646: On the Shelf With the Pickles

Marco, you can obviously do whatever you want to do, but if you'll permit me to punt to John, if I can do the punting to John for the pre-show when you're ready, please. Yeah. All right. Let's go live. Hi, everybody. We're live. Oh, is it me already? I didn't know if you had a preamble. Sorry.

i didn't know if there was i know they they say hike when they like you know snap the ball is there is there an equivalent command for punting over hold i don't know uh all right let me start over and get us going

A long time ago, when Marco and John and I first started talking about doing a podcast together, and I think we've told this story, but not in a long time, one of the things that Marco and John and I all said to each other was, look, we're not going to stop being friends on account of any of this. And at the time that was hilarious because it was us talking about cars and that didn't amount to all that much in the grand scheme of things until you get to ATP.

I stand by that. I think you two stand by it. I think we've done a great job of it. Except now everything is the show. And so in our internal show notes. we have a section for the pre-show. And sometimes there'll be stuff there. A lot of times Marco will just make something up, or sometimes the two of us will. But for the last 48 hours, I've had to stare at pre-show colon, John made an important purchase. And I don't know what it is. And I'm dying.

And this is why maybe this whole, maybe we should shut it all down because I don't want to have to wait to know what your important purchase was, John. But finally, the time has come. Fill me in, please. I spent so long trying to decide whether I should put anything there because a lot of time I just don't.

I'm going to surprise you with it, but I did want to like reserve the slot, but I didn't want to make it seem that big of a deal. Right. I didn't want to overhype it. Important purchase. That sounds like a big deal. But it's not like if I had like, if I had written like on your school paper, see me. Right.

Like see me after class or like we need to talk or something terrible like that. So I wanted to tamp it down to be like, this is not, this is a pre-show. It's not a big thing. Issue with your performance. I did want to reserve the spot in the pre-show. So no, it's nothing that exciting. John, everything we purchase can be exciting if we talk about it in the right way or if we care enough about it. Yeah, I think this one is significant in stupid ways. So picture it.

June 11th, 2011. San Francisco. You got anything, Casey? Your toaster. Yeah, actually, that's true. Wow. I was going to say WWDC, and I thought that that was keynote day of WWDC of that year. And that was the first time that I had met you in person. And we kind of sort of knew each other at that point, but not well. But I don't know if I would have jumped all the way to toasters. Well done, Marco. I'm shocked that Marco had that in a nanosecond.

I thought for sure you'd be like, I don't know. Anyway, yeah. Take a look in the show in the chat room. Take a look at that image. You may remember this. Yes, I do. I might have even taken that photo. I was certainly there for it. I think I took it. I think you probably did take that photo. Anyways, but yes, I do remember. It's advertising iOS 5 in the background. It's an iCloud. Right. So, fast forward 14 years. June 11th.

2025. I put in an order on Amazon.com for a new toaster. This is an important purchase. Whoa. Now, is it the same toaster? Did you buy a backup of the toaster? The real question is, why? Why did I? Put it in order for, and I didn't plan this. I didn't like, I looked on the Amazon order history of like, it was exactly 14 years to the day. That's incredible. 2011 to 2025, June 11th, both times. I put an order for toaster.

What's your guess, Casey? My guess is either the first one finally died and he put in an order for the exact same one again because nothing better has been made since to his standards. or he is buying a toaster for somewhere that one of his kids will be living like for college

Do you need me at all for the show? Because I was absolutely going to say both of those things. He probably would buy the replacement toaster, definitely the same one, because nothing else is as good for his standards. He'd probably buy the same toaster for himself, and then...

give the kid the old one yeah i would buy that well that's good that you are both on the same page here oh here's what happened um the toaster that i've had for 14 years has uh served us well but in recent months it started doing a thing where

It would work almost all the time. But once in a blue moon, you would press the button to begin whatever toast thing that you're doing. And the screen would change from blue to orange like it always does. And the timer would start counting down like it always does. but the heating elements would not get hot, which is an important function for a toaster. And you'd be like, huh?

like i put this bread in here and i pressed the button and it changed color and counted down and i came back and the bread was stone cold and then a person will come up to it and said what do you mean and press the button and then it will work but you can't have that it's got to work all the time so

Unfortunately, that toaster had to be retired. It's interesting that you mentioned potential kid things. It's like, what did you do with your retired toaster? Did you chuck it? Did you, you know, bring it to the... single stream recycling center along with the air conditioner that also died this year and the dehumidifier that also died this year? No, because it works like 92% of the time.

is that packed up and put it in the attic in case a kid wants it when they go okay what kid is gonna want a toaster that works most of the time it's a good toaster it still works great Almost all the time. Nothing is wrong with it, except for the times when you press the button and nothing happens. Okay, I cannot think of very many appliances that I could tolerate that kind of failure in. Like, I would rather...

Go to Target and get a toaster oven for $30. That works 100% of the time. Have you tried a $30 Target toaster lately? Because I have. Because we bought a toaster for my son for his apartment-style accommodations.

his junior year and it's terrible like i wouldn't i just yeah so maybe it turns on all the time but it is terrible all the time is being terrible all the time better doesn't do a good job of any of making your food hot and toasting it it's all uneven and it's just it's like it's unsatisfying to use it doesn't do its job well like it's bad

So this toaster, even if it only works one out of every 90 times or whatever, is still way better than that. So anyway, it may eventually end up getting chucked. But for now, it is a mostly functional toaster. So what did you replace it with?

I mean, the same toaster. Yeah, okay. There it is. There it is. Luckily, they still sell this toaster. I've tried a lot of toasters since. Um, and I haven't found like the only one that I think bested in some ways is the Panasonic flash express, whatever thing, which is just so much faster than this toaster.

but it is smaller, oddly proportioned, and I don't like the UI. And so I need something that's, the size of this one is perfect for my kitchen because it's basically as big as will fit. There is a much bigger one, which I literally can't fit. And honestly, my friend has the other one, so I...

very familiar with it i don't think i would like that bigger one because it's just too big so this is the size for me and by the way my parents have the smaller one so i have some experience with that when i'm over their place so the the breville 650 xl they still sell it i just got another one the same toaster um i but i want i want it to salute

this toaster that you gave me generously as a gift in 2011 that I did not ask for that, that you, you got me this toaster, which we later learned through extensive Casey off a link to your page, extensive reviewing of other contemporary toasters that you. basically stumbled upon by going into the rich person store the best toaster that was available at the time you bought it like where did you get like bloomingdale's or something i think it was nordstrom i thought nordstrom there you go

You went into the rich person's store, paid way too much money for a very fancy toaster, and then paid even more money to have it shipped back to my house, which was very nice of you. And I had it for 14 years. So that's a good run for an appliance. That is an amazing run. It technically isn't entirely dead. That's amazing.

and by the way i think it was merlin who paid for it to have it shipped back to you but yeah right but now here's a review of the new toaster because although it is the same model number oh no they've changed some stuff oh no it for all for the good So first of all, the toaster that I had, the place where I put it, the plug... for the toaster is basically directly behind it dead center and because my house is ancient and weird it is directly behind a dead center and very low in the wall

and the the plug like the you know thing the thing that goes into the wall on the toaster that you guys got me is like breville's patented thing have you seen it where like the end of the plug has a hole in it where you could put your finger through the hole to yank it out have you seen that yep Right. That's really bad when the plug for your toaster is directly behind the toaster because that thing sticks out really far.

like so much so that if i plugged in my toaster and then tried to slide my toaster towards the wall it will hit the cord and you can't have the hot back of the toaster touching the cord you know have you ever tried one of those like right angle adapters that has like a six inch cord on it that just like has like a flat right angle plug that goes on the wall and then just ends in like a three prong plug six inches later down a short cord

Yep. So I have a whole bunch of those when you back in 2011, when I got this toaster, I knew this wouldn't work. So I took about one of the right angle things and I connect up a toaster to it. But now I have some extra cord to get rid of. So the right angle thing is flat. It's in the wall. The toaster cord goes down.

and to the right the thing the thing in the wall the flat thing goes down and to the right i just connect them all but where do i put this loop of cord i have very little counter space here zip right next to the toaster is our stove top slash oven And so I was going to chuck the cord behind our stovetop slash oven. I don't know what you call that. We just call it an oven here. But on the top of it is a range with burners. And then underneath it is an oven with a door that opens that thing.

I put the cord behind there and it was, you know, I don't know, maybe like two feet of cord or whatever, because again, it was the toaster is right next to that. But if I'm going to put some electrical cord behind a thing that gets really hot, I'm going to try to protect it. So 14 years ago. I wrapped that cord in a whole bunch of aluminum foil and various other things to sort of make a giant sort of heat sink muffler heat shield thing around the cord that was behind there.

to get it out i realized i had to pull the oven out i must have pulled it pulled it out to put it in there and so i was wondering after 14 years did that thing finally melt through and that's the problem with my toaster or something didn't seem like it because the lights were all turning on everything but anyway

I pulled out the oven, did some cleaning. It's pretty gross back there. Pulled out the cords, unwrapped all the aluminum foil, looked as good as new, like the day I got it. So aluminum foil or tin foil, as you would call it if you're my age. Amazing as a heat shield. Totally protected the cords. They were perfectly good. The new toaster has a flat right angle plug. Good job, Breville.

They realized that that patented thing that they're so proud of, it sucks for a toaster. So I didn't have to use the adapter for the new one. And it was only a tiny little bit of cord that I tucked behind the oven and I wrapped it in some aluminum foil. So that's great. The next thing is there are little offset pegs.

On the back of the toaster, they're trying to stop the hot back of the toaster from burning your wall. Yeah, so you have to put it at least an inch away from the wall? Yeah, the little standout pick. So first of all... My house being terrible and old, essentially the backsplash or whatever you would call it on the countertop does not go up as high as the pegs. So the pegs basically are above it.

And so if you, if on my old toaster, if you were to push it against the wall, setting aside the plug, you got the right angle plug in there, it's all flesh and everything. If you were to push the toaster up against the wall, the pegs would go over the backslash, touch the wall, and then...

The hot back of the toaster is like a millimeters from the wall, which is bad. So I had like standoffs on there. I was using like the things you put on the bottom of chair legs to keep them from scuffing your floor. right those things i had them i was extending the standoff so it actually stayed far away from my wall new toaster longer standoffs

Number two in Breville's Comp. Great. And then the final thing, I can't tell if this is an improvement or just the fact that my old toaster was 14 years old. The screen is way brighter. maybe it's led and the other one was like the cold cathode things because it was so old i don't know but the screen is so bright i'm actually hoping it fades a little bit this is incredibly bright it's again blue when you turn it on and orange when it's going otherwise toaster works amazingly

Best toaster ever, Breville 650XL. Salute to the 14-year-old one that you guys got me. But now I've moved on to another toaster, which is the same toaster, but better. Pour one out, John. All right. I'm curious. I mean, I'm pretty sure.

This will be a predictable answer, but I'm curious why you didn't consider other things that are now more popular than they were 14 years ago. We now have all sorts of smart ovens. We have combination steam ovens.

