614: Don’t Puke for the Show

I am in a good mood now. This has not been the case for the entire day. I gotta tell you... You have been slightly more absent in Slack over the last several months, or at least in our little corner of Slack, which is fine. You're a busy man with lots of things to do. But you were very chatty this morning. And if I may be so bold, pretty fired up. All right. So what I had to do this morning was work around...

Some Swift UI bugs. That's never going to put anyone in a good mood. Right. And these bugs involved... The handling of in-app purchases. Oh, that's a double whammy, as they say in the business. That's no good at all. Any developers out there who've done in-app purchase testing, you know in-app purchase testing is painful. Especially testing subscriptions and the handling of those transactions, it just is very painful. It's very tedious to do it reasonably well and in a reasonable amount of time.

you needed a bunch of test devices. So I, you know, my desk was like covered in iPhones. I'm like charging them up, booting them up. I have all these lightning adapters everywhere, like, you know, dealing with all that crap. And then, you know, getting past all the different setup prompts and everything.

for some of them that needed to be updated and stuff like that anyway so dealing with all that because the way a lot of this testing works is like you can like you know start a purchase and like test it out but then if your app doesn't process that purchase correctly for you to be able to change something and rebuild it and try it again, you have to either wait like four hours for all the fake renewals to go through for your annual purchase. Or... Try it again on a totally new device. Or...

erase the device and start over and reset it up. And there are tools to attempt to mitigate this in Xcode. There's like a store kit debugging thing, which I swear to God. So I opened that. I didn't know this was there. I discovered it this morning as I was searching for alternatives. And I opened it up. It's like a little window. And you build and run your app. And this window has nothing in it. It's just empty list.

And for a split second, when I build and run, overcast shows up in that list. And then a second later, it disappears. I've had pretty good luck with that, to be honest. Not to say it's perfect by any means, but...

It typically works all right for me. And if I recall correctly, because I haven't looked at this code in a bit, nothing is in that list, to your point, until you initiate some sort of purchase. So I'm a little surprised that you saw anything flash up for a moment. Oh, that's interesting. Well, so...

This was like with an active... like a currently still renewing test subscription though so i don't know like if that counts yeah i'm not sure it's gonna tap it when it appears you wait for it to appear and the second it appears you tap it it's a little bit of a race i had the same thing recently when i was i forget what i was trying to do i was trying to do something

where Apple sends you their own little notification that shows you the little map that says allow, like, Apple ID thing. You know that dialog box? And I was trying to do a thing. I was trying to do a thing on Windows. Oh, I know what I was doing. I was trying to get iCloud syncing on Windows with the iCloud. thingamabobber with the just password sync now um and it would pop up on my phone for a split second and i spent a while trying to tap that button

It was like, it seemed like it was long enough that I could get the tap through. It wasn't so fast that like, oh, there's no way I'm ever going to tap it. It seems like I should be able to tap it, but I never did tap it. Yeah, I've had a similar problem, actually. If you have... A modern Mac, if you have multiple users on that Mac, when you plug in a new USB or Thunderbolt device, where in recent OSes, you have to approve the prompt. Well, if you have multiple users signed in...

there's a good chance you can't approve that prompt. Because what happens is you plug in your USB whatever, and it flashes up on the screen for a split second on whatever your login is and disappears. This is true. I swear to you, this is true even on a single user device. I swear to you, the same thing happens. Not to say you're wrong, not to say that your explanation is incorrect, but I have had USB keys die on me.

or other USB devices and cables. I'm like, why did... I swear I just used this... freaking yesterday. And then I realized, oh, and now some of this is a self-created problem because I have way too many pixels in front of me. But I will realize later that either there is a dialogue that I just did not see that I need to approve or it like flashed up.

and then disappeared immediately. For me, that happens every time when there's multiple users logged in. Whether you're in your main admin user that you use all the time or not. It doesn't matter which user you're in.

But as soon as you make one of them, when you log out the others and leave only one left logged in, then you can just replug the thing and the dialogue shows up correctly and you can approve it. I'm pretty sure there's only one person logged into my iPhone, so I don't know what the problem is there. And by the way...

a workaround for that as you just have it like you say I can't don't have access to my devices then it sends you an SMS essentially which is janky but that's what I had to do the moral the upshot of my story was I never could get

iCloud password syncing to work. I clicked a little approve thing in the Windows settings screen. It would send me the prompt. I would try to tap it. I would fail. I would tell it to send me an SMS. I would. I would enter the number. It would say, OK, great. Thanks for the number. It would spin for a while. And then it would bring me back to the...

same screen that says you should approve passwords. That was kind of a bummer. May I derail us from our derailment very quickly? This is still a pre-show. We have not yet railed.

Well done. So anyways, I have a request for follow-up, please. When I had my Apple Watch Series 8... I had it set up in such a way that if either my standard, my 99% of my use Apple ID... or my Apple ID for the business got one of those six-digit code challenges, my watch would receive it and I could get the code for my watch.

I did a transfer, whatever, of Series 8 to Series 10. I didn't start anew or anything like that. But something I've done or something it has done has taken that away so that I get the challenge, the two-factor challenge. for my personal account on my watch every time, which is what I would expect, but I'm no longer getting it for my business account. And if there is, there's gotta be a way to add that like secondary account to like log into iCloud or whatever, just for.

the purposes of these challenges if anyone knows how to do that specifically for the watch because i have it working on like my mac and stuff but specifically for the watch i would love some feedback if if you know how do you have it working on your mac because i only have my personal like the apple id that i'm

logged into iCloud with you know the iCloud photos and iCloud notes like that's the only Apple ID that I get those Apple branded notifications all my other Apple IDs I got to do it some other way no it works so that if you like the way that like you know the The system preferences has the concept of internet accounts you can be logged into. You can log into multiple iCloud accounts, and you can then turn off all of the other stuff about them. On macOS, you mean?

On Mac and iPhone. So I don't know how it works in the others. But yeah, Mac and iPhone, because that's how I have different accounts for my developer account versus my personal account. That's how you do that. Exactly. Where is it on the phone? I go to iCloud. I just see my main iCloud. On the phone, I believe it's under mail.

You have to add an internet account or add another account. It's something like that. It moves around every few years. There's another problem related to that, which is I think I complained about it about a year ago, and Apple said they were aware of it. It was on the Apple developer website. When you go to log in,

if you try to log in with a passkey, it will always try to use the passkey of the iCloud account you're logged into and not one of your other accounts that you actually use for your developer. Yeah, you basically can't use passkeys with Apple developers as far as I can tell. It never works correctly. While we're on this subject, please, Apple. So when you are logging in to Safari with, you know, to App Store Connect or something with a developer account, and it sends you the 2FA code.

It shows the 2FA box on the Mac exactly centered in your screen. You know what else is exactly centered in your screen? the input boxes in Safari that you have to type it into. So every single time I have to... drag the little window out of the way so i can see it because it's always on top of course so i can type in the code and it's like doesn't this happen

To everyone inside Apple? How has this not been fixed after all these years? Maybe everyone's using their windows like I am. I've got a member special video you can watch so you can learn how to arrange your windows so they're not always dead center on your giant screen. Oh my goodness. All right, let's re-rail, I guess. So I think we were talking about you doing in-app purchase testing and how that's a nightmare. Oh, yeah. So anyway, so I was a little annoyed at that. And then...

I remembered, well, Casey had assigned us some Vision Pro homework. So I get out the Vision Pro. Which in your defense, I assigned, I think I had it in the show notes days ago, but I didn't call that to your attention until this morning. So in your defense, I did kind of drop this on you last minute. Right. So I'm already a little mad.

I'm sorry. That's on me. All right. And then I have to get out my Vision Pro to watch the thing we're going to talk about, the weekend video. I put it on and, of course, it's dead because I haven't used it for two weeks now. Why would it possibly have a standby life? I don't know, but it doesn't. Totally dead. So I plug it in, go about my work. 10 minutes later, I go back to it. Still totally dead. What?

What is going on? I unplug it. I replug it. There isn't like the little orange light that lights up on the battery pack when you plug it in. That's really hard to see and really hard to decipher its signals. That orange light was not turning on at all. So there was no LED on the battery. I'm like, what? I'm thinking like, I'm getting so mad. And this is when I start chatting in Slack with you guys. I'm like, I hate this.

effing thing like you know with respect i'm not sure it was as much chatting as it was venting which is a service that we provide to you and it did sound a lot like my daughter venting about the same thing but you have you had the knowledge that my daughter did not have and yet you were still angry

My understanding after the discussion, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that what you're mostly angry about is that this device has bad standby power usage. You don't use it for very while. It's got a full battery. It's sitting in your drawer. You feel like...

Sitting in a drawer with a full battery for two weeks, when you pick it out, it should not be so dead that it needs to be charged for a while before it will boot. Yeah, and more than 10 minutes. That's before it will even start to boot. To me, the Vision Pro, from day one... The Vision Pro has always had...

horrendous standby battery life. It basically is always on. It has the two hours-ish of battery life when you are using it. As far as I can tell, it basically has two hours of standby life. And every single OS version, it comes... It comes out and people are like, oh, it's better now. And every single time I try, I believe it. And then I try to ever use it for anything and it's dead.

Always dead. Usually it's so dead that I have to eventually disconnect the power cord from the headset, which is basically like unplugging a desktop, like just disconnect it.

and reconnected it. Because a lot of times it won't even boot even after it's charged. Let me do a PSA though, by the way, for the people who don't know what you know and what my daughter now knows and will soon forget. If you have an Apple device that has a battery... and you and the battery discharges down to nothing like you leave it in a drawer or you just let it you know you use it until the battery runs out or whatever and it's been like that for a while and you really drain it

very often you will need to plug that device into its power adapter or into a charger or whatever kind of device it is. And still it will not turn on. uh if you're lucky and it's like an iphone or an ipad it will show a picture on the screen that shows like a little battery with like a little red uh progress bar kind of indicator in the batteries trying to indicate to you hey i don't have enough battery power but if you're unlucky and it's a mac or apparently a vision

pro or some other device you will plug in your like your macbook air which in my daughter's case and she's like i plugged it in nothing is happening is the adapter broken is something wrong with it why won't it turn on it's literally plugged in why won't it turn on and the answer is it is doing something most Most of the time it is doing something. You might have to leave it plugged in sometimes for hours before it resurrects itself and is ready to boot.

and it was maybe it was better in the days when there was more glowing lights all over the thing so you could tell oh i can tell it is getting power based on the little led hardware led changing by where you plug it in or the little glowing ring remember the ones that are kind of glowing ring around it for the old power box or whatever anyway nowadays with usbc you plug it into power adapter and nothing happens so if that happens to you and you're sure that the power adapter

works and the outlet it's plugged into is powered it may be that you just need to let it sit there and how long do you need to let it sit there 10 minutes an hour i've had sometimes had to have the thing sit there for multiple hours before they're ready to turn on so be aware that's a thing it can save you a trip to the apple store you do have to find some way to check that the outlet and the adapter work so find some other device so you can test that their work

have to make sure the adapter is the correct wattage to actually power your device or whatever but yeah vision pro apparently doesn't show you anything when that's happening it just sits there until it's good and ready and then it boots up Yeah. Well, maybe. It might boot up. You might have to unplug the thing from the thing. And to be fair...

Everything you just said applies to almost everything with lithium ion battery. That's just how batteries work. That's just how – when a battery gets very discharged, sometimes it's actually just dead forever if it's very discharged for a long time. But I think this – you know, brand new device that has no cellular modem should be able to last in idle standby use for... For two weeks? I don't know.

