647: You Get One Exclamation Point

John, something occurred to me. I was listening to directives earlier today, and it was very funny to me that you two talked about Das Boot because there is a forthcoming and comparable episode that I was on where we talked about it. I also had never seen Das Boot before. for. But it occurred to me as you were talking about this and talking about your graduation results that you two are going to be empty nesters real freaking soon, which I think I knew, but it never really...

I never really thought about it. You are almost there. And how are we feeling about that? Does it count as empty nester if your kids are still living at home? They're just at school. I thought it was like when they move out. I think strictly you are correct. I think that is the, it's only when they move out permanently that you are officially an empty nester, but you're an effective empty nester in a couple of months. And that's wild.

How are we feeling? I don't know. I feel like I just haven't looked that far yet. Still trying to always get over the next turtle. And it's just like... getting the kids off to school, getting my daughter settled in her first college dorm, getting my son off for his senior year, figuring out what he's going to do. Like, it just feels like there's still a lot of stuff to overcome. But once they're settled in and I've stopped doing the...

15 trips back and forth to ferry all the things they inevitably forgot. I don't know. Maybe ask me then. Mostly, I think it'll be good for everybody involved and it'll be a fun change, but we'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll just be bored. Let's do some follow-up. Tahoe is apparently dropping Firewire support, and we should pour one out.

Did we talk about this already? We did. We sure did. Wow. I jogged your memory. I was waiting for the little gears to kick in. It was like three days ago. It was so long ago when we recorded that episode. This is the thing we've done. But we have more information about it. That's why I brought it up. See, I'm a professional. I swear.

That might be in follow-up, you know, because it's a thing we talked about on the previous show. Well, with you, you never know. Everything that's ever been thought about in the last 30 years is somehow follow-up. Oh, no. No, no. I mean, this was literally two days ago. So I'm going to say this one is pretty valid. It is. It is. I'm trying to blame you, even though this is 100% on me. All right. So anyways, Timo Hetzel writes, I was shopping for audio interfaces about 10 years ago.

box in the store with a sticker on it that read, Now with Thunderbolt! Turns out they just added a free FireWire to Thunderbolt adapter to the existing FireWire-based model. The World of Audio is one that came up when we were discussing FireWire support going away. way uh they're very conservative over there to the point where if they have a device that works uh you want to make a version of it with thunderbolt just put an adapter in the box and that it made me wonder like if they do that though

Does that get around the lack of FireWire support? Because as far as the computer is concerned, it's not FireWire, it's slenderable. I think it does, right? I would assume, but you would be the one to know that. I don't know. The way Thunderbolt works is basically it's like PCI Express over a cable. It's like the simplified version of how it works. And so it's almost like you're plugging in a PCI Express card.

with a FireWire controller on it, I think, logically for the computer. So if the computer drops support for FireWire as a... host protocol i think any way you connect it through thunderbolt would also not work because all thunderbolt is doing is exposing the firewire controller to the computer saying here here's a firewire controller and so if the computer has no idea what to do with that

I was thinking that it would just expose the device as if it's connected directly to the PCI bus. You know what I mean? Yeah, but does Tahoe drop support? Like, if you have a Mac Pro with card slots, and if you put a FireWire card in one of those PCI slots, I bet that'll also stop working.

Well, I don't know. I mean, I guess this is one of those things I feel like, well, someone obviously who knows the technical details could just tell us. But failing that, when... tahoe does actually ship with no firewire support uh i'm sure someone will either accidentally or on purpose get upgraded and realize that firewire stuff doesn't work and then try to find ways to make it work and then we'll find out

We shall see. I'm sure someone will be kind enough to do an experiment for us. If you wanted to install Tahoe Betas without installing Xcode Beta, I feel like we've definitely covered this at least thrice at this point, but that's all right. Anonymous writes,

device support package you can install that doesn't require installing the entire Xcode beta. Device support for macOS 26 beta 2. You can install device support for macOS 26 beta if installing the macOS seed in a virtual machine fails on a host Mac. You can get this from developer.apple.com slash download, but we will also put in a direct link, although I do believe you get challenged for login when you click the direct link.

Yeah, you need to be logged into a developer account. But it's interesting that, like, so all these requirements that I didn't know because I had never done this before, that you need the Xcode beta, but actually you don't need the Xcode beta because you just need the device support, and actually they distribute that separately. It's one of the things that annoys me about Apple's developer website.

Finding anything on there in terms of downloads is just always such a... puzzle because they don't they have this weird they divide it up into like three different tabs it's like oh it says applications and other or there's like a more thing and then sometimes there's an additional download section and what if you want some older stuff is that still available somewhere that's why all these little websites pop up basically

saving the URLs of where things were when they were first put up somewhere on some CDN that Apple controls. And even when it goes off their website, as in it's no longer linked from a webpage, the download is still there and you can get it if you can. And if it's not one of those things that Apple needs to sign or something, anyway. Yeah, all things that could have benefited me, but many different ways to skin this cat.

And apparently device support for macOS 26 beta 2 is one of them. I wonder if that's going to be updated with device support for macOS 26 beta 3 or if it's not beta specific. We'll find out. We shall see.

A friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, with regard to putting older OSs on newer Macs. So if you buy a Mac that comes with Tahoe in a couple of months and you wanted to put Sequoia on it. So Guy writes, on the subject of running an older OS and the one that a given Apple...

and Mac was originally shipped with, the short answer is that it is effectively impossible. Even if you patch the restore image by copying the missing components from a newer release, you'd end up with iBoot components that don't match the kernel cache or a kernel cache that doesn't match the DYLD cache. cache in the root file system, it would be a mess.

Regardless of the above issues, you wouldn't be able to get such a restore image to be flashed onto a DFU Mac because Apple's online signing service would refuse to sign the firmware components for a board that's not allow listed for that OS release.

Binding is mandatory when restoring an Apple Silicon Mac from scratch, even with a lower security configuration. The only way I can think of that... could potentially be used to achieve such a thing would be to hand-assemble the entire volume scheme that's required by a macOS installation on Apple Silicon using the file system components from the older OS and the firmware or kernel cache from the newer OS.

Doing that is far from trivial, and even then the result would likely be a machine that kernel panics very often, even if not before it even finishes booting up. Yeah, so basically, if you're thinking like, should I attempt some kind of macOS hack? to get something working. If Guy Rambo says that's going to be really difficult, don't. Just don't. It's not going to happen for the rest of us. Basically, it's impossible.

All right. And then we talked last episode about an uninterruptible power supplies. I believe this was an ask ATP and how they deal in volt amps and, you know, the. Two or three of us, but particularly John and I probably should have known this or did know this at some point, kind of shrugged. Well, Marshall C. writes, I have my bachelor's of science and electrical engineering, and I'm a licensed professional engineer in the power discipline. AC power is tricky, but here's my.

Real power, or P, which is measured in watts. This is the electric power used to run your computer, heat up your toaster, and what your utility bill bills you for. Reactive power, which is represented by Q or VARs. is often called fake power. This is the electric power used to form the necessary magnetic fields for the transmission of AC power.

Then finally, there's a parent power, which is represented by S, and that's volt amps, a combination of real and reactive power. Imagine an XY axis where the real power is on the X axis and the reactive power is on the Y axis. A parent power is the distance from the origin to the... coordinate.

Non-utility people will never need to think about reactive power unless their job involves industrial equipment like electric arc furnaces, large motors, etc. And they're responsible for the engineering or bills to the power company. Apparent power is how devices... that generate power have to be rated because they're responsible for providing the real and reactive power for the system. For most consumer situations, you can assume that the watt rating will be roughly the same as your VA rating.

ac power is insanely complicated like what i said last like dc power fairly simple to you know to conceptualize ac power it's so complicated what one thing i um uh i went to a family member's house once and they had plugged into the wall these like things that claim to be energy savers and they like lit up and i was curious so i looked it up and it's basically like it like some weird amazon device from god knows where in china that

bridges the two ac prongs with a capacitor i think it was the gist of it and i at first i was like there's no way that could possibly work and I was mostly right, but not entirely right. I looked up how do these purport to work, and does it actually achieve some kind of power savings somehow, magically? And the answer basically is it plays a trick. with the way those ac like phases and pulls and induction motor loads like it it pulls some kind of trick with that that like

If it did a really big version of it, it might slightly save you some of your billing of your power. But of course, these little tiny things were scams and didn't actually do anything notable. But the principle upon which they claim to work...

was not entirely BS. It was just mostly BS. But yeah, they are, regardless, scams. But I thought that was interesting. It's like, oh, there's other weird complexity to AC power that, like, it's sort of, kind of... might enable weird tricks to happen on a much larger scale.

I mean, tampering with your electrical meter will also save you money. Yes, probably counts as fraud. And so does not find the electrical system at your house in some way to make the electrical meter or read incorrectly. So, yeah.

All right. Jared Nichols writes with regard to smoke alarm remote notifications. So, Marco, I believe you were talking last episode about how you've got your temperature sensors and we were talking about leak sensors. But then what about.

smoke detecting. And so Jared writes, listen to Overtime, and Marco mentioned Smart Smoke Alarms by Yolink. If you've got HomePods in the house, you've effectively now got Smart Smoke Alarms. I've got regular residential smoke alarms, and when my son, home from... college burns bacon while my partner and I are not home, we get a home app alert about the smoke alarms going off. Burn the bacon again? Yeah.

And then back to normal business. Yeah. So I thought this was interesting. So I actually I have gotten one of these alerts before because I do have HomePods. And one time the smoke alarms did go off and I was I was not home, but my wife and son were. And I and it comes in as one of those like high priority alerts that breaks through do not disturb. And so it will sound no matter what. Like it's one of those kind of, you know, urgent alerts on the on the iPhone. And it sounds like.

it sounds like an urgent alert. You know, it's like a very alarming sign. Like, Oh God. And you look and it's like, it gives you a notification saying like, Oh yeah, there's, it sounds like a smoke alarms going off in your house. And like, Oh my God. And, um,

In that case, it turned out they had burned something in the oven. But I have seen these modifications. And so it is better than nothing in the sense that, like, if you want to be remotely notified of your smoke alarm going off, that's good. That's one way to do it. Another way is to just get a smoke alarm like nests or these Yolink ones. There's a bunch of weird Amazon brand ones now. And the reason why I kind of smiled when I got this feedback email is like, yes.

The HomePod can do it. But do you trust your HomePod to do anything important reliably? True. I'm glad I had it, and it did indeed work for me once, but my HomePod... does not reliably do literally any of the things that it is marketed as doing. Like, it doesn't do a single one reliably. I would say I have maybe a 60% success rate with the things I try to have happen on my HomePod.

So it kind of points out, like, if Apple wants these features to be taken more seriously, there's so much work to do with the reputation and the reliability of Siri, of these products, of their backing services. It has to be way better than this. Like right now, the idea that I would rely solely on this.

it literally made me laugh out loud earlier today when i saw this email so it's nice to have it as a backup like oh that's that's cute apple nice job you know that's nice but i'm not going to rely on this i would rather also have smart smoke alarms that notify me through any literally any other means besides hoping a HomePod will do one of its many accessory jobs. I had the same thought when I saw this email. I got the original HomePod when it was first released and had it for a long time.

Uh, recently Marco sent me two of his original home pods, like the big ones, the original big home pods, because he just didn't want them anymore. Uh, and around that time, my original home pod started being a little bit wonky.

