659: Lose the Ear Lottery

Very often when we record, stuff happens the day that we're going to record, hours before we record. Stuff happens. Drives me nuts. Late-breaking stuff. Sometimes it just has to go in the notes because it's just, we got to talk about this. But other times it's like, ah, that'll keep until next week. And this week I was, today and the past couple of days, I saw a bunch of stuff coming. I'm like, oh, that'll keep until next week. Oh, that'll keep.

I don't know. It's not even that interesting. I don't even know if it's going to make it into the show because it's like, well, whatever. We've already talked about all of this.

But it was like an extravaganza of Apple leaks of products that we've already talked about. So it's not like, did you know they're going to make another iPad? Yeah, we knew that. Did you know they're going to make more MacBook Pros? Yeah, we're not surprised. Did you know the iPad's going to have the M5? Yeah, we're not surprised. But the leaks are getting so bad that, like, one YouTube channel had, supposedly, the iPad Pro M5.

Like just physically there. They took it out of the box. They booted it. They benchmarked it. It's nuts. I mean, I think that same channel had like... one of the earlier things like uh an old macbook pro or something and in some ways it's like wow this is like an amazing leak on the other hand it's like well i mean it's The iPad Pro M5, it looks exactly like the iPad Pro M4, but it's got an M5 in it. And the M5 is a little bit faster than the M4, and it's like the most boring leak ever.

I don't know. I don't know what's going on. And that's, you know, in addition to all the FCC leaks because our government can't do anything competently anymore. So all of Apple's secret plans... Well, right now it's not doing anything at all. Yeah, there you go. Anyway, I just thought it was funny. Like, we probably won't mention it on the show because honestly, like...

We've already talked about all the products that have leaked, and there's no new information in them other than they exist. Like, we know they exist. So we're just here waiting for the October event, but it is still funny to see, again, assuming it's real, an M5 iPad Pro.

on a YouTube channel before Apple has announced the product. Yeah, that is a remarkable... leak or i mean theft i mean what however however it happens obviously like that's not you got it theft yeah like there there's no way for this to be on the up and up like how this person got this it's definitely theft or i mean it could be entirely faked but like it just seems like some

much work to fake it and it's probably less work to steal it. Yeah. And I think that, like you said, this person or this channel had something pre-release. I think it was an M4 MacBook. yeah i think they had the the physical like the plain m4 macbook again one of the most boring leaks ever because it looked the same it like the m3 one but now it has an m4 inside and the m4 is faster than the m3 but otherwise it's the same product it's the most boring thing

ever to leak. But on the other hand, it's legitimately, seemingly a product that has not been announced in the flesh on a YouTube channel. Yeah, that's... wild like i it's like when you think about like the level of leak that is it is i think it's kind of funny that this person has now gotten two seemingly legitimate products this way but yes they are like the most boring like spec bump why doesn't he get the mac pro come on no one cares about that you can steal that real easy it's heavy i guess

All right. It is as we record this October 1st, which strictly speaking means it is no longer Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. But the Relay for St. Jude campaign does hang out for another few days. And so we will ask you. Quickly, one last time, to go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP, and throw a little bit of money their way to try to give kids stricken with childhood cancer more tomorrows. This year we've had some people write in and share with us some personal stories.

We heard the story of a young girl at a year and a half who lost her battle with cancer somewhere in Europe, which was terrible and awful. But still, the hospital in Europe used some St. Jude treatments and techniques. Well, Patrick writes in, in case you're interested in specific St. Jude programs to mention, I wanted to flag one that's near and dear to my heart, supporting action for emergency response or SAFER.

This program helps kids with cancer in Ukraine both to leave and to get the treatment they need if they can't leave. This builds on a similar program they ran for displaced children with cancer in Lebanon. And they're continuing to learn from this program in order to make a kind of global crisis response blueprint.

St. Jude has countless programs worth mentioning, and there's no wrong answer when deciding which of their initiatives to praise. But one of the five-year-olds in my daughter's kindergarten is a Ukrainian refugee. And as harrowing as his mother's tale is,

tale is of fleeing their hometown with just what they could fit in their car as the sounds of explosions and gunfire grew nearer. I cannot imagine the added burden of wondering where your child's next dose of life-saving medicine will come from on top of that. This is a quote from Patrick. I think truer words have never been spoken. Patrick writes and finishes, St. Jude and their local partners are true miracle workers.

Couldn't say it better myself. Unless one of you has something to add, I think we'll just cap it for this year there. But please, if you have any money to send St. Jude's Way, no amount is too small. No time is too late. although it would be preferable the next week or so, go to stjude.org slash ATP, and we'll talk to you again in late August of next year. Additionally, as we're doing the show at Ministervia,

We have a new ATP member special. We do these once a month. We do these member specials that are obviously just for members where we talk about all sorts of different things. John, do you want to do a quick nickel tour of what sorts of member specials we do and then perhaps introduce this particular one if you don't mind?

Oh, sure. We've done all types of ones. If you become a member and you want to go way back to the beginning, you can hear us eating weird food if that's a thing that you're into. Sometimes we watch movies and talk about them, which is fun because the other two hosts of the show are not big movie buffs. So a lot of things are new to them. Um, we've talked about, uh, let's see, uh, we do tier lists where we, uh, rank things in a typical tier list structure.

Usually technology things, computer stuff, but sometimes things like storage media and connectors, those can be surprisingly contentious. We've done top four, which is an homage to Marco's top four podcast, where similar, we just pick our top four of certain things. We also have a subcategory for developer topics. We haven't done many of those, but the few that we've done have been very popular.

That's what we've done this month. We've gone back to the ATP dev well to do an episode for developers. Like we know everyone who listens to the show isn't a developer. I know we're all developers, but we try to. keep it keep the content not you know just to be all of only of interest to developers but every once in a while developers get a little cookie and uh this is one of those months nice what kind of cookie is it john

I don't know. Chocolate chip? I don't know. Computer chip? I see what you did there. Yeah, so we did ATP dev computer science curriculum where we discussed our upbringings in computer science and computer engineering and how that compares and contrasts.

to today and also what did we get and what didn't we get from our educations in the what was it mid 90s for you and early aughts for marco and i uh so yeah it was it was a lot of fun as always we had a lot more to say about this than i expected but hey it's us But I enjoyed it, and I think you will too. So if you're not a member, Marco, what do you do? Go to atp.fm slash join and give us some money, and you'll become a member.

Excellent. And obviously you get the entire back catalog of member specials. You get the bootleg, if you so desire, where you get the completely unedited version, which is usually me swearing a lot and or screwing things up. You can get an ad-free version of the feed. discounts on time-limited merchandise. I really think it's a really solid offering. I really, truly do. And so, atp.fm slash join.

Yeah, and if you do join and you want to see the whole back catalog of specials, they're in all the regular feeds and everything. This is all in the FAQ on the website. But you can just also go to atp.fm slash specials to see just the specials. There's a dedicated feed with just the specials. So if you just want to catch up on them, it's pretty easy.

And this one about computer science curriculum, to be clear, the goal was to talk about like college, like you go to college, you major in computer science. What are the courses? What do you learn? What are you supposed to learn? What are they trying to teach you? But the topic is so expansive that even within the realm of that, I.

realized from some feedback we got from people who listened to the episode. There's more stuff we should have covered. For example, we didn't even really touch on the thing that I was tooting about a few days ago about my children learning about the file system in college.

So that's I felt like we should have put that in this member special. Now I'll just save it for another one. So it is actually a much bigger topic than you might think. If you never studied computer science in college or interested in it or wondering like how that. works uh this is a good uh special to listen to uh but as i said in the show you absolutely do not have to

go to college at all, let alone major in computer science, to be a successful programmer. And that is a whole other topic about being a programmer without any formal education and what that's like. So we'll probably go back to the ATP dev well at some point. But for now, ATP dev, computer science curriculum, mostly in college.

We have two unrelated yet kind of spiritually related quick and adorable stories I wanted to share. Mark Christian writes... I was just walking through Manhattan and wearing an ATP shirt when a stranger tapped me on the shoulder, held up his phone showing Overcast, actively playing ATP, and gave me a thumbs up. What a nerd. Can I save button for the record? Yeah. Every time.

I am around people in the public. If I'm in the city or on the subway, every time I see a phone screen, yeah, I spy it. I glance. I want to see what they're doing on their phone. I don't want to read their messages. I just want to see what kind of apps are they using. I hope every time to see my app. It has never happened. I have never seen like a random outside of like a tech conference. I've never seen anyone using an app I've made on their phone.

What I do see is everybody playing those candy matching games and browsing Instagram and texting their friends. That's it. And TikTok. The entirety of what I see is candy matching. instagram and messages i wish someday to see my app in use by a stranger out in the world it hasn't yet happened Well, apparently it happened for Mark. And I think it's pretty clear that the what a nerd line was tongue in cheek, but it still made me laugh quite a bit. Mike got a nerd.

Yeah, right. Exactly. I would love it if you happen to be that person that flashed Mark your screen and a thumbs up, please write in. I would love to hear about it. Additionally, Richard Ernie writes that he was recognized in an ATP pixel.

shirt upon arriving in edinburgh scotland which i think is quite adorable as well uh apparently the person that he ran into was also an atp fan uh on this topic i think i might have mentioned this before my sister's family sister her husband and all her kids who are now adults slash college kids, have a contest among the family to see who is going to be the first to wear one of my shirts, like an ATP shirt or a hypocritical shirt or something like that.

Have someone recognize the shirt, like understand what it is. They get lots of people saying, is that about tennis? Is that about BMW? You know, like all those things. No one has actually seen the thing. So every time we get one of these, it says, see, you should just go to Scotland. You could win the game. Apparently you just show up in Scotland with an ATV pixel shirt and someone will find you. Easy peasy. But just like Mark.

like like lots of people have his app but he never sees them so it doesn't seem like it's enough so they're out there they're wearing atp shirts i send them atp shirts uh whenever we have a sale and stuff like that um they're out there wearing the shirts just hoping somewhere someone's gonna be like hey what is that shirt they'd be like oh my uncle's podcast right but it just never happens

I did sort of have something like this happen. We are members of a community pool, and it was early this summer, if I'm not mistaken. I saw a gentleman and his family walk into the pool, and I was like, wait a second. Wait a second. And sure enough, it was an ATP dad hat, as we used to call it on a dad.

And this was delightful for me. And I did introduce myself or I think I shouted out like nice hat or something like that. It was walking by as he was walking by, but this was made deeply uncomfortable because I am topless in a bathing suit in the swimming pool. And this is not the most.

wonderful time to meet someone who has listened to presumably at least a couple hours of your voice. So that was a little bit awkward. So, and I forget the gentleman's name. He's very kind. Um, but if you're out there still listening, you might not be after that experience and I wouldn't blame you, but if you're out there still listening, Appreciate you, nevertheless. Yeah, one time Tiff and I went...

About six years ago, we went on a vacation to Cancun together. And in the pool, like sitting on the pool deck of this... hotel in cancun somebody heard her talking and said oh my god are you tiff armand oh wow yeah like that and then you know we got to talking to both of them and they were end up being fans of both of ours but like

that's the closest i've ever come to that and that was amazing and it wasn't even me being recognized it was awesome that's the danger of being a podcaster is that people don't know what you look like but they do know your voice

for the people who can recognize voices, which is the only subset of our listeners as we've discussed in past episodes, but they do know your voice. And so you never know when they're going to come up behind you because you're not, they're not even going to be in your field division. They're going to be like, excuse me, are you John Syracuse? Like that happened. I mean, again, to myself,

If someone in my sister's family wants to win this game, they just need to go to WWDC. But I feel like that doesn't count. It absolutely doesn't count. But that's perhaps all of the people who know who we are at that conference. And then they disperse. And even then, it's not a huge percentage of those people.

exactly yes it's tiny percentage but that's all of them yeah yeah they're all there no it's i've told the story before on the show i'm pretty darn sure but the first time i ever got recognized in public I was sitting in Dulles waiting to go to WWDC. This was Marco, Marco Jeezy Peasy, underscore and I's tradition every year. We were on Virgin Atlantic.

Or Virgin America, excuse me, Flight 96, I think it was. Maybe that was a return flight. I don't remember now. But we were sitting in Dulles just chit-chatting. And I had my back to, you know, there was like one of those situations where the chairs had their backs to each other. And the person, like one or two chairs down behind. Behind me...

tapped me on the shoulder and said, I'm sorry, are you Casey? Because I heard your voice. And I was like, oh my God, what is happening? Because that was the very first time I'd been recognized in any capacity. And it blew my mind. It was incredibly flattering, but blew my mind.

that my stupid voice was what got me pegged, which obviously makes perfect logical sense, but it was so astonishing and off-putting, but not in the negative way, in like the positive way. It was very unusual and very cool. Anyway, sorry, that was a digression. At least we're super relatable to our audience. Right? Well, hey, even if you don't have a podcast, it used to be back when WWC was in person. If you lived in a major city and you got on one of the obvious flights...

for arriving at WWDC, there was tons of other WWDC people in that. You could spot them by like how much Apple crap they had or whatever. Like if they're wearing a past year's WWDC shirt, those were definitely nerd heavy flights.