I think you're asking a lot. I don't think it should be so dead after two weeks that it literally can't power on for like 15 minutes after you plug it in. That's crazy. And by the way, remember before we were talking about Adam's laptop and working without a battery? I do wonder how that's...

squares was we got some feedback that said oh yeah apple laptops can work without the battery as long as you plugged them in but i guess when there's a battery in there it doesn't like bypass the battery and power the entire laptop off the adapter or maybe it can't power the laptop off the that's the whole point

out the feedback i said oh yeah if you take out the battery they'll work fine as long as you keep them plugged in but when the battery's in there plugging it in does not let you boot immediately so there's some nuances there that i don't understand yet

Yeah. And the Vision Pro, I think, all bets are off on talking about the Vision Pro because it's such a weird and obviously half-baked product. Like, it's just, it's so, like, okay, I know there are people out there who like it. We'll get to this later. But... It's a crap product.

like oh god i'm so i'm so mad that i own one just because it didn't last for two weeks in the drawer i think this is a harsh judgment based on yeah because it isn't just that it's like it's how it behaves in this like iphones and macs behave so much better in this kind context no the macs don't the macs just show a black screen and have your kid calling you on the phone saying why isn't my laptop turning on

I have to explain to them that it really is doing something, I swear. The good thing is once I did get the Vision Pro actually powered on and booted, I told it to do a software update because it was going from, you know, 2.0 to 2.1 or whatever. And it just sat there and spun forever. And then I came back. I'm like, okay, what do I do? I guess I'll take it off. Take it off, set it down, come back a couple hours later, put it back on, check on it. Still.

spinning you just you just mime control delete with your fingers and it will see your fingers doing that every literally nothing i've ever tried to do on the vision pro has been like a huge success Like, everything is like, either this didn't work, or it sort of worked, or this is the promise or a demo of something that could be good later.

I do understand your frustration, especially since you were in a bad state of mind. Yeah, I'm just mad from store kit testing, I think. I totally get that. But that being said, I think you might be a little unnecessarily harsh on the vision. pro, but that's okay. I don't blame you for your anger. I think even if it's misplaced, I can kind of understand that too. But I think maybe it's not so bad. So let's shelve that if you are content-ish for now. We have some administrivia.

we have a new ATP member special. Now, if you are one of the people who joined as a member for the recently finished merchandise sale, which by the way, we got plenty of people reaching out saying, oh, I missed it. This is why I make the announcements over and over again. It always happens every time. But anyways, thank you to those who did buy merch. We appreciate you. But for all of you that are members, we have a new member special. John, would you tell us about it, please?

We went back to ATP Movie Club. That's actually how we kicked off the member specials with a series of three ATP Movie Club episodes. I haven't done one in a long time, and we were trying to decide what kind of movie to do. I think it was Casey who actually suggested maybe we should do another Studio Ghibli movie. Uh, we've done one so far and now we've done a second one. It's Kiki's delivery service.

Quite a change of pace from our normal tech topics and other stuff. But, you know, maybe in line with our domestic workflows episode. If you're familiar with Kiki's Delivery Service, that makes some kind of sense. Anyway, it's just a much more chill.

pleasant holiday experience for you uh even though it's just november atp movie club kiki's delivery service uh atp.fm slash join and you can hear too and if you're already like casey said if you're already a member because you joined to get the discount code You can listen to this member special and all the other member specials. Yep. And you can binge them all. I mean, you can download them all and stop being a member if you so desire. I don't recommend that.

I wouldn't encourage it, but you could do it. There is a dedicated feed for the specials. If you are a member, you have multiple feeds on your member page, and you can go to atp.fm slash specials to see all of them, whether or not you're a member. You just can't play them if you're not a member. See, after I was...

you know, upset by store kit testing and then by trying to do something with my vision pro, that would have been the wrong mood to watch that movie in. That's true. That is very true. Uh, yeah, you definitely want to be in a more chill mood for that. And we talk about it quite a bit more after the fact or in the special. Yeah, it was good. You should go listen to it.

So let's do some follow-up. And I believe it was late last week. It seems to be the rule that the day after we record is when Apple chooses to release New Vision Pro content. Not every week, of course, but it seems like most days it's Thursday. we're recording this week on a Thursday, and there's the concert for one.

thing premiering on friday so no matter what happens it's always like a day or two after we record and that that bums me out but last week the weekend uh released uh their first music video from their his their it's i don't know know, his new album, I think. And this music video was done in immersive format. So as I like to do every time I will recap, there's 3D where you just get a rectangle that has depth and then there's immersive when you can actually...

move your head around and the perspective of the camera moves with you. This was immersive. It's about five and a half minutes. I tend to like the weekend, which is almost frustrating because... He actually did a performance at WWDC one year, and all of us were like, first of all, who the hell are you? Because this was...

early ish in his career and certainly before he exploded anyway. And secondly, why is the space so goddamn loud? Because I don't know if you guys remember, this was in Moscone. I remember it was loud. It was so loud. Now, granted, the Fidelity was phenomenal, but it was so loud. We needed our AirPods Pro, right, Marco? We didn't have them at that point. Yeah, we didn't have them. But anyways, I tend to like The Weeknd's music, and I think it's been well done.

documented at this point that I'm a sucker for any immersive anything. And guess what? I thought this was pretty cool. Weird. Weird as hell. But pretty cool. And I don't have too much more to say about it other than you should give it a shot. And if you have a Vision Pro or access to a Vision Pro. And my understanding is you can actually sign up for a Vision Pro demo again or now if you've never done one.

before. And one of the things you can elect to, or perhaps they force upon you is watching this music video, which I think is worth your time if you happen to live near an Apple store. Marco, what were your thoughts? I hope you did do at least this much of your homework. Do you know how long it took me to find this?

Oh, that is true. I'm trying to stay positive here, but let's just say that the information architecture on the Apple TV app is bad on every platform, but I feel like it is uniquely bad on the Vision Pro because it should have... like a gigantic flashing, uh, like what was the HTML tag that we all made fun of? That was super popular. Yes. Thank you. Or blink or marquee. Either one doesn't matter. It should be both of those in the Apple TV app. Here is where you get immersive.

crap from apple right here pointing there should be a thousand arrows at different like depths and whatnot all pointing to the button you're supposed to tap or pinch or what have you uh in order to get to the immersive content and it is usually one of the small items front and center on the Apple TV app, but it is never where I expect it to be. So hard agree on that one. Very frustrating. But anyway, so hopefully you did eventually find it. The Apple TV app on the Vision Pro.

Is just the Apple TV app the same way it is everywhere else? Like, but, you know, it's native. Like, they, you know, the native frameworks, but like the informationally... What do you think people using a Vision Pro want? I mean, yes, obviously, if you're really using it all the time, you want access to everything, of course. It has one of those little sidebars on the left side where it has the five different things. Add a sixth one.

For all the immersive content. Because, you know, newsflash, there's not that much of it. Like, so it's not like it's too much content to fit in a section. Like... Just add something on the side so that you can quickly... Okay, so here's what I did. So first, I opened up the TV app. This just came out recently, right? Isn't it like a week old or something? I think last Thursday or Friday. I forget exactly which day. So it's a week old.

And it's probably still the newest content available on Vision Pro. And so I thought, how hard can it be? I'll open up the TV app and look for it. Nope. Nowhere. There's even a thing. There's a promo in the TV app for some kind of upcoming like concerts thing that they're going to do. So I looked at that. Of course, it's not there.

Because I guess it's not a concert. It's a music video. Okay. So I'm like, all right, well, that's not it. Maybe I'll just go back and try to... I browsed through every section that I could find in the TV app. It's nowhere I could find. So I'm like, okay. So then I'm like, maybe it's in the music app because it's a music video. So I go over to the music app and it's, of course, I can't find... And there's even like...

I'm going through all these different things. There's even like a like some kind of like promo for some kind of big like featured station that they're going to do. So I'm like, oh, great. Click on that. And all that's showing me is like super low resolution for some reason. Live broadcast of.

some weird thing i'm like well that's not right okay so like i eventually back out it it takes me a good five minutes just to find eventually the way i found it was I searched the music app for The Weeknd, went to his page, and somewhere eventually in there...

It linked me back out over to the TV app where it deep linked me directly to the right thing. That is very, very frustrating. For what it's worth, I did eventually put in Slack the actual link to the video. But again, in your defense, this was probably an hour or two.

after I had asked you to watch it. So I did not set you up for success on this. And for that, I apologize. Well, yeah, you did send me the link, but I'm like, how am I going to get this link in my Vision Pro? Surely it should be easier to just find it in, because I don't have Slack on there. I don't even know if...

Is there a Slack app on Facebook? I don't even know. It's not native, but you would have to run the iPad app, I guess. Right, yeah. But I don't have that set up, so that would be a whole thing. And, you know, setting up Slack is a whole thing. So it's like, I'll just, anyway. So I eventually found the video. It was very interesting. It's a music video, so... It has a very different style than a TV show, series thing, or a nature documentary. It's a music video, so it's very artistic, abstract.

I did not like the motion of it, and I felt pretty motion sick afterwards. Oh, interesting. Because being a music video, there's more cuts. than the other stuff we've seen in the Vision Pro immersive formats. There's more movement. Some of the things they do... There's like a scene with the road, like the road's like bending in front of you. Yes, it is like straight out of Inception. And it didn't give me motion sickness.

but it gave me some very weird vibes. I felt not uncomfortable. I don't know how to verbalize it, but it's just like, I don't know what's going on here, and I'm not sure if I like it. I was happy to see... a different style of 3D content in the Vision Pro. And it showed me that there is a lot of promise for that still because it's very sharp, very high res. They do the thing where they get like super close to...

I guess the guy, The Weeknd, is that his name? They get super close to Mr. Weeknd to the point where you're like, again, like if you were that close to a person, you'd have to be like making out with them. And for you to be that close in front of somebody you don't know feels a little uncomfortable. It's almost like I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be this close to this stranger. I'm being a creep here by being this close to this person.

But it did show off the format of immersive video well. Super high res. Super good like lighting effects and everything. So one of the elements of the video is that they have these like shadow people where they're just like shadow figures and like bright lights for eyes like Starburst.

lights for eyes that was a really cool effect to see there there were there were a couple of scenes where you have like a first person view of what basically amounts to a car chase but like with an ambulance in front of you and so you're like going back and forth in the road and so it's like you're like looking through this 3d car chase and so it and it's almost like showing you like here's a demo of a bunch of different types of scenes that immersive video can show you and it's really cool

And it's very realistic, and it does feel like being there. The problem is it feels too much like being there, and I felt very motion sick, which I don't normally with watching other 3D content, but this one was... this was bad for me. Like this was like, I almost couldn't finish watching it. Like I was almost going to bail.

But I'm like, for the good of the show, I went through all this to find this thing. So brave. I'm going to get through the five minutes and actually finish it. Yeah, John, you should never watch this. Don't puke for the show. Just if you need to stop, stop. That's a perfectly legitimate experience because I tried to watch it.

i got so motion sick i had to stop i would say if you are motion sensitive do not watch this it's it's it would not be a good idea but if you are usually not motion sensitive and don't mind getting a little motion sensitive. It is something good to see. But what it shows me is that there's a lot of promise with immersive video, but we haven't really nailed that format yet.

And more experimentation is needed. But it does show a big range. It shows everything from close-up shots to car chases to weird abstract road warpings. It shows you a bunch of different things. So from that point of view, it's a good demo. But I think they did not test this on enough people.