Like it wouldn't do OS updates. If you saw in the home app on the phone, it would show the little spinner for an OS update, but then it would just disappear. And it kept saying, we're having trouble signing into your Apple ID. Bring your phone close to the HomePod and do blah, blah, blah. And I read factory reset it and reset it up a million times, did all sorts of stuff. And it was just, it just wasn't working. And eventually it stopped.

showing up as an airplay target i was like well whatever i'll swap it down for as the other two were in the basement i'll swap it down for one of the marco's ones in the basement so i put mine down into the basement it was in like a stereo pair but mine was like just dead so i just put it there brought one up from the basement put it upstairs

It started doing the same thing, swapped it again for the third one. And now the situation I'm in is the third and last one that still somewhat functions and somewhat does something like you can talk to it and turn the lights off. Still. tells me that I was having trouble shining to my Apple ID. Still won't do an OS update. I think sometimes it appears as an AirPlay target for audio, sometimes doesn't. And then my original HomePod, now when you plug it in, doesn't.

do anything. Doesn't turn on. Nothing lights up. Like, you know, that's all you can do with these HomePods is plug them in. There's no on and off switch, right? So my original HomePod is... dead dead because there's that whole issue that you can find youtube's videos about where there's some component on the board that burns out because they have these people who just repair them anyway

So what I'm saying is I have three first-generation home pods and they're all sort of on their way out I feel like that was just a flawed hardware product and i considered you know like maybe i should just get a homepod mini if i just want to use it to turn the lights on and off and use it for my testing against other things or whatever but reading this thing of like using it as a smoke alarm like i have that feature enabled on all these things

Just because why not? But I absolutely would not use it as my primary means of anything. I don't even use it as my primary means of turning the lights on and off because there's a Google device in the same room and most of the family uses that one because it works every time.

All right. So Dion Garrett writes with regard to the limits of LLMs and LRMs, the app paper discussed in the overtime segment of ATP 643 mentioned LRMs complete collapse on out of distribution problems. This is not the same as outside of the training data, which is what we had said a few times. Neural nets generalize really well on inputs that are not in the training data but are drawn from the same distribution.

I think you know this already, but there's a huge body of people who believe that LLMs cannot reproduce anything that wasn't literally in the training data. That's certainly not true. yeah so that that is a fine distinction that's worth making although the the fact that uh lms can reproduce things that were not in the training data but just are in the distribution of the training data that's where hallucinations so-called hallucinations come from like all of it is just statistical

stuff based on the training data so there's the distribution of the stuff in the training data and there's the things that can be reproduced and yeah it'll it'll put so if it looks like something would fall naturally within the distribution it will produce that is that valid or true

Or, you know, are the things in the training data true or are the things that like it synthesizes because they're within the realm of the stuff that's in the training data that may not necessarily be true either. And that's, you know, that's why you will get LLMs to say things that you said this information, this fact, this.

answer was not in the training data no it wasn't in the training data but it was apparently in the quote-unquote distribution of the training data and that's why it got spat out of the machine But anyway, important distinction. This is a follow-up from many episodes ago, so we're sorry for the delay, but WWE kind of sidetracked it. And speaking of that...

Right. So we talked about that paper that Apple had put up, The Illusion of Thinking, Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity. And there was a rebuttal about it that... made a bunch of waves, and again, we just didn't have the chance to talk about it. The rebuttal was called The Illusion of Thinking, and it was by Alex Lawson and Claude from Anthropic.

Reading from there, Apple's paper says that large reasoning models, or LRMs, exhibit accuracy collapse on planning puzzles beyond certain complexity thresholds. We demonstrate that their findings primarily reflect experimental design limitations rather than fundamental reasoning failures.

Then there was a whole bunch of talk about that. There was a rebuttal to that rebuttal by Victor Martinez. Victor writes, putting aside the stunt of having Claude Opus as a co-author, yes, I'm not kidding, the paper in itself is a poor rebuttal for many reasons which we shall explore.

lore but mainly for missing the entire point of the paper in prior research by ai researchers such as professor some k-based name i'm not going to try to pronounce because i'll butcher oh you gotta attempt it you gotta attempt it Combahampti. I'm going to say Kampampati.

Yeah, I think you're closer. Then Gary Marcus chimed in again. Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper and why they fall short. And we're going to link all these in the show notes, of course. And then finally, it turns out that Alex Lawson's rebuttal was a quote-unquote...

joke. So reading from Alex, people were treating my elaborate poopoo post as real science. And while I'd aim to point out some real issues with the post, I hadn't really expected anyone to take it seriously. Look, I should have been more careful. The original version I uploaded had some genuinely terrible

sections, stuff Claude had written that I hadn't bothered to check properly. I had vibe-coded, if you will, the whole thing, and quite frequently asked for an entire rewrite if I wanted a small section to be different.

there was a computational complexity analysis that was just complete nonsense. If I'd been doing my actual job, or if I'd been working on an actual paper, I'd have been more careful. My thinking was that the whole point was to show that even Claude could find problems with the original paper. trying to write something good. I've updated the paper to fix the biggest mistakes for the first version, but the lesson's been learned. Once something's out there, it's out of your hands.

So, OK, I guess lesson learned. But anyway, that all that drama essentially happened in the time between when this rebuttal of the paper was put into our show notes and then WWC happened. So we looped around to find it. And, you know, there's Apple's paper. Then there was.

this thing rebutting it that turned out to just be I love how we're using vibe coding for things that are not coding a vibe coded quote unquote joke response that was kind of serious because it was like I do think there's problems but I'll have Claude help me write it and won't that be fun turns out not so fun

Lister Periato wrote, with regard to HDR on the 26 OSes, I've noticed that Apple is using way brighter HDR effects on interface elements in the betas for iOS 26. But I haven't read or heard anyone discussing that, including Apple.

I think that they started playing with this with the new Siri animations on iOS 18 and now it's 26. It's sort of everywhere. Is this available for developers to play around with? Well, it scratches my nerdy itch for novelty. More Chroma, more Luma, more power. I can see it risks getting old and gauch.

Thank you. At least I knew enough to know it was wrong. Anyway, old and gauche very fast, so I hope Apple's designers thread carefully. It could be used the same way that game developers use lights to guide players' attention, or it could end up blinding them out of their... train of thought i will note that we did mention this when we were discussing the uh x86 os's or i keep running as xos 26 the the os 26 is um

Yeah, I think Marco noted it, and I think maybe I didn't when we were talking about it in the past. But yeah, I've been noticing it more and more. It's a thing they're doing. So they did it with Siri. If you've noticed on your phone when the new Siri animation came, one of the reasons you might have noticed it is that it literally is brighter if you have an HDR screen on your phone, which most of us do these days. And they're using it.

in all sorts of places like uh i think like in tooltips and popovers on mac os they'll they're briefly in and when we say hdr we just mean brighter than the brightest white uh that your screen is set to display so As we discussed before if you have a Mac with HDR There is the maximum brightness that macOS will let you set the screen So if you just make like a window like a text edit window

How bright will the white in that window get? And it used to be like 300 or 400 nits, and now I think they'll let you go up to 700 or whatever. But Macs with HDR screens often go up to as high as 1,600 nits. But they don't draw the text edit window at 1600 nits because A, they would draw a lot of power and B, it would be blinding in many environments. So that's what we say by HDR brightness, something that is brighter than the cap on the brightness of plain white.

in just like part of the user interface, something that's not an HDR photo or whatever. And what they're doing in Tahoe and a bunch of places is making things like popovers briefly appear.

when they first like pop over when they first pop up briefly appear at a much higher brightness and then fade back down to like the full white level brightness and it's an interesting effect but i'm not sure it fits in because it's so it's not it's not ubiquitous it's just a few elements do this and they do it briefly so much so that you might think am i seeing something you're not it's it's a real thing that's happening but

You could go hours without seeing this effect and then have it appear. On the phone, obviously, the Siri animation does it every single time, so you kind of get used to it there. But on the Mac, you might think you're seeing things you're not. It's not a ghost inhabiting your computer. Those things really are briefly a little bit brighter than you would expect them to be.

Yeah, I'm noticing this all over the iPhone beta as well. Even mostly in like edges of things. Like when, you know, with part of the glass effects here and there, there's a lot of controls have like little glints. uh you know on the edges of like oh there's this is a reflecting light and it's hard to tell whether it's passing that hdr threshold or not but i'm pretty sure it is um and it's it's doing it right now it is doing it kind of

occasionally and subtly and in small areas of the bitmaps and stuff. Small areas of the screen. But it's definitely there. It sure looks like it's there. And I think this is...

On one hand, it kind of feels like cheating because apps can't really do their own UI very easily this way, like in a custom way. Like for apps to use... the the hdr range would require it requires a lot of hacks and has a lot of limits and it's it's not it's not easy for apps to do so basically what this will do is it will make

Apple's stock controls and Apple's built-in system apps that use this kind of technique or system features, it'll make them look way brighter and bolder and better and easier to notice than... what most apps are displaying most of the time. So this can be used to a useful effect. Like I do think the Siri animation being brighter than, than a hundred percent, you know, like that helps it jump out and show like, okay, this is a different.

level of the system that is above what everything else is going on in my screen. I also think it's yet another way, though, as they're expanding it now into a lot of these glass effects that we can use, but we can't really necessarily customize or make our own. What that will do is that will make... Apps that use the stock controls stand out even more than using custom controls. Now, as talked about with the introduction of this stuff, the developer ecosystem around custom designs right now...

Apple is basically putting a shot out there that says, look, we're going to make some really cool stuff. And if you use our stock controls, mostly unmodified, your stuff will look like our stuff and it'll look cool and it'll look different. And now it'll look even better with these little specular highlights on the edges of the glass and stuff that are even brighter than what you can do in your app very easily.

But that's not what most apps do. Most apps are made by big companies who want all their apps to look the same, and they use something like Electron or some kind of cross-platform toolkits and stuff so that all their apps...

look the same everywhere and the same on the web and everything is flat and everything will look old forever after this. That's the ecosystem they're playing into. So I think it's really, it's a bold move and it's... it might be a little bit of hubris but i think it's kind of in the best way that like apple is gonna be like you know what if you want to do your own custom thing good it's gonna look drab and flat compared to what we are doing it's an interesting

care it to bring people over to using stock controls. I don't think it will work for big companies at all. I don't think the big companies care. I don't even know how much Apple cares about them caring. But I think for... For the built-in apps and for developers who use the built-in UI widgets in a less customized way,

I think it'll be a nice little polish and it'll make our apps stand out even more for those of us who do stick to the stock stuff. I feel like it's kind of like using exclamation point important in a CSS document. uh in style sheets that's a way for you to get a property to take precedence over one that would otherwise override it due to like selector specificity or something uh but you only get one of those

You get one exclamation point important. There's no like exclamation point important X2, X3, X4. Although I'm sure there's CSS hacks to get that. So the analogy may not be perfect. But anyway. How many chances do you get to say, now there's a new layer of the UI and we're going to make that one brighter? Probably only the one or maybe two because there's only...

so much of a brightness delta that eyes can comfortably tolerate and it's great that screens are getting brighter but they're still kind of like the regular brightness and then the maximum brightness and may like i said maybe you go with the regular brightness a medium one and then the highest one if we get something into like fourth

thousand nits on a phone or something but i'm not sure that's the best way to add emphasis to a user interface it is possible to make a visual and functional and conceptual hierarchy without relying on large brightness deltas as a differentiator. I'm not saying it's a bad idea to do it, but I am saying that Apple should think twice about making this a foundation.

of its visual hierarchy i think it's fine for like we have a new design and this is a flourish that we can add to it but you really don't like they like this is why i keep going back to dollar sign important you really kind of only get to do this once and You should maybe for the next big redesign. I guess you could keep doing this, but maybe it's better to think of.

another way to show this layering again we've done it in computer interfaces for years and years without hdr so it's you know now that we have hdr this is another tool that we can put in the tool belt but i feel kind of like this is a uh, an exuberant explosion, uh, based on like, well, now we have this new tool in our quiver. We've never had this before. We can use HDR to differentiate things, differentiate things in the interface.

it's not great for battery life it is sometimes a little bit jarring i think it will be fun in the short term but i hope this does not last more than 10 years this is the mindset of my now like probably we only have to worry about this for like 10 years it will be okay yeah if apple's still around then which it probably will be so i'm not a giant fan of this i think it will be fun for a short period of time but i think there are better ways to do what it's trying to do.

