let me attach a debugger, because I want it to catch where the crash was or whatever, and LDB gives me some error and I want to attach to it. But anyway, that's all.
I just wanted to complain about Quicksilver, which has been such a fixture in my computing life, and I'm sure everyone's going to send me all their alternatives. Like I said, I probably already own all of them. And some of them are really good. And some of them are really cool. And some of them, you know, tons of them do things that Quicksilver couldn't even dream of.
But I'm just so used to Quicksilver. I just wish it would, like, continue to work the way it used to work. And I would be happy with it. I don't need any new features. I don't need anything. I just need it to stay the same as it is forever. But unfortunately, that's not the way computers work.
You are going to get all those responses from everybody saying, why don't you switch to Launcher X? There's so many of them now. They're very good. I did switch away from Quicksilver, but I understand why you don't want to because these launchers become such a part of how you interact with the computer. Your comparison to the right mouse button is not that bad because...
It is like a basic input mechanism. It is, you know, like changing to a different launcher, I think is kind of like changing your keyboard. It's like, you know, you can get one that works pretty similarly. There's going to be a lot of differences in some of the details, but it's, you know, and it is a fundamental way that you interact with your Mac.
It's like changing your shell, which is another thing that I've been resisting doing since 1993 because I still use an ancient shell, and I've complained about this a couple times online. If you do anything with Unix stuff, they're like, oh, and sure, just copy and paste this, and it will do what you want. And it's always for Bash, or these days you'll see it's for Bash or Phish.
There's just so much open-source software that just assumes, well, of course everybody uses Bash or Phish or ZSH. Those are the only shells, right? Like, no, that's not my shell. And all shells are not the same. And I can't copy and paste that because it won't work in my shell. So yeah, changing launchers like changing shells in that, oh, I could change shells real easily.
But now I got to take everything that I built up since 1993 in my shell, which is TCSH, which is ancient and nobody should use it. Do not use the shell. But anyway, I would have to take all that stuff and reproduce it in my new shell. And it's exactly the same with Quicksilver, although it's a smaller number of things. So you want to use Alfred. Can I...
essentially port all the things that I was doing in Quicksilver and have them be the same keyboard shortcut so it just looks different but works the same and the answer is yes I could do that and did do that after some pain but in the end it didn't quite look the same and it's like well what do you care it looks slightly different it's fine like who cares I'm like I just kind of like the way Quicksilver works so yeah Alfred is my fallback I have Alfred's app to do pretty much everything Quicksilver not everything everything that I care about that Quicksilver does there's some other stuff like I think Quicksilver does large text a little bit differently and
some other slight differences in searching and tabbing and typing. Like there's still differences, but I can get by with Alfred. That is my choice, my personal choice for replacement. But the time spent sort of porting your world from one thing to another very much reminded me of what it will be like someday when I'm forced to port my world from TCSH to another shell.
Yeah, because it's similar to a shell. If you mostly just use one of these launchers for its surface-level feature of launching apps quickly, that is what it does on the surface. You can do the same thing with Spotlight a little bit less quickly. But for the most part, it's like you can use this on the surface and launch those apps quickly.
And if that's all you do... I have to say, Spotlight is really good these days. It is much better than it used to be. Every time I'm on like a default Mac and I use Spotlight, I'm like like Spotlight is honestly one of my contenders for a Quicksilver replacement is just use Spotlight. It's not as configurable as any of those cool launchers and everything, which is bad, but it's still pretty quick.
And, you know, like consider that.
Yeah, it is an option. The problem is like, so if all you do is that surface level stuff, then you can switch freely between these options and you won't notice that much difference. But again, like a shell, good analogy. The problem is once you get into any more advanced features than that, then it becomes this kind of muscle memory lock-in. It becomes very disruptive.
So my launcher of choice is LaunchBar. And I actually, for the most part, I am a very... shallow, basic user of all these launcher's features. I don't do the second level, like, alright, do this, then do this, then do this. I don't do any of that. I mostly just use it as a launcher, and occasionally as an emoji search. But it's basically like a launcher.
Do you open files or folders with it?