Yes, they were. I miss those days. All right, so what we have in the show notes is as follows. Apple released iOS 26.0.1, and Apple says, this update provides important bug fixes and security updates for your iPhone, including fixes for the following issues. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth may occasionally disconnect an iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and iPhone 17 Pro models. And I saw this and thought, yes, this is my moment. Because as I lamented, I believe, last episode,

CarPlay with my beloved car link kit dongle, which I bought something like seven years ago. So it is not new by any stretch of the imagination. Wireless CarPlay isn't working anymore. Stay connected for like... 30-ish seconds and then crap out and then it'll reconnect like 10 seconds later then crap out and it just does this endlessly wired car play still works great but wireless with this particular dongle does not

That's making me very sad. A lot of people, including Rosemary Orchard, have written in and said they've gotten newer versions of whatever their particular dongle that they favor is, and that's worked out well for them. But I figured, oh, this must be software. I'll wait it out. And so 26.0.1 happened. Today, I went to one of my favorite local libraries. And that's like a 15, 20-minute drive from us. It's not the nearest library, but it's one of my favorites.

Like I said, it's a 15-20 minute drive, and I tried using my 26.0.1 iPhone 17 Pro with my CarLinkit dongle, and almost immediately it crapped out and had the same exact problem. I'm holding out for 26.1, but after that, I'm probably going to use this as an excuse to just get a new dongle and hopefully fix the problem. I can tell you, so I'm running the 26.1 beta on my 17 Pro. Oh, are you? Well, honestly.

I figured nothing can be more buggy than 26.0. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. And I'm happy to report 26.1 does fix some of the UI bugs in the system that have been... Oh, man. It's... Being an app developer right now and having adopted the 26 design, like...

It's kind of like a darned if you do, darned if you didn't kind of thing. If you didn't adopt the 26 design yet, you're hearing from all your users saying, why aren't you adopting this design? If you did adopt it, you are getting bug reports from your users. about bugs in your app that you can't fix because they're system bugs and so i have like i would say a good half

of the bug reports that I'm getting in the last month have actually been Apple bugs. They've been iOS 26.0 bugs. Especially, oh my god, when you have reduced transparency. In dark mode, you will frequently get white-on-white liquid glass toolbar buttons. Neat. That's a 26.0 bug. I think they fixed that in 26.01. Did they? Because it seems fixed in 26.1 beta.

Um, but that's not, that's not out to the public yet. So like I get, I probably get five to 10 emails a day about that issue alone. Like it, and there's so many, you know, I'm getting reports of like car play. Speaking of books, Casey, I'm getting reports that. My app is getting garbled audio quality in CarPlay along with other podcast apps when running on iOS 26. What am I supposed to do about that?

As far as I can tell, I think it's an iOS bug. But again, my users don't know that. They just report it to me as my bug. Oh, man. I'm kidding. Honestly, I'm so worn down from getting a bunch of reports.

of bugs that I can't fix because they're Apple's bugs. I hope they... iron these out soon because like this this release cycle is rough it it did exactly what we all feared it would which is like oh this huge redesign that's going to be a lot of work for apple too and they're not going to hit their deadline well they didn't they shipped a bunch of betas

as final versions. They definitely did not hit their deadline, and no one could have. This is a problem of their own creation and the schedule they made to themselves. Anyway, but going back to your topic about Wi-Fi connectivity bugs... Tethering.

is totally broken on my 17 Pro. Oh, yeah, I saw you talking about that on Mastodon. I haven't had a chance to try it myself, but I don't feel like I've had a problem with it, and a couple times I've tried it very briefly. Are you running the beta like Marco is? No, not in 26.1. To be fair, it could be a 26.1 beta problem. I don't know that because I'm running 26.1 beta on my 17 Pro and tethering is...

incredibly unreliable. You can get it to work, and it'll work for between 1 and 15 minutes, and then it'll just... be totally dropped it'll be unreachable like you'll still be connected according to the computer but no data will go through you can't ping google.com whatever like you know everything just dies you lose all connectivity until you reboot the phone

And this happens, I don't think it's Wi-Fi, because this happens whether you are running over Wi-Fi or a USB cable. It doesn't matter either way. So it seems like there's some kind of massive breakage of tethering. at least in the 26.1 beta or, or, or the iPhone pro like one of those it's broken, whatever it is. And like, I've been so spoiled all summer long because Tahoe has been awesome for tethering because Tahoe finally.

auto reconnects when you go through a train tunnel or whatever and lose connection for a second tahoe auto reconnects and If you open up your Tahoe laptop on a train or whatever and you have no Wi-Fi, after a couple of seconds of looking for Wi-Fi, it automatically connects to tethering.

which is a feature Apple has advertised, I believe, for something like three years, but it never worked until Tahoe. So all summer, I've had this glorious tethering experience on my laptop with my 16 Pro as it slowly melted itself. couldn't keep it self-charged but like slowly you know heating up the world but it worked every time i would open my open up my laptop on the train

And a few seconds later, I'd just be connected. And it would stay connected the entire time. It was glorious. It almost made me think like, maybe I don't need a cellular MacBook after all. But, you know, two seconds with this problem on my, you know. beta running 17 pro not being able to tether reliably and i'm like oh no like this is this is unusable again so i don't know what to do i i hope this is fixed quickly but all this is to say that like not only is is are the 26.0 releases

obviously very buggy. And now maybe 26.1 as well. We'll see. Of course it will still have bugs. It's not enough time to affix to all of them. But it seems to me maybe introducing new ones, we'll see. It is a beta, but... also these phones have the have apple's new wi-fi chip the n1 it's in all the new phones and i can't help but think that like obviously there's going to be some problems there's going to be some you know compatibility issues there's going to be

flaws are going to be bugs, and that's going to take a while to iron out too. So in a way, I think we also have beta hardware this season. And not that I don't think it can be fixed in software. I think in a few months... These exact iPhones with software fixes will be fantastic at all these things. I'm sure this is a very short-lived problem until they get these fixes out. But right now, there are problems. And I hope they fix them soon.

Because otherwise, these are fantastic phones. But everything is not fully baked yet. Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that... 26.1 from the rumblings I've heard from birdies, and I think I'm not the only one, is really the 26.0 release. It's obviously not literally, but it's the release that I think Apple internally wanted to have is 26.0 and just couldn't make it in time.

I'm hopeful. We'll see what happens. I will say very briefly, I know we already talked about first impressions of these phones, and we're going to talk about first impressions about other things later, but I will briefly say... This thing does not get hot like the 16 Pro did, or at least not yet anyway. Now, I haven't had a football game in full sun or anything like that yet, so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm jumping ahead of myself. But...

From what I can tell so far, this thing does not get anywhere near as hot as the 16 Pro did. And I don't think I really appreciate it or... understood because i don't appreciate it how hot the 16 pro got and i thought and i thought i knew but now having a phone that doesn't turn into a ball of magma i find that it is quite a bit better now so that is very good yeah that has been

awesome like like if i'm not tethering i have no problems with this phone like it when i'm just using the phone itself which itself maintains its own internet connection just fine when i'm using the phone itself It is glorious because you're right. It is a much better thermal design. The phone can actually keep itself charged while outside and being used through a cable to a laptop or a battery or whatever. It can charge itself to 100%.

without massively throttling itself for hours while it cools down. It works so much better. It's a great overall phone. I'm very happy with the 17 Pro. I love the orange. I'm so glad I did the orange. It looks fantastic. I'm so happy when I see it every time. Can we not? Because Aaron got the orange and I don't dislike my purpley blue, bluey purple, but.

The orange was a better choice. Unquestionably, the orange was a better choice. It's not too late. You can still get it. Nah, it's all right. Like, it's fine. In case he doesn't want to go through the phone setup experience another time. No, I really don't. Yeah, just get like, you know, three Thunderbolt cables. Right. Yeah, exactly. I'll get to that later.

All right. So we had some questions last week, speaking of all this, about... That was a perfect segue. Thank you, gentlemen. We had questions with regard to backups. And what does iCloud actually back up or not? And Dayton Lowell writes, if you haven't turned on messages...

I think this is actually a quote from Apple. Directly from the Apple page, he gave us a link to the Apple webpage. Thank you. But via Dayton, if you haven't turned on a message in iCloud, your messages are included in iCloud backup. If you use messages in iCloud, your messages automatically sync to iCloud, so they aren't included. your daily backup which makes sense

Additionally, with regard to my iMessage stuff, Nick writes, yes, you should consider enabling messages in iCloud. Temper your expectations, though, is nobody will ever accuse the feature of being fast, and it may randomly pause if your devices are not charging or get too warm. But...

When you delete a conversation thread on one device, it cleans it up everywhere, which is very nice. Also, for the sake of your iCloud storage, and especially for your Mac, consider going to Settings Apps, Messages, Message History, Keep Messages, and change this from forever to one year, which, as an aside, I've now done.

Messages is a terrible archive for attachments and photos. If you are already in the habit of saving important photos and you want to keep forever to your iCloud photos as you receive them, then you can probably let go of Messages older than a year. This is less of an issue on the iPhone where it will offload 100 gigs of messages, but Apple has yet to implement the same offloading feature for messages on the Mac, which is untenable for a lot of folks.

Additionally, Nathan writes, Casey, if you're worried about too many GIFs in your messages, go to settings, general, iPhone storage messages, GIFs, and stickers. You need to select them one by one, but you can delete them quickly.

Additionally, I don't think we put this in the show notes. I meant to, and I expected John to do it, and I should have done my own homework, so I apologize, John. But a lot of people wrote in and said, I'm doing this off the top of my head, so I might have this factually incorrect, so please bear with me. It's my entire life, man. You're good. If you turn on advanced data protection for iCloud...

Then the whole thing I was worried about where Apple has a key to your iMessages so that they could, strictly speaking, unlock them. That is not true if you have ADP on. If you don't have ADP on, then yes, they could, strictly speaking, get in there if they really... tried hard enough, but with that advanced data protection on, several people wrote in to say they can't get in there no matter what.

And there is a link somewhere that details this, but again, I forgot to put it in the show notes, so I'm sorry. I intentionally didn't put that in the notes because I'm like, well, we've covered that when we talked about advanced data protection, but I guess you don't remember that we talked about that. I don't even know what advanced data protection is. Do we ever talk about that?

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm not that bad. I'm not that bad for goodness sake. You can troll us forever on that because there's nothing that you don't remember that we will not think. But yes, that is, that's why the, um, who was it? Whoever, um, Dayton wrote in to remind us that like, um, The whole thing is like the iCloud backups, that Apple has the key to them if you don't use advanced data protection. And they're saying if you use iMessage as an iCloud...

Your messages aren't in the iCloud backup, so it doesn't matter whether they're protected. When we discussed this last time, I think we all said that we had chosen not to turn on advanced data protection because there are downsides to in addition to the additional protection you give.

out was i'm much more likely to accidentally lock myself out of my own data than i am to get hacked by somebody because nobody cares about my crap and so that's why i choose not to have advanced data protection on uh because i'm more worried about data loss than i am about hacks but everyone has to make their own choice there and it's nice that apple gives you that option if you do enable that it takes away apple's keys even from your iCloud backups yep

All right. With regard to iPhone transfers, Winnie Lewis writes, I feel like Apple pre-populating a new iPhone purchased directly from them with the iCloud backup of your current iPhone could be an incredible value add for customers. I don't see a technical reason why this wouldn't be entirely possible. DU. This reminds me very much of Kindles that come pre-linked to your account, which...

is really freaking nice, if I'm honest with you. That being said, I don't know how much, as much as I agree 100% that this would be amazing, in principle, in execution, I'm not so sure it would be so great. And that's in no small part because... The iCloud backup that's being taken and put onto your phone, aside from that being a little bit creepy, that also is going to be, what, several days, a week, two weeks old by the time you get your phone in hand. So leaving aside technical challenges...