With regard to iPadOS 26, John Edwards write, my hypothesis on the 12 window limit in iPadOS 26 is that it is a safeguard against unresponsiveness. On the Mac, if the Windows server stops responding, you can still move the mouse cursor itself around. even if it's beach balling, which is an indicator that the system isn't completely hosed. If window drag is slow, like John encountered when more than one user was logged in a few months back,

Too soon. Too soon. The cursor stays locked to the drag. It just feels like pulling the window through molasses. On a touch-first device, there's no guaranteed analogous affordance. If the windows on screen aren't responsive to touch, the system feels broken. As Marco pointed out, even on...

the latest and greatest iPhone hardware, Liquid Glass and the overall performance of the current beta feel slow. Beginning with the last few releases of iOS 18, my iPhone mini locks up in Apple's own apps and becomes unresponsive to touch. I can tell you from firsthand experience that this behavior sucks.

This is an answer that Federighi and others actually gave when asked the same question. I forgot the timing on this one, or whether John Edwards said this before those interviews were released or after, or if he'd seen them or not, but either way.

we're like uh they weren't talking about the 12 window limit which they didn't talk about too much but they were mostly talking about like why is it taking so long to get windowing on ios and they gave the power as a possible thing and then we talked about the 12 window limit and said well maybe that's why they're doing it because as federally said in his interviews like

We want it to always be responsive to touch because if it isn't, it feels broken. And I'm here to say that the Mac also feels broken when stuff stops working. I know what he's saying about like, oh, but like if the drag is slow, both the cursor. that the mouse is controlling and the place where it is on the title bar will stay together so it'll be slow together it still feels awful first of all and second of all there are plenty of ways that the mac os can and has locked up such that

You can't drag windows or the mouse doesn't move anymore. If you look back to the classic Mac OS days and. Even if that's not true, even if like, oh, I'm as long as the cursor stays on the thing that I'm dragging, I'm fine that it's updating at three frames every 10 seconds. No, you're not fine. It feels totally broken. Like there are just so many ways or like the beach ball, the beach ball appears and now you can't click anything. You're like, well.

the beach ball is still spinning i guess the computer is all right no so this notion that like and frederick was pointing out it's like well these touch devices they always have to feel responsive the mac should also always be responsive why is the bar lower from the mac like when terrible things happen to the mac user interface it all

also feels terrible it's not like we're fooled by like well it's just a mac it's fine if this was an ipad i'd be annoyed um and so i you know there's i don't think this is a I mean, as we discussed in past episodes about exactly how much power modern iPads have compared to Macs that ran Mac OS X with no window limit on them, I still feel like the main reason for the limit has to be either...

ram limits and their refusal to go to swap without a again i don't know the details of what the situation is like or just the plain fact is it's a small screen and they're trying to keep it simple i do wonder if this limit will increase as as time marches on but

you know 10 years from now when ipads come with 64 gigs of ram standard it'll be like well they can't handle more than 12 windows since you'd be like really mega was 10 ran 128 megabytes but this 32 gig ram ipad pro can't have more than 12 windows on screen at once so that's ipad os for you

uh it's moved by leaps and bounds this year but it is still holding itself back from being the unlimited bonanza that is mac os for some good reasons because again that's the selling proposition it is simpler it gives you Less ability to get yourself into trouble and making lots of windows is one way you can do that. But 12 feels weird and somewhat arbitrary. Maybe in iPadOS 27, we'll get a bigger dozen. Wow.

All right. Then, John, you had asked for, or not really asked for, but had talked about the idea of a glass iPhone. Can you recap what that was about, please? Yeah, a listener actually sent this in. We were talking about the rumors of liquid glass and the rumors of using the light sensors.

or the camera to figure out where the glint should be on the UI. This is back when we just had the rumors of what it was supposed to look like. We didn't know yet. And a listener wrote it and said, well, you know, I'm also talking about making an OS that would fit for the rumored all glass iPhone and the rumors, the patent they had for making a thing literally. entirely out of glass including the case the front the back everything just all glass um

And Alyssa wrote in and say, well, you could have the equivalent of that today if you just turned on the back camera and had the back camera show what was behind the phone on the phone screen. So when you were looking at your phone, any area that wasn't content, you'd see.

quote-unquote through the phone to whatever's behind it and guess what somebody did it artisanal asparagus water on mastodon has a cool demo movie uh they just mocked up an app doing this exact thing which is turn on the back camera and show the image but then put some ui on top of it uh it's really hard to do this you know this makes you appreciate vision pro but also understand why vision pro has to strap itself to your face you can't actually do this

in a perspective correct way without knowing where your eyes are all the time so the illusion is broken if you're not lined up it's kind of like the what are called the volume that big uh LED screen that wraps around actors that they use at ILM to do like The Mandalorian and a bunch of other shows.

That only looks good from the perspective of the camera. If you're standing not where the camera is, the background looks all wonky. Same deal with this. Like it's not perspective correct. But anyway, if you want to see what that looks like, there's a video we will link it in the show notes. Kudos to artisanal asparagus water. for mocking this up also like isn't it weird if you're simulating the idea of the phone being transparent isn't it weird that you don't see your hand

yeah i mean well they don't have a camera they can show that but they could they could do a 3d model of the hand like they do like the what are you the personas there you go see you can't see your face but we you just put your hand in front of it'll model your hand and then yeah it'll show your fingers yeah we scanned your hand and now here is a hand that looks almost like your hands. Nobody will notice probably asterisk.

And then finally for tonight, Joseph Humphrey writes, the name of the app you mentioned in an earlier episode that can translate natural language to terminal commands is Substage. And it's made by me, who Joseph self-proclaims himself as friend of the show.

Joseph Humphrey. That's not really how that works, but I appreciate the hustle. To be honest, I get where you're coming from when you express doubts about using it. As I was saying to my wife the other day, if someone else other than myself had made the app, I genuinely don't know if I'd trust it and want to install it either.

The thing that makes the difference for me is that one, I made it, so I know exactly what it's doing. And two, I added risk assessment as a feature. So it assesses commands instead of blindly running them. And three, you can inspect and edit the commands before running them too.

I'm also always finding new use cases daily that let me do things that I'm not sure I'd even think to do with ChatGPT, just because Substage is right there. For example, my most recently... quote, trim the sides of this video to make it 16 by 10 instead of 16 by 9, quote. Something like that would be a huge faff. I guess this is a Brit in After Effects, and I'm not sure how long I'd have to poke around and handbrake to figure out whether it's even possible or not there.

Yeah, I did. Actually, I have, like I said, I have this app in Sol. I couldn't remember the name of it at the time. So I wanted to put this in here. So to tell people what it was called, and I have actually used it recently. I don't use it much because like I said on the show, I'm a little nervous about even assessing the commands myself by looking at them.

Like, it's just, I don't know. But anyway, I had occasion. I forget what I was using it for, but it was something very straightforward that I trusted it to do. uh and i you know it was it was faster than going to my web browser window that or it was already open to gemini or chat gpt or something and asking it the ffmpeg command and then copying and pasting it sub stage does what you would want it to do which is

let me just do all that for you right here you know in the finder right click the thing or you know invoke the command or whatever and then just tell me what you want i'll do it right here so it's it's cutting out steps in the same way that A lot of these LMs save you time by...

doing something that you would have to do a bunch of web searches for first they'll just do it right in the window you can get even faster by having it integrated directly and the chat gpt app for mac os uh does very similar things but it unfortunately does not run an Intel Mac so I'm not running it on my main machine so I don't get a chance to use it.

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All right. There was a rumor that broke a few days ago. Apple is planning this reading from Mac rumors. Apple is planning to launch a low-cost MacBook powered by an iPhone chip, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. In an article published on X, quote, explained that the device will feature a 13-inch display and the A18 Pro chip, making it the first Mac powered by an iPhone chip. The A18 Pro chip debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro last year.

a more affordable MacBook could come in silver, blue, pink, and yellow finishes. The new MacBook is expected to enter mass production late in the fourth quarter of 2025 or early in the first quarter of 2026. Apple's hoping that it will drive MacBook purchases and account for... 20 to 28% of sales next year.

Additionally, a different post on MacRumors. MacRumors has spotted evidence of such a device in back-end code related to Apple Intelligence last summer and subsequently confirmed its use of the A18 Pro chip. The machine features the identifier Mac 17,1. So we'll talk about this rumor in more detail in a second. But the headline here, I believe this is straight from MacRumors, also from the store. Yeah, it's straight from Mingjuku. Low cost is the...

adjective modifier on this MacBook. Apple is planning to launch a low-cost MacBook. And the only thing we know about this, other than the size of the screen, which is the same as the current 13-inch MacBook Air, and some colors, is that it comes with a phone chip.

How much cheaper do you think the A18 Pro is than the M4? Hmm. Not that much. I can't imagine. I mean, I think it's cheap. I agree that it's probably cheaper. Not the least of which is because they make a bazillion of them because it's a phone chip and it is physically smaller. So just going by the math of like dye area, like the bigger you make the chip, the more expensive it is.

It makes sense to me that it would be cheaper, but I don't, especially on low end devices, I don't think the SoC is usually the most expensive component in the.

machine and the prices involved here especially since apple isn't paying somebody else's profit margins other than tsmc's on these chips like i'm thinking like maybe like 50 bucks 30 bucks less expensive like do you think that's the ballpark yeah i'm guessing it is i'm guessing the price difference is less than a hundred dollars yeah and so this rumor is that it's a low-cost macbook

Now, we'll get to what Marco has here in a second. You save money in lots of different places, but I haven't seen anyone really mention this. It's like, wow, a low cost, a cheaper computer would be a great idea. And you could use a phone chip in it and that would make it cheaper. And this is great. I'm like, OK, but if that was the only difference, if it's the M4 MacBook Air with the M4 swapped out for the A18 Pro.

I'm thinking best case scenario, this is $100 cheaper computer, which is not nothing because the thing is $1,000. So if you have one for $900, like that's good. But is that enough to justify this thing's existence or does this replace the M4 MacBook Air? Well, I think even if it is only $50 or $100 different cost to Apple,

When you multiply that a million times, two million times, five million times, that adds up real quick. And so I don't think you're wrong, but it wouldn't surprise me if they wanted to go after what seems to be a not very large delta just because on the scale in which they operate, that can make a huge difference. difference. Yeah. So that leads to Marco's idea for a game here. What could be removed or limited to make this cheaper than a MacBook Air?

other than obviously the a18 pro versus the m4 so let's just let's just take that as a given because all the rumors seem to agree that that's that's the deal with this including MacRuber is finding a thing that seemed to identify that chip number. So we've swapped out the M4 for the A-Team Pro. How else do you get money out of this machine?

Let's do a round robin. You've got to pick a giraffe. Until we run out of things that we can think of. I have a list here. Remove the keyboard. Some of them are pretty crazy. Just for context. The MacBook Air currently starts at a... thousand dollars oh isn't like a 900 for education or something yes something like that and then there's the walmart m1 macbook air still for sale for 650 yeah also for reference

The cheapest iPad they sell is $350, and it has a $250 keyboard option. So combined, if you want the cheapest iPad with their keyboard and trackpad that go with it, it's $600. And what chip does that one come with? That's the A17, I believe. So the base model iPad currently for sale does not run Apple Intelligence. The iPad mini...

It has the 17 Pro, so it can. But that's more expensive. So just the cheapest iPad they make. And I think you can look at some of the things they do with that cheap iPad to get that iPad down to $350 without the keyboard. And I think we're looking at a similar likely product here. Now, obviously, a laptop requires a keyboard and a trackpad. So I'm guessing...