Because if they did, they would have revealed some pretty significant motion sickness, I think. I mean, I didn't have any issue with it, but I don't tend to get motion sick. I definitely got, like, some heebie-jeebies about some of the moments. Like, at one point, you're up in the air contained in something, and then you...

Leave that container. I'm being vague on purpose. And you are like way up in the air. And it's a little like, I don't know if I like this at all. But all in all, I do think it was very cool. And I know I've said this. many times, but it just gives me an even stronger thirst for more of this kind of content. I just, I wish we could get more and they're doing better about getting more and the pace is improving, but golly, it's just so neat and so cool.

And so unlike anything else that I can or have experienced, I'm not trying to say that equivalents don't happen on other platforms. All I'm saying is for me personally, this is about all I've got. And since... I don't have the occasion to use the Vision Pro for many other things. This is one of the highlights of my use of the Vision Pro. I have not yet tried the new Mac virtual display stuff, which...

universally has been deeply praised in the best possible way. Everyone says it's amazing, but I'm not putting a beta on my laptop just now, so I'll wait until it's all in the release. But anyways, I don't have a lot of excuses to put on the Vision Pro, and this gives me an excuse, and I'm excited about that. But it was just really cool. And I think it's worth, again, it's not worth driving an hour to the Apple store or whatever to try this. But genuinely, as I've said many times, if you...

If you have an occasion that you're near an Apple store and you know you will be and can schedule one of these try-ons or demos or whatever they call it, I can't stress enough, even just to experience it. I think it is well worth your time. And like I said, I think the last time we spoke about this, when I did it anyway, which admittedly was back in February, they were not salesy about it at all.

all, or not pushy is maybe a better way of describing it. They were just like, hey, you can do this, you can do that, you can do this, you can do that. And they were not like, okay, so you can buy. You know, they were very chill about it. So it's worth giving it a shot. What this video... shows me it continues to show me that there are so many experiences that can only happen in immersive video and that's a very good thing like i am very sold on the idea of

dedicated hardware that's capable of giving us 3d experiences because when you see a really good one like parts of the submarine one like parts of this like when you see a really good one It is really something. It's really amazing. It's hard to communicate this without experiencing it because... You can't show somebody a screenshot. You can't show somebody a video of it and have them view it on a regular screen and be able to convey what it's like.

So much of technology, so many of the devices or services or the media that we have available to us, so much of it, you're able to get a pretty good idea of what it's like. by watching a video of it, or like a video review that somebody has, or looking at a screenshot that somebody shows you. There is no good equivalent to that, to immersive 3D content.

That when you're viewing it on a regular screen, like nothing can really convey what it's like to experience that in 3D. And, you know, we say like to be in. there to be in the vision pro because it really feels like you're going into a different world every time i experience really good 3d immersive content which is still you know we're still not past the

You can get through everything the very first night you have it level of the Vision Pro. There's still not enough content for that, but there is so much promise for the idea. of 3D content. So as much as I rail against a lot of the decisions Apple made with this product, I love the idea of more consumer availability and adoption of hardware that can deliver us 3d experiences this just you know this is still super early

And still has a lot. This is like the Vision Pro is like Johnny Ive came back from the dead and had a fever dream and shipped it as a product with no editing. Like it's just, oh, it's such a weird product with so many bad decisions. But. It's compelling when you have these experiences in it. You're like, oh, this is a big deal. This is different. This is better than I thought. This is more immersive than I thought. This is more immersive than I thought, maybe. But there is so much promise.

to that type of experience. Part of the reason why I think AR and VR are almost entirely different things, that's part of the reason why I'm largely down on the... computing side of spatial computing as discussed previously. But I think the content experience side of it is very strong and has a good future if the...

proper investments in the content are made. And I hope they are, because it really is. I would almost describe this video or the submarine one, I would almost describe them as amusement park rides. It is really something to experience. I would say the submarine one is closer to a real-life play. This one was closer to...

what I would assume a very strong hallucinogenic drug trip might be like. Having never tried hallucinogenic drugs, I concur that this is how I expect it would feel. Yeah. So it's a different style, but it shows you like... This is the kind of thing that is possible if somebody makes content really made for this. So I hope more of that happens. And it's good that Apple was able to push on an artist that is in with them already to make this happen.

More, please. Useful to know in the chat, user Jared H said that apparently Lens Rentals now rents the Vision Pro. You can rent one for a week for a couple hundred bucks. You don't need to rent one for a week.

I'd say you can rent a Vision Pro for three days and get a very good idea of everything it can do for you. The first day, you can go through all the content. And then the second day, you can actually like, you know, you can sign in as yourself and put all your stuff in it and, you know, try out some apps and try to do some productivity, try the Mac mode.

You can do all of that in a three-day rental pretty easily if you want to save some money. But eventually, if they step on the gas a little with the content, this could work. We got to see them step on the gas. And we have to see the content get a little more refined in the techniques they use to avoid things like motion sickness.

So I was looking at the trying to find lens rentals link to put in the show notes. I don't think they've ever sponsored the show, but I haven't been a patron of theirs in a long time, but I have really, really liked their services in the years that I have. used them several years ago but anyways yeah me too uh q a for apple vision pro 256 gig first item why is the battery life so short i just no notes no notes

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Go to squarespace.com slash ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So once again, squarespace.com for a free trial, squarespace.com slash ATP for 10% off your first purchase. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show. Ah. So we got a lot of feedback and appreciation for John's tip, which I was aware of, but Marco was not, about, hey, if you're dragging something on macOS and you say, oh, just kidding, you can actually hit escape in order.

to cancel that drag. And I don't remember how I stumbled upon this, but I did. And it's been something I do constantly. And Marco was one of the lucky 10,000 that didn't know that day. And now he knows, which is great. But we had some feedback about alternative methods to cancel drags. John, do you want to take us through this?

Yep, everyone wanted to tell us the thing that I already knew because it's also from classic Mac OS. You can also drag to the menu bar to cancel a drag, which is a big drag location. So you don't have to be very precious about it. Although I will say that I think it's possible to have like menu extras like the little icon.

in the menu bar that do allow you to drag things to them so don't drag it to one of those you kind of just have to find a safe place in the menu bar but anyway that's another thing from classic mac os that was like an easy to hit drag destination that will let you cancel a drag um

And yeah, I don't know how many people still do that. I still think escape is better because you don't have to drag all the way to your menu bar if you have a big screen or whatever, or if you're near the bottom. But I'll give you one bonus tip here, which I alluded to in the last episode.

If you're like me and you like ListView windows in the Finder and you turn down the little disclosure triangles on the folders to show like a hierarchy of things in ListView, I love that feature. I use it a lot. If you ever want to drag something... in the finder into the folder that is represented by that window without mistakenly dragging it into one of the disclosed subfolders. You know what I mean?

You can try to like drag it and see if the finder is highlighting the top folder or not highlighting one of the subfolders or whatever. But the much easier thing that I still do to this day that I started doing in classic Mac OS. is if you drag to the uh the header bar the one that says like name date modified size that bar on top of list you and you if you drag your item onto that bar it will always go into

the folder that is represented by that window, and you will never mistakenly drag it into a subfolder. That one's a little bit more nuanced than hitting escape or dragging to the menu bar, but it is very useful if you use ListViewWindows and you don't want to be fidgety with them. Good deal.

M4 versus M4 Pro, the Mac Mini SSDs are a little bit interesting. So Thor Johansson writes, while I don't have access to two Mac Minis to compare them, the behavior from all previous Apple Silicon Macs would suggest that the M4 Mac Mini... 512 gigs is using two 256 gig chips, while the M4 Pro Mac Mini 512 gigs uses

four 128 gig chips, and that the M4 Pro is also providing wider bandwidth to effectively utilize the extra chips. So the M4 Pro might have far greater read-write speeds than the non-Pro.

Yeah, if you're trying to figure out why would two SSDs that are the same size in the same, you know, Mac mini, the only difference being the SOC, why would they be different speeds? And apparently the Apple has done this in the past. I haven't seen a teardown to confirm this, but it seems plausible. Like basically.

If you have an M4 Mac Mini and an M4 Pro Mac Mini and they have the exact same size of SSD, why should they be different speeds? And the answer is the Mac Pro might just have twice as many chips on it. And of course, you can read and write those in parallel, so it gives it a speed boost. And yes, the M4 Pro may have slightly better...

bandwidth to the ssds as well so that is the plausible and likely explanation quinn friend of the show quinn nelson uh did a video with regard to the mac mini and quinn tried to build a 600 pc to match the performance of the $600 Mac Mini. You got to read his quote. That's why I put it in there because I thought he did a good job of...

Saying it in a zingy way. All right. Well, Quinn says the following, which I'm being told in my ear that I should read. Quinn says, I tried to build a $599 PC to match the performance of the $599 Mac Mini. Size and efficiency be damned. I could not do it.

cannot build a better PC for $600 using new parts, period. But the Mac Mini is only a good deal if you leave it as is. And there's a 10, 15 minute video on it, which as with most, if not all of Quinn's videos, is very, very good and is worth your time. Yeah, so that middle sentence there, this is a moment in time worth noting. Here's Quinn saying, you cannot build a better PC for $600 using new parts. I don't think that's been true. of Mac versus PC.

for a long time and when it has happened it has been brief and fleeting because that's always the thing with max someone some tech nerd is going to say i'll use a mac i could build a better pc for that that than that for half the price right that's always thing and usually it's true usually you can build a faster more capable uh you know

I wouldn't necessarily say better, but spec wise, you can build something that performs better, that finishes work faster than the Mac, that plays games at higher frame rates, that has more storage, that has more RAM for less money than the Mac. That's just. The order of the universe and yet here we are in this brief moment in time where if you get the base Mac mini for $600 you literally cannot build yourself

A computer at any size, any appearance. Now, forget about trying to make a tiny little, you know, you can make it as big as you want, as noisy as you want. Quinn even said, forget about Thunderbolt. I'm throwing that out the window, too. None of those fancy Mac buses that no one cares about. Just...

Just a plain PC. I don't care about the IO. $600. Can you make something that beats the Mac mini in GPU and CPU and multicode, anything? And the answer is you cannot, which is pretty amazing and shows how amazing Apple Silicon is. But as Quinn points out, the second he emphasizes this with the same word in the video, the second you touch any options on that Mac mini configuration page, you totally lose the price advantage.

goes touch anything add more ram and more storage like maybe not not add 10 gig ethernet but maybe even adding 10 gig ethernet blows it yeah the second you add anything to it and go up to a non-base model then the pc you can get something much cheaper and faster which is a shame but

It is worth noting that for this brief moment in time, there is a Mac that is the best buy in terms of performance, not in terms of aesthetics, not in terms of size, not in terms of power usage, nothing in performance. It's amazing. What a day to be alive. I mean, and this just shows like a lot of times Apple's

base models are pretty good values compared to almost anything compared to their own products or other competitors' products. The base models can be great values. It just is usually not the case once you... upgrade anything like that that is a very common failure mode because well also the base models like for this is the brief moment in time but like

five years from now when it still comes with 16 gigs of ram and it starts to seem a little bit constrained because apple intelligence 2.0 or whatever can barely run in 16 gigs of ram like that's what the problem with the base models they're like They're a great buy when they've just recently been bumped in their specs, but then they stagnate for years and years and years and they become a worse and worse buy because it's like...

the soc maybe is a good buy like the computer is a good buy but the storage and memory just get more and more anemic and eventually it stops being a good buy because you're like if you buy this you won't be able to fit your stuff on it because it's like a 16 gig iphone or whatever you know I think part of Apple's whole revenue and profit margin strategy is they are willing to eat into their margins a little bit when the product first launches.

