660: It’s All Chicken Salad

So I took a vacation. to visit Casey. If I'm honest, it was not entirely to visit Casey. No, that was a happy coincidence, if we're honest with each other. It worked out well. Casey's there all the time, but there was something else that was there that made you go now.

Yes. One of my new favorite bands, Goose, was there playing a couple of shows in Richmond. It's one of those things where I looked, I'm like, I kind of want to see Goose's Falls, looking at where they're playing. I like a good venue. I also like good seats.

And I looked. I'm like, oh, they're playing in Richmond. That's interesting. Maybe I could fly down there and see Casey and see Goose. And maybe I could even bring Casey to Goose. And then I looked. I went on one of the ticket resale sites. And I'm like, let me see if I can get tickets. And there were three tickets, basically like the best seats you could possibly have in this venue. The first row of seats behind the general admission pit.

But it's also like elevated three feet above the pit. So you're just looking across the top of everybody. You can be seated and be looking above the entire pit. And you're perfectly centered. The perfect distance from the stage. You got all the light effects and everything.

and i was like oh i can't let these go and like and you know they were like maybe they were pricey for richmond but they were not pricey for new york if you know what i mean so i was like oh yeah this this is a no-brainer i'm getting these tickets

So I asked Casey real quick, I'm like, hey, by the way, are you free this night by any chance? Yeah, okay. So we booked everything and Casey was, first of all... an amazing host like so i flew in oh thanks flew in the day of the concert like that morning flew out the next day

Casey was basically like my private driver. Like he drove me, he picked me up at the airport, dropped me off the next day at the airport, drove everywhere. And he even brought me to get the, this is how good of a friend Casey is. He brought me to a chicken salad place for lunch. Now, let me be clear. This is not a place that serves chicken salad.

This is a place that serves only chicken salad, 12 different flavors of chicken salad. And you can pick and you can get like, you know, one scoop of each one. And what a good friend Casey is like. That's amazing. What kind of chicken salad did you get?

I'm dying to know now. So they had a bunch of different options. Casey got like a barbecue one that I sampled and then I got like their classic. I want to know like, you know, what's the what's the regular one. And I also got one that had like pineapple and stuff in it. It was fun.

You know, it's funny you say about the barbecue because I understand where you're coming from. This is a chain called Chicken Salad Chick. I think it's only in the Southeast US. And they do a couple of other things besides chicken salad. But for all intents and purposes, it's all chicken salad. And they have something like 12 of them. I forget exactly how many. We'll put a link in the show notes.

Um, the, all of the, it's chicken salad chick, right? So all of the names are silly, like takes on girls' names. The Barbie, think the doll with the letter Q, barbecue, get it? Barbecue, barbecue. Uh, I love that one. It is a very subtle barbecue flavor.

But anyone I know that has tried it has at the very least said, oh, that's pretty good. I get why you would go, ugh, John. But truly, it's quite tasty. It doesn't look as barbecue-y as I thought. It's just like barely pink. Yeah. You get like a hint of the barbecue flavor, but it's not like overwhelming. It's not just like a chicken salad doused in barbecue sauce. No, no, no, no, no. Then Marco got the classic Carol and I forget what the other one was.

Fruity Fran? No, you didn't have Apple. The only one that has pineapple. Yeah, it doesn't matter. But my perception of Marco is that... Generally speaking, Marco would like something a little fancier than an equivalent to like a Panera Bread. But I was casting about thinking, where could I take Marco Arment for a...

a meal that would be quick and easy after he's traveled. And even though the travel I believe was relatively easy, it's still travel. It's still tiring and whatnot. And I thought, oh. This is a man who used to go for chicken salad, what, every other day, every day for lunch? Why are you avoiding saying that you're trying to take him to a place that is, like, you know, uniquely Southern? Because that seems like what you did. I mean, that wasn't the—but that wasn't the—

impetus for. The impetus was, this is a man who appreciates a chicken salad. Let's get some chicken salad. Your other choice, I guess, would have been barbecue. You want to take him someplace he can't get. Well, hold on. Just you wait. We did barbecue the next day for lunch. This is not like a very healthy trip.

It was amazing. The chicken salad wasn't terrible. I'm sure it wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible. And barbecue is mostly protein. They have red velvet cake, too. We didn't have red velvet cake, though. No, I wanted to fill up entirely on chicken salad. I'm like, I'm not going to have anything else here. I'm not going to, like...