I'm guessing this laptop includes, you know, the rumor already says a 13 inch screen. So a 13 inch screen, keyboard and trackpad. Now, the details on those can matter. So who'd like to go first? I'll go first. And this is the thing that I hope they don't do.

I seriously hope they don't do, but you can't rule it out. Remove RAM. um at the apple to eight gigs apple just bumped all of its max to 16 gigs and we celebrated how can apple screw that up you know how oh our new low cost model and of course because it's the lowest cost model when it comes to the eight gigs i really hope they don't do that but that would save them at least

$5? Yeah. And look, when you're trying to hit a low price, because again, maybe they're trying to replace the Walmart MacBook Air. with a newer product that can actually run Apple Intelligence and that they can keep making new models of over time. If they're trying to come in around 650, 600, 700 range...

They're going to have to cut a decent amount of stuff because here's the one thing they will never cut is margin. You know that. Apple will never cut margin. So they're going to make the same margins they're making on that $1,000 MacBook Air. So how do they get there? How do they shave off like a third of the price? Well, one of you goes. I did Ram. What's the next one? Casey? What about...

the fidelity of the display, and I don't just mean going non-retina. No, I'm serious. Not even just non-retina, but what if the backlight gets worse and weaker? It only does R and G, not B. That's it. You got it. Savings of one third. No, like a crummier backlight or, again, maybe non-retina. I would be stunned if they went non-retina, but it is a possibility. Well, you have to pick one. I wouldn't go with non-retina, but a cheaper screen. Yeah.

And I'm specifically thinking about like, you know, one of the things they tout in the MacBook Pros is, oh, it's 11 billion nits. Well, what if this is three nits, so to speak, you know? Well, the current MacBook Air screen and the M1 MacBook Air screen are also... already worse this could be you know one thing to consider is that that cheap ipad lacks p3 wide color and an ar coating anti-reflective coating yeah when you get down to these low-end screens it's difficult to like

but yeah cheaper screen is yeah is reasonable but i think i think the way they would do that would not be resolution because resolution is not that expensive these days like i think it would be no display p3 but should probably save them on some you know calibration also um and you know some certain like you know chip

support so no p3 and then you know different coatings or enclosure so maybe it doesn't have the ar coding because again like that's what they did to make that cheap ipad screen well the thing about screens and a cheaper screen is that given the age of like let's just say again the m1 macbook here given the age of that machine at a certain point or even just the m4 one like

The cost of the screen that's in the M4 MacBook Air is going down all the time because it is so old and just like so far away from the cutting edge. It's kind of like, I don't know if this shows a name for this parts curve, but like we've joked about it many times in the past, but it's a real thing.

Something that's like older technology gets cheaper and cheaper as it's supplanted by newer technologies. But then all of a sudden it starts getting more expensive again because it's so old that nobody wants it and people stop making it. And I do wonder if Apple walks that line with their screens that like, yeah, they get cheap because...

The machine they sell doesn't get cheaper and cheaper over time, but the parts that go into it do. And so I do wonder if when the A18 Pro MacBook whatever comes out, it might have a better screen.

than the m1 macbook air simply because you can't buy screens that are as bad as the macbook air anymore and it will still be cheaper just like casey's saying it will actually be a cheaper screen than the m1 macbook air screen was when that machine was introduced but now a cheaper screen actually ends up better so but I could see them saving costs there. Marco, what's your pick? All right. I have a lot of others, but my first pick is you got to think like...

In addition to using the low-end iPad as inspiration for some of these changes, you also got to think, how do they keep people who just want the cheapest MacBook from buying... This instead of like they want to preserve MacBook Air sales to no SSD. So how do they most importantly, how do they keep businesses from buying this one?

They want businesses to keep buying the Airs and the Pros. So, my number one pick is no external monitor support. And also, think about it. The A18 Pro probably doesn't support external monitors. It might. But yeah, that's a good call. You know, I'd just be part of the, if it's just part of the SoC, then they kind of get that for free and it's not really a cost savings. But yeah, I'm not sure that would...

saving that much money. I don't know if it would save them money, but I could see them doing it in software because the A18 Pro absolutely does support an external monitor because you can do that with your phone, right? I mean, I'm almost sure I've done this. Yeah, I think so. I'm pretty darn sure you can. And so I don't think that that would be a savings, but I do agree with you. I could see them doing this as a feature gate just to get people to upgrade, like you had said.

Because they want no businesses to buy this computer. They want businesses to keep buying the Airs and the Pros. All right, John? I mean, this is kind of in the same spirit as what you were saying with your thing. But use an existing, like use the M1 case design.

Like I'm assuming the M1 case design is cheaper than the M4 one, but like use a case design that they've been doing for so long that it's just incredibly cheap for them to do that. They have all the machines to do it. So no new case design. And it would also differentiate it from the M5 MacBook Air because it would literally still be the wedge shape, like that older thing. So yeah, use the M1 case design. And you think they would do that instead of making a new cheap case?

Oh, yeah, but it's like, there's no such thing as that when it comes to cheap, like a new cheaper to make case. Yeah, it may be cheaper to make, but the cost of developing that new thing, it would take a while to recoup that. The Tim Cook way is take some existing thing that we've already been making for. I mean, that's part of the reason the Walmart one still uses the way just like we already we already know how to make that case. We've mastered it. We have the machines for it.

uh and presumably it is cheaper to make them the newest and latest and greatest case so yeah i think they would just keep using that one well what if like you know their their cases have all in in you know the last for a decade or more they've all been unibody case designs um where you basically have like you know

big blocks of aluminum and you have these machines that like carve out sections of it. A cheaper way to make... metal cases is to have them be in different like flat sheets that are like screwed together or something what if like if they're actually designing a case from scratch to be inexpensive i would think that maybe that might have some significant savings of going like a multi-part case

I think I know what you're talking about because they used to make that before the original MacBook Air came out. Yeah, I think that's actually more expensive to manufacture due to the fastening issue. Like, I really do feel like the M1 MacBook Air case, given how slim it is and how long they've been making it.

may actually be the cheaper option. Cheaper in terms of repairs, even cheaper in terms of manufacturability for all the parts that don't have to be aligned and connected and precision made. It's just one top and one bottom. You know what I mean? There are pieces to it, but there's far fewer pieces. far fewer fasteners.

I do wonder if that would actually be a cost savings. And I think, honestly, I think they would never do that. They've had unibody again since the original MacBook Air. I don't think they're ever going back until there's a new materials breakthrough and they start making them out of like transparent aluminum or graphite or something. All right, Casey, what's next? Back on the chopping block. Here we go.

This might be silly, but it's one of the first things that jumps to mind is what about crappier radios, crappier Bluetooth radios, older Bluetooth radios, older Wi-Fi radios? They already do that for all their computers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? But, you know, where... where the MacBook Pro, the newest MacBook Pro, maybe has Wi-Fi 7. I don't even know if that's true anymore. I can't keep up. It doesn't. Yeah, I think we're still on 6E, although, funny you mentioned this, Casey.

The base model iPad does not have Wi-Fi 6E. It has Wi-Fi 6. There you go. And so, you know... Could you go even older? Would that be an advantage? I don't know. But, you know, some sort of crippled Bluetooth radio, Wi-Fi radio, something along those lines, where it's just not a modern chip. It's sufficient.

but not stellar. All right. My next pick, the ports. One USB-C port and a headphone jack, and that's it. Casey will love it. Oh, stop it. So no Thunderbolt support, no MagSafe, no HDMI, because again, we have no external monitor support in my theory here. So one USB-C port and a headphone jack, just like the old MacBook.

Yeah, actually, jumping slightly ahead here, Stephen Hacken wrote about this, and he was musing about the possibility of... an a18 pro and a mac and he says the immediate downside to the 18 pro is that it only supports usb 3 at 10 gigabits per second not thunderbolt that would make any mac with an a18 at its heart only capable of usb c

And that's fine. That's just, that's what they used to do with their law and computers all the time. Anyway, I think. Then there. Yeah, I think, I mean, yeah, having one port is crappy. But having no Thunderbolt, I think, is a given. And so the A18 is not a limiting factor there. Mine I expected, I thought you were going to steal this from me, is a pretty easy one. Smaller battery.

Smaller batteries cost less money. Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. You're stealing all mine, y'all. Yeah, think of the iPad. The iPad has a smaller battery, and the phone certainly has a smaller battery.

Kent, how small a battery can you get away with and still have accessible battery life? Because for every amount that you make that battery smaller, first of all, it makes the laptop lighter. But second of all, it makes it cheaper because smaller batteries cost less money. Yeah, that's pretty good. All right, Casey.

I'm out of any of the ones that I brainstormed when we started the game, but I think, did we already talk about a teeny tiny SSD? No, we did not. I said remove the SSD. I think a teeny tiny SSD, define that as you will. I think, you know, 128 gigs or something like that.

I don't even know what the... We're just making the world's most terrible computer here because this is what happens if your job is to remove costs. You can remove costs, but this is like we're rapidly getting to the point now where we would not recommend this computer. I think we may have passed the point where we would not recommend it. Oh, and actually...

Come to think of it, a corollary to what I just said is whether or not the SSD is smaller in terms of capacity, what about making it considerably slower? you know, where SSDs are still lightning fast, even crappy SSDs by and large are lightning fast. It might cost them more money to get a slower SSD. That's fair, but again, I'm just brainstorming. What if it's either smaller or slower? And that low-end iPad does start with a 128 gig model.

um and so yeah like and i did i looked for for instance though like as a point of clear of comparison like what are the cheapest pc laptops like in this price range like you know in like the 600 ish dollar price range what do you get on a pc laptop these days and you get 16 and 512 like that's that's a pretty pretty universal across the board yeah i know yes apple lives in

a different universe that's the other thing about this cheap laptop i know we're like talking about in the context of the walmart one which i think has no configuration options but like can you imagine them making a low-cost macbook like it's like you said with the minis the lower cost of apple makes a mac

you'll double the price when you try to add RAM to it. If that's even an option, like if there are any options to configure the RAM or the SSD, and this thing is cheaper than any existing Mac, you will literally double, you almost double it on the Mac mini. You said it's like a $600 computer, add RAM.

it adds four hundred dollars to a six hundred dollar thing so if there was a four hundred dollar mac mini adding any amount of additional ram that apple offers you would double the price of this so it's they're they're getting real close there with their obsession with uh you know ridiculous margins

So one idea I had is... What if they don't offer any options except color? You two keep stealing all my ideas. That's the nature of a draft. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. No options, but like the colors are in the rumor. But you're saying no options except for color. Yeah. No storage, no RAM option. Just like, here is the MacBook. That's what it is. You can pick yellow or blue or whatever. That's it.

Again, I think maybe the M1 Walmart one is already like that. Is that the case? I believe, yeah, you can't pick storage, I don't think, on it. It's just like there's one configuration and you pick color. That's it. All right. Well, I'm glad you didn't pick my one because it's the last.

legitimate one that i could think of uh no charger in the box oh that's a good one that's a real good one you're thinking like tim cook now what can we remove no box some assembly required it just comes shrink wrapped loose here it's just wrapped in a piece of paper it's biodegradable that's amazing yeah but no no charger they've been ripping that out all our products like everyone's got like it'll charge with any phone charger like no charger in the box

All right, I got a couple of the miscellaneous ones and then a big one. So my miscellaneous ones are, if you look at the keyboard and trackpad, the base iPad...