And then they'll sit on those specs as long as possible so that, yeah. It's a really good competitive deal, and they might get less margin for the first few months that something's out. But then over time, throughout the lifecycle of that product, when it's not getting updated, it becomes a worse and worse deal for us and a better and better deal for them. And so if you pay attention, you can get pretty decent deals when you do things like jump on something.

right after an update where some important spec has been updated well, like the RAM has here. So you can get better deals, but the availability of them goes in cycles with the product lifetimes. So speaking of good and bad deals...

John, it looked like you wanted to talk about storage pricing. Yeah, I mean, it's not the same topic we were just touching on with Quinn. You know, as soon as you touch those options, it becomes a bad deal. And we've been harping on it, but there was two good Reddit posts that I thought were funny on that topic. First one is, what do you get for your money?

Option A, upgrade your Mac mini to two terabytes of storage. Option B, for the exact same amount of money. You can get a PlayStation 5 Pro, which comes with two terabytes of storage and also $100 cash.

and let me tell you the two terabytes of storage that comes with the playstation first of all the mac mini upgrade you're only upgrading 1.1 and three quarters of a terabyte right because it comes with 256 and you're upgrading to two terabytes so you're adding one 1.75 terabytes, you know what I mean?

So you're not even buying a full two terabytes. And that costs $800. For that same $800, you can get two terabytes of storage in the PlayStation 5 Pro. And PlayStation 5 has fairly strict requirements for the SSDs you have to put in it. The minimum spec... is 5,500 megabytes per second read-write.

for the playstation storage so this is not crappy like oh it's not the same storage as in the mac mini it's probably as fast or as faster than what you have in the mac mini of course you get an entire playstation 5 pro not playstation 5 the the playstation 5 pro the seven $700 one that just came out.

and then you get a hundred dollars cash back so uh yeah apple's prices make no sense uh maybe you can maybe you could buy a playstation 5 pro with two terabytes of storage and get the hundred dollar cash and well i guess you have to desolder the the chips and never mind And by the way, the PlayStation 5 Pro does have an M.2 expansion port in it as well.

And then the second item, this is also from Reddit. It is a fairly confusing chart that somebody made, but it does show some interesting stuff here. So it's showing Apple versus market SSD prices. And here I think they did a little bit of a cheat by not considering.

the quality and speed of ssd chips that apple uses versus like market prices because when people try to compare market prices like this is how much a terabyte costs well what terabyte a terabyte that gets how much read write speed you can buy a slow terabyte for less money than a fast terabyte. But setting that aside, what it's basically showing here is this is a chart from 2013 to 2025, and it shows storage prices.

going down over time, which we've all experienced. SSD storage prices since 2013 have gone down over time. You can get more storage for less money. It's a fairly sharp curve. And then on the same graph, there are a bunch of lines for Apple's products and the storage. pricing associated with them. Starting with the 2011 Mac mini, which was $300 for 256 gigabytes or $1,200 per terabyte. And the Apple product lines, like Marco was alluding to before, are completely horizontal.

their price never goes down. They just go, it's just a horizontal line on the graph. So the Mac mini was a terrible deal. And then came the 2014 Mac mini at $800 per terabyte. That is a horizontal line that extends from 2014 to 2024.

Does not dip. The actual storage line is going down, down, down, down, down. The Mac mini line is just straight across, never changing. $800 per terabyte, $800 per terabyte for 10 years. For 10 years, they did not change the storage price. And now finally, the new, the M1. Mac mini in 2020 is its own horizontal line at $400 per terabyte, still above.

the market prices so yeah that's the apple strategy introduce a thing at an expensive price and never change it sometimes for a decade while the entire pricing commodity parts environment around it changes radically apple is you know frozen in time with prices fixed in place as of the introduction of that computer. And presumably that will happen with the M4 one as well. It's just that right now.

uh that computer in terms of its capabilities is a good deal at the base model but yeah when you once you add any storage you jump off of this market line and you go up into apple fantasy land and you just stay there forever It's so frustrating because I'm so happy that we finally got the increased RAM, but it's just shining a gigantic, like, what is this, bat signal sized light on how egregious the storage pricing is. It's just... It's not good.

But we can move slightly forward. Anonymous writes, the ridiculous RAM and SSD upgrade prices Apple charges look even worse when you notice that Apple only lets its retailers sell the lower-end versions. Want to future-proof your MacBook Pro by getting a 2TB SSD?

that's only available from Apple directly. So Apple keeps 100% of those ridiculous upgrade charges, making their margins even higher compared to the versions that are also sold by third parties. I did not know that. This is something I didn't think about, but like, I mean, we all know the whole deal of like Marco experiences this because he very... often needs a computer in a hurry because he's marco um if you go to the apple store they have a certain

a certain fixed number of like, oh, here are like the fixed configs we have in stock. And it's usually like the base one and then like a better one. But if you were to go to like Best Buy or like any other random place, they have a limited number of configurations. And I didn't realize that they just don't have.

like the very upgraded configurations at all and so yeah it seems like apple is just saving the highest margin products only for its channels either ordering through apple's website or you know their store or whatever and then everyone else gets I guess the base model may be one bump up. They don't have extensive experience looking for Macs sold by companies other than Apple, but this is just another way that Apple is making sure that they keep most of the fattest part of the margin curve here.

By the way, this isn't entirely an absolute truth. There are certain retailers that seem to have really good relationships with Apple and maybe sell a bunch of stuff to high-end customers. Like B&H, maybe? Yes, I was going to say B&H is a good example. B&H usually... has so like even you know when you go to apple stores there's always like

you know, whatever base configurations they have on the Apple website, like there's usually like, you know, three per computer family or two. Used to be a good, better, best. Right. Like, you know, so whatever base configurations they have. Every retailer that does any kind of volume will have those configurations. But usually, if you ask an Apple store, if you go to an Apple store and say, I need something today, what else do you have that's higher than these? They do stock.

Other configurations usually, but you know, not every configuration possible. So it's like, all right, well, if you want the, you know, the four terabyte SSD, you might need to upgrade to 64 gigs of RAM to get it. that same day in that store or whatever. But they do stock usually a couple of higher-rank configurations that are not listed on the website in Apple stores. Well, if you go to a retailer like Best Buy,

usually they will have those, or Best Buy or B&H, usually they will have some of those in stock. And if they are running any kind of discount or special, oftentimes, you know, if they'll take like, you know, a hundred bucks off for some kind of sale they're running.

Oftentimes, that will apply to those high-end configurations also. So I have seen high-end configurations discounted by resellers before. It's not as common, and you can't get every configuration you want, but they do exist. All right. And then we got some news, I think around the time we actually recorded last week, but allegedly the M4 MacBook Pro...

just started quietly using quantum dot display tech, which I was not aware of. So reading from MacRumors, the M4 MacBook Pro models feature quantum dot display technology, according to display analyst Ross Young. Apple used a quantum dot... A change that provides more vibrant, accurate color results. And apparently...

John, interrupt me whenever you're ready, but apparently Quantum Dot was a thing for a long time and Apple was aware of it but refused to use it because there was an element in there, I forget which one now, that apparently is not easy to recycle or not easy to come by without really... getting it from really terrible places. And so they said, yeah, no thanks. But now you can do this quantum dot stuff without that whatever element it was. And so they're like, hell yeah, let's do it.

I'm not sure if the environmental reason was the main motivation, since Apple seems very far behind in a lot of display stuff. But just to clarify on the quantum dot thing, so we'll put a link in the notes to Ross Young's post about this, and he's got... little spectrograph images showing the red, green, and blue wavelengths of light emitted by the subpixels in a display. These graphs are something that's very familiar if you watch a lot of TV reviews or any kind of monitor with RGB pixels.

And you would think, you know, if you look real close on a monitor, it's got a little red subpixel, a little green subpixel, a little blue subpixel. Some TVs have white subpixels as well, but computer monitors don't. You would think that if you expose that to one of these spectrum analyzers, you'd see like a spike in the blue, a spike in the green, and a spike in the red.

Uh, but surprisingly, especially on televisions, you will see some very misshapen lumps with like kind of a plateau between blue and green. And then one spike is higher than the other is. And other spikes are wider. You're like, why are these so like unevenly distributed? Why doesn't it's just. pure red, pure green, and pure blue. Well, the way non-quantum dot LCD displays work is they have a backlight that shines usually white light through a filter, and the filter...

They have a red filter, a green filter, and a blue filter. And the filter blocks all the wavelengths that are not blue, and the green one blocks all the wavelengths that are not green, and the red one blocks all the wavelengths that are not red. It's like when you take one of those red film things, like 3D glasses with the red and the green. They're little things that go over your eyes, and they work by blocking wavelengths that are not red or green.

Red or blue from getting to your eyes. So the bottom line is they block light So you have to turn the backlight up even higher because some of the light from that white backlight is being blocked In fact like a third of the light or whatever depending on the spectrum of the white backlight is being blocked by each sub pixel

That's not good for brightness. The way quantum dots work, that's not actually how they work, but you can think about it as instead of blocking the wavelengths that are not red or green or blue, they take whatever light hits them.

and essentially change it into what light of the wavelength that is desired it doesn't it basically the light hits the the quantum dot then the quantum dot emits light in a particular wavelength so you don't lose as much light by blocking wavelengths i'll take your light whatever color it is and by the way most quantum dot displays

have like a blue backlight because that is the highest energy and you can downgrade that to green and red right so they'll have a blue backlight and the blue blacklight will go straight through the blue pixel so no filter whatsoever there And then the blue black light will hit the green quantum dot. And rather than blocking...

I mean, there is no green wavelength there. It will change the wavelength of the light by emitting a green wavelength after it's being excited. Anyway, that's what quantum dots do. They eventually change the color of light.

in a more efficient manner so you can run the backlight lower so you can get higher brightness all that stuff and the macbook pros with the 1000 nit uh thing now i mean that's not that big of a deal because the old ones went up to 1600 nits anyway it's really just a software setting but i think the reason they unlock that with a software setting without

the fear of them destroying battery life is because the quantum dot display lets them get 1000 nits on that display with a less bright backlight because the quantum dots are more efficient.

What this isn't is anything like OLED. OLEDs, there are things such as a quantum dot OLED, which is what I have on my TV, but OLEDs... emit light in an entirely different way and are a different technology and are much better than what apple is doing with the mini led but the rumor is that the oled macbook pros will have to wait until

Late 2025 or 2026. So keep holding your breath for those. But for now, we get to enjoy brighter, more vibrant, more pure color with less energy on these new MacBook Pros. Yeah, this is cool and I'm jealous. So there we go. So sometime in the last week or so, a couple of weeks actually, there was a bit of a kerfuffle about...

iOS devices starting to just randomly reboot themselves. And hear me out before you grab your pitchforks. So this started on, I guess, the 9th of November with a report from The Verge. Reading from there, there's apparently a new iOS 18.

security feature that reboots iphones that haven't been unlocked in a few days frustrating police by making it harder to break into suspects phones this apparently was all kicked off by a 404 media post which we will also link again reading from the verge 404 media which first reported police warnings about the reboot

on Thursday, writes that restarted iPhones enter a more secure, quote, before first unlock or BFU state. Now it seems Apple added inactivity reboot code in 18.1 that triggers iPhones to restart after they've been locked. for four days, which is kinda wild.