Obviously, everything says it's an air fryer now. There's like, you know, different... brands that have you know taken on like you know ninja is really well liked among rich people um there's the anova precision oven which i've been lusting after but it sadly is like one inch too deep to fit on my countertop um you know there's all sorts of like smart and

more functional countertop ovens now did you look at any of those or consider any of those i mean i'm aware of all of those and i've seen them as they've been introduced and flown by but like

first of all space considerations exclude a lot of bigger fancier things even something as simple as like the there is a breville one that has like convection or whatever those that doesn't fit or smaller models that have like room for a convection fan convection is honestly the only feature that i would even remotely be interested in, but the space available is just not.

going to happen any of the smart things that are like we look at your food with the camera and figure out nope nope no thanks absolutely not can you imagine any of those lasting 14 years yeah 14 years forget it like it just this thing does what i need it to do it has adjustable temperature and time and you press

button and it gets hot and it evenly heats and it gets hot pretty quickly and it is durable and all the places the parts on it that could potentially like get gross or easy to replace i did i did replace the wire tray once in 14 years to tell you how sturdy this is still have all the original trays it's a workhorse like i just this is and this is a situation where i can get it again they still they still make it in fact they make a better version so i'm not interested in any of the fancier stuff

I don't have room for like convection. And even then I would be at a problem because I feel like those convection ones are much more interested in being ovens. And honestly, most of the time I'm using my toaster for toast type things like toasting bread or. toasting bagels or even like reading pizza which is not on the toast setting but still

And then occasionally we use it as a small oven, but it mostly serves as a toaster that can also serve as a small oven. Or when I'm toasting like for Thanksgiving, I can toast like six slices of bread at the same time for stuffing, which saves a lot of time. um so now uh nothing else out there interests me uh this one does the job if someday i get a better different kitchen that's larger i'll probably still go with this

Just because I would probably get a convection like regular oven because my regular oven doesn't have convection. I would get a convection regular oven and stick with this for the toasting stuff. Just to get ahead of all the feedback, half of which has probably already been sent.

We all agree that slot toasters are very, very interesting in their own right, but pretty much useless in our personal opinion. I don't agree to that first half at all. All right. You think they're completely useless in every way. I mean, they're really not good for reading pizza, I'll tell you that. No, they're terrible for that. I think there are very few things that they are better at than...

toaster ovens and there are a lot of things they are worse at i actually agree with you yeah i mean the the only slot toaster that that would have any interest in me is if i was constantly making breakfast for huge numbers of people i get one of the ones that has like 12 slots

Because you can make a lot of toast. At that point, just get one of those roller toasters. No, like those are faster. The ones where you can cook a huge amount of toast very quickly because the slot toasters are faster. The heating elements are closer to the bread. They're just plain faster. And if I just have to, if I had to. make a lot of toast fast all the time a giant slot toaster without a huge number of slots is the way to go but any other situation i'm not interested yeah i i

was trying to provide a little bit of an olive branch because the people who are fans of slot toasters, while being wrong, they are extremely dedicated to their wrongness. And I was trying to be nice about it, but since we're all in agreement, yeah, slot toasters are silly. Well, I mean, as part of the problem is,

We've been saying, oh, you got a new toaster. John's toaster. Toaster this, toaster that. And everyone is hearing this. And in their head, they're picturing the flying toasters from the After Dark screen series. They're picturing slot toasters. Every time I say toaster, what I meant was toaster oven.

that's what i grew up with that's what i have that's what i want if you could find a slot toaster that was flying though that would be a pretty good feature yeah hard to get the toast though because it jumps from one toaster to the other you know We are sponsored this episode by Factor.

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All right, let's do some follow-up. And hey, here's the thing. We're not really saving lives like the Apple Watch. Well, maybe. But Tim wrote to say, I want to thank you for turning my spouse and I onto the Yolink, Lora, L-O-R-A family of smartphones. We'll be right back.

This evening, I got a notification that one had tripped. A neighbor with a key was able to drop by and discover that the water line to the fridge for the ice maker that we never use, please, John, focus, had burst and was pouring water on the kitchen floor and down to the basement. friend had last checked our house at 4 45 PM. We got the leak notice at 8 PM. If not for your advice, the fridge would have been pouring water into the house for close to 24 hours. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Leak detectors. If you've got an old New England house and you unwisely got a water feature on your refrigerator, leak detectors. They're cheap. They're so cheap. They're so cheap. They're like 15, 20 bucks each, I think, for the lower ones. I've sprinkled them all around our house, and I am not looking forward to the time that they eventually get set off, but it gives me incredible peace of mind to know that they're there. One of mine.

tripped recently by the way the one of my in wall ones that's underneath my bathtub trying to detect leaks from the wall it tripped i'm like oh my god the wall is leaking again i opened it up i looked inside and there was like one tiny drop of water that had fallen on the thing and i still don't know where that water came from so i'm like all right well i'm gonna keep an eye on this i'm gonna put i'll wipe off the thing of water put it back wait but it never came back so i know they work

How do you have it in wall? I'm not trying to be snarky. I'm genuinely... There's like a... Well, if you had an old New England home, you'd know very often there's like a panel. There's like an access panel? Yeah, there's like a panel on the wall that you can unscrew and remove to get access to the plumbing that you otherwise wouldn't have access to. And it's all...

raised edge panel and painted and blah blah blah and yeah it's the way i get into the walls that are underneath and behind my tub to see if it's leaking gotcha i mean that's it's a good thing it's working yeah yeah seriously you always want to have a test you know to see if it's working i've got them i recently bought a couple extra ones for like the basement near the the lines that go to the washing machine too not so keeping an eye on things

Yeah. And then speaking of saving lives, we talked last episode. Why did we talk about this? About trip insurance, travel insurance? What was the reason for that? You were telling me about a lion's theater. Oh, yes, that's what it was. Thank you. Yep, Allianz Alliance, whatever it's called. So Jason Poole writes, I never expected my profession to be applicable to ATP feedback, yet here we are.

Quick aside, that is like one of my favorite. We've heard that same statement made many times over the course of the show. One of my favorite things to read, it really is. Anyways, Jason writes, as a travel advisor, I talk about travel insurance every day. Travel insurance has two components. Pre-trip cancellation, which is what everyone thinks insurance is.

is and during the trip emergency coverage nearly all united states based health insurance policies do not work outside of the country and this is where travel insurance is critical allianz is my preferred company and the policy i sell serves as a primary source of payment to hospitals

outside the country. I rarely purchase travel insurance for domestic trips, but I never leave the country without travel insurance. I could write a small book about my clients that have declined travel insurance and have been in tough situations outside America. More positively, I could write a a book about Allianz saving the day for clients that have purchased it.

Additionally, Levi Dalton writes, in reference to the travel insurance discussion in episode 645, I'd like to note that many credit cards offer some form of travel insurance when trip purchases have been made using the card. This can either be the primary, as in you don't have other travel insurance, or secondary. You have other travel insurance, but this acts as an additional...

coverage. For someone traveling a fair amount it is worth looking into which cards provide travel insurance automatically and what specifically is covered. I'd also like to note that Allianz and presumably other companies sell yearly all trips insurance if you go to them directly. This can price out to be a better deal than purchasing individual trip insurance each time if you're taking multiple trips a year. For example, I have yearly coverage for my entire family. And if any of us goes...

anywhere we have coverage. For our plan, it works out to $150 a year a person, and it is a set it and forget it option where I don't have to wonder about whether a certain trip is covered or not.

Allianz plans also include a travel concierge, which can help with dinner reservations in a foreign city and so forth, by which I mean the concierge can assist with trip planning, not just with insurance related issues. Of course, some credit cards offer something similar, but not everybody knows that they don't have to personally fire up translation app and make.

calls at weird hours because of time differences to restaurants in greece or france to make a reservation a concierge can do that for you maybe this is old news to everyone else but i didn't know most of this so i thought it was worth sharing i didn't know most of it i i do though think like it's probably not

as much of a like you should always do this as they say um but you know it certainly seems like When traveling internationally and therefore health insurance or health coverage becomes more of a thing, that's obviously a bigger factor to consider. But I still am not convinced about its value for most people most of the time.

I like the people responding on Mastodon. They're like, oh, they were saying the same thing. Basically, you should definitely get it if you travel overseas from the U.S. because your U.S. insurance won't work here. And the health insurance in our country, we have, you know, we have universal coverage, but it's not for you because you're from.

america so we'd have to charge you and then they would show us the amount that they would charge and we'd laugh at it like three days in the hospital we'll charge you five thousand dollars you're like We can't even look at us for 30 seconds for $5,000 in this country. So paying out of pocket for coverage overseas. No, you don't want to do it. You want insurance to cover it, but you can't scare us with health care costs. At a fucking healthcare cross in France or whatever.

You've got that tooth looked at in a dentist, that'll be 50 bucks. Ooh. Oh, yeah, yeah. All right, John, do you want to tell me about this next item, please? Sure. Avi Drissman writes in about a window widget size in Tahoe. He says, in episode 64,

you quoted my toot about how window control size on mac os 26 is gated on the sdk linked against you thought that the size might be connected to toolbar visibility it is not as i said if you link to an sdk less than 26 you get compatibility size window controls and if you link to the mac os 26 sdk

You get window controls with the new size. This is the sole determining factor. So there you have it. Big window controls. No matter whether the toolbar is visible or not, toolbar controls the corner radius and maybe also the position. of those things because they got to have concentricity uh but the size is always big with 26 which honestly i think is a reasonable thing to do like the window widgets have changed size a little bit over the course of mac os uh all these many years

making them a little bit bigger or maybe it's because i have a huge screen now and i'm getting old but yeah they can stand to be a little bit bigger so i kind of like the new size in tahoe so any app that links against the new sdk which that whole concept i know if you're not a developer and you're like what are they talking about does that mean when i

i get tahoe although i'll be bigger like it's not a thing that you would otherwise have to know or care about but if you're wondering when you get tahoe some apps have the big window windows and some apps don't it's basically the ones that do were built using the API set that comes with the new OS and the ones that have the old one are built with a different API set from an earlier OS. So there you have it.

Apple intelligence is now allowed when booting from an external drive in Tahoe Beta 2. And John Val writes, unlike on Sequoia, which required a hack to activate Apple intelligence while booting from an external drive, on Tahoe that hack is no longer needed. I didn't even know about that hack and I would have liked to know about that.

the heck but it's good that it's no longer necessary whatever the deal was with the whole like apple intelligence can only be on the internal drive i'm glad to see that go

Ian writes, you've been complaining about the new liquid glass tab bar on iOS because it can obscure the content. I've been playing around with it and I'm finding that when I scroll to the bottom of a view, the content scrolls above the tab bar, even on websites. It seems to me like they were well aware of this potential. And so they do some view magic to make sure you don't end up with content stuck under the bar when you scroll to the bottom. Am I missing something?

See, I'm still not able to figure out whether I should make a blog post about this because it does kind of require visual aid, but I'll try expressing again why this whole design drives me up a wall. What we're talking about is the little lozenge that floats over the top of your at the bottom of the screen a margin on the left, on the right, and on the bottom, where you can see the stuff that's behind it.

And I was complaining about things getting stuck behind there and things being obscured by it. And he is saying, well, I've been trying these various apps. And what happens instead is they let you scroll the content. So it goes up. So it's above that thing. when you have the content so it's scrolled above that, now you have the problem of what do I show in the empty region that is below the end of the content?