That $250 keyboard folio that it has, it advertises, first of all, non-backlit keyboard. I think that's a given. This thing will not have a backlit keyboard. Also, it says there in the... you know the keyboard folio thing for the ipad they call the trackpad a quote click anywhere trackpad but if you do the tech compare with other ipad stuff it it does not list it as saying haptic feedback so like I'm thinking it's actually not a Taptic Engine trackpad.

but they have somehow engineered the mechanics such that you can push anywhere, and the whole thing does indeed click down. I don't know. Actually, I've never used this keyboard fully, so I don't know that, but that's how it reads in the tech specs. So I'm guessing non-backlit keyboard and a non-Force Touch trackpad.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. Sounds terrible. It does sound kind of terrible, but it makes sense. All right. What are your other ones? Only two speakers. The MacBook Air has four with no spatial audio support. I think that's probably somewhat of a given.

And now the... The piece de resistance. I said they probably really don't want businesses to buy these. What if it only runs App Store apps? I don't think they'll do that. I don't think so either. Honestly, I don't think that would actually make it any cheaper. And honestly, businesses might like that more.

They only run app store apps and they love distributing stuff from their own enterprise app stores. You know what I mean? Like that solves problems for businesses, maybe. All right. So if they did all this, first of all, I think...

ibook has got to be the name like that would be such a great name right yeah whenever you try to think of something obvious and good regarding naming it's probably not what apple will do so yes ibook has come up a lot people have fondness for the name uh it would make sense Lots of things make sense. Yeah. Especially when it comes to naming. I mean, I remember when Apple made the iBook store. That was not a store that sold laptop computers. No. So yeah, we'll see what they do with that. I mean.

One of their past not-so-great-naming things required us to give a name to the MacBook Adorable because what was his actual name? MacBook. That didn't catch on.

The computer didn't catch on and the name didn't catch on. All right, slow down. No, the computer did sort of catch on. That's the problem. So that's part of the dream of this one is like, oh, it could be really thin like that one. But like if they're going to reuse the M1 case so much for that dream, you know what I mean? I don't know. We'll see.

I guess they could reuse that really thin case if that, if they still have the, like the machining tools and everything for making that. But yeah, it just like. People are attaching their hopes and dreams to this. They're like, oh, thinner, lighter, cheaper, lower power. Like, that's great. And they just start envisioning the MacBook one or the MacBook adorable, as we used to call it.

Because the thing we described is actually kind of like that. Like, that was so old that the screen probably is worse, right? And I did have a backlit keyboard, I think, Casey? Yes, I'm pretty darn sure. But that wasn't like, that wasn't a Walmart. special machine it was actually you know it was priced about what you would think it would be priced at it wasn't like the cheapest no it was priced quite a bit more than what you would think well you would think because it was so slim and you know

It was like the thinnest computer ever made. Like it was a breakthrough at the time from Apple. It was outside the realm of normalcy in Apple's product lines. Whereas I feel like this one will be well within the realm of normalcy in Apple's product line to hit a cheaper price point. So the final question.

what do we think that if they if they do this like you know this like really decontented laptop what do we think that price point is i think they'll just sell it for exactly the same price as they're selling the m1 macbook air so 650 ish Yeah, I think that's, I mean, regardless of how much it costs to make, I think that's what they'll sell it for. Like it will slot into that. And honestly, as the years go on, 650 is worth less now than it was when the M1 MacBook Air was first introduced.

Yeah, I think they'll hold the line at maybe $599 if we're lucky, but I feel like it's going to replace that computer. Yeah, I think I would go, again, like the base iPad plus its keyboard and trackpad case is $600. The Walmart MacBook Air is $650. The real MacBook Air is $1000. I think it should be around 600, but it will be like 750. I think they're not going to go as far down as we all want them to because they never do. And I think it's going to be...

closer to the MacBook Air's price than we feel that it should be. What do you think, Casey? I think What they end up doing is they basically replace the Walmart one and say, sorry, Walmart, you're cut off. And this is the new quote unquote Walmart. you know, MacBook or MacBook, iBook, MacBook Air, whatever they call it. And then they're getting all of the proceeds from it rather than Walmart taking a little cut. And I think 650 bucks or very, very close to.

So here's my other angle on the rumor of this computer and the idea of this computer. So we'll link to Jason Snell's graphs in six colors about the speed of the A18 Pro and how it compares to the M1. The summary is that... the 18 pro is 46 percent faster than the m1 and single core tasks and pretty much the same in multi-core but single core is all that really matters for just like sort of day-to-day tasks or whatever and this highlights

The interesting fact on this is one of my hobby horses that I'm always bouncing on on the show. Usually I'm talking about it in the realm of media catching up to the limits of human perception. which audio has and video is always racing towards. As computational power becomes cheaper and as it increases the maximum computational power available for a given number of watts,

increases over time, it starts to race past the needs for doing some basic stuff. Long ago, computing power raced past the point where if you want to type words into a document, It can be handled. It used to be that you needed a good computer.

to do that to like one word star or whatever on DOS. Like you need, you need, you couldn't buy a bargain basement one. You needed a computer that could keep your whole document in memory and maybe one that could have proportional fonts. So you need even a bigger, fancier computer like a Mac, which costs so much money. But now, you know, a little kid's toy that comes in a cereal box has more computing power than the early PCs. Like, typing, we have passed by.

Web browsing is a surprisingly complex and computationally intensive thing, and seemingly only getting more so as web apps become more complex. But I think an A18 Pro has no problem.

browsing the web or doing spreadsheet stuff or anything like you're doing word processing like that level of computation is now satisfied by essentially phone chips we do it on our phone people use their phones as their main computers they do incredibly complicated things on their phone you basically run photoshop on your phone your phone has so much more computing power than

whole swathes of computers that we use as the highest of the high end thing. So as this continues to happen, like the things people, regular people need to use their computer for like, going to a web page, using a couple of simple apps and doing word processing only become easier and easier to accomplish. So it makes perfect sense to me for phone chips to make their ways to the Mac because.

I don't know the right word for this, but like the available computing power is now more than sufficient to do the things that most people need to do with their computers. I'm not saying it couldn't be faster. People do occasionally have to wait for their computers, in particular storage speed and stuff like that. So it will continue to get better over time. But this machine makes so much sense to me. Not just as a way to save money. But recognizing that...

most people don't need this much power out of their Macs. The baseline power, especially with the advent of Apple Silicon, is so massive that it's like an M1 is actually overkill for a lot of people. And this is actually faster, 46% faster than an M1 in the ways that counts. Which brings me to my...

other idea about this computer which the rumors don't support but i think would be valid is what if this wasn't a low-cost machine what if instead this was just the bottom of the macbook air range

But they didn't take every ounce of cost out of it. And instead, just added it as essentially the... get way more battery life option it would have the same size battery as like the m5 and m6 macbook air in the same case with all the same features the same screen like everything the macbook air gets this gets the only difference is hey do you not need an m5

For what you do with your MacBook Air, get the one with the A20, whatever, processor, A18 Pro in it. Same size battery, but boy, you'll get even more battery life. And no, it's not that much cheaper. But like, instead of thinking of this as like, oh, this is the way we're going to get cost out of it, think of it as just a different trade-off between computational power and battery life, essentially. I could see that being a perfectly valid product. It's not what's rumored here, to be clear.

but i think the day may come when we see that as an option because if the if apple keeps doing the whole thing where it's like m something and then m something pro m something max and something ultra whatever the m something i feel like already with the m4 is more power than like a student needs to use web apps and word processing and spreadsheets for their college stuff. Like it's overkill. If you could get something that is less powerful, but also.

uses less battery power yeah that would be great and so i i hope uh that either either they They stopped doing the M, M4, M4, like they add something below that. And I don't think, honestly, the answer isn't just do M4 and then M5, M5 Pro, M5 Max or whatever. Something like, you know, using a phone chip. Maybe they've got the unified design. Maybe they unify the naming between the A chips and the M chips and just have a line of chips that they use throughout their products.

somehow name them in a sensible way where it's a scale up from the smallest and least powerful to the biggest and most expensive and they just are most powerful and just distribute that across their line of products without this artificial bifurcation between both the a series are for ipads and phones and the m series are for max unless it's for a vision pro but also some ipads have m's you see what i'm getting out there so that's not today but that's just something i'm thinking about that

A time may come when the M5, M6, or M7 is too powerful. The power of it is wasted on a MacBook Air, and you can make that a better computer for people by putting in a quote-unquote phone chip and giving it way more battery life.

This has got me thinking of a dark possibility here. What if this is not really... that much cheaper like you were saying what if this is basically the new macbook air maybe it goes from a thousand to nine hundred dollars and they just push the price of the air up because here's the thing if you look right now you know in the current lineup they sell the air m4 for a thousand dollars you know there's like you know disabled cores probably but like there's a thousand dollars

Then they sell the Pro, the 14-inch Pro, with the same chip, the M4, but with some MacBook Pro niceties, you know, the screen, the speakers, everything. $1,600. That's the cheapest Pro with the same chip. The screen is so much more expensive than a computer, though. It is, true. But it's not $600 more expensive. And there's other changes, too. So the MacBook Air...

to the MacBook Pro with the same M4 chip is a $600 difference. Although, again, there's probably a binning thing. Yeah, there's a binning thing going on. Without binning, it's a $400 difference. So... I wonder if this is really just a way for them to close that gap, and Apple never closes gaps by making things cheaper. I'm guessing maybe the cheap laptop is really only $900, and then they push the Air up to like $1,200.

Yeah, we'll see. Like, it's kind of a shame that these rumors seem so concretely set on the A18 Pro because that chip does not have a unified name. Like, they've unified the name of their OSs, but their chips are still weirdly bifurcated between A&Ms and 1R.

And a C for a different thing. And speaking of C. Don't forget the H's. Yeah, that's right. Speaking of C, Liam alum asks, do you think the new phone app in Tahoe might mean cellular functionality will be coming to Macs? And I would say putting an A18 Pro into a Mac also makes people think that lots of things make people think about.

cellular being in macs honestly there's so much in common between mac and phone hardware and has been since the advent of apple silicon that there's nothing new that they do including adding the phone app or making their own C1 chip or putting a literal phone chip inside a Mac that to me makes it

Any more or less likely because it has been so far over the edge of a thing they should obviously, obviously do for so long. Nothing else needs to change. Nothing else needs to happen. It's like, well, previously, I didn't think it would or should happen. But now that they put the phone app in time, they're different.

going to do it apple you need to do it no matter what it's it's like there's there's so much it's like the scales are like a million pounds on one side and a feather on the other and we're all just sitting where their arms are going well where is it yeah i mean and again i will remind everyone Every iPad since the very first iPad, including all of the cheap models of the lowest-end models of iPad, every single one has had a cellular option since day one.

Including the ones with an M chip in them, Marco? Surprisingly, yes. Including the ones... I didn't think anything with an M chip could do cellular. That's impossible. All this Mac hardware is in all the iPad Pros now, and yet... Or maybe it's the other way around, but still... all this all this ipad it's all in max now and yet we still don't know like yeah it is not a hardware consideration and it i'm guessing realistically it never has been like the reason we don't have cellular max

Whatever their reasons are, it's not hardware. Or software. yeah or services at this point because yeah so i i don't think the phone app makes it any more likely i think that is just a continuing thing where they take apps that previously were on the phone and bring them to the mac and the phone app is just one more of them great i like it it's a good thing it doesn't make me think

that cellular on the mac is any more likely than it should have been before because i feel like the likeliness is already pressing up to 80 90 and holding steady there that was a fun game uh i i have no idea what the heck is going to happen but That was a fun game. I appreciate it. Honestly, I think this is a very fun rumor. I love thinking about the idea of what if they take this other combination of hardware and make an even smaller or lower end Mac with it. That's interesting to me.

Or with way more battery power, cheaper gets people excited, more battery power gets people excited. I'm excited about the whole concept of computing power surpassing the needs of very common applications. And I think that's just about to happen to web browsing, which is...

pretty amazing yep i agree 100 a couple other quick thoughts um i was on upgrade excuse not upgrade uh clockwise this week we briefly talked about this and let me tell you If this portends, if this is leading to a reincarnation of the MacBook Adorable, holy mother I'm so in. Because if you remember the MacBook Adorable, leaving aside the fact that it only had one port, which kind of sucked.