So there's a demo video put up by Jiska Klassen, hopefully I'm pronouncing that somewhat right, who is a researcher at the Hasso Plattner Institute and one of the first security experts to spot this new feature and their video demonstrating this. shows that an iPhone left alone without being unlocked reboots itself after about 72 hours. And I watched this video. Of course, they accelerated most of it, so you don't have to sit there for 72 hours. It's going to be a long video. Right.

It shows that almost exactly at 72 hours, sure enough, the thing reboots. And then the same Jessica Klassen did a fascinating... Deep dive and reverse engineering into how this exactly works. Before I get there, do we have any commentary so far? Do you want me to read this next section? There was a little bit of scaremongering when this came out. It's like, well, first of all, the police are complaining. Oh, please.

It's going to make it harder to bring into criminals, phones, every kind of any kind of security feature. Law enforcement's like, we don't like it. We want back doors. We all want to be able to hack things. We want things to be, you know, because.

They need to find out things about criminals. But as individuals, you want to protect our privacy. So this is like, oh, Apple's doing this thing. Are they thwarting law enforcement or is this a bug? Or is it some there was also some rumors about like the phones are talking to each other in the evidence.

room and telling each other to reboot i love that that was very good that was the best i love the crazy crap cops come up with and they say it with the most with the utmost authority yeah or like it's when there were some other theories like it's when they're not on a network because in like in the evidence room

There's no Wi-Fi they can connect to or they can't get cellular or whatever. But anyway, yeah, this reverse engineering. It must be a conspiracy between the iPhones to lock us out. Yeah. So this reverse engineering does a good job of discovering exactly what it is. But I think the most interesting part.

about this that Casey's about to read is the background on why doing this? Why do this? What's the point? Like why? So what? Your phone reboots if no one touches it for 72 hours. How does that stop someone from breaking into your phone?

I'm sorry to derail us just a little bit, but Tom H. in the chat said they don't need to bring this to the Vision Pro because it already has another way to reboot long before 72 hours. I'm sorry, it was too good. I couldn't help myself. Again, Marco had it in his drawer for two weeks. not three days. Trust me, it won't last three days. Well, probably not. You can run that experiment, we'll see. So going back to Jessica Klassen, this is a bit of a long passage, but it is worth reading.

Did you know that entering your passcode for the first time after your phone starts is something very different than entering it later to unlock your phone? When initially entering your passcode, this unlocks a key store in the secure Enclave processor, or SEP, that encrypts your data on an iPhone.

The state before entering your passcode for the first time is also called before first unlock. Due to the encrypted user data, your iPhone behaves slightly differently to later unlocks. You'll see that Face ID and Touch ID won't work and that the passcode is required. But there's more subtle things you might notice. Since Wi-Fi passwords are encrypted, your iPhone won't connect to Wi-Fi networks. If your SIM is not PIN protected, your iPhone will still connect to cellular networks.

That means technically you can still receive phone calls. Yet if you receive a phone call, even if that number's in your contacts, the contact name won't be shown as the contacts haven't been decrypted yet. Similarly, when you receive notifications about new messages, you'll see that you got messages, but you won't see any message previews. In the after first unlock state, or AFU, user data is decrypted. You can't imagine this is like a key safe that is kept open while iOS is running.

Even when you see a lock screen, certain keys remain available to the operating system. This way, you can stay connected to Wi-Fi networks and receive message notification previews even when your phone is locked. While it's more convenient, the AFU state is more susceptible to attacks. An attacker who can somehow bypass the lock screen can get access to the decrypted data on the iPhone.

To bypass the lock screen, an attacker does not necessarily need to know the passcode. Security vulnerabilities within iOS can allow attackers to get code execution and extract from an iPhone even while it appears to be quote-unquote locked. So just to summarize what they're describing here.

we've all seen this like when you boot your phone for the first time you have to type in your passcode to unlock it and all these sort of side effects of like in the before unlock state that like yeah your phone's on And it's booted. And if your SMS doesn't have a ping, you can receive SMS messages. But...

None of your data is accessible yet. It's all, I mean, everything is encrypted, what they call encrypted at rest on the phone. Like the bits on the disk are just scrambled garbage, right? They make no sense. If you look at them, they're encrypted. You need the secret decryption key to decrypt them into something. When you boot your phone, it hasn't decrypted any of that stuff yet. It hasn't decrypted it and put it into memory until you unlock it, right? Once you unlock it.

The keys to the kingdom are in the memory of the phone. They've been retrieved from the secure enclave thanks to you entering your passcode. It's unlocked the key safe that has the keys in them. And now your phone's busy reading stuff. It's reading your contacts. It's putting them into memory. It's reading your messages as they come.

everything right in the running memory of your turned on phone is all your valuable information just sitting in memory somewhere right obviously it's hard to get to you'd have to crack into the phone and find a way to read memory which you usually can't do blah blah but it's there it's unencrypted in the memory

chips like you can imagine if you could crack the thing open and somehow access the memory chips but you know like if you have physical access to the phones all sorts of weird stuff that you could do right it's very much like as people think like

When I lock my computer, like when I turn the screen saver on and it requires a password to get in, like everything is secured. But think of it more like just taking a very thin curtain and putting it over the front of all your secret stuff. And if they can like... tear a tiny hole in that curtain. A breeze can blow that curtain aside or the curtain becomes a little transparent or the curtain crashes.

torture the analogy here and disappears that was like one of the early security flaws in early version of mac os 10 the password dialogue for when the screen separate locks your screen if you just held down a key and just entered like a really long password just by repeating the letter a a thousand times it would crash

the screen lock application up and the curtain would go away. And guess what? There's all your stuff totally decrypted sitting right underneath the curtain. So the after first unlock state is all your stuff. with a thin veneer curtain hiding in front of it that hopefully stops people, but it's so easy to get around the curtain. The before unlock state is...

Everything is still entirely encrypted and it's of no use to anybody. It is locked up. It is fully, it's almost like your phone is off, right? It is just encrypted at rest. So even though from our perspective, so what's the difference? I enter my passcode all the time. I do face ID. Isn't it just as locked when I lock my phone? No, it's totally different. Before unlock is way, way, way more secure than after unlock.

I love that Apple takes iOS security so seriously and it's so incredibly advanced and has all these different protections. But I also – I think even more than that, I love that they are constantly – in motion and constantly tightening things down even further. And they actually would care. You know, Apple, you know, you all know what I think of Tim Cook. But when he... does his shameless government cooperation. Usually it's...

opportunistic ways that he can make sure that he keeps making a whole bunch of money, as we're going to see him play very nice with Trump over the next few years. Like, that's what happened last time. It's going to happen again this time. And you can be sure that anything that, you know, if there's like...

tariffs on goods from China, you're going to see that, oh, they just mysteriously don't apply to Apple. There's going to be a lot of that kind of stuff going on. He's going to play very nice with government and with the... bag on top to make sure that Apple continues to make a whole bunch of money with its operations in China. However, Apple also does not

like cooperating with law enforcement more than it has to legally. And they especially do not like things that try to get around their phone's privacy and security measures. So Apple is constantly... Closing loopholes, adding more protections, fighting against different hacks. And that's – whatever you think of whether law enforcement should be able to hack phones that somehow would only be used for good purposes.

Whatever you think about that, this type of security affects everybody. This is just Apple making sure that our phones are secure for everybody. And this is total overkill for most of us. But I'd rather they err on the side of overkill when it comes to basic device security than underkill, whatever that word would be. I'm glad that they take these ridiculous measures. I'm glad that somewhere, some...

One of these various hacks from Celebrite or whatever, one of these various hacks that these law enforcement agencies and foreign governments and other kind of bad actors, one of the exploits, Apple realized, hey, you know what? If we just make the phones reboot after three days of not being unlocked, it'll erase this whole category of whatever from being used in practice. I love that kind of stuff. And I'm so glad that they keep fighting that fight. It makes their products safer.

and more secure for all of us. And by the way, that's why when the police have a phone that they want to break into, that's why they keep it plugged in because they don't want it to run out of battery and die and go into the before or first unlock state again. They want to keep all that stuff that's in memory, all the decrypted data that's in memory, they want to keep it there. They want to keep it.

in the mode where it's all the goodies with a thin curtain in front of it just so they can figure out how to get around that curtain or get through it or whatever but once it reboots it just becomes a bucket of garbage data that they have a very difficult time getting anything out of yeah and because and you know because a lot of times there's like It's like, oh, well, we have this phone. Keep it alive. Keep it booted. Keep it powered on until we can get...

I mean, do they get warrants? Really? Probably not. But it's probably more like until we can get the hack machine from Celebrite or whatever to plug this thing into that maybe the entire agency and the entire state owns one and they have to wait for it.

it a few days like now it'll it'll put some pressure on their tactics that probably should be and maybe are illegal um like again it protects all of us and this is a good thing Yeah, so a whole bunch of reverse engineering happened, and then there were some takeaways, and reading from Jessica's post, turns out the inactivity reboot triggers...

exactly after three days or 72 hours. The iPhone would do so despite being connected to Wi-Fi. This confirms my suspicion that this feature had nothing to do with wireless connectivity. Law enforcement's conclusion that the reboot is due to phones wirelessly communicating with each other is implausible. The older iPhones before iOS...

18 likely rebooted due to another reason such as a software bug security wise is a very powerful mitigation an attacker must have kernel code execution to prevent an inactivity reboot this means that a forensic analysis must be able to delay the reboot for the actual data to extraction but the Initial exploit must be run within the first three days. Inactivity reboot will change the threat landscape for both thieves and forensic analysts.

but asymmetrically so. While law enforcement is under more time pressure, it likely completely locks out criminals from accessing your data to get into your bank accounts and other valuable information stored on your iPhone.

It's not just law enforcement that wants to break into your phone. If someone steals your iPhone, it is much less valuable to them if this thing is locked and they can't resell it. If they can somehow figure out an exploit to get into your phone in an unlocked state, they can harvest all your information, try to get your passwords, get access to your email.

Reset your passwords drain your bank account all that good stuff Which is another reason if you're worried about your phone being stolen or taken or hacked into Don't just lock it You can shut it down and put it into the before unlock state. So

yeah this is uh this is a good feature uh and it's it's this is the type of thing that apple does without really announcing but it's just one more uh one more uh move in the cat and mouse game this is another reason if you care about this stuff at all it's always the update to the latest os because

uh the the cat in this case the hackers are always finding exploits but then apple closes them they find more than apple closes them and on and on and on and so if you have a phone that's like oh you're running you know, the latest version of iOS 17. Well, that has 25 known X points, but the very latest version of iOS 18, all 25 of those has been patched. Like, and that's the game. Not that there's none out there. There's always no ones being discovered, but they are.

patched pretty quickly after they're discovered in the best case. And any older phone running an older OS probably has a laundry list of hacks that work on it. Whereas the newer you get, the shorter that list of known hacks gets. And then, you know, then it's, you know, a clock on the thieves. They have three days, whether they keep your phone plugged in or not, they have three days to figure out how to get it, get inside it and get your stuff.

Also, I mean not to make this too dark but I think this is important to think about because it's a realistic threat. Keep in mind the direction that the US government is going in. There's a lot of data that is on our phones that the government might start wanting to look at more. For instance, if you are in a state that...

That has made abortion illegal, especially like the really hardcore ones that like, you know, any form of abortion is illegal. Well, information like you've had a period or not. And what happened after you didn't have one? That information could get you thrown in jail or worse. And the way we're going politically in the U.S.

We're going to have to really start taking a lot more of the data security stuff seriously and privacy data seriously because the government's going in some weird directions and it can get a lot worse. And I think what we see... With some of these political directions that things are heading in, like we're not that far from things getting a lot more threatening in areas like that. And so a lot of data is on our phones. A lot of data is in these services that we use on our phones.