I just don't think that would be as good as we think it would be because these devices are always in flux constantly. But I don't know. Convince me I'm wrong, gentlemen. Well, if you use advanced data protection... they can't do it they can't put your data on the phone if you use advanced data protection because how are they going to get your data to put on the phone they can't get your data they can't put it only you can do that that's the point of it now even without advanced data protection

Uh, even though they may be able to have access to your iCloud backups, I still imagine there's some things that they couldn't put on there without you like authenticating, because even though they may have the key to your iCloud backups, that's just data. There may be other stuff. Like for example, they can't get your iCloud key chain stuff.

no matter what kind of backup thing you use so tech there are technical reasons why they literally can't do this but the most important reason is even if they could do this from a technical perspective it's just like the presto presto pizza box thing and putting the thing out like the scale it

We all know how long it takes to do transfers. The best case scenario, it's taking maybe 30 minutes or an hour, depending on how much data you have. Multiply that by how many iPhones are sold. When is this going to happen? Are you going to...

pay fleets of people and giant machines to constantly be running putting these things through and keeping track like it's a huge added expense they read huge amounts of time and it's just not feasible at the scale that they do things due to how long it takes to put data on a phone so

Yes, there are technical reasons why it can't be done, and then there are also practical and economical reasons why it can't be done, or at least couldn't be done without charging you $200 extra and making you wait an extra week for your phone or whatever. Also worth pointing out, for Amazon to do it for Kindles, what's the maximum surface area of a bad outcome for that? Worst case scenario is somebody fraudulently...

i guess buys a bunch of stuff on your kindle account but that's amazon they can refund that like it's not that horrible of a thing and and they're probably writing like two bytes to the device too by the way that's why they can do it like this is your kindle customer id and then when you turn it on it says oh this is your customer id and it probably makes you log in

Yeah. Whereas like think about like the, you know, not only the technical side, but just like the security risk of Apple doing that. And somebody intercepts that phone or even just even just the idea that Apple themselves could just kind of instantiate your phone.

whenever they wanted to like there's a reason why we have protections and checks and everything like that you know there's lots of security implications of that and privacy implications that that would be very dangerous like the way amazon does it it's not super safe but like the again like the attack the possible attack surface for a kindle being registered to your account like it's not that terrible compared to your entire iphone

Very true. My buddy Daniel Nelson writes, I forgot to do anything about my test flight apps when moving to my new phone, and I was happily surprised to find this year it replaced them with the App Store versions. So although I still had to re-download them to get the test flight version, I at least didn't have to.

have my home screen positions get messed up. Daniel's very smart and a very good guy, and I don't think he's wrong. My recollection, as we've discussed, my memory sucks, but I thought that there were gaps in the home screens, the couple of home screens where I... had test flight apps, but I don't remember them having been populated by full app store apps. So one thing that is not populated by a transfer is...

developer mode apps. Like if you just build and run in Xcode and deploy that onto your phone, that won't transfer to a new phone. No, I'm thinking of like, you know, Overcast, Day One. Any app with a dot next to it. Exactly. And I, again, I'm not trying to say that Daniel...

was wrong i in fact i'm probably the one that's wrong i mean supposedly watches transfer to new phones too but we already heard that happens consistently for customers so daniel got lucky uh but anyways but my experience was that at least there were holes in my home screen which i

vastly preferred over the like reshuffling of my home screens um i think we talked about this on a member special at some point but i'm down to only a couple of screens now and it's only like 20 apps total across the two screens because widgets and whatnot

But it was still frustrating having to figure out, wait, what was the thing there? And what was my muscle memory? Oh, right. That's where overcast goes. And this time, at least there was a gap. So it was easier to figure that out. Or at least that's why I remember. Yeah, the gaps used to collapse. That was worse back in the day. Exactly. Exactly. But yeah, maybe your experiences were better. You, Daniel, and you, the royal you.

The same Nick from above writes, I've been doing all manner of iPhone migrations and restores many hundreds, if not thousands of times at AppleCare over the last 13 years. And I have strong opinions about which backup and transfer methods work best for whom.

Finder or iTunes backups still offer the most unique benefits over other methods, including you can have an unlimited number of full local backups, hard drive space permitting, and they stay in your computer forever until you choose to delete them. Not so for iCloud.

You typically get two, sometimes three iCloud backup dates to choose from. And then you wait too long to restore. And if you wait too long to restore, excuse me, those dates will change. Combine this worry with your trade-in deadline. It can feel very stressful. Local backups are included in your time machine backup.

Restoring from a Finder or iTunes backup allows you to front load the most time-consuming process and walk away. Also, Finder and iTunes errors give you far more information about what went wrong compared to the other methods, and there are more troubleshooting remedies when a backup or restore fails. For pro iPhones on a Mac, it's the second fastest migration, assuming you make the Finder iTunes backup before you get the new phone.

In summary, and I think Nick had said many other things, but in summary, iCloud is the choice Apple clearly wants most people to use. It's the practical choice for almost everyone. The best choice for the impatient and or phone addicts. The least complete restore method. I feel attacked.

Release, complete, restore method. Encrypted finder backups and iClude backup in sync is the best choice for nervous or reluctant upgraders, the best choice for anyone doing a trade-in, and the most complete backups tied with device-to-device. And finally, speaking of device-to-device, it's the best choice for... rural customers a slow internet no computer or apparently if you're in a car maybe possibly the most complete backups which is tied with encrypted finder backups

And the worst choice for transferring from very old phones, my experience is that these devices are not performance or stable enough to go through a multi-hour device-to-device transfer without failing over and over.

With regard to Apple's onboarding, Imphaz writes, I loved the conversation about how many questions and hoops one had to go through to set up new iPhones. Even the AirPods Pros have this problem. Back in 2017, when I first got AirPods, it was magical. Just open the case next to your phone. I was good to go.

Even when I set up the AirPods Pro 2 a few years ago, it was relatively easy. But now it was, do you want conversational awareness? Do you want personalized audio? Do you want to test your fit? Do you want to take a hearing test? Et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, it is getting worse on all products, but I think in the case of AirPods, part of it that is that the original AirPods didn't have a lot of features and now they do. And that's the time when you would expect someone to.

show you those features they didn't have noise canceling do you want it to be on off or whatever they didn't have it like and again having a sort of a wizard type thing where it walks you through these steps instead of just saying just let me use the airpods there probably should be a button for that

The phone should probably know if you've had this kind of AirPods before or if you use this feature before. Like I said last week, don't show me about noise canceling. If this is my fourth pair of noise canceling AirPods, I don't need to see that. But I do think that.

you're never going to go back to you just open it up and immediately start going because there's just so many more features on airpods than there used to be and the number of features in airpods is going up and not down now it does get ridiculous when it's like

you know okay well you got to pick which things you want to show in there what are the most important features to show the new user of airpods assuming they've never owned airpods before because eventually it's like do you want to test your heart rate monitor do you want to test the live translation it's like okay all right it does a lot of things let's just Maybe pick three.

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Thought, text, and alter ego. Was this Overtime last week, I believe? Yeah. This was the thing where you can strap some device to your cheek and it will read the muscle movements in your mouth in order to figure out what you're trying to say. Doesn't go on your cheek. I thought it was on your cheek. No.

Oh, all right. Shockingly, your memory is not accurate. Well, all right. Side of your head somewhere. It doesn't really matter. Yeah. Remember, like, the guy had it. He was sitting in the little lounge chair. He had a thing, like, on his temples kind of by his ears. No, okay. Well, also, in my defense, I'm being thrown off by this older image, which I know is an older image.

image of a much larger thing that's from april 2018 says right there in the notes you know i'm doing the best i can here john not all of us are perfect like you uh all right tell me what firefox the movie from the year of my birth is that's i i threw that out there during the overtime segment knowing full well none of you would get it i meant to clarify what it was just people don't think i was having a stroke or something but i said think russian

when we were discussing thought, controlling things with thought. The 1982 movie Firefox starring Clint Eastwood is a movie that was on TV a lot that I watched when I was a kid about a Russian spy plane. actually look pretty cool like a big you know it's kind of like a cross between the like the the the valkyrie if you know what that is from us military and kind of like sr-71 anyway um

like a black spy plane made by the Russians and Clint Eastwood goes to steal it. But when he steals it, the plane is controlled by thought, but to steal the plane, he's got to think in Russian. oh my god oh my and i was thinking that like we're really catching up to these 1982 sci-fi movies because you know if you had like a thought to uh text type interface for doing something or whatever and it was in russian you'd have to think you'd have to think

Think words in Russian. Anyway, that's what the reference was. Think Russian. I feel better knowing that piece of information. Watch that movie. You know, if we keep doing member specials, eventually I'll make you watch terrible eighties movies with me at some point, but my recollection is that it was not a good movie, but when you're a little kid and they have a Clint Eastwood.

flying a spy plane controlled by thought, it was cool. I mean, conceptually, that makes sense, but that does not sound fun to me. This is the point of contention with the... dear local friend of mine who is in love with like all 80s movies. What was, there was some military one you brought up like two or three months ago. Yes. Or a teenager gets to fly an F-16. Again, these are really appealing movies when you're seven or eight years old. Right. Well, and I brought this up with my local friend.

at and he was like oh yeah i love that movie and and i told him. He actually listens to the show, so now he's potentially embarrassed or delighted. Who knows? Anyways, but I talked to him about this and he was like, oh yeah, it was great. I was like, man, it did not look good to me. Great for kids. In his defense, I think that was roughly what he said, but nevertheless.

when i was young and wanted to be a fighter pilot before i realized i was never going to be a fighter pilot because my eyes are terrible and also i get terrible emotions before i knew all of these things many disqualifying factors i'm pretty sure the the the eyes are a problem but i'm not sure they're the problem john uh yeah yeah all right uh then we have some information from hans who writes alter ego seems to have been an mit project first

And very suspiciously, the man in the alter ego video doesn't show the left side of his head. It might look more like this. And this was the image that I was talking about. That was distracting me about the cheek thing. And we will put a link to the show notes to a post on the MIT, I guess, like Media Lab, Media Center, something along those lines, where they talk about this. And again, to John's point from April of 2018.

Yeah, and you couldn't see the side of the person's face, but you could see enough of their face to know that I think that their sensors were only like sort of over your ears. Again, kind of like a bone induction headphone. This thing had a sensor that was... touching your chin like underneath your lower lip i think that would have been visible if that was in the video but i think they're just using they're not using sensors in that location for the alter ego demo video anyway

That is true. CJ writes, I'm a doctor slash neurologist and neuroscience researcher. I was listening to your overtime discussion of the alter ego device and agree that it would be very unlikely to be able to reliably read brain signals or EEG. My group is trying to analyze walking in Parkinson's disease patients with electrodes deep in the brain or with 64 carefully placed.

contacts on the scalp. And that is hard enough in lab conditions. There's always way too much noise, and so a consumer device with very limited contact area to the scalp is unlikely to get enough usable EEG signal to work even with AI noise suppression. So it makes sense when I looked into it that it appears to be that the device is only measuring muscle signals, EMG, in the...

Here we go. In the temporomandibular joint. Oh, I think I got it. All right, look at me go. Older versions of the device had more contacts targeting the mouth and tongue, so they appear to have refined it since then. See the video, which we will link in the show notes. Electromyography, or EMG, is a technique for evaluating and recording the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles. We'll put a link to the Wikipedia page in the show notes. And additionally, electroencephalography, EEG,

is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity in the brain. Holy jamoles, I can't believe I'm mostly keeping this together. So many syllables, yeah. That's the distinction I was trying to make, but I didn't know these terms when we talked about it, EMG versus EEG.

Continuing from CJ, reading EMG signals is much easier as the muscles are only millimeters away and have much less noise. Maybe there are some accelerometers as well. Therefore, there's no potential for reading thoughts as noted in the video. It's unclear to me whether or not the tiny movements associated with silent speed. they are reading are unintentional or need to be developed as a technique to use the device.

Given the sensors and location of the demonstrated device, I see no reason the sensors could not be placed in glasses, arms, or indeed in the AirPods Pro. See, he doesn't know the technical term for the glasses arms, but now we do. Now who's a neuroscientist? Yeah, sticks. They're called temples. The basic signal processing is much less complicated than the audio processing the AirPods already do. And then the AI could presumably run on the iPhone.

If it is working on EMG signals, I would not expect that the interpretation would be much more complicated than audio-to-speech. In regards to John's question of being able to measure intention to act or speak, which these devices are not doing, this is a well-established research methodology. in neuroscience, particularly in functional MRI. We're able to see the main motor areas light up.

In a functional MRI scan, when a patient imagines walking, and we see how it is different with different diseases such as Parkinson's, but yes, it has more recently been shown that further networks are engaged when a movement actually occurs compared to when only imagined.

Yeah. So I'm still interested in these things in the EMG, uh, muscle thing, especially since, well, there's a couple angles. This, this, this person is saying that he thinks that, uh, the thing that the alter ego was doing could be done in an air pod, uh, or glasses. Uh, of course the, uh,

The Meta Ray-Ban glasses have the wrist strap that is also an EMG measuring thing. It's measuring the, you know, electrical signals to the muscles in your fingers to tell what fingers you're moving. That product is out now. And then we'll probably have a story next week about the late breaking thing that happened.

today about uh apple's plans to compete with uh meta's glasses and whether or not they'll have some kind of emg reading aspect to it or whether it will just be airpods on long sticks with uh cameras in the end five years from now yeah We are sponsored this episode by Factor. You know, fall always feels like a reset. Between back to school, busier routines, and shorter days, finding time to cook can be tough. This is why Factor is great. Factor is chef-prepped.

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Uh, let's continue with our first impressions. And I have nothing to say about this because I have only barely interacted with them, but I presume Tina has gotten a tech woven case.

Yeah, that was her first. She's always willing to try whatever the new case is from Apple. She actually got the fine woven case and used it for the entire two years that she had the phone. It's pretty rough looking, but, you know, she... thought it was fine uh it came in a color that she liked she didn't mind how it felt she didn't mind that the edges got nicked up or whatever um so when the tech weapon case is out it's all right well we'll try that one too uh she uh

uh is a wallet person like a magsafe wallet person so she uh puts it on the back of her phone she keeps her cards and her driver's license stuff in there and so she got the whatever it's i guess it's still the fine woven wallet right it's the tech woven case but the fine woven wallet it's a very confusing line but she got both of those uh and the tech woven case i checked it out she put her phone in it and i'm it's very It's very sort of scratchy and like the bumps on it are very regular.