Say the webpage, the very bottom of the webpage, there's a word. You scroll, that word is up above the little floating toolbar. Great, I can read the word. But the toolbar is still floating. What is it floating over? Should they draw... the checkered pattern there from back in early versions of iOS or early versions of iPhone OS. Scrolling couldn't keep up. It would show the gray and white checkerboard pattern. Should they detect the main color of the body of the page?

extend it down there? What if it's a photo that you've scrolled up and they want to let you scroll it so the photo is visible and the photo ends before the toolbar begins? Do they... say let's say reflect and blur the floater like they do with the sidebar thing these are all problems of their own making because if you're not going to show the content behind there but always scroll it up above there what then is the function of leaving that space

around the edges because you can't see anything there of consequence when you're scrolling through the content. And when you get to the end of it, if they're pushing that content above the toolbar, hey, how about just make the toolbar cover the bottom of the screen at that point?

which is the design we had before, which is so much more straightforward and doesn't have any of these problems of Apple's own creation. That is what I find so frustrating about this control, that it serves no purpose. It introduces problems that they must solve for no reason, for no benefit. Anyway, I don't like it. Good talk.

All right. Tim writes, do you think that Apple includes ducks, so to speak, in their beta releases to make the tech press feel like they've achieved some victories so that they don't make as big of a deal about the things that didn't change?

image on the mac os dialog boxes comes to mind as a candidate and so uh a duck we can define or this started on um what is it jeff atwood right uh his blog and this is a feature added for no other reason and then to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product.

And John also pointed out, see also the Architects Lions, which is by a friend of the show, Anthony Johnson, or a story retold by a friend of the show, Anthony Johnson, which we will also link to in the show notes. Yeah, the idea is put something in there so the people in charge have something to focus on.

and you know you're gonna let it's something that they're gonna say what's that doing there i want to get rid of that and you fight them on and fight them on and eventually let them have their way and the whole time you're fighting about that they're not paying attention to anything else The thing about the duck slash architect's lines theory for Apple's OS is they don't need to do that.

They don't care what we think. We're not their manager. They have no reason to put dumb things in the OS to allow the community to notice them, get angry about them, and fix them because they don't care. stuff like they honestly don't like they'll accept our feedback that that works but they're they're not intentionally releasing things that they know will get negative feedback to make us feel like we're affecting things that's not how they work they would never do that because they

Not because they're so good and kind, but because we're not their man. They have no reason to. There's no motivation for them to do that. We're not their boss. What we do and say.

uh is doesn't need to be corralled in that way um and interestingly i meant to mention this one of the shows after wdc if you watch a lot of the wd sessions and especially when um i know you were in some of these casey the uh i forget what they were called the like the group uh live what were those things called but the labs where it's a bunch of people and like at the webex call oh oh yeah the group labs

Group labs, yeah. So those were live where there was some number of WWDC attendees slash developers. They're all at home on our computers going to a WebEx. And then in the WebEx, hosting the WebEx, where like, you know, five or six Apple engineers and managers or whoever, whatever the topic happened to be. And the audience gets to submit questions through text in like the WebEx, like submit your questions thing. And then there's no other like...

speaking or you know you don't see any of the audience you just see the apple people anyway during those things very often there would be questions that would ask some question about like a glass or whatever and all the people in all the sessions would say

That, you know, say whatever I have to say. I would look at the last night and say, if you have any feedback about this, please submit your feedback to whatever. You know, they tell you, we're interested in hearing what you think. What do you think about this? What are the areas where it can be improved? They were basically soliciting feedback about the UI. They're all so disciplined. But my little radar was up the whole time going, which one of these people?

is desperately hoping that you send feedback because they also hate the thing that you're just about. Right. And they're so disciplined about like, you know, here's how it is. And here's the, here's what we're doing. I rarely have any feedback about it. And like, I have a feeling a lot of the people and a lot of the Apple employees in a lot of those sessions were...

carefully kindly and gently suggesting to you that if that if you have feedback about the new ui they'd love to hear it because they're like please please send this feedback because believe me there are people at apple that have all the same complaints that you hear in the community or whatever so that's another reason i think

There's no reason to put out ducks because there's plenty of people, Apple employees, who are expressing this feedback inside Apple because you keep, you know, never let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking. That's a reference, Casey. But they did solicit feedback in all these sessions. And so if you...

If there's something about this UI that you don't like, please send it to Apple. I'm sure Apple employees would say the same thing, whether they are desperate for you to send that feedback so it counts more than their internal opinion, or whether they're just saying that because that's what they're supposed to say. All right.

Adrian Mester writes, with regard to SD cards, you said on PCs you can just yank out a memory card. That's not true. You should still eject it first. By PC, I assume you meant Windows, but it's the same on Linux. And Adrian provided a link to the Windows... if you will, to talk about this. I don't find it surprising that these features exist. I do wonder how many people use them in Windows.

Yep, that's fair. I mean, I know I, when I was a Windows user, I pretty much always just yanked whatever out pretty much immediately, which I know is not the right answer, but I...

don't believe I ever got burned by it. So that's pretty much what I always did. I mean, the new versions of Windows might complain about it. That's what maybe make people do it. They do. You yank it out and it throws a dialogue in your face. I haven't actually tried it. They do complain about it, but I think everyone still just does it anyway.

If it throws up a dialogue, don't you think that would make people like... No. The experience of using every computing device ever these days is... being constantly nagged by the system for stuff that you just have to say okay okay cancel cancel dismiss whatever like that's even even apple stuff like this is just this is the reality that most how most people see computers is a series of interruptions to their work that they just have to quote cancel out of

so if some box comes up that says you go to eject first like okay whatever and they'll click okay they don't even read it i can't run windows 11 on my mac unfortunately because it doesn't it's not compliant with the trusted compute whatever thing uh but i can run i do run windows 10 so next time i'm in windows 10 i'll try to see what it does all right john it's not everyone else there it's not

all of us that are right and you that is wrong. Really, you are right and everyone else in the world is wrong. But it's okay because you have an answer now. so uh yeah i got an iphone 16 pro when it launched uh it was the uh the introduction of the camera control lots of people uh case manufacturers just put a big hole in the case for the camera control so i got

My preferred open bottom leather case for my iPhone, and it has a giant hole where the camera control is, and I didn't like it. And I said, boy, I hope some of these third-party case manufacturers produce cases that are like the one I have, but that have the...

pass-through button that Apple had on lots of its launch cases, which is like another button that presses the actual camera control button below it so that you won't have a giant hole in your case. What you instead will have is a camera control. on your iPhone case that works and feels just like the camera control that's under your iPhone case, just like the volume buttons and the power buttons where there's a button that hits the button that's underneath. Here we are a year later.

and uh they finally did it uh a little while ago ryan london did a case that had a camera control button on it that i believe had an open bottom but it had a metal ring on the back around the camera mesa and i don't like that but finally came out with essentially the same case that I had because the previous one was a bull strap case. The only difference is instead of a giant hole for the camera control, it has a little pass-through button thingy.

And I found this out because I got an ad on Instagram that said, we messed up with a broken heart emoji. The text says, for months, you asked, where's the button? Or I would buy this if it had a camera control button. And for months, we gave you a cutout. Yeah, we know. But now we finally got it right. A year later, a year later, they have introduced the case with a button on it. For me.

Better late than never because I keep my phones for two years. So halfway through the life of this phone, I swapped out the bull strap case for another bull strap case with the camera control and immediately realized how often. I accidentally hit the camera control button now that it surfaced on the edge of the case.

I mostly got over it, and now it is way better in all ways, but I was shocked to learn. Boy, I guess I put my finger in that hole a lot when I pick up my phone, and now that there's a button there, I can't press it as much. But yeah, it's way better. Last year... I also changed cases a year into my phone simply because I had bought multiples and I just swapped an old case for a new case because the old one was a little beat up. But anyway, I've got a brand sprinkin' new.

Bullstrap case. It is leather. It is black. It has an open bottom and it has a pass-through camera control button. Only took a year. Our long national nightmare is over. And it's an incredibly expensive case and I don't care. It looks really nice. I've had this case before, before this generation of phone. If you want a leather case on your phone, this is the best option I have found. $100 is not cheap.

But it looks very nice. It is. And it is, I believe, if you care about these specific things that I care about, I believe this is the only leather, black, open bottom, no metal ring around the Camera Mesa camera control button case sold anywhere. Well I'm happy you found it.

Finally, for follow-up ads in YouTube, Igor Coleman writes, why not just use uBlock Origin? If you also add SponsorBlock, you get a much better experience than paid YouTube. And additionally, Michael Brown writes, just use the Vinegar app on iOS and macOS. which not only gets rid of YouTube ads, but also gives you the system video player instead of the YouTube one. Uh, I can't speak to you block origin. I can speak to vinegar. I have bounced in and out of vinegar over the last couple of years.

I feel like when it works, it works incredibly well and I really, really like it. But then oftentimes I have weird little hiccups with it, especially if you increase the playback speed. And I don't know, just I have had weird problems with it from time to time. And the way I solve this problem, which I forgot to bring to the show, is that like a week or two ago, I finally signed up for YouTube Premium Lite or whatever it is we talked about, where it's like eight bucks a month.

for ad for YouTube in most cases. And I got to tell you, my life has dramatically improved on account of this. And you were both right to needle me and tell me I'm an idiot for not having done this sooner. What's annoying, though, is that nobody else in the family has noticed. Now, Aaron doesn't typically watch YouTube, but Declan loves a couple of like Minecraft YouTubers.

And I'm a little annoyed that he hasn't commented on the fact that he hasn't seen an ad in a while. It's too late. His brain has already been poisoned by ads. You waited too long. I mean, people don't really notice the absence of ads nearly as much as they notice the addition of ads. That's very true. But yeah, we got a lot of feedback about Ublock Origin. Maybe one of you can. I can't speak to it one way or the other. I think vinegar is worth giving a shot.

It's not a bad app by any means. It's very good. It's just, like I said, especially on macOS, I've had problems from time to time that maybe I'm holding it wrong. I don't know. But we'll put a link to both in the show notes. You should check at least Vinegar Out and potentially Ublock. Setting aside the...

The convenience versus like futziness of trying to block ads with a program versus just paying the fee to get the ads. If you can afford it, paying is always much more convenient. But especially in the case with YouTube, where I feel like part of the.

solution that Casey's going for and that definitely I was going for is let's get it so my whole family doesn't see ads in youtube and in that situation trying to use some kind of ad blocking thing is the worst idea ever because that means on everybody's device every every device that every person in your family uses you now have to carefully maintain configure

all of these different things to make sure they work right. And by the way, when those ad blocking things mess up in some way or cause some other site not to work, now you're on the hook to fix that. And once they find out that it's the weird ad blocking thing that blocks ads on YouTube is making it so they can't use their favorite website or whatever. they're gonna ask you to uninstall it, just pay for the thing. Like if you can afford it,

Just pay for YouTube without ads. It is so cheap in the grand scheme of things to not be bombarded by those ads. And once you do that, as long as everybody is signed in to their accounts for their Google accounts for YouTube, and unlike many other sites, YouTube will keep you signed in essentially.

forever like you won't have to constantly be signing them in then you're done doesn't matter what devices they get doesn't matter if they're on their computer on their ipad or on their phone or whatever so much better than trying to maintain a fragile fleet of ad blockers Yeah, I think it's very telling that both of these commenters included the word just in their suggestion. Why not just use UBlock Oregon? Just use the Vinegar app. And ad blockers are never a just.

there's always more complexity than that. They're always going to mess up certain things, and then you have to troubleshoot, oh, turn the ad blocker off, reload, see if it fixes the thing you're blocking. I mean, obviously, in the case of... trying to block specific behavior on a specific site, YouTube in this case. You know, the surface area for messing up pages is much narrower, obviously. So you have a lot less of that drama to deal with, but...

You still don't have zero. And it's a cat and mouse game. YouTube keeps trying to block all these different things. Then these things develop new heuristics and new strategies to unblock themselves and get working again. And then YouTube blocks it again. There's a lot of... of situations in which it is worth people saving the eight bucks a month to do this. But if you have the eight bucks a month...