One of the worst parts about it was that the processor was just dog slow. Even on a good day, that processor was dog slow. And the idea of having something that was that thin and that light, but not utterly crippled by a crappy Intel CPU. Oh, man, does that sound good. Oh, and also no butterfly keyboard. Sorry, trigger warning, Marco, but no butterfly keyboard. That sounds incredible. So, I mean...

I don't expect that's what's going to happen, but man, that would get me really, really interested. So proud of your pronunciation of dog, Casey. Yeah, I would love to see that because like ever since Apple Silicon, like we've been saying like, wow, we can't wait for them to make. a good version of the 12-inch MacBook with this new tech that they have. And they haven't. The M2 and forward MacBook Air is great. With its newer case design and everything, it is super slim, super light.

It's still not the same portability class as the ancient 11-inch MacBook Air or the 12-inch MacBook. Like, it's still significantly larger and heavier, you know, for the modern day. Like, the 12-inch MacBook was... I believe, two pounds, right? Like 2.0 or like close to 2.0? What was it? I think it was, yeah, around two pounds, something like that. Yeah, and I think we're currently at 2.4, something for the 13 inch air. Yeah, I don't know. So like, you know, we're still bigger and heavier.

We still don't have that magical like, you know, airplane tray table computer that we used to have. I know the rumor says a 13 inch screen. So it sounds like if that kind of computer is coming, this probably isn't it. But this does show maybe a path they can get there. If they decided for whatever reason that they can't do it with the full suite of M-chip series features...

although they do it in the 11-inch iPad Pro and the 11-inch iPad Air. So I don't know why they couldn't do it, but a proper 11 or 12-inch laptop. That's actually Mac OS, not just an 11-inch iPad, I think would be so cool in that two-pound range. I really hope they make that, and I haven't given up hope yet. I don't know if this is it, as I said, but I haven't given up hope yet. Just to be clear, based on the game before...

The price I was giving was for the price of the A18-based laptop computer that Apple would put out if it's going to be a low-cost model. It is not the price of what I think, after we removed everything in our game, the thing would cost, because I don't think Apple would remove all the things that we listed. of this thing to the point where it's a bad product uh real-time follow-up the weight of the macbook adorable 2.03 pounds or insensible units just a shade less than a kilogram

Oh, and Jason wants us to point out that tariffs may throw a monkey wrench into this whole thing. What else is new? Oh, and by the way, the 13-inch MacBook Air is 2.7 pounds. Oh, wow. So 2.7 versus 2.0 is a... big difference. We are not in that same class with the new MacBook Air. The new MacBook Air is a wonderful machine in lots of ways, but we are not in that same class.

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All right, let's do some Ask ATP. And Neil writes, with machines like the Mac Mini having such expensive storage, many people look at adding external storage with an external NVMe drive via USB 4 or a Thunderbolt enclosure. Are there reliability issues with having something permanently attached like this? For example, do you regularly run into it randomly being unmounted? Is there more risk to file corruption if you're using it for a backup?

Is Thunderbolt more reliable than USB 4? I don't have any strong answers for this. With a Mac Mini or something stationary, I suppose there's no reason you couldn't do something like this. But I don't know. If it were me, I would try my darndest. to find a storage solution that's internal that works both from a cost and space perspective but you know i'd get why you wouldn't want to do that for sure

As I think the one of us who's probably using has used and probably still is using the most external storage because I'm only using desktops and it's convenient to use for desktops. I will give a Casey style intervention here and say.

If you are using external storage connected to your Mac and it's randomly unmounting itself, that is not a way to live. You need to stop and either... figure out how to fix it or get rid of that hardware i know too many people who say like oh this happens all the time it's not a big deal it just you'll plug it in and remount it or it'll come back in a second that's not acceptable for storage that you plan on using like

It just, you can't have that. And the reason people live with that is because the problem that Neil was getting at here is it's not actually that easy to find reliable, inexpensive, external. storage like it's it used to be easier when it was much more common for people to do that but most these days most people get by with what's inside their computers so it becomes this narrower and narrower market and if you go on like amazon or new egg or whatever you can find tons of really really cheap

external storage from name brands that is nevertheless incredibly unreliable and flaky um and so everyone always wants to know what's the good one what's the one that i should buy and then you point out some thunderbolt enclosure and like yeah no seriously i'm not paying that much for that thing and it's like So to answer the other question, is Thunderbolt more reliable than USB 4?

usually but that may be because the thunderbolt stuff costs seven times as much and just just the cost difference means they're using more reliable components all around and the companies that make them cater to customers who demand more reliability like it's not just that you get what you pay for. It's like, it's,

If you don't need Thunderbolt, you would you would like to not pay for it. But every time I try to and I have so many external enclosures here, I try to find like an enclosure to fit like an SSD or back in the day, a spinning drive or whatever. I always felt like I was rolling the dice that if any of these. these external devices, whether they come with a mechanism inside them or whether it's a shell that I plug something into.

If they have any kind of reliability of things where it's like randomly unmounting, that's the end of that thing in my life. Like I stop you, but you can't, you can't have it. You will corrupt your data. Best case, you'll just lose some data. Worst case, you'll corrupt the thing. And you know, I didn't lose some data.

something didn't get written completely worst case you'll corrupt the entire thing so if you're ever in that situation and the drive keeps unmounting you need to fix that asap treated as a five alarm fire and i wish i had better advice on how to find something reliable but I mean, the best you can do is...

More expensive ones tend to be more reliable. In my experience, Thunderbolt things, both enclosures and drives tend to be more reliable. They cost so much more money, but I, you know, it's painful, but I do it like, for example, my, my one terabyte external drive that I currently have.

tahoe on is a thunderbolt drive which makes no sense because like i don't even know what the speeds the internal storage can do it's so old but it's just it's just so much more reliable for me than uh than my other usb based things that i have um

But yeah, don't like, and, and if it is reliable, yeah, you can use it for backup. It's fine. Like there's, especially if it's on a desktop computer, it's always plugged in. It's always paired up, especially if it's bus powered. Cause then it's meant to run on the bus. Don't put it through 17 hubs, like directly connected if you can. If it is reliable, by all means, use it as backup. It'll be fine. If it's not reliable, you need to stop using it. Yeah, definitely.

I use a bunch of external drives for things like Time Machine and occasionally an archive drive here and there. It obviously is harder to make reliable when you are constantly moving. the drives. In the context of a laptop, it's a lot harder to make that reliable over time because the cable will keep bending back and forth and maybe you might slowly wiggle it out of the port, the port might loosen. There's all sorts of stuff like that. But in the context of a desktop where it just sits

I have found for the most part, you're fine getting any modern USB thing and it's fine. Now, I have found there is basically no correlation. between the reliability of usb devices and their price or their brand name for that matter I have some rock solid USB hubs and cables and drive enclosures or external drives, external SSDs. I have some rock solid ones that are just like no name brands.

And I've bought some great ones from some high-end brands or well-respected names in the business that were unreliable pieces of crap. And the main reason behind a lot of this is like... When you're making a drive enclosure or a USB hub or something, there's only so many actual controller chips that are manufactured that will power something like that.

almost any brand that you get is going to be using the same, you know, one of a very small number of controller chips as every other brand is using. So I have found that like the... sometimes you just luck out and you get a really good one sometimes you get a bad one like john i think if it starts randomly unmounting it is done like you got to replace it like that that will never get better for that one but again i've had i've had most most of the ones i've had

are just fine and they last you know effectively forever and by the way on the chip thing one of the things you can do if you do want to try to research this is certain chip sets get a reputation for reliability or unreliability and if you can just look at the fleet of no-name brands or the fleet of name brands and find someplace that will list oh this one has this chip in it the all these have this chip and all these have that chip like even if there's only three possible chips

that are being sold on the market Maybe one of those is the chip you don't want and the two other ones are good. You can find that information out. It's annoying. It's hard to find because the manufacturers probably aren't going to tell you, but someone on YouTube will have cracked the thing open and said, oh, this cheap enclosure uses the good chip and this cheap enclosure uses the bad chip.

the same price you wouldn't know this unless you found the review like that's why it just feels like rolling dice sometimes because you don't know

Like it's not even a cost difference between these cheap controllers. Just sometimes there's good ones and bad ones. Or sometimes there's controllers that like macOS likes and has a good driver for and ones where macOS has a credit controller. Like it's not even always the drive's fault. So that's one thing you can do if you really want to dig into it. One other thing about Thunderbolt, though. Thunderbolt is a higher-end spec. It has more requirements.

a long time ago at some media briefing, I was talking to Greg Jaws about, I believe I was complaining about USB-C back in like, you know, the bad old days of the MacBook Pros with the touch bars and everything. And one thing that Jaws said, has stuck with me he said he said like thunderbolt hubs and thunderbolt devices are held to a way higher standard

than usb devices because every thunderbolt device has to be certified and it goes through a more rigorous process than most usb devices do now again that was many years ago um i don't know you know to what degree that is still true but I have so far, like in my computing life, I've had some flaky USB devices. I've never had a flaky Thunderbolt device. They've all been rock solid. Now, there are downsides.

In addition to them costing... usually at least three times as much as the usb equivalent um they also you know they tend to you know use more power that you know there's there's almost nothing that's thunderbolt bus powered like it's you know you're looking at external you know external power much of the time usually thunderbolt chips are bigger and hotter so the thunderbolt even something as simple as like a drive enclosure

That's going to have a big hot Thunderbolt bridge chip in it probably. And so that whole thing is going to be hotter and maybe it'll need a fan or at least it'll just be sitting there like melting your desk. By the way, my one terabyte external Thunderbolts drive is bus powered. It does not have a fan. It does get hot. Yeah, they get hot. Anyway, so Thunderbolt stuff, it is better, but it is also so much more expensive that for most people and most needs, it's not worth it.

I find Thunderbolt is best for hubs. If you want to have a port expander that you're plugging your laptop into with one cable and you want a bunch of ports that are going to be reliable, Thunderbolt's great for that. For just an external SSD... My needs don't need external SSDs to be massively fast. I'm mostly using them again in like a time machine or an archive context. So I just need my SSDs, my external SSDs to be large in capacity. I need like the four terabyte.

8 terabyte. So space is more important than performance. So I just go USB on those and it's been fine. Thunderbolt would have been even more expensive than they already were and it's just not worth it for me. But again, for hubs, definitely worth it.

And my backup drive, like my 8 terabyte SSD, is connected with SATA. Oh my god. Because it's internal, but like somewhere in there is some crappy ancient old chip that is... translating whatever that ssd is so we can speak sata to the internal sata bus on my mac which is not a thing that most people have to worry about but like that drives home the point that for things like backup drives or like clone drives or time machine drives um

if you want them to be ssds uh don't worry so much about the bus speed because it's just running in the background at low priority tasks and slowly siphoning bits over and the main advantage to it being ssd is the fact that it doesn't make noise yeah the the but the actual like protocol maximum speed for drives doesn't really matter to almost anyone, almost any of the time. So yeah, get the USB one. It'll be fine.

You know, it's funny. You were talking about Thunderbolt hubs just earlier today. The CalDigit TS5 Plus. is in stock enough that they're letting you order them from Caldigit directly. And so I've placed my order for my $500 Thunderbolt hub. Your dock costs as much as your computer if you have a Mac mini. Yeah, seriously. I'm excited to have it. So I have an M3 Max, so I don't have Thunderbolt.

I don't have Thunderbolt 5, but as far as I can tell, this should still work. It just won't be as quick. And I'm very excited to have an onboard 10 gigabit Ethernet port because the one on the TS4 that I have is two and a half gig. And honest to goodness.