I don't know if you've seen it in a person, you've felt what it's like. It's kind of plasticky. It's not fine woven. The weaving is very coarse. It's not fine. But whatever it is, it's like... Lumpy plastic. So it's like lots and lots of little lumps and the problem with that is that it provides the MagSafe wallet with less surface area where it is contacting the case. And that results in less friction. And so she rejected and returned the tech woven case based entirely on...

the fact that the wallet slid off sideways too easily because it didn't have the friction. It wasn't like the surface area. Like it's touching a tech wall in case, but it's only touching the tips of all the tiny little mountains. in the texal oven case and that doesn't provide no we did an experiment with you know of all the different surface materials so that got rejected she got an apple silicone case because she wanted to try the the body strap lanyard whatever the thing cross body strap

And Apple's cases have the little attachment points for that. That was interesting because I was wondering about this from seeing the pictures. Either you have the crossbody strap. No, I touched one extremely briefly at the Apple store and it seemed nice, but I didn't like put it on or anything like that. So you now know everything I know about them. Yeah, so she was willing to try that as well. She's like, oh, maybe that'll be fun. And of course, Apple's cases have the little corners.

things on it if you've seen it in the store or the pictures of you know that the things attached to the corner of apple's cases by these very very thin i forget what they're made of someone sent us the name of what they think it is but very thin strong

like thread type material uh and i was wondering like you know how how easy is it to take that on or off like do you have to like you know tie it onto the case and then it's there permanently or whatever the answer is that the the attachment things on the crossbody scrap have a little like metal bar

And then the crossbody strap wraps around that bar and snaps on the other side of it to itself. So it holds the bar and the bar has the string coming out of it. So you can pretty easily unsnap the crossbody strap on both ends. and then remove your phone but now your phone has two little metal crossbars dangling from it by about an inch of very thin string

So I don't think anyone would want to use their phone like that. So you basically have to take the case off and unthread the threads. The other thing is to get those threads, it's a loop of threads. It's just like a metal bar with a loop of thread. And that loop does not come out of the metal bar.

it is in the metal bar there's no way to remove it so to get it through the little thing you have to if you have big cameras marco knows about this maybe also casey the way the the camera straps attach to most cameras with the little loop that you loop through and then you put the strap through the loop you know I don't know how to describe it. But anyway, you don't have to. It's a continuous loop and you just loop it over on itself. But she had to use a needle threader to get through the case.

Cause she couldn't get like, you're trying to like, it's just like a loop of thread and you're trying to shove it through. She can get through the first hole, but then get it to make a U-turn and go through the second hole to come back out. She couldn't do it and had to use a needle thread or so. That was a little bit unuser friendly. And it really, you really are committing to the cross.

body strap because like i said the only way to get it off is to take your phone out of the case and then carefully unthread those things and you know pass the bar through the little thing and it's just It's not a simple maneuver. So I think there's room for improvement on the crossbody strap in terms of ease of connecting and disconnecting.

from the case i'm not sure what the solution is but the first try it seems uh the strap itself is fine it's magnetic to itself anyway so she replaced her tech woven case with the apple silicone case which she's used many times before she's destroyed many of those came in a fun color

The wallet, the new fine woven wallet sticks to it way, way better. And also I suggested to her, you know, if you don't like the tech woven and you're just so-so about the silicone, what about a leather case? So she got the bull strap leather case. And also she was won over by the... marketing of the Bullstrap leather wallet.

which is a find my device so it's thicker than a regular wallet but it has an actual kind of like air tag type thing in the wallet itself as opposed to just the apple thing where when it comes off the phone knows where it fell off and we'll tell you about it this actually has an air tag in the wallet so leather bull strap case with leather wallet on it. Very good friction between the two of them. Harder to slide off sideways. I think the best friction is probably her old sort of broken in.

leather she had a leather wallet back when an apple leather wallet she has one of those it's very well broken in that on the back of leather case or that on the back of a silicone case is probably the strongest attachment but uh that's that's her review slash my conveying of her thoughts on all of the cases i thought the bull strap case was nice she got it in a weird like pinkish leather color uh which is not to my taste but she likes it but i thought it was kind of bulky um

We should put a link in the show notes to Stephen Robla's leather iPhone case review. He also mentioned that some cases are... thicker or thinner than others even though they're all just leather cases they're not like it's like you know whatever that plastic shell or something with leather wrapped around it they vary in thickness uh significantly but she likes the leather one that's the one she's using but she also has a silicone one for the crossbody strap

which i'm not sure how often she'll use that because currently the silicone case is sitting on the desk behind me and it does not have those little dangly strap things on it and if she wants to put them on she needs to use a needle threader so i don't see that happening that often but for this year i would say tech woven is

More successful than fine woven with the caveat that if you're going to put a wallet on it, you're going to get less friction. All right. I will say also, my iPhone 17 Pro... case situation is not resolved yet um i have i really enjoyed last year i really enjoyed the nomad magnetic leather back That was just the back made of leather that would go over the whole back of the phone, and you could feel the leather on the sides, just like, you know, kind of because it's...

It goes to the edge of the phone, but it wasn't wrapped around the side, so it gave a lot of grip and made it, you know, more stable on a surface, and it would, you know, it wouldn't slide off of slanted things, and, you know, it really improved the ergonomics of the phone, but you were still using it.

like the naked sides of the phone which was really nice for like having the nice buttons and being able to see the the side finish and everything i ordered one of these for the 17 pro and unfortunately Because of the shape of the mesa, which now goes, or the plateau, which now goes all the way across, The Nomad, it has a magnet in the middle on the MagSafe area, and it has those, like, micro suction tape patches on the corners. Well, it used to have one on the upper corner, like...

adjacent to the camera plateau. But now that there's no room for that, because the Mesa or the plateau goes all the way across, it only has those sticky pad corners on the flat part of the phone area. And I posted a quick little video to Mastodon. The problem is then there's nothing holding the case back against the phone along the top edge above the Mesa. So it kind of just like flaps in the breeze.

Like it creates a gap. It doesn't sit flush. You know, stuff will get stuck in there. So it's basically, in my opinion, the Nomad magnet in the back is unusable on the 17 Pro. So I actually returned it. Like I'm like, I cannot.

I can't believe they shipped it, honestly, and they shouldn't have, unfortunately. And it's a shame because I loved it on the 16 Pro. And what I'm doing right now, I believe I mentioned last episode that... until my 17 cases come in i just cut the top off of my my 16 pro leatherback from nomad and just so it rests under the camera bump and i've just been using that

This is not a good solution. It doesn't line up correctly on the bottom edge. It looks ridiculous, but it does provide a lot of grip. So this is what I'm still doing. I've ordered a couple other things to try. They're not here yet. So more to come in the future. But the iPhone 17 Pro case story remains... unsolved for me I will say I did handle a tech woven case in the Apple store and I thought it was very nice and in fact

They seem to be selling very well because the Apple stores that I keep walking by, I'll breeze in and see. I was in Grand Central earlier today. I looked at theirs. And they're sold out of most of the good tech woven colors for most phone models. The tech woven cases seem to be doing very well with iPhone buyers. So there's something there. I do think...

I will probably end up preferring something else, but again, time will tell. All right. Who has an iPhone 17 in the family that apparently has some thoughts? Yeah, well, I mean, they're sitting on the desk right next to me. They're still in their boxes. I haven't had much experience with them, so I guess I don't have much to say about that. I wondered what the timing was when my kids would be getting these, but apparently they're going to wait until...

their fall break in October. So I did take the phones out of the box and put their cases on them, just because I like to get the phone into the case before the phone is covered with fingerprints, whereas no one else in my family... cares about that at all. So they will take the phone out and handle it for 15 minutes and then take the food encrusted fingerprint front covered thing and stick it inside a clear case. So I got them.

directly out of the box, immediately into the clear place, barely even touching it. And my son's got a silicone case. So they're all ready to go, waiting for their phones to come to do a data transfer. But no, they're nice. They look nice. They're normal. They have nothing exciting to say about them. They are extremely unsurprising, but they haven't yet been set up. All right. AirPods Pro 3. Marco, remind me, you did get a pair, I assume?

I did. Okay. Would you like to start or shall I? I really don't care either way. Okay. Uh-oh. I return them. Oh, interesting. Why is that? All right, so I did not expect this. I'll tell you that. By all accounts, they are much better on paper. they do have significantly better noise cancellation, which is impressive because it was already, like, for any earbuds, even the 2s were already pretty good. But the 3s were even better. The sound quality...

is indeed better. I wouldn't say it's world-changing better. It's still not to the level of full-size headphones, but it does come a lot closer. And they are certainly good enough that by noise cancellation and sound quality metrics alone, barring other factors, I would not recommend... anybody ever get like the AirPods Max for instance like I think the AirPods Pro 3 if they fit you and if they're comfortable and if they fit your you know for other like if they work physically for you

I think they're the better product in every possible way. They sound great. They have the best everything feature-wise. They're way ahead. My problem is the AirPods Pro 3 Fit. very differently than the twos. This is not like a little tweak. From AirPods Pro 1 to 2, as far as I can tell, there was no fit difference. From two to three, this might as well be a different product. Like, this is a very different fit. Did you lose the year lottery? I did. Now, so here's...

I guess I can count myself lucky that I have had a pretty good ear situation with the AirPods Pro 2. But not with the original AirPods, right? So you've been on and off with the ear lottery. Yeah. So the threes fit very differently. Mainly, the threes have the ear tip seems to go further into your ear, and it seems to... you know, push harder against your inner ear. So it does come with different size tips. I tried, it starts out with medium and then it has like small and extra small.

I kept going down in size. I would try for a couple hours on one size. It's a little uncomfortable. Maybe the next day, I'd reset my ears. Next day, put new tips on. Try it again. And there was no eartip combination that I found that made these not just hurt after a couple hours of wearing. And that is a problem for me. And every time I put them in, I'd be like, hmm.

Kind of hurts. Kind of uncomfortable. But let's see. Let me give it a shot. I would try adjusting. I'd try wiggling them. Different angles. Every adjustment I could make. There was no combination that didn't result in pain after, you know, generally about an hour or two. The twos don't hurt at all, ever. They have never in a thousand years have the twos hurt. The threes just hurt my ears. And I think they aren't as secure in my ears either.

And again, I've tried different ear tips, tried different angles. I couldn't get them to fall out, but they seemed, they felt less secure. It could just be psychological, but they do not work for me. uh and then every time like when i would when i would go back to my airpods pros twos uh you know after my ears would hurt i'd give them a break and go back to the twos so i could continue operating in my life uh

And the twos, it's like going home to a well-worn couch. The twos fit so comfortably for me. It's a night and day difference. And so I... Don't really know what to do. I think the 3s, if there were no other products like this, if I didn't have the 2s, if the 2s never existed, I might buy the 3s and just use them for short times because the feature set is that compelling.

But as long as my twos continue to work, I'm going to continue to use them. It's kind of like our discussion about the natural scrolling direction on Apple's mice and trackpads. I can still use the old ones. So I'm going to keep using them because I like them way better. They work way better for me. They don't sell the twos anymore, do they? They don't, but Amazon does, and they're on sale. So I got myself a backup pair of twos. You didn't think about getting third-party eartips for the three?

Maybe you just don't like the ones with the foam embedded in them? So the way that they are achieving the better isolation and the better base response is with better physical blockage of the ear canal from the outside world. That's how, like... The noise cancellation, they're doing some electronic things with feedback and everything. That's part of noise cancellation. But a huge part of why it got better is they are much more aggressively sealing out the outside world with the fit.

I think it's going deeper in the ear. It certainly is like sealing against the walls of the ear harder. It's like pushing harder against the walls of the ear. Whatever it is, they have significantly changed. the way these fit to to be further into my ears and it just it's doesn't work for me it doesn't work and so again i i don't i hope the two continue to work for a while it

And to answer your question, John, I don't think third-party ear tips would actually fix my problem. Because it isn't that the ear tips aren't soft enough. It's that... They move them. They sit differently in my ear in a place that is far more intrusive and invasive and far less comfortable and causes pain after a while. What if you got third-party eartips that were half the depth?

I don't know if they would fit or if they would keep them in my ears if they put them further out. I don't know. Were you afraid of staying within the return window? Because I'm kind of shocked that you returned these without. the opportunity to buy more stuff, which is I bought these 17 third-party eartips to see which one, see if anyone thinks the problem. Honestly, I wouldn't, at this point, I wouldn't trust third-party eartips for the AirPods Pros 3s.

to really exist yet that were any that were at all like reasonably considered so like maybe and maybe I'll try in a few months to look around but again like right now like well my twos work great So I think I'm just going to sit this generation out and see what happens. And I'm really, honestly, I'm really disappointed to have to do that. Because again, the rest of it, I do like the increased noise cancellation, although that's...

Obviously, if that comes at the cost of blowing up my ears, maybe I don't like that. I do like the better sound quality. That's nice. I like the fact that the new ones are water resistant. There's a lot that I wish I could enjoy about the new ones, but they just don't fit me. So I am ecstatic to report that I have yet to lose the ear lottery as I knock on wood because my time will come. In terms of fitment, I think these fit me just fine.