Just spend it on this and you can move on with your life and not spend so much time playing this cat and mouse game. And by the way, I don't like the system video player versus the YouTube one because the YouTube one has features that the system video player does not. I like the little graph that shows you like the the lump where like most people watched that type of thing. If you're watching like a how to video.

find out the good part where they actually show you what they're supposed to be doing like that's not you can correct me if you're wrong but i'm pretty sure that's not visible if you use the system player similarly i'm not even sure if chapters are visible if you use the system player um And, you know, the keyboard controls might be different as well. So anyway, for YouTube's player, it's not made with flash anymore, you know.

I prefer it because it has more features and whenever YouTube adds a feature they add to their player So my personal preference is not to actually switch it to the system video player, which is separate from ad blocking You can do that without blocking ads, I believe

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Marco, please feel free in the edit to insert taps right here because apparently Tahoe has finally dropped Firewire support. John, what even is Firewire anyway? Kind of like dropping x86 support. So Firewire is an old interconnect standard that was used for... digital video personal digital video cameras that used to record a digital video on tiny little tapes at home uh and it was also on max not just for video but also for peripherals um like hard drives uh it was expensive

It was fancy. It had lots of important features to reliably carry things like audio that are latency sensitive while making sure that things arrive on time. It didn't require the host computer to do as much sort of.

uh traffic control and computation so if your computer was slower or your computer computer bogged down firewire would keep chugging along because it wasn't dependent on your computer to shuffle the bits like usb was that made it more expensive because usb could be cheaper because it made your do a lot of

And I guess the reason most people even know this exists is if they got one of the early iPods, which if you didn't have a digital video camera, maybe the first time you ever saw a firewire port, the original iPod came with a firewire port that ended pretty quickly once they started putting like 30 pin connectors on them or whatever. But anyway, I came in 400, was that megabits per second? Megabits, yeah. Firewire 400 and 800 transfer speeds.

You can listen to our member special about connectors to learn about the FireWire 400 connector versus the 800 connector. But the bottom line is the 800 connector was terrible mostly. And eventually it faded away and USB remained and went through several iterations and got faster.

And Thunderbolt basically replaced Firewire as the big, expensive, really fast bus. But Macs have still had support for it. So if you... found a way to get an adapter somehow to plug in firewire to your modern computer or you were able to run a semi-modern os on a computer that had a firewire part you could still plug something in like a firewire hard drive or even an ipod i would imagine

And macOS would recognize it and still do all the old stuff. But apparently they are ripping out that software from macOS, which... Kind of like the x86 support, it's like, well, was that hurting anybody? It's like, oh, we don't have to keep maintaining that and making sure it works and making it part of our potentially non-existent QA process. Can't we just remove that code? Nobody has firewall protocols anyway. And if they do, they can just use an old Mac.

with an old version of the OS. So it seems like, I mean, this may change. We'll put a link to the Mac rumor story that links to a Reddit post.

that has some qualifiers like well maybe you know apple hasn't said one way or the other maybe a later release of tahoe will have firewire back but it just seems like they've removed that code so they don't have to maintain it anymore and it's gone and you'll have to remember that for like when for people like in the retro computing world like oh yeah um this mac can run tahoe but if you want to do any firewire stuff you have to you know put an older version of nos on

so yeah pouring out for firewire it was weird it was expensive most people didn't have it but it did an important job for when it existed Yeah, I have heard. I don't know how true this is. I guess maybe listeners can write in and tell us. I have heard that a surprising number of audio interfaces in production studios. Still are Firewire and people have just been daisy chaining, you know, Thunderbolt adapters to them over the years to keep them working with modern Macs.

If that is still the case, I can imagine this being a pretty big deal to them because what that would basically mean is you have to buy a new, you know, audio board or whatever, you know, whatever is outputting Thunderbolt or I mean Firewire. So that. That could be a significant deal to those people, but I don't know how many of those there still are.

Yeah, again, FireWire was ideal for that because it was really good about delivering data on time all the time without hiccups or glitches, which is really important for audio and like a studio environment. So that's...

part of the reason you still see those things around because they were big and expensive and if they're still doing the job why should you ever need to replace them and the answer is well if you upgrade all your macs in the studio to tahoe and they can't talk to it anymore it's time to upgrade or downgrade your computers

All right. Apple has done another thing where they... put up some marketing material, and then almost immediately say, just kidding. And in this case, they put together a PowerPoint and Keynote. I think one of the Google... present or whatever it's called. I forget what it's called. Uh, presentation about convincing your parents to get you a Mac. And they also put together like a 10 minute video of a guy, a comedian, um,

who was on some movie that everyone loved recently. What was that movie? Is that from Saturday Night Live? It's Martin Hearly or something? Yeah, something like that. Anyways.

They put up this video. It was like 10 minutes long. He's going through this presentation and teaching the kids how to give the presentation. And I didn't... care for it like i didn't think it was a problem but i just didn't think it was clever or funny and i think they were trying for both and they pulled the video i think the presentation is still available but they pulled the video after like 24 48 hours something like that um oh here we go let me just read from the show notes

One day after publishing it, Apple has taken down its parent presentation video on YouTube. Apple has also moved the parent presentation slides to the bottom of its college students page, effectively burying it. Just one day earlier, the presentation was prominently featured at the top of the page. In the YouTube video, comedian Martin Harrell... they showed a group of high school students how to effectively use the parent presentation. Yeah. So this is, there's two stories here. One is.

It seems like Apple's been pulling a lot of ads lately. I think some other people talked about this counted up four of them. There was like the crush ad where they smushed all those musical instruments and a hydraulic press thing that was ill considered and they kind of pulled that. There's the Bella Ramsey series.

ad thing that never shipped and they pulled that there's the parent ad and there's a fourth one that I cannot remember oh it was a it was like a vacation ad where like a family was like flying to Thailand and it was like super racist so they pulled that one

So I think it's within the past 12 months or so, they have, you know, distributed and then pulled four different ads for four different reasons. So there is the question of, like, what's going on over there with advertising? Maybe they should have.

people with more taste to take a look at the ads before they go out into the world ideally more taste to look at the ads before they decide to pay all this money to make them but you know they do a lot of advertising and i don't you know it's it is potentially

a thing uh the the case where you uh there's some cracks in their uh their system where people with taste are not in the right place to make these decisions unfortunately but you know it's not the end of the world they make the right decision you know a day later as opposed to just leaving it up, right? The second story is, and the reason I put this in here, I like the idea of them trying to convince people to buy Macs. I know that sounds so dumb.

Like, aren't they always trying to convince people to buy Macs? Don't they advertise Macs all the time? Isn't that part of their business? But time was when the whole company was focused on trying to get people who don't use Macs to try a Mac because they're a better kind of personal computer. And that is not the focus of the company anymore. Obviously, there's other products that are so much more important, make so much more money. And it seemed like...

They basically gave up on, yeah, we also sell Macs, and the people who like them like them, but we don't need to actually try to expand Mac market share. Like, they always had these statistics like, you know, 50% of the people buy a Mac, it's their first Mac, and they would say that, but it's like, is that because of any advertising you're doing? They became uninterested.

in trying to convince the world that Macs are a better PC, that Macs are better than Windows, that you should buy a Mac instead of a PC. It's like, people who want one will buy one. And it's fancy. And if people can't afford one, they'll get one. We don't have to do much advertising.

This ad seemed like it was from another era. Seemed like it was from an era when kids would go off to college and maybe the kid would say, maybe I should try one of those Apple computers. And the parents would say, you can't use an Apple computer. It's not compatible with the world. You have to use Windows.

That's not the world we live in today. Go look in a college classroom and count up how many Macs you see versus how many non-Macs you see. It is so lopsided. Macs are everywhere in higher education, and yet this ad is out there saying... you know it's a it's a bad ad i agree with you casey didn't do the job it's not funny it was ill considered in a thousand different ways but the concept of apple trying to

convince college students to get a Mac because a Mac is better for their purposes than a Windows PC is just blowing my hair back. I'm like, wow, remember that? Remember when Apple had this confidence in its computers? Remember when we would have, I mean, I still have confidence. the computers that you if you're gonna get a laptop for school you should get a mac like but like i just i just don't see ads like this anymore so it's a shame that

Them actually doing this, it's a sort of throwback head on Macs are better than PCs and you should buy one because they're good. And turned out to be such a stinker. And even like the Apple parent presentation, like it's like it doesn't.

It doesn't reflect the reality of parents or kids or anything, but I like the idea. Like, I mean, I mentioned this in one of my... post that i was writing about how like the apple seems to have given up on trying to gain market share from android and just like the deciding that it is what it is and we'll just sell iphones to iphone people and android can still have 70 of the worldwide market share right

Why should Windows still have as much market share as it does? Apple's hardware is amazing. And it's OS for all our complaints. I like it better than Windows. And at the very least, it's probably a wash for most people who don't care about computers. But like. This should be an easy thing to convince people to buy, especially once you've got things like the M4 MacBook Air for under $1,000, barely.

that comes in 60 gigs of ram that is perfect for any college student right it is expensive it's more expensive than a 400 pc like i get that but So within the realm of people who are buying $1,000 laptops for college, Apple should be able to win a lot of those sales by doing good ads. And I know they have ads on TV and sports and backup catalogs or whatever, but there are always so much like modern Apple ads, which is like...

apple we're wonderful buy our stuff and not just like coming out punching and saying windows sucks max are great look at all like for crying out loud this ad had like a blue screen of death thing and it's like all right all right come on like what what century is this but anyway uh I find it delightful that Apple still seems to have a little bit of fight in it about Mac versus PC, and I find it depressing that they're not able to make a good head about it anymore.

Yeah. What are you going to do? But I mean, I agree with you. At least they're trying to be aggressive. That's kind of fun. All right. We had some late breaking news as we record this on Monday, the 30th of June. Apple ways using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri. This is from Bloomberg. Apple is considering using artificial intelligence technology from Anthropic, PBC, or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri, sidelining its own in-house models.

Apple has talked with both companies about using their large language models for Siri, according to people familiar with the discussions. In its discussions with both Anthropic and OpenAI, the iPhone maker requested a custom version of Claude and ChatGPT that could run on Apple's private cloud compute servers.

Apple's investigation into third-party models is at an early stage, and the company hasn't made a final decision on using them. A competing project internally dubbed LLM Siri that uses in-house models remains an act of development. The project to evaluate external models was started by Siri chief Mike Rockwell and software engineering head Craig Federighi.

They were given oversight of Siri after the duties were removed from the command of John, Gene, and Andrea, the company's AI chief. After multiple rounds of testing, Rockwell and other executives concluded that Anthropics technology is the most promising for Siri's needs. That led Adrian Perica, the company's vice president of corporate...

to start discussions with Anthropic about using Claude. Apple's models are developed by a roughly 100-person team run by Ru Ming Pang, an Apple distinguished engineer who joined from Google in 2021 to lead this work.

The proposed shift has weighed on the team, which has some of the AI industry's most in-demand talents. Some members have signaled internally that they are unhappy that the company is considering technology from a third party, creating the perception that they are to blame, at least partially, for the company's AI shortcomings.