Maybe this is a, not a placebo, but maybe I'm convincing myself of something that really isn't true, but I feel like when I'm moving video files like onto or off of the Synology, it is... noticeably quicker i mean it's two and a half times quicker to do that with the existing thunderbolt 4 now that i have hardware my ubiquity hardware that supports you know faster than gigabit uh ethernet and so i can only imagine how amazing it's going to be to have 10 gigabit

because I already put a daughter board, I think we talked about this, put a daughter board in the Synology to have a 10 gigabit ethernet port in that. And then now in a few weeks when the ships, I'll have 10 gigabit ethernet on my desk. And I am very, very excited.

All right, Patrick Harms writes, I remember Marco talking about block storage or iSCSI for something similar he experimented with to increase the internal storage on his Mac. What I want to achieve is reliable protected storage on a NAS, Unraid, or TrueNAS that can be used most efficiently by the Mac, single user only, for storing the photo library or bigger files. The connection, speaking of, is 10 gigabit Ethernet between both devices.

So what I used iSCSI for was to get around a limitation of backblaze. or a feature of Backblaze. So Backblaze, the online cloud backup that they've been a sponsor before, they're still my preferred cloud backup provider. And Backblaze will back up at no additional charge any external drives that are connected to the Mac.

I had gotten this huge Synology Nest a million years ago with everybody else on the show. And I was looking for a way to like, let me have cloud storage of what I think it was something like, you know. 8 or 12 terabytes of archive data without having that be directly connected to my computer in the form of an external drive. I wanted the NAS to be doing that. And so I did. And I went through two. So iSCSI is not natively supported by macOS. You have to buy an iSCSI initiator software.

I went through two of them. I believe the last one was the Ato Extend SAN family. I think that's still the only one that works. I could be wrong. This is terrible Mac software. The iSCSI initiating process is horrendous, and what you get is what you expect it to be. It behaves like a disk directly connected. However, the NAS can't see it.

Because what you're doing is you're having the Mac have its own file system, its own block storage abstraction. So all those files that are on that giant share being hosted by the NAS. The NAS doesn't see it as files. The NAS sees it as a volume of a format it doesn't understand. Oh, I don't think I knew that. That's fascinating. So this, it basically, it removes a lot of the reason to have a NAS because...

its applications can't really interact with the contents of that drive. So it's fairly limiting. Again, the software on the Mac is terrible. It did work, and Backblaze did happily back it up as though it was an external drive. But I feel like pretty much any other solution would be better. So in this case, having some kind of mounted disk image on what's otherwise just a regular file share.

That's probably not going to be as fast for the Mac. There might be more overhead in terms of shuffling those blocks back and forth into the disk image. But... That's probably the better approach. I disagree with that. I think that would be much worse because I think any Mac application. that sees your iSCSI initiated NAS storage thing as just a volume, like that's going to work the way it expects because you formatted it and at the time, probably HFS plus or whatever it was.

Like it's just treating it like a drive and it works like a drive and it, you know, any, any kind of. thing that's like oh you need to have you put it off your internal drive for apple intelligence or uh photo libraries can only be on a volume of this type or whatever it's straightforward now you can make a disk image format in any format you want but it's not like it's it's a disk image there's all sorts of

stuff going on behind the scenes to make that work that especially when it comes to things like file locking and the uh atomicity atomicness whatever the word is of operations in the file system all that can potentially change when dealing with um disk images so i would absolutely recommend against taking a disk image putting it on a nas and mounting that disk image on your mac and then putting your photo library on it like the that stack of things is a not a good idea

If you're not putting your photo library on it and you just want to have a disk image on your NAS and put files in it, that should work, but it's an incredibly inefficient use of your NAS. you know as you break down the layers it's like look just just mount your nas and use it as a network attached storage and unless you have some other need like i want backblaze to back this up or i want to put my photo library on it and in either of those cases

You really have to look at what you're aiming for. If it's just a bunch of archived data and you want to get it backed up as part of your low one price thing backblaze, iSCSI is... Probably the only solution but if you want to put your photo library on it I would absolutely not put a disc image on your NASA and mount it even if it appears to work. It's just

It's too many layers, it's too slow, and I don't know if that's even a supported configuration for Apple Photos. And I wonder if Apple would even know, because they would be asking you, well, what... disk image format did you use did you use a sparse bundle did you use a read write disk image did you use the new asif whatever that format was that we talked about on the past show like

And then how is it mounted? And what are the Samba options on the serving side and on the client side? And what version of macOS are you doing? Too many questions for something as important as a photo library.

Then finally for today, Matt Jorgensen writes, my son recently graduated with a degree in computer science. What do you recommend for new graduates looking for their first job? Well, first of all, congratulations. Second of all,

I would say, and I think we've talked about this several times in the past, but it's one of those things we should do periodically, like John talks about. If you can get them involved in some sort of open source, I think that that's very healthy. Either that could be open sourcing their own thing.

It could be participating in bug fixes or features in some other open source project. That especially I think would be great because that teaches you a lot about working with other people, working with other people's code and so on and so forth. So I think the first thing I would look at at is getting involved in some sort of open source and trying to make a name for yourself within a project. Be more than just an anonymous lurker in some project and see if that can help. My advice is

probably more general and not like as specific as Casey's was. If you have, if you're just graduated with a computer science degree and you have any interest whatsoever in. being involved in any kind of like startup or you know leading edge technology or like be one of a few number of people in a small company with a lot of responsibility

Now is the time to do it when you're young. If you don't have any interest in that, don't do it. Like, don't do it just because you think it's what people do. But if you're like, oh, I always wanted to be like one of five programmers working on a project or something. I always wanted to be involved in a startup or whatever.

assuming your son graduated with a degree and is like, you know, young, like in the mid twenties or whatever, the expected age, someone graduates with that degree. Now is the time to do it. Because it will only get harder to do that. And also having a job like that early in your career where you are one of a small number of people will force you to learn how to do a whole bunch of stuff.

And that will make you a much more valuable employee when you get tired of the startup world or when you want to go in a company that's not going to go under later. You will have so much more.

real world experience and knowledge than people who went to work for ibm right out of school to throw ibm under the bus but like went to work for some big company so when you go for a big company you do learn things on the job but it's a much more stable environment where what's expected of you you're not you don't go in there and it's like now you have 17 jobs and you got to do all these things you got to learn them all now they're gonna it's gonna be more sustainably paced let's say

but you will learn less. It will take you longer or your skills will be more narrow because there's 75,000 other people who do their own specialized jobs. This is not to say that like do startups when you're young because that's the time to burn you out.

You shouldn't have burnout even when you're young. But what I am saying is if you are in a company with a small number of people, it can still be a healthy work environment. And also you will still be required to learn how to do way more jobs because there's just not enough people. So someone's got to figure out how to.

administer this Linux machine. Congratulations. You're the sysadmin now. Someone's got to learn this new API or this new language. Congratulations. It's you and one other person. Like you will learn so much. And you will be battle tested. And when you, your company inevitably goes under, because that's what happens to most startups when you apply for that job, let's say at Apple or Google or whatever.

you should look a lot better than the other candidates because you will actually literally know how to do more stuff. Also, you know, just money-wise... A pretty good career strategy is go work in the startup scene and get as many shares of as many companies as you can. Because over time, some of those will end up being worth money.

Not all of them. Maybe not even most of them. Or in my case, none of them. The way venture capital works is VCs make a whole bunch of very risky bets and they tend to come out ahead because... A few of them pay off big. You can do that as an employee getting shares along the way. You're playing your own version of that game. So if you work for a startup, the smaller and earlier the startup...

the more shares that you will get and the more they will be worth over time as a percentage of the entire company. Then secondly, once you are in the startup scene in your city or in your part of the industry. When one startup dissolves, you tend to get picked up by other ones or it tends to be easier for you to stay in that community because startup founders and their investors all talk to each other. And so they know like, oh, hey, this.

This startup just collapsed over there, but oh, they had a really good CTO. I'm going to try to hire them or whatever. There's this whole network that you get by being in the startup scene that people in your city will know you. And so even if... a particular job you know ends up going under or not working out that well usually it's easier for you to get more because you are in that that like social click really um and obviously it depends like you know

what city you are in like what region what type of what part of the industry are you in that that all matters but it's like like swimming to the professions it's very much based on who you know and what your track record is and the startup scene is small and they talk a lot and their investors talk a lot it worked out well for me but you know a lot of that was luck obviously but

I didn't just have shares in Tumblr. I had shares in a few different things, and not all of them worked. Some of them I lost money. Most of them I came out ahead, or at least it was like a push. Make a lot of bets. And I know a lot of people who have done this. Work for startups. See how much little slices of equity you can get. And I'm not saying don't also work for a salary.

Everyone there is getting a salary. That's what the investor's money is for. So get your salary and also get as many shares as you can. Place a lot of bets on those tables, so to speak. chances are one of them will pay off eventually or more than one. And that's a nice way to get a lot of bonus money. And that's very much a good path when you are young. Because like John was saying, you have...

You can take more risks when you're young. Startup founders also tend to be young, and there is insane ageism in this industry. So by the time you're in your 40s, startups won't hire you anyway. That's terrible, but it's the reality. It shouldn't be that way, but it is that way. So while you're young, go play that game. Collect your shares and see what happens later in life as a result. You can always go work for the big tech companies later.

But the startups are very much a young person's game. And then finally, I would say for you to stand out when looking at employers or when having employers look at you, one way to do that is to be in their boys club. So, you know, if you are also like a Stanford graduate or whatever, I don't know. I was not any of those things. So I couldn't play that game. The version of the game I played was I cared a lot. And.

I could program. Now, I don't mean I was a great programmer. I wasn't, and I'm still not. I meant I could program, period. You'd be surprised if you haven't... the applicant pool for a programming job out there, and if you haven't interviewed programming job candidates, you may be surprised how relatively few of them both care, and can program.

Now, over time, this has gotten better. There's more qualified programmers now than there used to be. And you're entering right now what's probably a pretty crappy job market because there were all these tech layoffs recently. And so there's a lot of unemployed programmers right now who do know how to program. That's temporary. That will change. When you are applying for jobs, if you show that you care.

And if you can demonstrate, it doesn't have to be anything massively impressive. If you can just point to any code you have written, whether it's like, here's a GitHub project for a simple app I made, you will stand out from that. And again, it doesn't have to be anything incredibly impressive or complicated. Just if you can point to a GitHub repo that you made and say, I completed an app that does a simple thing.

I guarantee you almost none of the competing candidates for that job will be able to point to any code they wrote that works. That kind of thing makes you stand out more than you think. And if you go into the interview and you show that you care. That you're into programming and that you are interested in this company. Do some research about the company you're going into and figure out what's important to them. And you can show them like, hey, this problem that...

It looks like you're working on. This sounds really cool. And here are some thoughts I might have on it. Like, show that and you'll be fine. I feel like, Marco, you're overestimating the expected return on working for lots of companies in terms of equity, because I think the answer is it's basically zero.

like rounds very quickly to zero because it's just the odds are so low and you'd have to have so many different jobs to try to increase those odds and having a lot of jobs itself exhausting i mean even if only just dealing with the the the 401ks that you have to roll over into each other and dealing with that hassle. Like I can tell you that all the companies that I had equity in, in my startup years netted me their losses or zero dollars.