There's definitely a tighter seal against my ear canal. I wouldn't say it's uncomfortable for me. I wouldn't say it's uncomfortable, but it is noticeably tighter and the tips give less. That sounds like an indictment, and I actually don't mean it as such. It's fine for me, but it is noticeably different. That being said, the ANC, well, let me back up a half step.

The reviews that I initially read or watched was that, oh, my God, these things are perfect. I cannot believe how great they are. I will I would buy a million of them if I could, you know, from I forget who like MKBHD had a really good review. I feel like there were a couple others, I forget who, that all said these are absolute win top to bottom.

My opinion is more tempered than that. These are an improvement for sure. And there are a couple of ways that I think they're a vast improvement, but... I would temper one's expectations if you have not yet bought these and are looking to buy them. They are better. And for me, I'm getting into a USB-C case, which is Chef's Kiss. Even though I almost never charge the case with a cable, it is still so nice to have one less lightning thing in my life.

And if you're the kind of person like me that uses AirPods on and off all day long, pretty much every day, I guess to some degree it is an absolute win unless you lose your lottery. But the ANC, I would say it's better. I wouldn't say it's dramatically better. Now, it is possible that maybe I need to use different tips. I did do an ear...

what is an ear fit test, whatever they call it. And it said they were fine, but I haven't actually tried any of the other tips yet. So perhaps going up a size or something like that would increase the, um, the isolation and maybe that would make it worlds better, but. I've only used the stock tips, the standard ones that were attached to them when they came out of the case. And the ANC is good. When I was on the plane back from Memphis, I went back and forth with my twos and my threes.

The threes were better, but I heard some people talk about how the plane just disappeared. And I feel like maybe I heard Jason talk about that. I might have that wrong. Yeah, Jason said that. I wouldn't say that was my experience. I'm not trying to say he's wrong. I'm just talking about what I have experienced. You hear that, Jason? In case you're saying you're wrong. You heard it here first.

uh you have currently or have you had a pair of over ear noise canceling headphones to compare with on plane flights not in probably 15 years when the technology speaking of like uh the the extra bit of foam uh blocking sound and wedging itself in your ear another thing that can

lock a lot of sound is a gigantic piece of plastic for your ear and i i haven't tried again i don't like things in my ear hole so i don't use the little earbuds but i always do wonder about uh the trade-offs on a plane in particular because of the air for a long time there's a

there's like an obvious drone noise that you would want to cancel out. I use the over ear ones, but over ear ones can make your head sweaty. And even they can press on your face and like be uncomfortable after hours. But I also don't like things in my ear holes. And I, I know lots of people who swear by the.

on the plane as a great noise canceling or whatever i'm like but but how could something that tiny cancel it but i guess if they just wedge themselves in your ear holes uh well enough they can get the job done but that's why i was wondering if you were comparing the twos and the threes if you had a pair of over ear cancelling headphones to compare

to both of those how they compared. I mean, over-ears can usually do significantly better on planes for the actual noise cancellation, but the reason why I don't carry over-ears on planes anymore is that they're huge. They take up your entire carry-on bag. Sony's come in a really small case. They fold up real small. It's nice. Yeah, but it's nothing. I have the Sony's. I know what you're talking about. Obviously, the AirPods are smaller.

I will, you know, we did note that the AirPod 3 case actually got a little bigger. So if we just graph this now, in the year 2162, the AirPod's case will be bigger than the Sony headphones. It's nothing, it is nothing like what you think. It is so comically small.

Like the AirPods Pro case versus the headphones. My wife has AirPods Pro. I know how big it is. I'm making a joke. It's like an infinite timeline joke. Extrapolating. Look at the graph. Oh, my God. All right. Well, it's worth noting, and I think I've said this before, but my AirPods, when I...

When it's jeans season, which we are quickly angling into jeans season here in Richmond, my AirPods live in my little change pocket on my right side. You know what I'm talking about? Like the little baby pocket on your right-hand side, at least for boys anyway. The iPod Nano Pocket?

Yeah, the iPod Nano Pocket, exactly. That's where my AirPods live. And they're always on me. They're basically always on me. And I would not have, and I know you're kidding, but I would not have those Sonys always on me. And honestly, I'd rather not even have them in my carry-on.

if I could avoid it. Because half the time I have my stupid Vision Pro in here. Talk about something that takes a lot of room in your car. Exactly. But anyways. The Sony headphones in the Vision Pro case. You're not wrong. The ANC, it was better. It was not. to me night and day better um and in general like i mowed the i mowed the yard today and

You know, definitely dramatically reduced or I guess attenuated, I think is the technical word I'm looking for, the volume of the lawnmower. But I would not say it disappeared by any stretch of the imagination, which, again, makes me wonder if I should try some of the larger sizes and see if they.

fit and if they work better etc but it's not a regression i don't think but the fact that i'm saying i don't think is probably not a good sign um also in the case which by the way is indeed bigger but is so barely bigger that i mean i it's hard i i can only notice when i'm holding both of them at the same time like otherwise i can't really tell the difference uh but what's interesting about them is in the airpods pro 2 the

Tips are angled fairly steeply. I would say at a glance, it's at like a, I don't know. I was going to say like a 45 degree angle. I think that's a bit dramatic, but they're angled. If as they're sitting in the case, they're angled down and pointing toward the center of the case. Whereas these point almost laterally, like they're almost at a 90 degree angle.

It's hard to do this. I'm trying to paint a word picture and I'm probably not doing the greatest job, but they sit very differently in the case, which also means they wiggle quite a bit more in the case. It's not... a big deal and i am 100 nitpicking but i see i i noticed it enough that i find it lightly off-putting that being said

There are two things that, oh, I'm sorry, there's one other complaint I have and then two absolute compliments. Connected, I believe it was mentioned this, but the light for the like charging and already charged and pairing and all that, it used to have. Yeah, it is a lot brighter. bright, which...

99.9% of the time does not matter. But I opened the case once when Erin was asleep and I happened to have the case pointed in her general direction. And I was like, oh, Jesus Christ. I didn't want to wake her up. And I'm being a little bit hyperbolic. Truly, the light is ridiculously bright, and I'm pretty sure they talked about that on Connected. A couple of really good things, though. Number one, the bass response to my ears is night and day better.

I never thought the base was bad in the AirPod Pro, AirPods Pro 2, AirPod Pros 2, whatever, you know what I'm saying. I think it is worlds better in this one, where the 2s... It sounded good, but it almost sounded, I don't know how to verbalize it, but it almost sounded like...

An interpretation of where the bass was and what the bass should sound like. Whereas the threes, this is what bass actually sounds like. And for some, like perhaps Marco, and I don't mean that to be snarky, I'm being genuine, perhaps... For you, you would find that off-putting because I know, or at least my recollection is that you generally don't care for bass-heavy mixes. No, I wouldn't say that. Okay, fair enough. I don't like...

you know, beat style mixes where it's just, but, uh, but I, I don't, I don't dislike a more bass heavy mix and the bass in these seems much more airy in a good way. Seems like the sounds. stage seems much wider is particularly with regard to base.

I think the bass sounds incredible. That is a vast improvement over the old ones. And I, again, did not, I would not have said, oh, yes, the bass needs to get considerably better in the twos. I never would have thought that. But now having had the threes, it got significantly better. One thing I'll say on that, so bass response in headphones, especially in tiny headphones like this, bass response really needs a good seal.

And so you will have different people have very different reactions to it. That might explain why you were saying to you it's a big difference. And some people have reported it's a small difference or they don't notice the difference. Good base, you need a good seal. And again, this is kind of what they did with their design choices here with the three is like they went for a much stronger seal to get better bass response and to get better noise cancellation.

at the possible expense of comfort for a lot of people and fit challenges. So whether that was the right idea for them, it depends on whether it fits you or not. But that is the trade-off there. I'll say also on the treble response. So I've seen and heard a lot of people complaining that the Pro 3s sound too harsh or too sharp.

Oh, interesting. Or I've heard like too digital or like too crisp. Oh, I wouldn't say that at all. Those are all different ways of saying the same thing. Those are all different ways of saying they have too much trouble for you.

And I did notice that the treble response is very noticeably stronger than the twos. And treble response is a very... personal thing and like what you want out of your headphones and if you look at high-end headphone reviews all over they're all over the place because each reviewer wants a different amount of trouble response and

What you hear is you'll hear people who think that they're listening to too much treble. They'll describe it as fatiguing or, again, sharp or harsh. And people who are listening to something with... bad treble response or low treble response they'll describe it as like warm this sounds warm what that means is it's kind of muffled there's not a lot of treble like it but it's very relaxing and it's you know a low treble kind of warmer tone

is less fatiguing to your ears over a long time. So it's nice, but you hear a little bit less detail and high crispness in the energy. So anyway, what they've done with the threes... is they've pushed that treble, I would say, and I like a lot of treble. I think they've pushed it as high as they can and still be within the realm of what I like. It's almost too much for me. And I love treble. So I think what they should probably do is give some kind of control over this.

It's impossible, Marco. We don't have the technology. How could you change the amount of different frequencies coming out of a speaker? They'll have to invent something, I guess. Right. And that's the thing. When AirPods were not able to produce a lot of treble response because they just weren't good enough yet. This wasn't a problem. They were able to have no sound adjustment whatsoever because no sound that their AirPods could produce.

was potentially offensive or objectionable to anybody it was not good enough to be offensive but now as they as they are getting higher fidelity higher response stronger base response stronger trouble response less drop off at those extremes and their frequency response. All of their competitors in the nice Bluetooth headphone or the nice noise-canceling headphone space, they all offer audio tone controls through their apps.

Every single one of them. You can customize the amount of treble, mid-range, bass. Some of them are pretty simplistic. Some of them you can have a whole parametric EQ. But they all offer customization. Why? Because people want different things out of their sound profile. I think that Apple has outgrown now. Now that their headphones have gotten really good at general sound response across the whole spectrum.

They've outgrown the idea that they can just have like one tone that they just let everyone have. And I think they've outgrown the idea of having one shape. that these products can be to fit in one type of ear but hey well you know i'll keep arguing that over the next three years until they maybe consider that but i mean they they did add more tips they used to have three tips now they add five so they are trying to but like i'm not sure what the alternative is like uh

kind of like the the visor things or whatever you can get airpods 3 with the a shape or the b shape or the c shape i don't know i mean i honestly uh when i when i try the different tip sizes it didn't seem to make any difference in comfort at all to me. I figured, oh, maybe if I go smaller, maybe there'll be more of a risk of falling out of my ear or I'll lose the seal, but they'll be more comfortable. They weren't.

I did eventually lose the seal and they did eventually risk falling out of my ear if I went too small. But going smaller and smaller didn't actually improve the comfort for me at all. I think it's a different issue than just the very minute diameter differences of those pads. But anyway, all that is to say, I think it's time Apple adds a little bit more control over this. Now, there are like, there's different...

system-level ways you can kind of tweak an EQ or have a hearing profile. There's ways you can kind of hack some customization here. Although, be careful with the hearing profile. Because if you're old, you probably can't hear high frequencies that well. And what the hearing profile is going to do is going to crank them up. And so if it's already too shrill for you in the high end, don't apply your hearing profile to it if you're old. But yeah, and also like whatever you apply.

would then apply to, I think, any headphones that you would wear. Yeah, it's all audio, yeah. Which is not, that's also not super desirable. So I think it's time, I hope Apple revisits the comfort and fit here and tries to... get something more universal. They've measured a million years, Marco. That's what they'll say next year. But not mine. It's a shame. The twos were great.

uh but anyway amazon is still selling the twos if anybody else has the same problem you can you can also buy a spare pair and i would suggest doing it soon because once these are like you know really out of all the channels uh you're gonna have a hard time finding you know, new ones with new batteries. So good luck.

They saw a million ears and they measured them all. That's a reference, John. One final note on this. One final note. I've got one on sound quality here. So on the subject of sound quality of these headphones, there has been much consternation among the reviewers about the sound quality. Some people like it. Some people like it.

don't my relationship with sound quality reviews uh is mostly through youtube channels that i watch i love it when youtube channels try to play the speakers in their video to try to let you know how they sound what is that about There's about a thousand things wrong. It's all right. But anyway, because like just the chain of stuff.

From that speaker making noise to it going into my ear holes when I watch it on my phone, it's like, okay, we're just... Anyway, one of the channels that I like, one of the channels that has found clever attempts to...

to be a youtube channel that reviews speakers in some constructive ways um always has an objective measurement section and a subjective part and objective measurements are great because you can put them on graphs and stuff and he always does this is called aaron's audio corner he always does his subjective review, and then he tries to figure out, based on the objective results, why his subjective review was like that.

Does it make sense? Does his subjective review just weigh off or is like, ah, this thing that I heard in my subjective listening, I can see it here on the graph. That is a good way to at least give people an idea of how a sound thing, a speaker or whatever, might perform. And then you can decide how much trouble do you like? What kind of response do you like? And eventually you learn your tastes and you'll know if you would like this speaker or not.