They have said that they could leave for multi-million dollar packages being floated by Meta Platforms Inc. and OpenAI. Apple this month also nearly lost the team behind MLX, its key open source system for developing machine learning models on the latest Apple chips.

are starting to leave apple made counter offers to retain them and they're staying for now tune into overtime for more on this particular issue about poaching people but uh This fits with what we had been hearing and rumors from Gurman about what's going on now that there's new leadership for the whole Siri thing, which is no more not invented here syndrome.

willing to look outside the company going so far as to say, Hey, we've got a team working on that LM Siri thing. Shouldn't we also, shouldn't we also talk to the people who already have?

chat bot type models and see if their technology might be farther ahead than our technology is and i kind of feel for the whatever 100 person team working on this stuff because like from the reports that we've heard It is entirely plausible to believe that those teams were not adequately resourced to make products that are competitive with Claude and ChatGPT.

I mean, it's totally reasonable to think of because we know how much money like OpenAI is spent on ChatGPT. And Claude has been around for a long time and has been out there in the world and they've been iterating on it. And this is Apple trying to do their version 1.0 of anything remotely close to that. And they've been flailing. So that team...

maybe hasn't been resourced to do a good enough job, but certainly they probably started later than their competitors. And so I think it is the right thing to do for Rockwell and Federighi to say, we shouldn't just assume. We're going to use our internal thing. Let's at least look at the external things. It does really highlight the not great position they're in because regardless of whether having a particular LM is a competitive advantage.

It's the type of thing that every big player in the tech space has felt the need to have. Facebook's got their own model. Microsoft has basically got OpenAI by having that big investment. Google's got their own models. Apple, in theory, has their own models, but nothing like Gemini, nothing like Claude, nothing even like the Llama stuff, nothing like ChatGPT. So they're behind.

if they come out and say well it turns out the most expedient thing we could do to make siri not suck in the fastest time possible was to license clod or something you know all right well that's what you had to do but now you are beholden to another company for a key technology

which to the extent that you believe that the cook doctrine is a reasonable thing to do, does fly in the face of it, owning and controlling the primary technologies behind your most important products, blah, blah, even if there's no moat, even if LMs are commodity. If you don't have one of those commodities, but instead have to buy it from some other vendor, other vendor that may compete with you once they come out with an egg that sweeps the world or something.

That's not a good position to be in. So I'm not saying they shouldn't do this. I think this is good news. I think hearing this makes me optimistic they're doing what they need to do to make Siri not bad anymore. And if that means paying someone to use their model because it's better than our model, then by all means, they should do it.

But I also hope they retain their own team because I think in the long term, it is important for Apple to have its own model, not because every company needs to have its own model, but because A, Apple has the money to do that and B, like any other thing that Apple does.

them being able to make exactly the thing that they need is part of their competitive advantage i don't think their model is going to be better than their competitors in some significant way i think it'll just be could be competitive and in the ballpark If they put enough money and time into it and eventually catch up with their competitors, in which case they could swap it out. Like, so if they go with like Claude or something.

They shouldn't can this team. I hope they can retain them because they should still be working to say, hey, your goal is now to replace Claude. Get something as good as is better than Claude so we can end this contract and have our own internal thing. Kind of like how we used a process from other companies until we eventually could.

make some of our own that were better and it took a really long time so that's that's my take on this article i think i'm actually optimistic about it but it does really does really highlight uh the corner that apple has painted itself into yeah i mean that's the thing is

It is possible for more than one thing to be true. It's possible for the internal team to have not delivered. And it's also possible that it wasn't the internal team's fault. But in the end of the day, Siri sucks. Like, everyone. agrees that Siri sucks. How many different times over the last 10 years, 15 years, whatever it's been, have we seen jokes on national television about how bad Siri sucks? Like, it sucks.

No matter whose fault it is, they've got to fix it. And in 10 plus years, they haven't. And I couldn't agree with you more, John, that this is showing at least a little bit of fire, a little bit of urgency, a little bit of enthusiasm about finally fixing it. am 100% excited about this. And to build on another thing you said,

Just because they might be doing this soon doesn't mean they're doing it forever. There is no reason they couldn't use like Claude or whatever for the next couple of years, two, three, four, five years, and then eventually swoop in and have their own internal thing that maybe would be even better. So, yeah.

I agree 100%. I am all in for this. Oh, that is tricky, though. Like, oh, we're going to do our own thing. You have to retain the team. They can't all leave. And it's going to be super demotivating for that team that's worked since 2021 on Apple's own internal models.

probably being frustrated the whole time by like the siri team and they're they're not being funded or whatever their issues are internally like i wouldn't actually blame the team that was developing the models i don't think that's where the problem was but the fact is they work for years on this and then

what happens is Apple just goes and use Claude instead, they're going to be so demotivated. So it's going to be a difficult challenge to convince them to stay at Apple and continue their work, right? Because it's just, it's demoralizing, right? You know, even if Apple wants to keep them. they could go and get much more money elsewhere and see this week's overtime. But that's the situation that Apple's in. It's difficult. I do like the fact that Apple is...

going to apparently according to this german rumor wants to run these models on private cloud compute because i think that is apple's one of apple's key competitive advantages is the privacy angle that they have a way to run server-side models in a privacy preserving way which

their competitors don't seem to care about because it's not part of their it's not part of the value proposition right they're just like oh send us your stuff for facebook whatever like open ai yeah send it all over it's fine um Apple's whole thing is we can't even look at the stuff that you are, you know, conversing with the models and that's the way they like it. And that's part of their whole deal. And so.

having a third-party model but saying okay we'll license this from you but we're not going to send like what they're doing now i believe is when we use chat gpt through siri it's going to open ai servers and yeah apple has this thing about well we do it in a more privacy preserving way we anonymize you and bounce off a proxy or whatever, but I don't think, and someone can correct me who knows if you're listening.

If I'm wrong about this, I don't think when you send a query to ChatGPT through Siri today that ChatGPT is running on private cloud compute. No, it's absolutely not. This story is that they're trying to do that. bring it on man like bring on bring on a chat gpt or and i'm not saying you just like you just replace siri with those no they have like there's still work to do siri is not just a chatbot as jaws will tell us a million times

very much like a chatbot but not just a chatbot so it's still like they need an llm engine that can do good things for them that they can build on top of and this would just be a piece of what would be the new siri which is which allows them to swap it out because you're never like

There's certainly no branding and you don't, it's not even like you're talking to Claude or Chachy, but you're talking to Siri, which does all the Siri things only now it just does them competently and faster and better. Hopefully like that's the dream. Yeah, I think this is all good news. You know, it plays into the narrative that we heard about, you know, over the rumor mill over the last few months that like, you know, that basically that Apple's high ups are taking...

the poor state of Siri and their AI efforts seriously. And they're making big changes in order to turn this ship around. And, you know, it started out like obviously like the restructuring of the, you know, Jean Andrea going over to Rockwell, like, you know, the staff restructuring. We heard reports of Federighi, you know, issuing directives now of like, you know, look, if somebody else does a better job of it.

Use it. We've seen now from what they did at WBC, from what they're releasing, that they have more integration than ever within these new OSs and products with third party LLM and AI providers. So this is good. This is showing us that like the not invented here syndrome is finally being like a little bit turned down for AI stuff.

It needs to be because the obvious reality to everyone in the entire market is that these companies are dramatically outpacing Apple in this area. And so Apple, you know, look. They fumbled the ball really badly early on in AI stuff. Their next option is spend a bunch of money and buy some stuff from some people. Or buy the people completely. Buy the company. Or have a big partnership with the company with some huge investment so that you have rights to stuff the way Microsoft did with OpenAI.

Oh, on the financial front I saw earlier today, on the news that Apple is doing this, on this story that's in Bloomberg, German or whatever, Apple's stock price went up the equivalent of two anthropics.

yeah which should show you like and it was only it was like three percent like as a percentage like that's not like it isn't like the double or anything but like that should show you even all like the stock market i mean we know how incredibly fickle that is and how yeah i'm not saying this means anything it's just funny it is funny and but it's also like the stock market upon news that apple might be spending a whole bunch of money soon jumped in value for Apple.

like that's that's significant because that shows you like the confidence that the investing world has in apple doing its own ai stuff is very low and once the news came that apple is going to be you know probably doing even more with a third-party company for AI stuff, the value of Apple in their minds jumped. That tells you a lot.

about what they think about siri and apple intelligence and again if apple's worried about the price their stock price just went up enough to essentially fund probably a purchase of anthropocans i'm assuming they're willing to sell like you don't know what these things would actually sell for because people people have a zuckerberg disease which

the one of the stories about zuckerberg that i i forget if it was in the original social network and if not it will surely be in the now planned sequel but his whole deal is uh you know he started facebook and uh at various times Other companies wanted to buy Facebook because they could see it was being successful. And he turned down what was at the time big offers that would have made him very wealthy, you know, millions and millions of dollars. He turned it down. And why did he turn it down?

Because he said, I don't want to be somebody who starts a company and then becomes a multimillionaire by selling it. I want to become Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Like, don't sell the company. Stay with the company. You are the company. The company is defined by you.

that's why he still has control of facebook and i feel like a lot of these old these ai companies fancy themselves the next mark zuckerberg or steve jobs or bill gates setting aside steve jobs got kicked out of the company and came back anyway um that

they're already wealthy and they're like you know you know what's cool you know what's cool than a million dollars you know what's cooler than a billion dollars a trillion dollars uh or like actually it's not even the money it's just like the power like to be To have this company, this world-conquering force, be a personification of you and be under your sole control is so much more attractive than any of the money.

When you say, oh, Apple's stock price went up the price of two Anthropics, like twice Anthropics market cap, that doesn't necessarily mean that the people behind Anthropics would be willing to sell it for their current market cap according to the stock market or their price.

valuation or whatever if those people decide no i'm never selling because i'm the next mark zuckerberg god forbid yeah but you know what the reality is like there's multiple companies that apple could partner with or buy that would be substantially better than what they

are doing internally right now i mean if they're willing to do the deal so i saw some article saying like let's go through all the companies and see who would entertain and offer apple it's like open i know because the microsoft antagonist google no uh llama no Because it's Facebook. They could steal llamas, open source things, or not steal, but take llamas, open way to things or whatever. The one in China, not a great idea.

uh and then you get anthropic and i forget what their reason was that anthropic probably wouldn't maybe they have amazon ties like it's like uh everyone's already it's like the dance and everyone's already all coupled up and apple's just like on the wall and there's no one to dance with Yeah, Apple walked in two hours late. Oh, there's a dance. Yeah, everyone's got a partner already, huh? Yeah. Yeah, I mean...

And I think one of the biggest problems here that got them to this point and will hinder them going forward is certainly one of the things that got them here is that, as mentioned many times in the past, I think Apple fundamentally... underestimated the value and importance of this kind of technology. And then the biggest thing is they underinvested in it early on. And one of the root causes of that, besides Tim Cook being a terrible product person and not seeing the value in anything, is...

Apple is really cheap. And they're cheap in a lot of ways. One of the ways they are cheap is they didn't want to give their teams GPUs and stuff to start developing these things. Another way they're cheap is they just don't... pay good salaries necessarily um and in a lot of areas in a lot of you know competitive markets

Their attitude, from what I've gathered from people, has always kind of been, it's an honor to work for us. You should be so happy to work for us that you don't need necessarily the highest salary you could get in the market. And, you know, certainly with the AI story, you know, we're going to talk about this in overtime about like, you know, there's a lot of high value going on in the AI market because there's a lot of hype.