We need to start building the infrastructure, if we don't already have it, to be a lot more careful and a lot more guarded and a lot more private about this stuff and a lot more secure. Because you might think today... You might be in a place or be a kind of person where you don't feel particularly at risk for government intrusion into your phone. But that can change quickly.

And I think we are in for some of those changes in those directions, unfortunately. So there's never a better time than now to start getting your security in order and reviewing some of these options and some of these practices and bulking things up where you can.

And if you're in that paranoid mindset, keep in mind that in the U.S., at least the current precedent in law is that the police can force you to put your finger on touch ID. They can force you to use face ID, but they can't force you to enter your passcode. So if you care about that type of thing.

another advantage of before unlock state because face ID and touch ID don't work in that state and they cannot compel you to tell them your passcode. Yet. You know, brief question, which I don't expect you guys to know the answer to. You know how... There's the trick of where on modern iPhones, you hold the volume up button and the lock button for a few seconds, and that will disable Touch ID.

Does that get you into the before first unlock? I mean, strictly speaking, it's got to be different. Yeah, that does lock out Touch ID and Face ID, but it does not get you into before first unlock. We are sponsored by Uncommon Goods. Spark something uncommon this holiday season with just the right gift from Uncommon Goods. This busy holiday season is here and Uncommon Goods makes it less stressful with incredible hand-picked gifts for everyone on your list on one spot. Gifts to spark joy.

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That's uncommongoods.com slash ATP for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer. Thank you so much to Uncommon Goods for sponsoring our show. Uncommon Goods, we're all out of the ordinary. Let's do some Ask ATP. And MR writes, can you guys explain how an M4 Ultra is expected to outperform or compete against an NVIDIA 4090 when an M4 is just a tiny chip with a small heatsink, while a 4090 is a triple-slot GPU weighs over a kilo...

and consumes around 400 watts of power. I know Apple's good at making chips, but surely we're missing something here. Yeah, an NVIDIA 4090, which is, I think, their current top-end GPU. It is really big, really expensive. It's 400 watts of power, has a huge heatsink. And you're saying, comparing to this, you know, with these... M4 is just a tiny chip. Yeah, the M4 is a tiny chip. The M4 Ultra, which doesn't exist yet, but when it does exist, it will not be a tiny chip.

It will also be a very big, very hot chip that requires a very big heatsink. Take a look at the M2 Ultra and the size of the heatsink that it has. Now, it's not 400 watts, but just a level set here. to try to compete with an nvidia 4090 it's going to take a chip that is substantially larger and hotter than the m4 that's mac mini it's gonna have a big heatsink on it it's gonna cost a lot of money but still the question is

How can they even be in the ballpark? I did this calculation back before the M1 was coming out. Is it possible for Apple to make an Apple Silicon chip?

with a quote-unquote integrated gpu as in a gpu that is on the soc on the die with all the cpus and everything that competes with the best video card that you can get best single video card that you can get and and the math that i did back then was based on the rumor of the jade 4c die the thing that would be like two ultras or four maxes put together the math on that worked out that would have been competitive with the best single gpu video card available at the time

But Apple never made that chip. They only made the M1 Ultra, which was two M1 Maxes stuck together. They never made the quad with four of them. And that's why no single Apple Silicon chip has ever competed with a single best.

top tier PC video card. Now, why are we having this discussion again? Because Apple's been doing so well with their GPU work that now when you look at the M4 Pro and the M4 Max and you start doing back-of-the-envelope math, you can be like, all right, well, if they just made an Ultra one of these, if they took two M4 Maxes...

and stuck them together, which again, I don't know if they're going to do this. I still haven't seen a die shot of the M4 Max to see if it has the interposer. But anyway, assuming the M4 Ultra has essentially twice the number of GPU cores as the M4 Max. That starts to plausibly be within shooting distance of an NVIDIA 4090, but here's the other thing to consider. The NVIDIA 4090 is, I think, the best GPU you can get today. It's an old card.

It's about to be replaced by the NVIDIA 5 series. It's kind of like when all the competitors were comparing their new like the Qualcomm ARM chip and everything and Intel chips with the M3 just before the M4 came out. Yeah, that's the time you want to do that comparison because when the NVIDIA... 5,000 series comes out, they're going to be way faster, and I think they will maintain that lead. How can they be in the ballpark? I'm not sure what process.

nvidia is using at various times apple may have had a better process like three nanometer three nanometer versus five nanometer um the other thing is the nvidia chips have lots of specialized stuff in them for applications that apple does not care about

like i don't know cryptocurrency stuff or like ai model training although apple does care about that at this point or whatever so I think that we're in this moment in time where you could fantasize about a non-existent M4 Ultra that's not going to come out until WWDC next year. could plausibly be somewhere in the neighborhood of the Nvidia 4090, which by the time the M4 Ultra is out will be last year's old news and will be replaced by better GPUs.

That's what it comes down to. Like, it's great that Apple is getting closer and their GPUs are really good and they are amazing performance per watt. I like the whole rest of Apple Silicon, but don't expect a single, you know. single Apple SoC to trounce the best single PC GPU available. If we can get in the ballpark, that will be amazing. But even that is going to be quite a challenge.

So when you get down to the lower ends, like if you start doing the people did comparison tests, like you can watch the Quinn's video that we talked about before, where he's like, the M4 is not like a beefy GPU, but it's pretty good for its size and power. And when you try to compete on pricing, you get like the cheapest NVIDIA GPU or like a really low end PC GPU. The M4 GPU holds its own against it.

amazingly and that is pretty amazing and remember the nvidia thing it's on its own separate card it's got its own separate memory that it has to power it's got all its own separate circuitry and now it's got to communicate to the cpu through the pci ebus and all that stuff right so there's lots of extra overhead that you don't have when the g

was literally on the dive with the rest of this stuff. So there are advantages to that arrangement. Of course, the unified memory architecture is you don't have to have a separate set of RAM, right? But yeah, I too wish... that apple would at least try to compete with a single one of the pc video cards uh when the m1 was coming out i was saying you know the mac pro you can put more than one of those video cards in it and it'll be you know there's nothing that apple could do to compete with that

and we were speculating if apple would produce apple silicon video cards and so far they haven't done that either so yeah um this is the question for my next mac am i going to try to get something with the big giant gpu speculatively so i can play the uh masterpiece edition of control a game that was introduced three years ago or whatever whenever i see an apple game announced i'm like oh it's cool these

these vendors are porting their games to the Mac and they're doing a good job on the ports and they have good performance. Then I look at the game, it's like, yeah, I remember that game from a few years ago when it came out. That's not really... It's good that it's happening, but that is not enough to turn the Mac around as a gaming platform. But anyway, Apple's GPUs are really good and they're getting better. But I don't think it's a fair comparison to compare the non-existent M4 Ultra.

speculative non-existent m4 ultra to the nvidia 4090 that's about to be replaced a couple other things on that too you know when you're when you're comparing you know apple's highest end gpu configuration of an soc versus a dedicated pc gpu's highest end model there's a couple of factors that are also worth considering so number one apple's strategy of making these socs and making the larger ones you know when you go from m4

maxed m4 ultra presumably they're going to do a similar strategy they've done with m1 and m2 ultra they skipped m3 where they just copy everything you just get two maxes glued together we don't know because we haven't seen if there's an interposer on the m4 max yet It's still up in the air. Right. Like that is how they did the M1 and M2 Ultras. So presumably that is likely to be one of the ways they might do this. It's probably the most likely way they might do this.

So if they do, keep in mind that as you try to scale up this design, you're also doubling a whole bunch of other stuff on that chip that is not just the GPU cores. If they were... to make a higher-end configuration for GPU purposes specifically. And instead of having two M4 Maxes next to each other, if they just extended the M4 Max to have just...

a huge amount more GPU cores but not doubling the neural engine, the CPU cores, the media engines, like all the other stuff that's on the die. They could fit way more GPU cores. than they could by doubling the entire chip. So if they did that kind of thing, maybe that would be closer to what the 4090 and those kind of GPUs are, because those are just GPUs.

those are spending all of that die space and all of that wattage and all that power and all those terrible manufacturing yields, those are spending all those resources only for more GPU bandwidth and cores. Yeah, one of the reasons the rumor is that they might not be taking two M4 Maxes and sticking them together is because one of the historical downsides of taking two Maxes and sticking them together is that Apple hasn't gotten linear scaling. on doubling the GPU cores.

And presumably because of like essentially overhead of the interposer and signaling across that barrier and cross communication. So even though you double the number of GPU cores, you don't get straight up doubling of the speed, which is what you would expect for something like a GPU with massively parallel.

of loads uh and it could be the that's the interconnect like they're too far apart from each other they have to communicate across the interposer it is in impeding their ability to scale the way you'd want to so again no i don't know what they're actually going to do

I haven't seen any rumors about it. That's why I want to see the eyeshadow of the M4 Max, because if there's no interposer, we know they're definitely not doing that. Yeah. The other thing to consider is when you're comparing against the highest end... version the highest end gpu for the current high-end family of nvidia whatever's you know the way these gpus work similar to how cpus work but i think to to an even amped up degree these days in this market is

You have the low-end and the mid-range configurations of these GPU families, and they take much more reasonable balances of power and heat. versus performance when you try to scale up performance of a computer chip normally you're just doing that like you have a certain family and you do it by either making more of those cores you know making the chip bigger

or you ramp up the clock speed of those cores, or both. When you ramp up clock speeds, the relationship between performance and heat is not linear. Heat goes up way faster than performance. So there's always a sweet spot where the mainstream GPUs, the mainstream chips, those will be... tuned in a certain sweet spot where they're getting pretty good performance for a nice, reasonable amount of heat and efficiency that they can get. All of Apple's chips in this family, all of the M series chips.

They stay in that envelope. So the M4 Ultra is, in all likelihood, probably not going to be cranked up to 400 watts.

They could, if they wanted to design chips to do that, they could design chips in that direction, but they don't. They keep these chips within the sweet spots of... heat to performance but when nvidia releases gpus they have chips that are in those sweet spots but they also will sell you a high-end model that is way outside of that sweet spot where it might use you know four times the power

of a lower-end model. To get that extra 5% of performance. Right, and maybe get twice the performance or something. Not twice, definitely not twice. Yeah, usually not. So when you compare it to one of those chips... Those chips are designed with completely different trade-offs in mind to achieve... The whole point of the 4090 and the whatever 90 series GPUs, the whole point is... Just give us the most performance you possibly can. Power, size, and cost be damned.

Right up to the point where the card crashes and then back it off a little. Right. But Apple does not design their chips that way because they don't design their machines that way. And especially talking about carbon neutrality, that's the last thing they want. And the only machine they have that could handle that.

is the mac pro because every other computer that they have is so tiny and has limited cooling or whatever so the only you can't put a 400 watt anything into any mac except for the mac pro Every other one will just melt. The coolers aren't big enough. When you look at what PC cases have to accommodate in order to have one of these GPUs in it, it's ridiculous. And there are markets for that, but those are not markets Apple cares at all.

Apple doesn't care about the super high-end gamer market that's going to buy these GPUs. Obviously, Apple doesn't care about that market. I mean, I could argue whether they should or not, but they don't. You're comparing very different things when you're trying to say Apple should match their performance or should be in the ballpark of the performance of this super high-end NVIDIA PC gaming GPU.

There's a lot of reasons why that's a very different kind of comparison. Yeah, and that's why I like the M1 Extreme that never came, the four Maxis together. That one would have been in the ballpark.