Uh, I've never heard of this channel that someone sent me. It's called the headphone show. I'd never seen it before, but they also had essentially a subjective part and objective part. I think they have like a little ear shaped machine where they shove. the air pod in and then they do like frequency response measurements with it shoved into the ear canal. So they get like, I mean,

who knows what shape the little fake rubber ear is. But anyway, they're trying to get a good frequency response. And you can see their graphs where they show the AirPods 2 versus the AirPods 3. And sure enough, just like Marco said, and much like Casey said, the AirPods 3...

are have more bass uh than the two and they have more treble than the two not by much but doesn't take much changes in these graphs if you watch a lot of these videos you learn that like the lines being just separated by a little bit it's

It's audible because it's usually a logarithmic scale and stuff like that. But I will say that both the AirPods 2 and the AirPods 3 do not have linear frequency response. They are boosted in the bass and they are boosted in the treble. The mid-range is nice and linear on, you know, it doesn't wiggle around too much. And then...

the bass i've heard a lot of people complain that's kind of flabby and not tight uh but like you can't oh i disagree you can't really see that in the frequency response graph but a lot of people thought like there is more bass but they don't like the quality of it but that's and that's again that's subjective listening and then the treble is again it's boosted on both of these it's just boosted more slightly more on the threes and it's not

flat um and the thing with one of the things you learn from looking at all these graphs and speakers is that you can tell based on there's another measure they didn't do but aaron's audio con always does which is basically if this line doesn't have any wiggles in it, this speaker will take well to equalization, which is deciding, changing the frequency response, you know, like, you know, like I said, 12 band, 10 band equalizer or whatever.

if you see a response curve that you don't like you can say oh this has too much treble so i'll just turn the equalizer down on those high frequency bands and i can adjust it to sound how i like not all speakers take to equalization that well based on this thing that whatever this parameter is that

Again, I wish I'd remember what it was. But anyway, from watching the channel, you just learned, oh, that line is nice and flat. That means this speaker will EQ well. And sure enough, you can put it through an equalizer and say, no, look, I put it the way I wanted and I can make the curve how I want it. And if it's too much show for me, I can turn it down. But other speakers.

If you try to turn down the treble with the equalizer, it will screw up other parts of the line and it won't be as linear. Anyway, all this is to say that AirPods 2 and 3 are not linear speakers. They are. very much like tunes to be appealing to mass audiences, which makes sense for what they are. They're trying to be a single product sold to millions of people.

They're not going to be like an audiophile linear speaker. The Apple brand is different than the Beats brand. Beats brand, their curve is even heavier on the bass and lower on the treble. And this is true of all speaker brands. Like, what is the one that starts with a B? Not Bang & Olufsen. B&O? Or that's B&O.

Bear Dynamic, the headphones? No, there's some, it might be banging all of a sudden, but I'm forgetting. Anyway, there's certain speaker brands. B&W is another one. Yeah, I know, but it's not that one either. There's certain speaker brands, and it's not Bose. that cost a bazillion dollars and have a reputation of having really tons of treble.

like tons of high-end and exactly like marco said some people like oh i hate that brand i find it fatiguing and shrill and it kills me uh and other people like oh that brand sounds the best i can hear every nuance of those violin strings or whatever um that's personal taste so

good to see. I haven't seen this for most of... You're right, Mark, also that I feel like the AirPods... pro are good enough that they deserve this kind of treatment now whereas before it's like oh they they're nice they go in my ears like regular airpods now where they're getting out the graphs now the audio people are looking at them and saying this is what airpods are they are this u-shaped graph where it's lots of bass and lots of treble

and the threes put more bass and more treble in and for the people on this show for the people on the headphone show it was over their limit they said this is too much treble and they both hated the bass but for other people your mileage may vary but just be aware that that's the product you're buying and it is interesting that they made that adjustment

or either didn't make that adjustment, but just, you know, the seal is providing that extra thing, and also didn't provide, that was sarcasm before when I said there's no technology to do this, it's called an equalizer. Like, let people have some kind of adjustment. We've had equalizers, we've had analog equalizers,

This is not a new technology. If there's too much treble, it should be possible to turn it down. It should be possible to adjust that frequency response curve so there's less bass or more bass, less treble or more, but you can even adjust the mid-band. All these bands go across the entire thing. equalization. If the speaker takes well to equalization, you can adjust it to sound better. So Marco, it's not going to help you with fitting in your ear, but the fact that...

Apple continues to provide so little adjustability for AirPods Pro really limits them because I feel like they are capable of more than this. And especially if you like everything about them, but you just don't like the sound for listening to music, which was true of lots of reviewers.

I saw a lot of YouTube videos where they're like, these are amazing, love the transparency, love the noise cancellation, but they sound worse than the AirPods Pro 2, and I don't like how they sound. And that's a shame. That I feel like is perhaps fixable for... Some subset of these people if they just provided basic equalization. But I guess that's just too fiddly for Apple. And again, usually professional headphone or speaker reviewers usually like...

a little bit less trouble than I do. Like there's, there's this thing called the Harmon curve. And for a forever ago, like the Harmon audio corporation developed or came up with this, this like kind of target frequency response curve. Like what people, what, is most pleasing to the most people because it is not a flat response it is not even response across the entire spectrum

most people have a certain balance, like a little bit of extra bass, a little bit of boost here and there. It's a shape of a line. I know what shape it is because I put the Harman curve into SoundSource, the Rogue Amoeba thing. as my preferred EQ for my external speakers. I like it. Harmon curve is appealing. Yes, most people do. So the problem is, as...

As everybody has gotten better at designing speakers and headphones over the last 20 years, we've made huge advances in the engineering behind developing these products. What has happened is... in order to optimize for the most market, almost everyone is now making their headphones and speakers try to match the Harman curve as close as possible. So you have a whole bunch of things that all sound the same. The AirPods Pro don't match it.

AirPods Pro don't match it, though, by the way. No, they don't. They definitely don't. Because I like the way the AirPods sound. Because what I know is, again, what I know about myself when I look at other reviews and when I look at frequency response graphs... I know that I like a bit more in certain parts of the mid-range, like between 1 and 3K. I like a little boost there to get a little bit more vocals and guitar presence. And then I like a decent treble response, not a rolled-off response.

plummets after a certain amount. But I also know that other reviewers don't like that. So I tend to go for choices that have a little bit more treble than most reviewers think is ideal. So for me, the AirPods Pro 3s sound great where they already are. But if Apple wants to only have one tone that everyone gets...

What they're going to have to do is issue a software update that changes their default tuning to be worse for me. And that just that illustrates why this should be some kind of control and why, again. All of their other competitors in the headphone space, they all have apps to offer basic tone controls, at least. Because people like different things. And again, now that they are capable, like now that these...

These drivers and these headphones have gotten so good, so advanced, that they're able to be good enough to cause these kind of opinion differences to be a problem. This is when you offer control. So maybe they will. We'll see. By the way, the speaker brand, I'm pretty sure, was Bowers and Wilkins. Thank you to hairline one in the chat room for going. So when I said BNW and you said no. You said BNW. I didn't know it stood for Bowers and Wilkins. All right. One final thought.

on the AirPods Pro 3. I can talk. This may all be in my head. This may be a placebo. I don't know, but... I will use transparency mode and I will use noise cancellation. I mostly have abandoned adaptive, although I think I need to try it again, to be honest with you. But anyways, I typically flip-flop between transparency and noise cancellation.

And with the AirPods Pro 2, transparency sounded really good, but you could tell you were listening to a reproduction of what was happening around you. In the same way that when you're wearing the Vision Pro, it's really good, but you can tell you're looking through some, you know...

humongous goggles at screens that are reproducing what you're seeing around you. With AirPods Pro 3, transparency is freaking transparent. It is unreal how... real it sounds i should have thought that sentence out a little more but um it is just difficult to believe how absolutely real transparency mode sounds for my ears anyway. It's as though I don't have anything in my ears, which is absolutely bananas to me. Um, but you know,

It's what it is, and I love it for that. All in all, these do get my recommendation. I do think that they are worth it. But if you're coming from AirPods Pro 2 that you're happy with, unless you're desperately seeking more bass... My personal experience is, or a USB-C case if you don't already have one, my personal experience is that these are good. I wouldn't call them requisite. These are not must-buys.

But they are definitely good. Again, you know, caveats about ear shapes and so on and so forth. But the initial reviews and certainly the way they were presented, that everything is better in every measurable way. Yes, but I wouldn't say that everything is dramatically better. The bass to my ears, dramatically better. The soundstage, better. Transparency mode, quite a bit better. Everything else... It's a notch better, but I wouldn't say it's night and day.

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So let's do some Ask ATP, and let's start with Joshua Wold, who writes, on past episodes, you've talked about the UK demand for encryption backdoors, which, by the way, breaking news is back, baby. This brings up something I never fully understood. How do we know if anything is encrypted? Couldn't everything have been encrypted?

backdoors what if signal has a backdoor i don't know john what's what's up with that so in some respects as just a consumer who doesn't know about the technical details you are essentially trusting the uh the products that you buy that claim to have encryption, the companies that make them, that they are telling you the truth about the fact that it's encrypted, and that they haven't made any mistakes when they implemented that encryption.

most of the time they are telling you the truth it's impossible not to make mistakes and so that's why there are security flaws and that's why they have patches and yada yada there's that but practically speaking okay but what if you are technical is there a way That people can tell whether Apple is telling the truth about encrypting things

unlike the world of like linux or whatever where there's you know that you have the source code and even then you what you would say is okay we have the source code to linux but how do i know that this is the source code that you're using when you build your linux that's in your product right so there's always that problem so

Apple has tackled that in a couple different ways. Their private cloud compute thing is one of the ways they try to tackle this, where they're like, we use these signed operating system images that we give to security researchers to say, here is...

here is the binary that we're running and it's signed in a certain way and you can we can prove that it's signed because only a signed thing would be able to answer this challenge of this but you know it's this whole sort of like math-based cryptography thing to say we're going to give you the binary that we're

using and we're going to try to give you a way to prove to yourself that that really is the binary that we're using but in the end as i forget the details of this but uh very secure researchers had looked at it when private cloud compute came out and said in the end there is still at the very bottom of this trust chain a place where you have to say i believe apple is telling the truth about something or other

It's very difficult to do sort of a zero trust thing. And no, please, blockchain people, please don't. Very difficult to do a zero trust thing that doesn't waste all of our time burning down the entire planet. Apple has also provided for iOS, I believe they provide like to security researchers like versions of their hardware and software for security researchers to try to crack because.

compiled software and even encrypted compiled software running like there are you can do things to look into the hardware and software to see If it really is encrypting things, because if it's not, it would be trivial for you to get all the data, right? The iPhone is a very popular, just to give one example, a very popular target for security researchers because people want to crack the iPhone.

So if there was a back door, somebody probably would have found it by now because that would be a very desirable thing to have. They're finding amazing exploits that are just mind boggling, like this chains of 15 different exploits, each of which is just.

You know, you can't even believe each one of them and you need all of them to get through. And now Apple just added that memory integrity protection that we talked about. It's going to make it even harder for everybody. But yeah, so practically speaking, even though you as a consumer can't really know this stuff, you can have some.

faith that the entire world is trying to break into Apple software and they're going to find all the flaws. And if there was a backdoor, they definitely would have found that I feel like by now, because. It's very hard to hide that given the access that people have to Apple's hardware and software to hide a backdoor like that. Oh, you know, everyone's you know, you can get into anyone's phone by typing this special password. You know, it's a typical sort of silly backdoor.

but any kind of sort of thing, like even the most sophisticated back doors, like there was... I forget the details connected to this, but there was some speculation by the various people who tend to be paranoid that some government encryption algorithm, maybe it was DES, I forget, but some sort of like government standardized encryption algorithm.

had some kind of flaw and the idea was that the NSA knew about the flaw when they made it a standard but since only the NSA knew about the flaw they enjoyed you know some number of years where the entire world thought this was unbreakable but the NSA knew the mathematical weak

that's also kind of a backdoor it's not like oh if you use this one password you can get into everything the backdoor was like the NSA and you know according to this conspiracy theory knew the weakness knew the mathematical weakness in this algorithm and so they could crack it in much less time than it

That would also qualify as a backdoor because it's like secret information that they know that you don't. But if other people did know that, then they could break in. So in the end, it's very difficult to know for certain that. you know, that your trust is founded. But on Apple's platforms and in the iPhone in particular, I think you can have some faith just because so many smart people are trying all the time to break into it. Tom Cole writes,

What do the neural engine cores and Apple's chips actually do? They spent years boasting about how the neural engines made them leaders in AI or ML. Then LLMs came out and it turned out they needed to boost RAM and were massively behind. Were whatever the neural engines for just...

a technological dead end. And so what do we do about this, John? How do they work? What are they about? I think we talked about this a while before. It's actually difficult to look up technical details on this. What do the neural engines do? They do math.

that's what all cpus do but like they do math um and why why is there a separate thing called the neural engine does math the whole the whole cpu does math like why do you need this separate thing The thing, the math that is useful to do, that is required to do for machine learning and AI type stuff involves...

lots of numbers so for example the math and the cpu you have an instruction to add two numbers together and puts the results someplace right but what if i told you that you're going to have to add 10 million numbers

Not just two. You could take the first two and add them and then take the second two and add them. Take the third two and add them. You're like, oh, geez, how many of these numbers are there? What if you could add a thousand of them at the same time? Give me the first thousand numbers.

and the second thousand numbers and i will add the first thousand to the second thousand in the same amount of time that it takes me to add one number to another number that's what these simd engines do single instruction multiple data Don't just give me two numbers to add. Give me...