The only company that gave me any equity that was ever worth anything was my very last job before I quit to do this podcast. And that was a job that I got when I was in my 40s for a very established, very big non-startup company.

that you know and my equity wasn't worth that much but it was worth more than zero or more than negative so i think that's the expected experience not saying you shouldn't do it like by all means do it but like it can be exhausting to try to like i gotta put lots of bets down because then you're just having a lot of jobs and on the flip side

of this on a non-startup side that's why i preface this by saying if you're interested in this if you're not interested in that world and don't want to be it at all and just want to get a good established job

you can do that and it's fine. And like, I would actually recommend that to a lot of people. It's what I hope my children do. I hope they don't go into the startup world. I hope they get a job with a big established company. Um, but if you do that, my advice to someone like, applying to apple or amazon or google or something is what your goal should be when getting that job especially if you're just out of school is you need to learn how to be a worker essentially learn how to be

an employee learn how to be on a team you're going to be learning how to to interact with people and work as a team to accomplish a goal and this sounds dumb and you think you did it all yeah we had group projects in school it's exactly the same thing it's not

That's the main skill that you should concentrate on learning. I know you're thinking about all, you know, what kind of programming things we need to know to get past the interview. And that's all true and everything. I'm like, what am I going to do in my job or whatever? But the main thing you're going to do in your job was guarantee for the first five to 10 years.

is learn how to be an employee. Learn how to be a coworker. Learn how to work in a team. Learn how to be successful in that environment. Success defined as... learning how to accomplish the goals set before you as a team which sounds so dumb and simple but it is literally the hardest thing and they don't teach it that in college and they don't teach it that in high school really they try to give you good projects they try to have that one course about teaching you that like

agile methodology or something that's not what the it's not it right it is a social skill that is integral to being successful in big companies with lots of people working as a team. In a startup, you can get away with being, you know, just a renegade lone wolf and doing your own thing and having 50 jobs and everything's all crazy anyway and whatever. That's the environment where you can get away with that. That's the environment where you can, you know.

know flourish without those skills but you go work for a big company no one wants that person there they need someone who can work as a team together on you know on goals that are agreed upon like it's a totally different environment and as you get older

You're not going to want to work in those chaotic startup type things. You're going to want to work for one of those wealthy companies that can afford to give you a good salary and good vacation and good benefits and a stable job and everything. And those companies require you to be a good employee and worker. And again, in all these cases is the main thing I'm going to hammer home to all my children once they get up into the real job market.

Do not let the job exploit you. Don't let it burn you out. There's all sorts of things you have to be wary of to be because your employer is not there to take care of you or to love you or to make sure your life is great. So you have to be on lookout for this all the time. But also you have to learn how to be a worker in these big companies. And so.

I mean, the ideal thing is if you really, really want to do startups, do them when you're young and then transition over. But when you make that transition to over to the big companies, you're still going to have to learn all that stuff about how to work as a team, how to work together, how to work in a more professional environment.

Um, and I've seen a lot of people have very long careers and really struggle with either with that transition to a big company, or maybe they start off in big companies and just never learned how to work with people and they don't succeed as much. So there you go. That's, uh,

New computer science graduate employee advice 2025. One more rebuttal of John's being down on getting a bunch of bets. When I say place a bunch of bets, I'm not saying change jobs every six months. I'm saying change jobs every few years, like the way most people in tech do. That's not enough bets then. Well, I mean... To change the odds from zero. Well, but also...

It matters, obviously, what bets you take. You can't necessarily know ahead of time what will pay off, but you can be in areas that are more or less likely to pay off. Typically, the way it has gone for the last 30 years in tech is if you want a higher chance of building meaningful wealth from stock shares and stuff in early companies.

The earlier you're in the company, the better. The bigger role you have, the better, obviously. But also, what area of the industry the company is in and what phase that's in in its maturity matters a lot. You want to be in a part of the industry that is young and experiencing a whole bunch of growth and change and flux. So, you know, obviously, you know, when I started with Tumblr in 2006, that was consumer web apps like that was very much still a big thing then.

Later on, iPhone apps, mobile apps have come in. Now that area is AI. If you want to maximize your odds, try to get into an AI startup. That's where all the action is. If you're listening to this for some reason five or ten years from now, that answer might be different. You've got to look around. Where is the action in the industry right now? What is new and growing and changing and lots of flux? Go there.

and get some bets placed on that table, and your odds are not too bad that one of those could work out pretty well. Instead of zero, they're .00001. I think you'd be surprised. And again, place a few bets and see what happens. And the whole time, get salaries anyway. And then you aren't... You know, you aren't out any money, you know, so to speak, but it's not a bad strategy. And again, like...

those people will all then promote you to the other startups in that community. So if you show that you're a great programmer or even just a good worker who does their job and is not causing problems for people,

two or three years from now, you're looking for a job and your old boss might be a good referral to tell some new company that they're friends with, like, oh yeah, I know this person. They're a really good programmer. That works in big companies too, by the way. That's just the general advice when you have any kind of job.

Your next job will probably come from somebody you knew at your first job or like one or two degrees separated. So even if you go work for a big company right out of school, it's another reason to learn how to be a good worker is because some person that you work with is going to be at some new company. And that's the way to get your foot in the door there.

decide you don't like this company you want to go to a different one you get laid off whatever you're looking for another job you need that leg up it's it's it's who you know um and it's and it's what they think of you if they know you but hated your guts probably not gonna hire you yeah maybe don't ask them for a reference

All right. Also, authority is taken, not given. All right. Thank you very much for listening, everybody. Our sponsors this episode were Squarespace and Delete Me. And you can... Of course, sponsor us directly by becoming a member. Thank you to our members as well. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking about Apple's newest app store changes for the EU.

If these are even still the current ones by the time this episode is released in a few days, we'll find out. You can hear us talk about that in overtime and many other member perks by joining us at ATB.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.

And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them. C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N

A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Technical So on a past episode, Casey mentioned that he had finally succumbed to our nagging and started paying for YouTube so that his family won't see ads on YouTube, which is the thing that both Marco and I recommended as...

A no-brainer thing that you should do because kids watch so much YouTube and we don't want our kids to see ads. And let's stop that from happening by paying a small amount of money per month. It's well worth it to protect your children from ads. Casey has already exposed his children to too many ads, so he's better now.

than a better light than never but then during some conversation that you have like a master that i heard you say that you were you mentioned on the show you're like oh i started paying for like youtube light or something i don't know the name of the product so i'm like well whatever he found the whatever thing that he could pay for that was

uh, gave him what he wanted and nothing else. But someone was, someone saying like, how do you get your, maybe your kids are still seeing ads. Maybe that's why Declan didn't mention to you that he, that he thanks you for getting rid of ads because he's still seeing ads because.

the thing you paid for is not a family plan, but only allows one person, one account to not see ads? And your answer to this person was, oh, I just let Declan use my account on YouTube. Is this all correct so far? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm here to tell you not to do that. Okay, why not? I mean, lots of reasons. First of all, you're being cheap, but let's set that aside. Yes. Second of all, your son is logged into your Google account right now.

Well, no, this is only on the shared Apple TV. But yes, I mean, strictly speaking, that is correct. That's not good. He can read your Gmail. He can delete your Google account. He can read everything in your Google Drive. He can't accomplish any of that on the shared Apple TV. Can't accomplish? Kids are very clever. Second of all, setting all of that aside. Do you want your son's videos and your video history mingling with each other? I have long since given up on that. And the recommendations?

affecting each other. Oh, yeah. My recommendations are trash. I can tell you that pretty soon, Declan's not going to want you to see what he's looking at. Well, that's also fair. And then I'll have a different problem. And then I'll probably have to spring for the family plan. But for now.

I didn't want to pay for it at all, but it became unbearable. So I wanted to pay for the crappiest, cheapest thing I could to get away with it. And that's YouTube Premium Lite, which is $8 a month, and it gives you an ad-free experience. with a couple of asterisks. I will say that if you read, because somebody else that reached out on Mastodon was like, or maybe it was an email and said, hey,

Does this actually work? Because if you read their documentation about YouTube Premium Lite, it sounds as though you're getting one fewer ad as opposed to no ads. And I think the real brass tacks of it is that... for watching music videos or music things.

I believe I still do get subjected to ads, but for pretty much anything else, I don't. Or at least that seems to be what's going on. First of all, you need to pay for the better one. Second of all, you need to not let your son be logged into your Google account is the keys to everything. How long do you think it'll be before he figures out exactly how?

much power he has now that he can get like password reset emails to your account like this is this is just i'm not saying he's a bad person i'm saying kids and eventually teenagers this is an irresistible amount of power that you have given him and it's a Bad idea. I guess. Also, he doesn't want all of your videos in his browsing history and recommendations. Yeah, he's not going to want that pretty soon either.

I mean, yeah, that time will come, but it's not here yet. And so I'll cross the bridge when I get there. Don't let your kids log into your Google account. It's your main account for all of your stuff. Well, like it's because it logged into YouTube means logged into Gmail, which logs into Google Drive being logged. He could be in our show notes right now deleting everything.

That is true. Well, that's true asterisk. Again, the only mechanism he has to do this is the Apple TV, and there's only but so much damage he can do on the Apple TV. Haven't you detailed how kids get past all this?

So kids get past all the thing on the Chromebooks. Kids will find a way. Life will find a way, Casey. They're like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. You cannot give them this access. I understood the reference. God damn it. No, I understand what you're saying. Also consider, though, that you are all in on.

Google stuff and I am pretty much all out. I do have a Gmail account that I don't use. Isn't that where your Casey list stuff is all? No, no. Remember I'm on fast mail, baby. Oh, right. You have some protection, but still it just, it's, this is not a good idea. Pay the extra $7 a month. Give your whole family ad-free YouTube on their own accounts.

But there are no other accounts but mine at the moment. There will come a time. There will be. There rapidly will be. Declan should probably already have one. Someone asked about this, like, oh, they don't let you have a Google account unless you're X years old or whatever. If you have to lie about their age to give them an account, you probably should. But I think they're a kid account.

If you can tell the truth about their age, do so, and then eventually their kid accounts will transition to adult accounts. Yeah, my son recently turned 23, according to Google, because he has a... We had the same idea. I got the YouTube premium thing for the family years ago, and I created the account for him with his actual birthday and actual age, and then it's like, oh, he can't do anything on YouTube because he's below 13.

Now he's actually legally above 13, but for all those intervening years, if I wanted him... to have an ad for YouTube experience, I had to create a second child who didn't exist, who was above 13, and have him log into that account. It was a mess, but I'm sure everybody knows that. Yeah, I mean, I'm not necessarily arguing with anything that you're saying, but...

I think the priorities that both your families have, I suspect my family will get there, but we aren't there today. And when we get there, I'll reevaluate. But for now, it's fine. So when he's watching YouTube on his iPad...

He's seeing it. He doesn't have an iPad. Well, he doesn't have any kind of computing device. He doesn't have a phone, doesn't have an iPad. He has, currently he has, I forget which one it is, but he has an old hand-me-down iPhone from me that doesn't have any service. So it only works.

where there's Wi-Fi, which for him basically means it only works in the house. And he doesn't watch YouTube on that. It's not installed on that. No, that day will come very soon. Oh, I'm sure it will. Again, I'm not trying to say that you're wrong or that this isn't. my future but it's just not something that happens now and honestly our house today again i know this will change i

Absolutely understand this will change. But today, I have a handful of channels I watch on YouTube, but not many, and that's about it. I don't ever typically just let the algorithm wash over me. I don't watch very much YouTube. Declan will occasionally put on a...

PrestonPlays, which is a Minecraft YouTuber that he absolutely adores. Oh, yeah. We had a big Preston phase over here. Mm-hmm. I mean, he seems... fairly innocuous um yeah it was fine does he shout all the time i mean i don't know but suffice to say that he'll you know dual screen playing minecraft on the switch as he's watching preston sort of in the background and also sometimes watching whatever um Michaela's doing on her fire tablet thing.

But right now, Aaron never watches YouTube pretty much ever. So again, it's not a priority for us today. I cannot stress enough because I can hear the feedback emails flooding in. I understand this is my future. I get that. But it's not my present. Well, don't make this like the Glass of Water repositioning episode. I understand what you're saying. It was a warning that was not relevant at the time, but became relevant. So very, very similar.