Now, I think people are thinking maybe the M4 Ultra will be in the Bora Park at the 4090 because we're at the end of an NVIDIA generation because of the rumors about the M4 Ultra being so vague that people can just fantasize about, well, imagine if the M4 Ultra had this number, of course. And it's like... I mean, you can just keep multiplying number of cores by number of floating point operations or whatever thing you're choosing to judge it by.

yeah um like the hope is again for the mac pro that they will ship a chip that actually requires this case because they didn't do that before they gave the same chip that works just fine in a mac studio and that is entirely a waste of the massive cooling capacity of the mac pro so we'll see how that goes probably uh next summer wwdc keep up alive john keep up alive

All right, Yannick Boysen writes, with Marco's recent switch from a NAS to a Mac Mini for his primary storage and my plans to do the same in the near future, I was wondering about file integrity in macOS. Is Marco worried about file integrity or bit rot on his external drives? Bye. Bye. Bye.

I've read a bit on the topic, but I'm still not clear how big of a problem this could be, if at all, and if having redundancy or RAID and or backups changes anything in this equation. Apple seems to think that on internal SSDs and modern Macs, it isn't a big concern, though others have a... different view especially when it comes to possibly lower quality external hard drives or ssds and we will link to a post from 2016 from adam h leventhal on apfs that talks about this

Yannick continues. So the second question is, in John's opinion, should Marco and I be worried about this? And is a dedicated NAS still the best option as a primary personal storage, or can it be demoted to backup duties only without any problems even for storing data in the long term? So, Marco, you worried? No, I figured John would tell me when to be worried.

well maybe that's right now well so we've discussed this before especially when apfs was coming out these data integrity fixtures the features that they're talking about it's basically like um is any part of

the file system or the computer checking that the bits that were written to it are the ones that they're reading back so if you write some bits to it and then wait two years and then read the bits back is there any part of the system that says hey are these the bits that i wrote two years ago Or have they changed since then? Or does it just say, here are the bits on the disc. Here you go. With no, no knowledge. I can't have any knowledge of like, have they changed since I wrote them there?

Like, did one of those bits flip because the cosmic ray hit it or something? Or is there some bug somewhere? Like, that's data integrity. ZFS was a real pioneer on this. It was a file system and a whole, you know, the whole stack for ZFS was designed with features that led it. know when anything has gone wrong.

There's a bad driver. There's a bad disk. There's a cosmic ray. There's a software problem. Any kind of thing that could go wrong in the entire stack between your storage device, your computer, your CPU, you know, bad memory, Casey, anything like that. ZFS would catch it because ZFS had checksums on all the data. And so if anything changed, it would say, hey...

something about these bits is off. It could correct small errors. If you had redundant storage of the same data, it could say, okay, well, the data off disk one is bad, but I have some of that same data on disk two, and oh, it looks like it's good on disk two, and I'll write it back to disk one. So now it's good in both places again. That is data integrity. I like that feature. And I really wished that Apple's next generation file system would have it. APFS does not have it.

um as part of the file system stack so and when abfs writes some data and then reads it back two years later It has no way to know if that data has changed out from under. It has no way to know if the data was perfectly fine on the disk, but then it hit a bad part of RAM, and then it gave back to your program, and it's all scrambled because it came through a bad piece of RAM. It has no way of knowing any of that.

because it doesn't do these things so there are third-party utilities to say okay if the faucet is not going to be do it do it for me is it something i can do can i like write a bunch of little checksum files in each directory that has checksums of all the files that are in that directory so when i

them later i'll also read the checksum file and sort of do the same thing that zfs is doing under the covers but manually with a bunch of files yeah you can do that and there's a bunch of utilities that do that why would you want to do this why do you care uh because in general if you have lots and lots of data stored somewhere you probably care about it like say your family photos your family photo library

You don't want to go and read those photos five years from now and pull up your favorite photo and it starts rendering and halfway through the image it cuts off and then it's just gray or snow for the rest of the image because the JPEG is corrupted or something. And how could that happen? Bit rot, cosmic rays, bugs, bad memory, bad disk, like so many things could cause that to happen. The detection of that happening.

is step one in fixing it so so obviously like if your data is going to go bad what you want is you want to know that it's bad and that's important for example when you're doing backups because if you don't know that it's bad and you're doing backups you've got a cloud backup you've got a local backup you've got time machine you didn't backups everywhere

If things are going bad, you're just backing up the bad data to 17 different places. And in fact, maybe the good data was in your time machine backup, but then you overrode it with the bad data and slowly it pushed off the good data off the end because, you know, you can only fit so much on your time machine disk before. pushes the old versions off the end. And now you had the good data, but you've since overwritten it with 17 new versions of the bad data.

because the file system and the operating system and everything have no way of knowing that they're taking bad data and pushing it to the cloud taking bad data and pushing it to your time machine backup they just think here's the data here it is they don't know if it's good or it's bad it's just this is what came back from the disk so here you go right that's why

you want this detection and the second part of it is redundancy if you have both detection and redundancy it can detect when there's a problem and fix the problem and warn you about it so it can fix it with a redundant data and warn you about it right so this is a question about like raid and everything raid is not a backup strategy raid can help save you from discs going bad

Or not data going bad. Well, maybe it'll know that there's a difference between the two things, but it won't know which one is right, depending on which RAID level you're using. If you're using RAID 5 with checksums versus RAID 1 where it's just duplicating stuff. That can help a little bit, but a file system that enforces this is what you really want. I think ButterFS can do it for data and metadata separately.

But you really want it for both the metadata is what keeps track of where all your files are And then data is like keep make sure the data is is good now as for whether Margo should be worried probably not because there's not really much point in worrying about something you can't do anything about that's the bad part here like there's no i could get hit by a bus yeah like what like it's a shame that apple's

storage stack doesn't have any data integrity features other than like you know the basics of like uh error correction in the ssds and redundant storage and stuff like that's all under the covers but like in the end it is not end to end like securely checking that your data is good

And there's not much you can do about it, practically speaking. All the solutions that, like, write a bunch of checksum files or whatever... they are cumbersome onerous don't work in all situations like they don't work with time machine really you'd be backing up the checksum files directly from the regular files i don't think you can be sure that they'd even be in sync with each other and you're just going to be adding more files that like that system

It's difficult to write a system like that reliably. The third-party tools that do it can be good for targeted use, like just this folder. I want to be sure it's secure. But for things like your iCloud photo library, You don't even really have good access to the, I mean, they're buried in there somewhere, all in the originals folder and those all UUID type things. But like the Photos app manages those files. If you try to...

put something on top of that that tries to keep track of all the files in your photo library and then write checksums to them and correlate them, you're just going to get so many false positives from your system not working right that there's nothing I can recommend that you do that's going to save you from this.

I mean, one of the things is like, oh, keep your data in motion. Constantly be copying it from place to place to place so that when something goes bad or rots, you'll have good copy somewhere. That's kind of the best we can do, but it's just a race condition. Have you been moving your data around at the right time such that you didn't just spread the corruption everywhere?

right it's not going to be the case where it goes bad here and you're like oh but i got good copies here here and here a you won't even know it went bad and b by the time you do know it went bad the bad thing is probably in all your places so that argues for potentially doing what marco did once and i've done once which is like You know, write things out to a Blu-ray M disk and put it in a drawer. If that happens to have the good copy of that data,

then nothing's ever going to change that data again. It's not going to get overwritten by subsequent backups, right? But if that has the bad data, well, then, you know, tough luck. So the question is, we should all... not be we should all know that this is a possibility but unfortunately for us there's not really anything we can reasonably do as an end user to fix this which is why it's on apple to eventually

get its button gear, and fix this. I'm so happy they did APFS for years. I've been hammering on them for, like, they need a modern file system. APFS is a modern file system. It's great. I love it. It's just not... everything that it could have been for for some good reasons because a lot of these data integrity features hinder performance and take more memory and there's yada yada right but

eventually if i live long enough and we're doing this podcast long enough i'm gonna be hammering them to say you know what apple it's time for you to have a modern file system maybe if s was great back in 20 whatever but now it's 2040 something and it's time for you to have a file system with data integrity uh and we'll see yeah and again it's a shame that like btrfs has it zfs has it like there's existing things that do have it um and as for nasa's as a you know

as primary personal storage, I wouldn't use any network attached storage as primary personal storage. You should use directly attached internal or external SSDs for your personal storage and use the NAS more for backups. And for data integrity, yeah, if you can have a NAS that uses a file system that has...

data integrity checking on it, that can help you detect corruption and potentially correct it depending on which file system you're using. You can buy a NAS that uses EFS that has all these features on it. You don't really care about the performance because it's just a big backup. I would recommend that. That's one of the advantages of having a NAS. or just any kind of separate computer that's not an Apple computer that is running a file system that has data integrity checking and using it.

to make backups keep in mind that if you carefully put your corrupted data there it will carefully preserve your corrupted data because that was the data that it was written it thinks that's the right data sorry so you have to be careful with your backups if you push the old backups off the end periodically you will always end up

spreading your corruption everywhere before you find out that your favorite picture of your kid when they were two is half corrupted. Cool. Also make prints and print books because. That's another, that's another hedge against this. You know, if you lose all your data or your one favorite picture is corrupted, but you printed five eight by tens and they're in frames on your walls, even if they're like UV bleached, it's still better than nothing.

Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Uncommon Goods. Thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week, Overtime, we're going to actually address the question. Earlier we were talking about... Apple's prices and the storage upgrade prices and everything. And over time we're going to ask, is complaining about Apple's prices actually useful?

So we'll get to that in overtime. If you want to hear that, adp.fm slash join. Thanks everybody. And we'll 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 CAS.

E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-E-M-K-O-R-M-E-N-T-E-M-K-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech Podcast. so long I I decided I needed another project. Many people know that I talked a couple of years ago about putting fiber in the houses and nothing like that. I still want to do that at some point. I'm still kicking that can over and over and over again.

I needed something that is far more cost-effective to work on and a far shorter stretch of time to complete it. The problem statement is as follows. Because I hate myself, I'm a fan of the New York Giants. New York Giants is a football team, a NFL football team, an American football team. Their record is currently, for the season, two wins and eight losses. It has not been a good football season.

I've been a Giants fan since I remember, and although I'm not a super-duper-duper fan, I generally prefer to be able to watch the Giants when I can. The way the NFL works is that typically there's only, you know, like three or four games that are happening concurrently, oftentimes maybe only one or two, typically played, you know, Sunday afternoons.

And if you live in the region near where the football team is based, you will likely receive a broadcast of the game. If you are out of market like I am. then it is pretty unlikely you will receive a broadcast of the game. Unless they're playing your local team. So for me, my local team is the Washington Commanders, once known as the Washington Redskins, which thankfully was finally changed because that's a very problematic name.

And so if the Giants play the Commanders, which does happen, then I will get the game. But otherwise, it's unusual for me to get the Giants game. The easy solution to this problem is the Marco solution, which is to throw piles of money at the problem and... Fix it. And you do that by subscribing not only to YouTube TV, which is not an insignificant cost, but also NFL Sunday ticket, which is hundreds and hundreds of dollars per season on top.

of the cost of U2 TV. And I don't want to do that because I like the Giants. I don't like them that much. And I thought there must be a way around this problem. There must be a way I can fix this with technology and a smaller application of money. So, so far, any questions and or theories about how I am attempting to solve this problem? I don't know anything about sports. The only thing I know is that people will do...

very ridiculous things to get their sports. But the most common solution is usually just to pay a bunch of money for them somehow through some kind of cable or whatever subscription.