A lot of value is being created. A lot of potential value is being seen. And so to really be a big player in AI, you have to spend a bunch of money. Somehow, whether you are developing your own stuff, you know, spending a whole bunch of money on various computing resources and GPUs to get that done or spending and or, you know.

hiring a huge team of very talented, very in-demand people right now, or buying one of these companies that has, or, you know, very heavily partnering with one of these companies that has all of those things already. It's all going to take a lot of money. And Apple's cheap. Even though they have all the money. It isn't that they can't afford it. They have...

all the money to do whatever they want, but they are really, really stingy with it. And I don't know if they are going to value this stuff enough yet. I mean, over the past few years, the problem is they haven't. So we don't know how much.

How much has their mind changed on this? How much are they going to value this? Are they going to value it enough to pay what it takes to actually get competitive? From the time G. Andrea came, though, the story was that the reason there was resentment in his group is because...

He came and hired a bunch of people and they all of a sudden immediately start getting paid more than everybody else. Which you can imagine bringing resentment to the rest of the employees who are like, we work on the products that pay the bills around here. But we don't get the money that these new people in the AI group do. And that is probably just a reflection of the market. But it is also like it is a culture clash with the established culture at Apple, which is pay.

of vaguely competitive but not like super high salaries but when it came time to staff the ai people they're paying them super high salaries because you gotta if you want to hire any of these people you have to um and but now you have a problem in the company because you've got one part of the company this new shiny part that's getting paid more than you and you've been working there for 10 years and you're making the iphone and you're like what the heck and so that's you know it's

either you can't it's very difficult to pull that off you really have to say okay well we're not going to do what we've historically done which is pay competitive salaries but most of it is made up with the fact that our stock price keeps going up so we can pay you a little bit less and you know like If all of a sudden you need to hire people who are in high demand and pay them more money, if you don't do that for the rest of your company, it makes people...

sad and and even then i'm not even sure they were paying the people in their ai group as much as the other companies are and certainly not as much as the new things again we'll talk about in overtime so Yeah, they've got themselves in a difficult situation and they're under investment in this, whether it's under investment or they didn't have enough time or they didn't have enough people or like...

or maybe maybe it's entirely on it's not even the lms but it's entirely on the siri team maybe they have models that could potentially have been used and were competitive when they were ready but siri wasn't ready to integrate them and now they've fallen behind like

It's hard to tell what kind of mess they have over there, but it's clear that they have a mess. And we can see the results. They just don't have anything. Series not competitive series was bad before LLMs arrived. That's the worst part about it. It was before LLMs even existed. Series was terrible. starting at a deficit and they just have not caught up um and yeah so i i hope they

I hope they figure out a way to retain their existing team and to hire more of them. And they're probably going to have to continue paying higher salaries. And I don't know what you do with the rest of the people. Like they could get themselves into a situation where. They are kind of already there and have been in the past where the people who have the skills that Apple needs are not actually that.

common it used to be you had to find people who knew objective c which wasn't that many people and then the iphone came out and it made a lot more of those people but still especially if apple's weird about working remotely like many more people can make a website with react than can make an app with swift

forget and let alone a mac apple swift or something like that so it's kind of getting in the situation not that apple is filled with cobalt engineers or something but like at the skills need because native apps are a bit of a native native apps on apple's platforms are a bit of a niche thing like at least android has like basically cotton which is basically java right java skills are way more common than swift at this point certainly they were more common than objective c so i kind of feel like

Most of the people who are really good at the skills Apple needs for its bread and butter platforms are underpaid simply based on how rare they are in the market, as evidenced by our, you know. perennial complaint that it seems like there's nobody left at apple who knows how to make a good mac app i guess they've all retired yeah so uh highly in demand skills uh ai people or anybody knows about how to make a decent app on an apple platform

It's a tough nut to crack. And I don't know what the right answer is. But I agree with both of you that the fact that they're willing to change the modus operandi from everything being trash and that's just the way it is. I'm really excited about that. And so I really am hopeful that we get to see the results of these efforts sometime before we all die.

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Let's do some Ask ATP. Francois Olivier LeBlanc writes, I was planning on purchasing a MacBook Pro, but I got some unexpected bills recently, so I had to put it off. I was going to wait for the M5 models, but I just realized that these come with macOS Tahoe. I think Tahoe is ugly, and I strongly disagree.

with its design principles. My main iPhone will be on iOS 18 for a very long time as well. Should I stretch my wallet and buy an M4-based MacBook Pro now so I can stay on Sequoia for as long as possible? But before we answer this, I get what...

what Francois is saying, Francois Olivier is saying, and I, there was somebody that wrote us the email that had a pretty much identical question. Let me just say, don't, throw out i was 19 or 26 excuse me i was 26 don't throw out tahoe yet like yeah it's a little bit rough now but i really think it's not going to be as bad as pretty much everyone says it's going to be i really think it'll be okay That being said...

If it were me, and I guess because I'm more optimistic, I would say just get the M5 when it's available and just be happy with that. And don't worry about Tahoe so much. But I'm guessing I'm the most optimistic of the three of us in this regard. So I don't know. Marco, do you have any thoughts on this? Whenever Apple does something that radically changes things about their OSs...

A lot of people say, I'm going to hold on to the old version either for a long time or for as long as I can or for forever. I mean, it's hardware too. I mean, look at how long I held on to that 2015 MacBook Pro. That's a good point. Before the butterfly keyboard and the touch bar. We do this, and there are times when you can do it, and it's fine. But the moment you say...

I'm going to not update to the latest version. I'm going to not buy new products that come with the latest version. And I'm going to stand here as long as possible. The moment you start that, you... You start feeling resistance from all sides in various ways. Obviously, this takes the form in hardware of like, well, if you need to buy new hardware, you have to buy something old.

somehow you know so that's one problem uh and then of course in software um you know the world moves on so you are saying i'm going to stand right here i'm standing still But the whole world is not. The whole world is running past you. And one of the aspects about the redesigns, like any other major system redesign, is...

It triggers a lot of redesigns and rewrites of software, of application software, and it becomes really difficult to support old OSs and the new OS with the same app. So many apps raise their deployment minimum, their minimum OS target. to the new version because it makes it a lot easier. Now, I don't expect that to happen on day one. There will be some apps, mostly indie apps, on day one that will be iOS 26 slash Tahoe only.

You can get away for a while without most of your apps switching to that, but I bet within a year... almost everything will require the new OSs. So again, you can keep the old versions of those apps going, but you'll stop getting updates. So you're going to see all this friction fighting against you to do this. So you can do it.

You can do it for a while. Eventually, there's going to be some compelling new feature of something that will require you to update. And at that point, it's like, well, was that fight worth it? Maybe for a little while. Maybe give them a chance to iron out all the 1.0 bugs. I bet you're not going to want to keep this strategy going for more than a year.

And so you might as well, if new updates to the M5 models might be compelling for you, I'd say just suck it up and just do it. You also don't know like... Are future iPhones going to be compelling for you? The MacBook Pro, you know, we've heard it's rumored...

sometime in the next two years, I believe, to probably go to an OLED screen to have a... Yeah, it's not the next one, but the one after that. Yeah, it's like the M6 generation, right? Yeah, I think so. That's what the rumors were for. So you're probably not going to get that by waiting for the M5, but at some point... you're going to be forced to make this transition. So don't expect to hold onto it for too long. And it's probably going to be harder than you think within about a year.

because all those apps are going to start requiring it just to make the redesigns at all tackleable. Yeah, so this question is slightly different than the similar sounding question, which is, hey, I have a computer. Should I buy a new one or should I just keep using my old one?

If you have an old one that's still serving your needs, like if you have an M4 or you have an M3 and you're like, oh, should I use this for another year? Sure, you keep using it. But if the question is, I'm going to buy a new computer, should I buy... an m4 based one now should i buy the last one that can run pre-tahoe should i especially if you're in a situation where you're like i can't afford to do it i have to wait a little bit but should i stretch just and should i buy one now

So I'll have something that doesn't have to run Tahoe so that I can plan on using that for years and years and avoiding Tahoe. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me. My advice is to save your money, buy the M5 when it comes out.

If you have something you can use now until the M5 comes out, because that seems like you do, you may use a little bit longer. When the M5 comes out, wait six months. You can wait for the bumps to be ironed out, but there's no holding back the tide. If you don't like... Tahoe and never will change platforms.

because like this is what mac os is going to be for a while like if you didn't like mac os 10 you're like i'm going to stay with classic mac os well like well you're not a mac customer anymore because guess what the mac moved to mac os 10 and you can use classic for a real long time but eventually

That's not what the Mac is anymore. And if you don't like what the Mac is, you should be on a different platform. So I think it's why, you know, if you don't have the money for an M4 right now, wait, save your money. buy an m5 if you can wait for an m6 buy an m6 but like and like i said my personal experience with tahoe is despite my complaints about the ui actually using it day to day is not shocking like

It's fine. Like, you will be fine. It's not like, oh, I can't use this. It's just totally unusable. Like, there's things that annoy me that I feel like are regressions from a UI perspective, but... you get used to just playing sitting in front of the us and using it pretty fast it still works like a mac it's not that radically different yes things look different and things are too light and high contract or whatever but like it's it's fine so my advice is

Get that M5. I think you'll be happy with it. And if not, get an M5 and a half or an M6. What is the email question we got, which I don't have in front of me? Might have been the same person. No, I don't think it was. Also has something about. downgrading. So could you buy an M5 that comes to Tahoe and then put on an older version of the OS? And to the best I recall, that's not possible, right?

Everything's possible with hacks, but I don't think that's a supported configuration for Apple, which is why I would not recommend. If that's your plan, if you need to run pre-Tahoe, don't get a machine that doesn't support Prieta. Because, yeah, if you can get it to work, fine. But, like, you're just asking for trouble. Like, if you're that desperate for something and you have to buy something and you can't afford to buy something, buy a new M4 now or later on buy a used M4.

It's much better to do that than to try to force an older OS on hardware that doesn't support it. Yeah, because when Apple releases new hardware, that hardware is only supported by... the OS that was current when it shipped, and then all OSes forward. So right now, the M4 MacBook Air, say, that's the current M4, that's the current MacBook Air. Right now we have Sequoia.

This fall when Tahoe ships, they will still probably be selling that same M4 MacBook Air. If you buy one and it comes with Tahoe, you can probably easily downgrade it to Sequoia because that exact hardware shipped with Sequoia at some point. But then later on in the fall, if an M5 series of MacBooks comes out and that comes out after Tahoe, then Sequoia. will never be updated to get hardware support for that hardware, so you won't be able to downgrade it in any way.

Alistair Logie writes, I have a Mac Mini M1 with 16 gigs of RAM, which I primarily use for Xcode. My only niggle is how long it takes to spin up new simulators. Will that be noticeably faster with an M4 with 16 gigs of RAM? I don't know, to be honest with you, but I don't imagine it'll be that much faster. Will it? I mean, the M4... So keep in mind, as you go from M1 to M4...

A lot of other things have also changed about these chips. You have various throughput improvements. I'm sure the memory has more bandwidth. I'm sure the SSD is probably faster. There's other... other things about it that have changed. And then, of course, M1 to M4, as awesome as the M1 was...

That was, what, five years ago now? And they've made a lot of very big progress since then. The M4 is really fast. The M1 was amazing for its time, but, you know, it is like four or five years old now. The M4...

is very, very fast. It is substantially faster than the M1. So I would say if you're going from... m1 16 gig to m4 16 gig you will probably notice generally faster performance with almost everything that that is a taxing operation on the computer now i would also suggest though if you're using this for xcode

that 16 gigs is starting to look a little skimpy these days. So if you can at all afford, if you're going to replace it, and if you can at all afford more RAM than that, I would suggest get more RAM than that. If you've been living with 16, and you're doing Xcode, I'd say at least go to 32 if you can. That would be a great setup. An M4 family chip, whichever one it is, with 32 gigs of RAM can last you a very long time, I think, in today's software. John?