100 200 500 of these huge numbers and give me all the memory give them all together and i'll just take this huge bunch of numbers and these and then i'll same thing with multiply you know i'm going to multiply these numbers together i'm going to put the result here i'm going to add it there

that's the job that you have to do to run most of these machine learning algorithms. And these specialized pieces of hardware are engines that instead of taking two numbers and doing something with them, two numbers to multiply, two numbers to divide, they take hundreds. and they it's just you know it's like it's massively parallel right and they can do this because they only do a certain small number of operations that are commonly done for like matrix multiplication and stuff like that um

which if you take a course in school to learn about all the big square brackets and the numbers and how you do these things a certain number of operations that you're going to have to end up doing a lot of and if you have huge amounts of numbers you can do it faster now what i was trying to look up is okay

That's the neural engine. How does that differ from the sort of the existing SIMD units? Because if you remember back in the Pentium days, they had MMX and the PowerPC had Altevec. Those were the first sort of popular SIMD engines against single instruction, multiple data. The single instruction is add.

multiple data is two sets of 100 numbers or whatever, although they were smaller back then. There were groups of five or six or whatever. Anyway, the Apple SoCs have things in them called AMX Unix, Advanced Matrix Extensions. Those, I believe, are like MMX and Altevec. They're like CPU instructions that you feed to the A19 or whatever. And instead of going to the adder or like the multiply units or whatever, it goes to the AMX unit. So that's part of the CPU.

um it's so hard to find details about this i'm sure people know but the silicon know it well but i didn't know where to search on the web so i did find a scientific paper called evaluating the apple silicon m series socs for hpc performance and efficiency hpc is high performance computing

and they talked about the amx units and then this is here's what they had to say about the neural engine the neural engine supports int8 and fp16 precision that's integer 8-bit integers and 16-bit floating point precision As a hardware accelerator, the Neural Engine operates independently of the CPU and GPU, not as a coprocessor, such as AMX. The Neural Engine delivers higher throughput for matrix operations than AMX, but at a lower precision in FP16.

While this makes it highly efficient for AI-related tasks, low numerical precision is not beneficial for traditional high-performance computing workloads. HPC applications requiring FP32 or FP364 precision may not be fully benefited from the neural engine. So the neural engine is separate. it's not part of the cpu it's a separate unit so it can operate independently while the the cpu is doing other things it's tailored for the kinds of data

that are used in machine learning, which is like 16-bit floating point, not for a 32-bit or 64-bit floating point, which you'd have to use the AMX or the SOC's regular units for. And... that that's what it's there for like and it's not a dead end that's that is still very useful in fact it's so useful they recently add those whatever neural cores to the gpu which i'm assuming is the types of matrix math that is done inside the neural engine now there's a separate

thing inside each gpu core that also can do that so if you're doing some kind of gpu or graphics related operation or if you're using the gpu as a compute engine now you have some really wide matrix stuff going on in there that wasn't there before a lot of it's probably branding neural engine versus amx versus whatever everyone else calls their thing but that's the answer they do math on a lot of numbers at the same time because

The things you need to do in machine learning and AI require you to do math on a lot of numbers at the same time.

Finally for tonight, Sean Harding writes, I always try to keep my SSDs from getting too close to max capacity because I know that filling it up kills performance. But why don't we hear about this for phones? Is the storage in the phones different enough that it doesn't suffer from this problem? Neither do you ever fill the phone? I feel like I've gotten close. And I feel like when you get really properly toward the end of your available storage, it does get ugly fast. But I feel my...

The vibe check here is that Sean's right, that you can be pretty close on a phone and it'll be all right, whereas if you get pretty close on a computer, things are not all right. Also, do we know... How much this is still a problem with modern SSD controllers. When SSDs were new, this was a pretty substantial effect. But there's been a lot of advances in...

you know, how smart their controllers are, how advanced they're, you know, how they operate and everything. How much is this still the case? It's still a case. obviously SSCs are better than they used to be, but there is a measurement, I forget what they call it in the enterprise world, like over-provisioning or something, of essentially how much... extra hardware is there in the ssd beyond it's kind of like when you have like a car electric car battery

They tell you the capacity, but really that's like 90% of the capacity. They never let you fill it to 100%. And then even within the 90%, the car software will also not let you fill the full 90%. So they call the 90% 100%. There's how much it's advertised to hold, and there's how much is actually in there. Enterprise SSDs are over-provisioned in the amount of memory they have because the cells wear out over time.

And before those sales have worn out over time, I can imagine that will alleviate some of the problem. But yes, in all these cases, there is still kind of the problem of even with spinning disks, like when you start to fill the thing up. the number of choices of places you have to store new data become more limited.

When it's empty, you can store it wherever it's most convenient across these three chips and these strips or whatever. But as things, you know, in the old days get fragmented or whatever, or as like cells wear out and you can't use the ones in this chip anymore or whatever. And as the thing fills up, you get fewer choices where you want to put stuff. And having only one or two or three choices of where to put data, even if it's the not most efficient place to put it, will slow things down.

so and phone ssds are no different than any other ssds in that respect in that if you do fill them up you reduce the number of choices and i can sell things down but that's not your problem the real problem is ios mac os The underlying Darwin operating system gets very upset when it runs out of disk space. Even if the SSD was like a quarter full, say you partitioned your SSD and three quarters of it is totally empty.

but the quarter of it that you're using is about to fill, macOS is going to flip out because there are so many things in the operating system that expect to be able to have disk space. On the Mac, for example, the swap files.

If it's time to make a new swap file and it can't make one because there's not enough disk space, things are going to go bad real fast. If certain things try to write to the disk and they get no space left on device back from the operating system and that part of the operating system expected that never to happen and doesn't.

handle that failure well bad things happen and so that's the real danger for you should worry about for filling your ssd your spinning disk or anything is that most operating systems and especially apple's operating systems do not behave well when they run out when they start to run out of disk space when anything that expects like surely i'll always be able to write this one little file here with this like process id in it or something and it can't do that

how good is the error handling is there's this cascade of like well i couldn't do this therefore this thing happened could this or does it just fall on the floor and things start to fail bad things happen and the other the thing other thing about phones is and like max as we discussed in the past

how much space is left on your phone's ssd you're going to go into settings general iphone storage and look at that graph and think you get information out of that that graph is a lot of hand waving right and there's and as we've discussed with the abfs stuff and the mac stuff

There's not actually a good, solid answer to that question of how much space is left, especially on iOS, where the OS has such control about things that it can purge and stuff like that. And there is the race of like, well, the operating system needs to write this thing, but this thing is...

purging like old uh icloud stuff at the same time and who's going to win that race um so yeah i think i think the answer for why you don't hear about it in phones too much is because ios is such a more sort of controlled environment and it is so much much more aggressive than apple than the mac os and apple's other operating systems about doing stuff behind the scene to like purge things to make room

But if you fill a phone all the way and then try to do your normal work in it, your phone is going to be worse and slower and probably the OS is going to flip out at some point. So don't fill your phone. Thank you to our sponsors this week. Claude, Factor, and Zapier. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership, besides the special we talked about earlier and a whole bunch of other exclusive member specials, is...

ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. So if you have not heard enough from us, you want to hear more from us, you can do that every single episode with Overtime. This week on Overtime, we'll be talking about Synology. third-party hard drives, and the new Ubiquiti NAS products. So tune in to hear that, atv.fm slash join. Thank you so much, everybody, for listening. 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 Because it was accidental. Accidental. It was accidental. Accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into... You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So.

So I have a USB odyssey that I went down. Not just a story, not a journey, a full-on odyssey. It has been an odyssey. and i have i'll tell you i have figured it out and i still can't figure it out oh lovely okay so uh about a maybe two weeks ago oh maybe a week ago My Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard started to flake out and slowly, you know, lose keystrokes or double keystrokes. Now, I've been using the Sculpt ergonomic keyboard for a while.

This happens. This is how they die. There's two tragedies to the Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard. One is that they never updated it. And in fact...

It's gone through this whole now afterlife of like Microsoft sold their whole keyboard business. They sold part of it to Incase. Incase is now remaking this particular keyboard among a bunch of others. Other people have tried to make... clones of the sculpture ergonomic because it has such a strong following including um matthias and kinesis both of which i have tried and neither of which i can recommend um

And this keyboard, the problem is a lot of people love this keyboard, myself included, and it dies after maybe. It depends, you know, it's a roll of the dice. It dies after usually between two and three years of use in my experience. And so I have like, you know, five or six just new in box, like ready to go waiting around in reserve.

So I've seen this problem before. I've gone through. I've probably killed maybe four or five of them over time. I've been using the keyboard for a long time. So anyway. This one starts flicking out. The keys start doubling and missing. I'm like, well, I guess this one's at the end. Just in case, I'll change the batteries. Change the batteries, no difference. It's still doubling. I'm like, okay. I guess this is about to die.

And then one morning, I go to my computer, and the keyboard is totally dead. No keys work. I'm like, well, that's a new one. All right. I guess this one's done. Get the next one out of the box. Go to the garage, take one off the top of the stack of boxes. Anyway, I go to plug the new one in, and it also doesn't work. That's weird. Well...

I guess maybe something else is wrong. Maybe I'll try a different port on the hub or something. I don't know. Because it has its own custom USB receiver. That's important. This is not Bluetooth. Do you have your keyboard connected to a hub? Of course. Because I have one Thunderbolt cable going into my laptop. So I can take my laptop and bring it to me. Laptops. Your laptop has more than one port, though. Come on.

Of course, but it's the one cable dream, John. Plus, it's a USB-A receiver, and I don't want to have this stupid dongle hanging on my laptop all the time. I know. Then you've got to deal with hubs. There's a reason my USB microphone connects directly to the back of my computer. Well, anyway, for a while, for years now, I've had the same setup here and at the beach. I have a Pro Display XDR and a couple of USB devices plugged in. I have a USB...

You know, sound headphone amp thing. I have my USB pre audio device. I have the keyboard dongle and, you know, a couple, you know, like an extra little drive here and there. A few things. And a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter hanging off of a hub. So I have all those things in both places, and they've worked great for years, many, many years. But when this dongle died, when this sculpt keyboard died,

The new one didn't work in the same place. First time ever. And then, so I'm like, all right, well, I keep one of the Apple... the narrower of the two Apple keyboard styles without the big numpad on the side, I keep one of those around for Touch ID. Usually it's stuck to the bottom of the desk. So I'm like, all right, I'll just switch to that temporarily until I figure this out. So I switch to that, and that works fine.

And I go through and I realize, oh, also, why can't I play music? My sound isn't working. My sound devices also plugged in. Neither my headphone amp nor... the USB pre-microphone interface, both of which are USB sound devices, both of which plug into the same hub, they're not working either. Huh. What I eventually conclude is that...

USB 2.0 devices, which sound devices, they all are, I think, but certainly both of mine are. USB 2.0 devices are not working when plugged into the ports on my Thunderbolt hub. But the USB 3.0 external SSD is working. That's bananas. I mean, you hope the SSD is working, or maybe it's slowly corrupting all of its data. Well, right, I guess. Yeah. So...

I'm trying to figure out, why do those work? And then I'm like, wait a minute. When I plug in, like, I was moving stuff around, different ports. If I would connect it through the ports on the Pro Display XDR. It worked. But if a USB 2 device was connected through any other way through the Thunderbolt hub, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be recognized by the computer at all.

What is your Thunderbolt hub? Yeah, I was about to ask the same thing. So I was using this OWC one. I forget the name of it. These hubs all have such similar names and they change like every two years. But it's one of the OWC ones, the one that has a built-in power supply. And it has like, you know, Ethernet and everything.

i was using that so i'm like all right well i have a i have a couple of cal digits around from previous buys i'll just swap one of those in maybe maybe the ports on my hub went bad when somehow maybe this keyboard dongle killed the usb ports on my hub

I don't know how, but I, you know, these keyboard dongles are crap. Like the sculpt keyboard works great, feels great, amazingly comfortable, but electronically it's a piece of garbage. This is why they keep dying. And so I'm like, all right, maybe somehow. My sculpt keyboard killed the USB 2.0 bus because USB 2.0 uses different pins. We talked about this recently. USB 2.0 uses entirely different pins on the connector than USB 3.0. So theoretically, it is possible.

for a hub to basically, for USB 2.0 not to work, but USB 3.0 to work. But I figured, like, but, like, you know, they get power and everything, and I'm like, well, and it should be, like, you know, multiplexed over Thunderbolt to the computer. That shouldn't matter. Anyway, so I'm like, let me try a different hub. Try a different Thunderbolt hub. One of the CalDigit, the Thunderbolt Element 4. No difference. Same problem.

And I'm like, that's really weird. And I take out, I'm like, maybe it's my laptop somehow. Maybe it's a software thing. Who knows? So I take out the other laptop and I connect. the element hub to that. And I got it to work once. I'm like, well, that's weird. And so I moved some stuff around, rewired, plugged it into my other laptop, but that doesn't work. I'm like...