And Ben Thompson, who is not allergic to spending money, even he has to do a Byzantine solution to this. I believe, so he lives in Taiwan, but he wants to see his local team in Wisconsin. So I believe he has a residence in Wisconsin where he has a bunch of... hardware running that hardware gets the game because it's in wisconsin and then he sends it over the internet to his home in taiwan where he sees it i think he uses a sling box or used to use a sling box so casey

Do you have a relative who lives in the New York metro area where the Giants are local and you could put a box in their house that gets the game and then sends it to you? Is this going to be something where you're asking me to reach under my seat in a minute and I find all of a sudden, oh my god. god what's this what marco wants to be doing is is a nurse mating a piece of hardware that records football and sends it to casey so that might be definitely going outdoors

So spoiler alert, that may be the end of this discussion, but that's not where it's going yet. So yes, let me, all snark and kidding aside. The remainder of this topic is probably going to sound like SpawnCon. It's not. This is hand to God, me trying to solve a problem for myself. And it just so happens that I'm going to use tools that I know and love in order to do it.

This is not sponsored. This is me just doing this because I want to. Wait, is SpawnCon something people say? Sadly it is. That's disgusting. Sponsored content. That is not this. This is 100% my own thoughts. Nobody's compensated me in any way, shape, or form. So I apologize if it comes across as love letters to anything because it's not... If they are love letters, it's because I really wrote them, so to speak. But anyways, so the solution to this...

Problem is, yeah, taking a page out of Ben Thompson's playbook. So what Ben does now, as far as I'm aware, is he has one or perhaps more.

small PCs or perhaps Mac minis or something that are physically installed in one or more places around the country. And I think you're right, John, that Wisconsin, if I'm not mistaken, God, I hope I have that right, is the home base, and I believe he does have a... residence there where he has a um a like a knock and then you see you know a small like effectively the pc equivalent of a mac mini um or something like it

And he has an HD Home Run. There are several flavors of HD Home Run, but all of them, the point is basically to convert a either cable TV feed or an antenna feed. into something that's on the network. So it's kind of a bridge between either an antenna or cable to your network. And actually, we pay for television service with Verizon Files here in Richmond.

and I have an HD Home Run, I forget the name of the model, an HD Home Run Prime, and we've talked about this in the past, that I've put a cable card into, and that is as close as I come to a cable box. I have an HD Home Run with a cable card, and I use...

an app called Channels, which I think sponsored once, maybe twice in the past. But hand to God, I genuinely love this app. And I'm actually personal friends with one of the people who wrote it, so I'm predisposed to like this app. But it's really a new...

incredible app and so what channels does is it's a dvr basically that will slurp you know slurp down all the stuff that the hd home run is sending it and it will you know either record it or display it live you can do plex style like watch your tv from

somewhere else and this is the same software that ben is using as far as i'm aware this is very much in the spirit of a slingbox but you know much more modern tech top to bottom so i have a friend that lives uh in southwestern connecticut and uh he is a I would call him a network administrator by trade. He would probably bristle at that description. But he does this sort of thing for a living. And he has, you know, deeply over...

over-provisioned networking equipment at his house because this is what he does for a living. And so I bought... a small Intel NUC. I'll try to put some links in the show notes. It's, shoot, I don't even remember what this thing's called. But it was like $130 off Amazon. And it is... more than overkill for what i need it's a b-link n95 intel 12th One, two TH, uh, mini PC, mini S. Uh, so this is three and a half gigahertz, eight gigs of Ram and 256, uh, gig SSD. And this is.

It came with Windows on it. I immediately killed Windows, put Ubuntu on it, and then put Channels on it. And so I have this. I have an HD Home Run Connect, which is one of the HD Home Runs that you can connect an antenna to. And I bought an over-the-air antenna. And I set all this up here in the house.

And I've got it working so that, you know, the channels could see the HD Home Run. The HD Home Run could see local channels here in Richmond. Everything was working great. Thanks to some help from my friend John. I love that my solution is viewed as the throwing money at it problem.

You're talking about like hundreds of dollars worth of hardware here. It was like 200 bucks all in. Have you heard about how he opens and closes his garage door? Well, there's that. Or not even open and closes, how he can tell whether the garage door, which open and closes through a different mechanism, is in fact. open or closed. Can confirm. So this is, I mean, as much as I'm getting a little grumbly, Marco, your point is fair. It's...

a one-time fee of roughly 200 bucks as compared to paying like $400 every single season for NFL Sunday ticket. So the theory is I solved this problem once. And that's that. And I never have to worry about it again. That's always, you will never have to worry about it again, for sure. That's how computers work. Yep, exactly. It's only true of Lutron Caseta and everything else. Also not SpawnCon.

but I should keep the timer running. When I got that thing and installed it in my house and put black tape over all the lights and threw it behind my TV, I've never touched it. Right. I'm telling you, it's incredible. So... So yeah, so I set all this up locally, and then you have to do some kind of acrobatics to get the channels on the NUC, the little PC, to get the channel server there.

to basically broadcast to my primary channel server which is running on my m1 mac mini here at the house um in order to get those two to communicate with each other but the idea is that the stuff that's coming off the antenna would then just be additional, now I'm using an overloaded term, additional television channels that are available within the channels app. Hopefully that makes sense. So that all worked here when I was on my same network.

But then, of course, I need to be able to put this on somebody else's network. So enter former and recent sponsor Tailscale. They have paid me to say nice things about them, but not in this case. This is me just genuinely being excited about Tailscale. I got Tailscale set up. That all worked great. And so it all appears as though everything's on the same land, even though it really isn't. All's good. So I box everything up. I ship it to my friend Sean. It arrived today.

Sometime shortly before I shipped everything, I think Sean had said to me, hey, have you looked at this? And he links me to, I think it's an FTC database. that's like, here's the over-the-air digital TV maps here in the States. DTV reception maps. And he says to me, I don't think I get a lot of over-the-air stuff.

uh, if you look at this map, it's not good, Bob. Uh, so he says, this may not go the way you think it's going to go. And I said, nah, it's fine. If nothing else, it's a project in an academic exercise. So he gets all this stuff today. He gave me my own private little VLAN on top of his network because, again, this is the sort of thing he does for a living. And everything's set up. He plugs in my NUC and it boots up.

It jumps right on my tail net. Everything's good to go. It connects and communicates with the HD Home Run. I'm able to use some slightly advanced features of TailScale that let me hop on to the HD Home Run even though it doesn't have TailScale. scale on it. And so I'm able to tell the HD Home Run, all right, go ahead and search for channels. And it does it.

And it comes up with like eight of them. And then I go to start tuning in to these channels. And I see that one of them I think was ABC, but it won't actually... play it because apparently the signal's too weak. I think one of them might have been NBC. But it won't actually play that because the signal's too weak. There's something that channels thought was Fox, but it's some weird foreign affairs channel. And that comes in great, baby. But that's useless for what I'm trying to accomplish.

If you are curious, this coming Sunday, the Giants are playing, I forget who, but they're playing a game that will be broadcast on CBS. I will give you one guess, gentlemen, what channel wasn't even offered as a weak possibility at Sean's house? CBS. So I don't know what I'm going to do, but this academic exercise, the infrastructure of it worked perfectly. Chef's kiss.

unfortunately i need sean to move because it might be cheaper to just buy season of whatever on the whatever service oh for sure and it'll be cheaper once you factor in your time although this is a fun little hobby but like but you're getting you're getting trying to get cbs over the air doesn't sean get cbs Not over the air in some capacity?

Well, and so it's funny you bring that up because some of the things that we have been discussing up until the time we started recording were, you know, hey, Sean might decide to ditch his TiVos. Sean is younger than I am, but he has the spirit of an 80 year old. And so he is.

still clinging to his TiVos, John, and he said, you know, maybe I will take, well, I think he has two of them, and he said, maybe I'll take the cable card out of one of those and put it in the HD Home Run, you know, the HD Home Run that accepts a cable card, and maybe he'll use... He was thinking about going down this path for his own reasons. And then I could...

My channel server could also find that same HD home run on the local network, VLAN notwithstanding, and I would only need one of the four tuners that it has available to it, and only on certain times on Sundays, and maybe everyone would be happy.

Unfortunately, Silicon Dust, who was the manufacturers of HD Home Run, seemed to have stopped making the HD Home Run that... accepts a cable card so you can only come up with them secondhand which is mildly alarming and cable companies aren't giving out cable cards anymore either and they're as they break they're probably not going to replace them i was actually thinking of getting rid of one of my cable cards but uh haven't quite done it yet but yeah the right

Strings on the wall for cable card. But yeah, so one of the things we were talking about is if he can come up with his own, you know, it's a home run connect, which takes a cable card. And maybe he'll do a channels installation of his own. And then I can just kind of occasionally borrow one of the two. Another thing he was talking about is maybe if he could create like a secondary login on his cable provider, just on their online systems, and either I could use their app to potentially watch.

you know his cable from here uh which is actually made easier because of a different feature of tail of tail scale where i can basically have my internet egress be through this knock that's at his house so from a geographic perspective i'm entering the internet Connecticut. So that's a possibility.

Um, that's not my preference. You know, I'm trying to do this on the up and up, like, well, as much as I can be because I have shipped hardware to him. It's great getting it over the air or was that was the hope, uh, and so on and so forth. Um, there's also, we're also going to look into a TV everywhere.

thing, which is kind of spiritually like YouTube TV, but not at all YouTube TV, where you can use your cable provider to get access to a bunch of channels. I don't know if his cable provider supports that, but maybe I could... have you know log in or even have him log in on channels that's at his house you know so i don't even need to see his credentials or whatever uh and we might try that um but i will say uh marco that i did

just for grins and gigs, look at what the reception would be like at the new place on Long Island. And I got to tell you, being very close to Manhattan means you got a lot of options, a lot of options. Although I don't think that CBS was one of them, if I recall correctly. But you do have quite a few options if you're to believe the FTC's little website thing. And so depending on how this works out with Sean, I might attempt to call in a favor. That's to be determined. Fair enough. We'll see.

But I don't know. I thought, if nothing else, it was a fun academic exercise in Little Baby Project to see, could this be done? And I'm genuinely very pleased with the result from the perspective of, you know, I got everything set up here in the house. I had... him basically plug a few things into the wall and plug in a couple of things to Ethernet, and everything just worked no problem in that respect. The problem is I need him to move, and I don't think he's going to be doing that.

But it was a fun little project, if nothing else. So maybe he'll ship this stuff back to me. Maybe I'll ship it to you if you let me. We'll argue about that another time. But we'll see what happens. There's other alternatives and avenues to try. Although it's funny, normally speaking of all your ridiculous TV-ness, for many years, part of my Thanksgiving...

celebration was messaging Casey the morning of Thanksgiving saying, Hey, my family is trying to figure out how to watch the parade. How do we do that? And a lot of times the answer was you would like give me access to your whatever TV bouncing situation.

It was a slingbox for many years, but you haven't asked in the last couple years, if I recall correctly. Yeah, because what's happened in the meantime is that whatever network runs it just has an app that you run on Apple TV and they just broadcast it to it.

So it's no longer necessary to use your crazy hacks for that. But thank you for all those years of serving us. Of course. It was that and the dog show, right, if I'm not mistaken? Yeah, yeah. It's the parade and then the dog show that follows it. Mm-hmm. I'm happy to be of service. You might be repaying that to me in the future. We shall see. We shall see. Hopefully I'll find a different mechanism, but we shall see. I got a lot of room in the garage.