Almost never. A couple big hits, like Dropbox. I'll open that, but for the most part, no. I'm doing very basic things with these launchers. However... In LaunchBar, LaunchBar has by far my favorite multiple clipboard manager interface. And it's not because it's like the best in the world. You know, I don't know. I haven't used every clipboard manager. It's because it fits me really well.
And I have incredible muscle memory for it. And any Mac that does not have clipboard management... done the way I think it should be done in LaunchBar feels broken to me. I get that feeling from that.
And so even though I'm only using a fairly shallow amount of the features in this launcher that many other launchers could do just fine, I am 100% tied to LaunchBar the same way you are to Quicksilver because the clipboard management is just in my... It's in my hands.
Like, I can't, like, yes, I could learn a different system if I really had to, but the amount of friction required when I don't have the way Launchpad does it, like, any change in that introduces so much friction. It's almost like changing keyboard layouts.
It's like, yeah, I can type on some other non-US English keyboard layout, but I'm going to make a lot of mistakes, and I'm going to be slower for a little bit, and it's going to be frustrating if I don't need to be doing that. So that's how this is. It's like changing keyboard layouts. It's like, yeah, you can get by, but why get by with a change and get used to it if you don't have to?
Yeah, I'm kind of dreading, well, not dreading, like we've been saying for years, Apple needs to add multiple clipboard support to all their OSes.
Oh, my God.
Disabled by default, but available because it is such, like once, you know, every nerd in the world has gone to multiple clipboards for like a decade now, right? And it is a nerd feature. But at this point, I feel like, kind of like the second mouse button, it's like, it's so important. Every OS needs to have second mouse button support built in and also multiple clipboard support built in.
You can disable it by default so not to confuse people, but it's got to be there. But the danger for people like us is, okay, but we all got our favorite third-party clipboard managers that we've been using for a decade. Now the question is, do I keep using my third-party one or do I switch to the system one?
Switching to the system one is like, oh, it's one fewer thing I have to worry about installing or whatever, but it surely will work differently than whatever third-party one we're using. And we've got all our muscle memory problem. And it's not like Apple's going to make it infinitely configurable. So Apple, please add multiple clipboard support to every single OS you make.
but please also do not disable the ability for us to use our third-party ones. You probably need some accessibility permission that requires 17 dialogues and you have to read them every week.
For the record, nobody asked, but I have been using Alfred forever. I've tried most of the other ones and aesthetically, I don't have any problem with them off the top of my head. But they think differently than I do. And so because of that, it's just a non-starter for me. What's the one that everyone is obsessed with lately? Raycast or something like that?
Yeah, Raycast is one of the fancy new launchers.
Yeah, I mean, I tried it briefly. Again, it just does not think the way I think it doesn't mean it's bad. I'm not saying it's bad at all. I'm not saying that launch bar is bad or Quicksilver is bad. It's just that none of these things click with the way I like to get things done. And so because of that, I've been on Alfred forever. I've had the power packs, you know, all the time.
That's always been what I've used. And I have no particular reason to leave anytime soon.
Yeah, it really is the thing about the shell thing because it's like, just to give one example, one of the things I use Quicksilver for is mounting volumes. because the finder sucks so bad that mounting them through the finder is like pulling teeth. But if I can hit command space and type two letters and it returned, it's so much faster.
When you change shells, one of the things you have to quote-unquote port is, oh, I probably built up many aliases that I use in my shell. And the aliases themselves are fine. It's just something you type and a different thing happens. But if you have complicated aliases, porting those aliases to a new shell...
at minimum requires you learning the syntax to declare an alias in the shelf it's different than yours but you might also have to quote things differently to capture arguments or the second argument here or whatever or which things need to be escaped with double backslash versus single back like stuff like that makes me think about what i had to do with alfred to do the simple thing which alfred is 100 capable of but how long did it take me to figure out how to make alfred
mount a volume, a password-protected volume in response to a keyboard sequence, and it took me an embarrassingly long time. So yeah, like that. I mean, again, I'm saved by the fact that I don't do much with Quicksilver, so I didn't have to port too many things. But if I had to port all my aliases, and honestly, I don't even like other shells that much either. But anyway, just do not use TC.
Don't let your children use TCSH. Let them use Bash or Phish or ZSH or something more modern. But it seems like at this point, I'm just going to die using TCSH.