What? What is going on? So here's what worked. USB 2.0 devices would not work in any configuration except when connected directly to the MacBook Pro. or when connected via a USB-C hub that was not Thunderbolt, or connected to the Pro Display XDR's built-in ports, whether or not there was a Thunderbolt hub between the XDR and the laptop. Here's a bunch of things that didn't work. Two identical CalDigit Thunderbolt Element 4 hubs. Two different models of OWC Thunderbolt hubs.

If I connected the USB 2 devices via USB-C or USB-A through dongles and ports, it didn't make a difference. Whether I connected the USB 2 devices through a USB 2 hub... connected to one of the Thunderbolt hubs upstream ports, no difference. Whether the Thunderbolt cable was connected to different ports on the MacBook Pro, no difference. And a completely different MacBook Pro, mostly no difference. But...

If I connected Thunderbolt devices to the Thunderbolt hub, like the Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter I have, that worked just fine. And the USB 3 devices worked fine. So it's only USB 2 devices. Even if I connected the USB 3.0 SSD, if I used a USB 2.0 only cable to force it to work over USB 2.0, it didn't work.

But you're not describing the whole world of devices here, but I'm assuming you were going one device at a time, or were you trying all these configurations with all your devices? I was trying everything I could try. Like, I was... I mean, I'm sure I didn't do it perfectly scientifically, but like I was I spent like three hours trying to figure this out.

Because I would have gone down all the way just to the keyboard, keyboard directly connected to the keyboard, the keyboard being the only device on the thing. Because, you know, you mentioned like you're a device killing the hub. And I feel like hubs will die all on their own. I always suspect the hub is being bad. But you've eliminated that by trying like four.

different hubs right so it's probably not all four your hubs are bad so then my next suspicion is some usb2 connected device is like just spraying garbage data because it's flipping out oh yeah that's what i thought too and any device connected to usb2 is now failing because the entire USB 2.0 environment inside any of the hubs is totally destroyed by that one device that's just spewing garbage. So then I would have said, okay, does just the keyboard work?

you know and all the configurations nothing but the keyboard just the keyboard right you know what i mean and then add a second device yeah so i did that because i had the same thought i'm like maybe one of these is like you know broken and like and like polluting the whole USB 2.0 bus somehow. But all the same thing, which if I connected them directly to the MacBook Pro's ports, they would work, but they would not work through any Thunderbolt hub.

and only usb 2 devices and i'm like that that but except if they were plugged into the xdr's hub if for some reason the xd and i would imagine what the xdr situation would be that the xdr is like you know again like tunneling it over the thunderbolt the one thunderbolt cable that connects it back to your mac right but even so yes you're right but so i have i have a usb3 hub that has like a couple little ports on it. So I tried, all right, maybe, what if I connect USB 3 hub to a Thunderbolt hub?

And then connect a USB 2.0 device into the USB 3.0 hub so that it was like, maybe it's translating the USB 2.0 back and maybe it will upstream to the hub over 3.0. And I was trying all that, no matter what. If USB 2 devices were in that Thunderbolt hub, they would not be recognized by the computer at all.

And I was like, am I going crazy? And I would try different things, and I'm like, didn't it work that one time on the other laptop, but then I couldn't get it to work again? When I tried it again, I'm like, what happened? What is this? What OSs are these laptops running? My main one is running the non-26 one, and my travel one is running 26. And so I'm like, what? What is this? Now, that's all the information I had.

What are your guesses? Because I did eventually figure out something about it. But what are your guesses at this point? Power supply. Casey? No, I don't think it's a power supply. I don't know what it is. I don't think it's a power supply.

I mean, I feel like there's something about, I mean, obviously, there's something about the fact that it's USB 2.0, and I'm thinking about how on the TS5, which I know you're not using, but on the CalDigit TS5, plus particularly which is what i'm now using there's a different like usb controller for different pieces of the hub and i think it's running two different usb controllers and i feel i have this vague notion that it's something in that direction but

I got freaking nothing other than that. I mean, really, I said power supply because that's something you haven't mentioned yet. But really, like, if I was narrowing this down, which I have done with, like, my mouse and stuff.

Oh, I would always strip it down to zero devices, then one device. Like I would want to know which one of the things is causing the problem rather than it sounded like you were very often hooking up all your devices through various things. I'd be like, no, get everything off of this. It's just a computer. It's just a keyboard. It's just a single cable.

and then build up from there until it breaks. And then you'd figure out what the thing that's causing the problem is. And I was doing that, but what would happen is as soon as I would plug any USB 2.0 device... that would have to be routed through a Thunderbolt hub, it would not work anymore. Unless that hub was the XDR's hub. Even if... Even if it was just one device? Yes. Even if I ran the XDR...

through a different Thunderbolt hub, and then into the laptop. So, daisy-chained it worked, too. Like, if the XDR was hosting the USB 2.0 device on one of its ports... This all worked just fine. Which single USB device did you use to determine this? Did you use Apple's keyboard? Did you use the NK's keyboard? I was using one of the sound devices.

Anyway, I always say power supply because in these devices, especially hubs, but even like external hard drives and stuff, the weakest part of it is the thing that converts alternating current to direct current. Those things, if they get wonky and start...

providing too low voltage briefly and do or just get bad it's not the fault of the hub technically but it's just not getting enough power and so things can be disconnecting or freaking out or whatever but so you've tried so many hubs that's probably not it well at one point I like unwired the whole setup and like, again, pull everything from scratch, right? And I like move something around. Oh, were you using the same wires when you were swapping in the hubs? One of them.

was the same wire. You don't even have cats. The Thunderbolt cable that ran between the laptop and the hub. which is apple it's the one that comes with the xdr the it's like you know the the braided two meter long because that's like it's kind of a long run it like runs along the whole side of the desk so and it's the only cable i had that was that link your standing desk that moves

Well, that part is fixed. That part doesn't go up and down. But anyway, so that's the only Thunderbolt cable I had that's longer than like a foot and a half. So it's the only one that can make the run. So I was using that one cable for all these tests. Except the one time I plugged in the other laptop and it worked for a second. I couldn't reproduce it. Let's say your experiment design is a little shoddy here. This cable, again, this is like the Apple Pro XDR cable, it works for everything else.

Except, suddenly, when the Sculpt keyboard died, it then stopped working for USB 2.0 devices being sent over Thunderbolt that are not plugged into the XDR. Now, I... I have no idea why. And I have a cable tester. This is what I was about to say. Didn't you recommend this to me?

The BLE, KBQ, yeah. Because as you're talking just now, I wish I had come up with this a while ago, but just now I'm thinking to myself, wait a second, I'm pretty sure USB 2.0 rolls on different... pins on a thunderbolt cable so that's maybe the only thing that's using those wires but yep but see here but here's the thing like i mean maybe i'm missing something about how this works

When you plug in something into a Thunderbolt hub, the Thunderbolt hub is like a big PCI device, right? And like, isn't the Thunderbolt, isn't the USB controller on that hub? translating the USB pins to the devices into PCI? I thought it was more of a tunneling thing where it reserves lanes for plain old USB 2 somewhere in there. I don't know. I don't know the technical details. Like, I don't think that...

You're sending the USB 2.0 data pins over the Thunderbolt cable coming from a hub. Well, anyway, I would say that if you have determined that you have a bad cable... no amount of tunneling is going to save you probably unless it actually entirely avoids those conductors but well so here's the thing so i tested with my caber queue this great little cable tester i tested

the cable that seemed to be the problem and sure enough it says like does cable health zero percent like whatever that means charging power zero and it says like is that good i i don't think so but then under the specs like it only lists USB 4 and alternate mode. It does not list any of the backwards compatible USB modes. I'm like, okay, but it's a Thunderbolt cable. Because of the age of the XDR, this is like a Thunderbolt...

3 cable, I believe? So this was before USB and Thunderbolt were united. So you could have, like, USB 4, they're all united. A USB 4 cable should also do Thunderbolt 4 and 3 over it. But a Thunderbolt 3 cable... might not have the pins to also do USB. So this tester was verifying, okay, it has Thunderbolt, basically, but not old USB modes. But again...

That's been fine for years. It has worked for years. It was only when that keyboard died that it stopped working. So I'm like, maybe it fried something. So anyway. Then I test one of the CalDigit cables, like a true USB 4 Thunderbolt 4 cable. And, of course, every light on the tester lights up. It passes every possible test. And I use that, and it works. I'm like, what changed? But I'm like, well...

I go online and I'm like, well, Amazon can deliver me tomorrow morning a brand new one of these cables. I'm like, okay. I still need a long Thunderbolt cable so I don't run cables in a weird way across my desk. So I still need a long cable. I still need to buy a new one. So...

all right, let me get the same Apple cable again. Like now it's officially, I think it's like labeled USB 4 or whatever, but like, let me get the same cable again. So I got the replacement cable the next morning. Sure enough, replacing the cable in the exact same run. Works perfectly. So I'm like, oh, cool. Let me get out my cable tester and see what's different. Is it an active cable? No, I don't think so.

It's hard to tell these days because the chips are really small, but actually it has tiny microchips in the ends of the connectors to help with the transfer of very long cables usually. Well, I think all Thunderbolt cables have that. All? I'm not sure all, but anyway. But when a Thunderbolt cable says, I believe Thunderbolt...

Thunderbolt cables can also, I think, have like optics, like fiber optics for certain lengths. I don't know. Anyway. Yeah, but even the electronic ones, they have tiny chips in there, and the chips are very small, so it's hard to tell whether they're in there, and obviously those chips go wrong. Your cable is going to have problems. Yeah. So I got the replacement cable. The tester tests it exactly the same. What? So I cannot figure out what has changed about the bad cable.

whatever it is this tester does not distinguish it from the new cable yeah i would imagine that tester absolutely can't handle active cables but who knows i don't know but like it's well it handles all the other ones anyway so all this is to say I still have no idea what happened. I still have no idea what about the cable went bad such that USB 2 devices would only work if plugged in through...

A Pro Display XDR is a hub and no other hubs. This was the hardest to figure out problem I have ever had on my home computer. And I... I still don't know the answer. I've at least just worked around it by just replacing this cable. But this is the most bizarre thing ever. And so anyway, that's where we are now. I still...

I'm still using that Apple keyboard. I did not go back to the Sculpt. I'm kind of testing to see. You should go back to the keyboard that you thought went bad and try that first. Oh, I already threw it away. Maybe it was fine. It could have been just the cable that was bad. My theory is because it was dying with the key misses and stuff, because it was dying in the way those always die, I think it was just dying.

I've killed like five of these over the years. I've seen exactly this pattern happen. So it's very likely the keyboard was dying and it was about time for this one. But I think when it died, I think it is something really weird to the stuff it was connected to. And I think something got fried or something along the way. God knows what happened.

But things got very messed up and it all came down to this one cable, like the upstream cable between Thunderbolt hub and the laptop. And I have no idea why. Well, not even knowing whether the cable is an active cable doesn't let you know whether you could potentially blame the tiny microchips that are in the ends of the connector, if they exist or not. Well, again, I think on Thunderbolt cables, I believe there are always microchips in the end. It's just a question of maybe of like what kind.

but there's always chips but if those start to do weird things like that's the type of thing you're not going to be able to debug from the outside very easily because how can you tell whether the chip is working right and you'd have probably have to know more about the protocols and stuff and to understand how the the chain of stuff is configuring itself and yada, yada. But in the end, it doesn't really matter.

why it's going wrong you want to get it down to the problem and i think you would narrow it down eventually to that cable uh because replacing it although buying the exact same cable again i would have maybe bought a different one but you know it worked for years with that cable so i suppose yeah and like and you know it's also you know it's

It's still it worked for all these years. And I think the Apple cable, it was the only cable I could find that was anywhere near this length. Like it's I think it's like one point eight meters or something like it's not. most of them are like either two meters or you know like 0.6 or something like it it's there it's a weird length and it happens to fit like the run that i have for it it fits so perfectly

So I'm like, I don't want to get anything else. But anyway, and it looks nice. And, you know, this is like it's one of the only cables that's visible behind my monitor. So I want it to look nice. So it's anyway, I'm it's finally it's finally done.

Well, next time, yeah, next time come up with a... more regimented experiment design that will get you to this answer sooner and strip it down to nothing and then slowly add things back and change all variables different you did a different laptop you did different keyboard you didn't think to do a different cable till the end

I was expecting this to be some sort of interference-related thing, like you and I were fighting with my XLR cable the other day. But no, turns out it's just... I mean, or it could have been like the cable gets caught in one of the hinges of your standing desk and gets shredded or I catch you. through it or there's all sorts of cable related things that can go wrong. Nope. Allergy to cats and that so when I wire a standing desk

I put all the wires that are important and that are actually useful. Like I put all of the wiring that I can. somehow attached in on or under the desk so that the wires all move with the desk the only wires that go downward from the desk to the floor are power and network that's it

There's a whole surg strip mounted in the desk or under the desk. Whenever I do a desk, that's what I do. So that way, the entire setup moves up and down, and you only need a little bit of slack in the power cable and the network cable. Yeah, that's the plan. But, you know, cable gets loose, flops down, gets caught between two pieces when the thing has gone up and down. You know, it happens.