I don't have experience doing simulators. That's why it's a question for you too. I agree that like the thing, the place where you'd probably notice it for like starting up a simulator is probably going to be SSD speed that I don't actually know what the bottleneck is for simulator startups. And I think you could get.

buy with 16 gigs of ram like it depends on so like simulators are simulating phones right it's kind of like phone backups we used to do our like local backups and finder to our phones but then like phones would come with like a terabyte it's like i don't want to do a local backup of a terabyte phone on my mac and

need all that disk space right simulators are simulating iphones which used to come with a piddling amount of ram but now like they're i mean they're iphones with eight gigs of ram there's ipads with 16 gigs of ram and so

Yeah, if you're simulating a high RAM device and it is faithfully simulating the amount of RAM that device really has, that's going to eat up some of your max RAM. So maybe that makes a difference. But I felt like if you're doing iPhone dev and you have a 16 gig Mac and the only thing you're running is Xcode, I thought you'd be OK.

You two know better than I do about using simulators. So yeah, if you think 30 gigs will help, it will probably help. And now this just says M4. It doesn't say like M4 Pro, M4 Max, or M4 Family. It just says plain M4. And you know, it's a mini, right? So...

I don't know. I feel like if you have an M1 machine, it's reasonable to upgrade now anyway. If your M1 is feeling a little pokey, like you're wondering if you'd get a thing, you waited a good amount of time. You got good mileage out of that M1.

it lasted you reasonably because it's not like you're just using it for casual web browsing you keep using that m1 for casual web browsing for ages right but you're doing dev work in it and you got a lot of years out of it and the new mac mini is cheap especially in the base config so

I would say upgrade. And I think you will notice the problem with any kind of thing like this of noticing is you'll notice the day you get it and then you get used to it the next day. That's just, that's just computers, right?

You know, we get used to how fast it is. I guess you leave the old one around, so after a month, you can go back to the old one and try building your app and going, oh, yeah, I remember this. I did just, by the way, I just went to the configurator to see, like, okay, so a Mac Mini base model is $600, which...

For the computer that it is, it's 16 gigs, 256, yeah, 256 sucks, but 16 gigs, M4, $600. That's honestly a really good deal. If you want 32 gigs... the price jumps by 400 more dollars no longer a good deal so a lot less of a good deal it's still in you know that you're at a thousand dollars for that which again like when compared to apple's other desktops like that's a pretty good deal but Wow. To almost double the price of the Mac Mini? Look for a refurb, you know? Save some money. Wow.

David Levine asks, how do you recommend choosing a new UPS? How do I know how much, what is VA? Volt? Volt amps? I do not understand VA. I only ever see it in UPSs. Like, I don't quite understand. this measure and all i know is that ac power is really weird and so there's all sorts of little complexities to it that like you think you know dc is much simpler it's like oh you got you got volts you got amps watts all of that makes so much sense with dc

AC is so insanely complicated. What phase are you pulling the load on? Is your motor pulling it this way or that way? Is it a motor or a light? It's so complicated. Yeah, it's nuts. I did computer engineering in college. Is that what you did, John? Isn't that right? I did computer engineering, that's right. So for me, it was basically double E and CS combined. And let me tell you, the double E side, I did not do well at at all. But anyways...

So how do you choose a UPS? I don't know, man. Add up how many watts you think you're going to use and how long you think you want that to last and put your thumb in the wind. I'm sure there's a better answer than that. John and I have each put our...

respective UPSs in the show notes. They're basically the same model. John's just has a little bit more power than me. I probably could stand for more. They're both cyber power tower style UPSs, which actually Marco might have been the first of them. three of us do have one of these i don't recall i've had these for for years and in fact the rack mount version i have three of them at the restaurant

There you go. I will say that mine, after only like three-ish years, the internal batteries did go on them. However, it was astonishingly easy and relatively inexpensive to replace them. They looked very similar to... motorcycle batteries. I'm sure they're not actually the same, but looked very similar to that. I bet they're surprisingly similar. Yeah, fair. But I ordered a couple of new batteries from Amazon, put them in myself. And other than the...

The slack on a couple of the cables being very, very taut. You know, there was not enough slack in a couple of spots. It was actually very easy to do. But in terms of how to choose, I don't know, do either of you have a recommendation in this regard?

Well, we get this question every few years, and the answer is always the unsatisfying, like you said, add up all the power in the devices you have and see how much you need. Every UPS seller will have something on their website that purports to do this for you, but there... those tools are motivated their interests are not aligned with yours let's say because they'll let you enter a bunch of information and they'll tell you

uh what ups you should buy from them if every one of your devices is pulling the maximum power it's allowed to fall at the same time which honestly like that's the conservative answer but that will cost you a lot of money which again is in their interest because they sell ups right

For years, I bought, because I remember when I first got my, like, I guess, Power Mac G5, maybe even when I got my G3, I did the calculations on the various websites, got a number that said I should buy this UPS that was more than I could afford.

And I said, okay, well, how about I just get a much smaller one? And for just years and years, I had a series of UPSs that, yes, I would replace the batteries when they died. And it was like 30 bucks to replace the battery when it was real cheap. Anyway. So when the power went out, I had about two minutes and 30 seconds to shut down my computer. And they have a thing that most of the good ones have a thing where you can connect your Mac through USB.

to the ups so your mac will detect when it's on ups power and shut itself down and even that was a race so even if you're not there to shut it down the mac will shut itself down based on knowing that it's on ups if you can figure this is built into mac os you don't even need to use third-party software although they used to come with it back in the day but mac os itself

knows what a ups is and i think built into mac os is a thing that will shut itself down with x amount of time remaining on the thing or whatever What I'm saying is you can get away with a UPS that is massively undersized for your uses. If you have, let's say, a dual Power Mac G5 that could potentially use a huge amount of power with like an NVIDIA graphics card in it and you buy a dinky UPS that can barely handle an iMac.

it will protect you when the power goes out as long as you shut down within two to five minutes right and sometimes that's enough especially if the power like flickers

or whatever, or you just want time to save your stuff and shut down. And in my experience, having experienced many blackouts and many flickers or whatever, i have never lost anything or had any problem due to having a massively undersized ups that said once i got fancier computers and could afford a ups that was closer to being sized correctly uh that's better you should do that if you can um the reason i linked the cyber power one in the show notes is i had a series of apc ups and other brands

uh that were more of like the horizontal kind that's like a big giant flat thing that marco rests his feet on or whatever um there might be rest your feet on the tower ones too no the tower ones aren't they're not they're they're too top heavy they tip over you gotta rest your feet on a subwoofer or an old

Big style UPS. Or your feet can reach the ground. That's another option. No, that's terrible. Anyway, and those were fine. But when I got my 2019 Mac Pro, The place where I was putting it was on a little skinny table that is the proportions of a tower computer and a tower UPS fit perfectly under a tower computer on a tower shaped table. The danger that I have with all these UBSs is, is it going to make noise?

It doesn't have a fan in it. And a lot of the fancier ones that support a lot of power do in fact have fans in them. And you're always like reading the comments, reading the help and say, okay, it's got a fan. But does the fan run all the time?

or only when it's on battery power. Because when it's on battery power, I don't care if the fan runs. And I can tell you that the model that I'm going to link in the show notes, I'm assuming Casey will say the same of his, does not make any noise in normal operation. when it switches to battery power yes it has a fan that turns on but at that point i don't care because i'm just shutting down my computer so my main criteria is is it reliable

Can it keep my computer alive when the power is out long enough for me to save my work and shut down? And does it not make any noise? And this, I have two of these cyber power ones. I think I have one of the ones that Casey's going to like, and I have one of the newer ones. They're both sitting in this room with me. They're silent. They do their job. That's all I can ask for them. And when their batteries die, I will pay and replace the batteries with a new one.

Yep. So I have the CyberPower CP1350 PFC LCD, and John apparently has the CP1500 PFC LCD. Yeah, and I have a whole bunch of these all over the place. They're all good. The one thing, we actually, back in episode 569, I mentioned that there was, I have... Tesla Powerwall batteries as a solar backup battery at the beach. I had a UPS plugged into one of the outlets that is backed up by the solar panels or by the batteries.

And I had said like for some reason, like when it goes on solar power, like if there's a blackout from the utility company and it switches over to the batteries providing the power to those outlets. then the UPS that I had put into that, the standard cyber power UPS, would think it was like a blackout, even though there is power going to the outlet, and it would cut off the supply, and it would use its battery until it died, and then everything would just die.

I was thinking I was like double backing things up, but I wasn't. And there was some issue with like the way that like Powerwall batteries, when supplying power, supply a different frequency of AC. It's like 62 and a half to 65 hertz. instead of 60 hertz for the AC switching rate. And that... throws off ups's they think oh this is invalid this is bad power i better switch to my internal power supply and so you have to use certain ups's that do it and there's a brand called eaten

E-A-T-O-N, that makes UPSs that cost about the same as everybody else's, maybe a little bit more, that are compatible with Tesla Powerwall batteries. So if for some reason you have Powerwalls as backup power for your house...

and you also want to use a UPS on those outlets for extra protection for some reason, then consider the Eaton brand. My solution was I just disconnected the UPS and just plugged directly into the wall and let the Tesla... batteries do their jobs and this was before you know elon musk etc all right uh i think we're all good here okay thank you to our sponsors this episode uh factor 1Password and Quince. And thank you to our...

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. We're going to kind of continue what we talked about earlier about the AI stuff by talking about... Are developers... Is any developer worth... These big, multi-million, even $100 million pay packages that AI developers are allegedly being offered or taking right now in the open marketplace. We're going to talk about that in overtime this week.

You can join us, listen, atv.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. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at CA. That's Casey Liss. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T. Marco Arment. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-O-Q.

It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech podcast So long I

I now love one each of Casey and John's previously talked about MVP technologies. We don't have MVPs. MVP is a thing that you do for your restaurant. When did we ever do MVP? I am curious, but fascinated and excited.

Okay, so these are two things that you guys have talked about in the past that I have recently come to need that I have really appreciated. I will start with Casey's. I have recently come to finally... install and use and really appreciate tail scale. ah yes indeed one of us one of us so and they have been a sponsor i don't know if they're sponsoring again but they have been a sponsor so to disclose that um but i had never really had a need for it before um but so

what tail scale does, as you've heard Casey talk about in sponsor reads, uh, is basically, um, it's like a, like a network routing software, you know, let me take a stab at this. So, when you hear about tail scale and I didn't know I was going to talk about this tonight, but hand, hand to God, I love tail scale so much that whether or not they've ever sponsored, which they have, uh, I would, I would talk it up anyways, because I really do love it that much. But anyways, when you hear tails,

you think vpn and it works with vpn the same kind of technology that runs vpns but it's not that's not the way you should think of it the way you should think of tail scale is what if all of my devices could talk to each other irrespective of how they're actually connected to the internet. So what if I had a server at Linode and I had my laptop here at my house and I wanted them to be able to talk to each other as though they're on the same local network?

That's kind of what tail scale does. So all of your devices that are on your tail net, which is what they call, you know, your, your, your account, if you will, your network of devices, all of the devices on your tail net can pretty much always talk to each other, irrespective of how they're connected to the internet.

Irrespective of where they are geographically. Yeah. And so where this became useful for me is I have my Mac mini doing basically like file server type work in my garage over on Long Island. I'm now at the beach for the summer. I want to be able to access that Mac mini. And I want to be able to do screen sharing and stuff like that and access the network volumes. How do I do that easily? Well, tail scale.

lets me do that i installed it on both and now i can i can access and i installed it on um on my my ipad for some testing things because i wanted to like when i was on long island i wanted access to the network at the restaurant So at the restaurant, there's an iMac that we use in the office. So I installed an exit node.

there as well as you know the regular so that the exit node is basically like a vpn host you can basically say sir like whatever device i'm using right now tunnel all the traffic so it comes out of that device over there And so you're basically creating your own VPN. So now I have exit nodes at both houses and the restaurant. So anywhere I am in the world, I can...

basically treat it like a VPN. I can say, connect to my Long Island home Mac Mini and route all traffic through that, and then I don't have to use somebody else's VPN or something. But also... I can screen share right now to the Mac Mini back at home, and it just works.

you know the tail scale menu like it copies uh the ip address you need to use and i just go into you know the finder i hit command k you know vnc colon slash paste the ip address and boom i'm in my mac mini from anywhere that's really cool and like this is the kind of thing that like you you there have been ways to do this over time with like all right port forward things or dynamic dns and like all these different things that were a pain in the butt and fragile and this takes all of that

pain in the buttery and fragility out of the situation and he's like oh here's here is an ip address that you can use from your local device to connect to this thing over there and it will behave as though it's local that's fantastic

It really is incredible. If you have devices that are not... geographically next to each other pretty much ever tail scale really is incredible and to build what marco said the way it works is it kind of it's kind of sort of layers another network on top of all of the network that your device is currently on and so like marco said you get a i think what is it called a carrier-grade network address translation? You get a 100.xyz IP address for each of your devices. And so...

While your device may have the 192.168.1.whatever IP address, TailScale adds to that another IP address that that device will answer to. That's something like 100.75. whatever, whatever. And so if you use that 100.ip address to access your other devices, that tells your device and tells Tailscale, oh, I'm going to go through Tailscale to get to this other thing. And then, like Marco said, you can use exit nodes, which is what they... consider like a way

of egressing onto the internet. So you can be in London, but have an exit node in Long Island and you're effectively getting on the internet from Long Island. They also have the idea of subnet routers, which is to say, what if I want to access a non-Talescale device? on my in-home network. Well, I can set up one of my in-home tail scale devices to allow me to tunnel through that onto my local network. You can do some really crazy stuff where...

My parents, for example, they have a 192.168.1.x network. And I want to occasionally be able to get on their network to do some maintenance things for them. And I don't want to do the standard subnet router thing where it just says, okay, any... Anything that is 192.168.1.x, that's going to be served at Casey's parents' house.

I don't want that because that's not necessarily the case. And you can actually use IPv6 to get around this. I have a blog post about it. I'll link it in the show notes. It's kind of complicated to talk about, so I'm not going to spend any more time on it now. But my point is just that you can use this really cockamamie.

IPv6 address to get into this other network via IPv4, like the stuff that Tailscale does is bananas. It's really, really worth your time looking into it. You probably already did after my incredible sponsor reads back in the day, but seriously.

Give it a shot. Yeah. So very happy with tail scale. Thank you for that, Casey. And next, John's MVP. Well, at the restaurant, I needed some ways to monitor the temperatures. In the walk-in fridges. Oh, here we go. Yo, Link. So, just by coincidence, we happen to have this Yolink follow-up this episode. It's the cheapest thing you bought for your restaurant. By far!

So I have, you know, so we have three walk-in coolers, you know, a freezer and two fridges. You know, as a restaurant, it's very important to know the temperatures of those because, you know, for food safety, basically, you need to keep things within a certain range.

so that your food doesn't spoil your frozen stuff doesn't thaw your cold your refrigerated stuff doesn't freeze like there's all sorts of uh you know bad things that happen to food and drinks if they are in the wrong temperature zone So for a restaurant, for health code compliance, you have to keep things in certain ranges and it's very important. OK, so you can go to my preferred brand, ThermoWorks for high quality.

thermometers and stuff and thermoworks will sell you a uh you know a wi-fi app enabled temperature logging kit for a walk-in has a couple of sensors and It has a module that connects to your network and you can then view the historical data. It's $400 for one fridge. And if you have three fridges, it's $400 for each fridge. Yolink gives me that for about $35 per fridge. So the only weird thing about putting the Yolink thing in the fridge was...

I was like, how do I attach this to the fridge wall? Or where do I place this in the fridge? It is basically like a three by three inch by one inch rectangular solid-ish. I'm like, how do I attach this to the wall? Nobody has made brackets to stick them on the wall. They don't come with one. And I could just use my trusty VHB tape, which I mentioned in the past. I could just use that to stick it to the fridge wall.

On the back of the O-Link sensor is a battery door and a few holes that are probably to let some of the air in to measure the temperature. so you can't really I don't want to like stick it to the wall and then the battery you can't like take it off easily every probably you know six months or a year to replace those batteries so what I did was I actually you know we have an old 3D printer that mostly Adam and Tiff play with. I'm like, finally, I have a use for this thing.

I custom 3D printed my own bracket. Nice. That has a flat back so I could use the VHB tape on that. I made little cutouts for all of the air holes on the sensor. And it perfectly, it looks like a... like a bench in a Catholic church. Like, you know, that kind of like shape, you know, like a, like a straight edge, like, you know, back little arms and little front lips so that it rests in there, but it's mostly open on all sides.

And I stuck those to the wall of the fridge with VHB tape. They've been there now for three months. They are working perfectly. The kitchen staff loves them. And now I have a complete... history of all the temperature variations of the fridges and i can see i can get notified

Every single time, something goes out of range. And I can see, oh, is it out of range right now because they just loaded the freezer and so it went up by a couple degrees for a few minutes? Okay. Or I can see, oh, wait a minute. On a regular day, it goes up, down, up, down, up, down like this. As the compressor kicks on, kicks off, kicks on, kicks off, you can see the cycle that it stays within. And then I noticed a couple days ago, or about last week, I noticed, huh.

It stopped that pattern, and now it's like two degrees higher, and it looks like it's having trouble keeping up. So I called the fridge repair guy, and it turns out, oh, there was some frost somewhere. There shouldn't have been frost, and it couldn't work the way it was supposed to work. But we caught that.

because of Yolink, because of these sensors. If it was any other situation where we just relied on people noticing, hey, the fridge is warm, it would have taken a lot more of a temperature delta before people noticed. I noticed it within two degrees. So it was still within the safe range, but I could tell something's wrong or something's different and get it fixed before it becomes a bigger problem. So it's actually keeping our food safer.

And it's keeping our butts better covered in a lot of those ways. Like, this is incredible. And these are, they're so cheap. So I am now, I just, just a few days ago. Bought myself a second Yolink hub, this time for my house. And I'm going to put some of the temperature sensors here and various things. I got one to float in the hot tub. Nice. They have one of those cone-shaped things that you can float in the hot tub and monitors.

I notice they have smoke alarms now, which that I would very much like. If we're not here, I want to know that the smoke alarm is going off. I have tried other solutions to this problem, and they are not very good. And so this, let's see if this works. But they have the whole family of stuff. As we mentioned earlier, they have water leak sensors. They have door open sensors. They have all sorts of custom things. You can custom wire stuff to a relay to do things.

And what I have found with their service is like, I mean, yeah, the app is what you would expect the app to be. But it works.

And it's reliable. And those notifications come in immediately every time. They're very reliable. It's kind of low drama. It just tells you when you need to know stuff. That's it. So given how... inexpensive their stuff is and how low needs it is in terms of like you don't need to hardwire everything like i have um for temperature monitoring in my house what i previously used is these little Eve, I think they're called Eve rooms, Eve room sensors. They're like a hundred bucks each or something.

and they are powered you have to like you have to power them by micro usb with some kind of charger uh pretty often or just leave them plugged in all the time and so i have one of those like there's like a room in the basement that the water main runs through and so in the winter you want to make sure that doesn't freeze so there's like you know small heater things in there and i have one of these monitors to make sure like if it ever gets below you know 40 degrees alert me you know and

I've been doing that through, you know, with Eve's sensors and through HomeKit. And it's just, it's very complicated. It's kind of unreliable. And it's pretty expensive. And then, you know, you go to YoLink and it's... you know costs almost nothing it's like it's a third as much per sensor and they have you know infinite battery life they don't need home kit complexity they don't need hubs or anything and yeah they have a fairly ugly app to manage them but like

at this point who cares everything else about them is better and cheaper so i'm into it yeah they do need a hub that you need one hub per like you know location that you have them um what i'm also like 40 bucks Yeah, it's really not that expensive. The other thing I'm waiting for inevitably is for you to decide, you know what I'd like to do is have more control over exactly when this triggers and how it triggers and so on and so forth. Or, you know, maybe it should send an email to...

So what I'm saying is the next time you bring up one of these that's inspired by John or me, it's going to be Home Assistant because Yolink has a really solid, I don't think it's first party. I think somebody else wrote a really good Yolink integration for Home Assistant.

then you can do all sorts of crazy crap. Like, Oh, if it's been higher than such and such a temperature for such and such a time, and it's not whatever time of day when we know that they're always opening the fridge and leaving it open for 10 minutes, you can get just utterly bananas with this stuff. But that being said, I'm genuine.

very glad that you found them and like them as much as john and i do so that that is like you said 100 john so thank you john yeah and and again like you know the low drama like what am i going to put in a walk-in fridge there's no there's no outlets in there yeah yeah and it's a metal box It doesn't do Wi-Fi very well from there. Right. There's not many options that you can do with wireless transmitting technology that will work well inside of a metal box.

These work great. They work totally fine. I've never... Each one of them reports into the base station on a regular basis. I've never had one drop out or miss one. I installed them all in March or April. Their batteries are still totally fine here almost in July. It's great. I'm very, very happy. And when you compare it to the stuff in the consumer HomeKit ecosystem that connects directly to Wi-Fi or even Thread.

It's night and day difference in range and battery life. Yeah, Wi-Fi is the wrong tool for that job, as I think we discussed in the past. I think you overcomplicated it with these little church pews on the wall.

My Yolink and my fridge and freezer, I just chuck them in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just chuck them in the fridge like they're any other thing that's in the fridge. Like I'm not treating them special in any way. They're just on the shelf with the pickles or like somewhere in the... I don't even know.

where it is in the freezer i just chuck the thing in the freezer and it's just you know i have one in the downstairs like it's just they're they're not fragile like you can just put them in there i mean i guess if you want to be really careful like oh don't put it like in the hottest or the coldest part in your fridge but like They're like $17 each. Buy two. Put them in two places in the fridge. They're so cheap. I actually did that. Our refrigerator repair guy, when I first...

complained that the fridge was running a couple degrees warm and something must have been wrong, he looked at where I put it next to the door on the inside and was like, well, you shouldn't put this here. So I said, okay. So I... Grabbed a second one because I bought a couple extras. I bought a five-pack. I grabbed it. I just grabbed another one. In three minutes, it was set up, paired. I put it.

in the back bottom corner of the fridge, like as far from the door and down low. So it should be as cold as possible. And then like, you know, a few hours later, I'm like, look, here's the data. it makes almost no difference whatsoever. It was like a one degree difference. There is obviously no difference, but he thought there would be. And I was able to show with data, nope, look, disproven. And in two seconds... It's a great system. I strongly recommend it.