I'm not going to waste stomach space on potato salad or whatever. I'm going to have more chicken salad. Oh, they have egg salad, too. Very nice. That's like going to a steakhouse and ordering the fish. It's like, you can do it, but that's not really what it's for. I mean, the distance between egg salad and... and chicken salad is not as far as the distance between fish and steak, I think. Maybe. You're mostly eating mayonnaise in both cases. True. Anyway, regardless, even though we had...

this amazing chicken salad place, and the following day, amazing barbecue. That was actually not the highlight of this trip. The highlight of this trip was the Goose Show. It was... incredible it was so good it was so good on multiple levels like number one you know i've only there's only the second time i've seen them

It was, I would say, the second best concert I have ever seen. The number one best was Fish at the Sphere, night three that I went to. That was number one for me. This is number two. It was that good of a show. Goose puts on, and this, again, I saw them a year ago, and that was also a great show. But they're even better now. They're getting refined, and they're getting more time together and a bigger catalog.

It was an amazing performance. It was an amazing show. They played so many of my favorite songs, including some that they hardly ever play. So that was very, very rewarding. And all of that was topped off by the topper that... Casey seemed to really enjoy it now some backstory here you know the listeners might recall Casey and I often have some debates about whether his band

Mr. Dave Matthews, is considered a jam band or not. And so I thought, well, Goose is unquestionably a jam band. So let me bring... I knew... Casey probably couldn't handle Fish on his first try. unless maybe i slipped him some gummies and you know then anybody could enjoy it but like you know but i figured like you know an unadorned casey uh probably would not go right from Dave to Fish. That's a big jump. Goose has a lot closer to mainstream appeal compared to Fish. And so I thought...

this is a good step into my musical world. I thought maybe Casey would enjoy it. And it would at least show him, when I say that Dave Matthews is kind of a jam band, but not really, this is kind of what I'm... comparing to it's like this is definitely a jam band and maybe maybe i thought maybe this would allow him to just like mildly appreciate the difference but instead like days before the trip casey was like

listening to a bunch of goose like in preparation for the show and getting really into it i'm like oh boy this this could really become like an actual fan here and not only was Casey visibly happy during the show he was moving more than I was now granted you know this is still like me

doing my like, you know, white guy at a jam band dancing, you know, it's like, let's not get carried away with what I mean by moving. It's pretty limited. No, hard same on that. But yes, I'm with you. I'm with you. To have... To have brought you to this, to have forced you to go listen to this band that you probably didn't think you would enjoy. I mean, that's not entirely true, but finish it off. And then to see you...

Get super into it and seem to really enjoy it was incredibly heartening. And it was it was a wonderful trip for lots of reasons. Casey was amazing as a friend and as a chauffeur, and I got to spend a lot of time with his family, and that was really nice. And of course, the music was really nice. But to also expand the fandom of one of my favorite bands into... Somebody who I would describe as maybe a light skeptic of the genre was really quite special.

No, I appreciate it. I was very glad you came down. It was a semi last second thing. And the funny thing about it is it was whatever the recording we did right before I left for Memphis, you had kind of what is the term or phrase like floated the trial balloon or whatever.

and said, hey, you know, Goose is a thing. It's coming to Richmond. Maybe we should do it. And I'll say, okay, yeah, sure. I'm sure it would be fine. And then as I'm trying to get to the airport, you're like, hey, let's do it. Let's buy tickets. Let's go. And you weren't doing anything wrong, but I'm like trying to get to the airport. I'm like, okay.

Sure. Great. Whatever. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, and I'm sure it was at the time. I'm like, I'm sure it'll all work out. It'll be great. Uh, and so I go to Memphis, I do my thing. I come back from Memphis. I'm like, all right, now I got to do my deep dive on goose. And I had heard a little bit of their stuff in the past. Like, you know, the algorithm had pushed a song or two. here and there, and I liked it. It was fine. It was good. I liked it. And I generally

I just really love live music. I don't have the occasion to go see live music very often, but as I said to you probably 15 times over the 24 hours you were here, if you put me at a Phish show, as much as I joke, as much as I give you a hard time about it,

I bet you I would enjoy it. I might leave it and say, that was fun. I don't need to do it again. But at the time, I think I would enjoy a Phish concert. And I figured it would be like that with Goose. Maybe a little bit better. But as it turns out, these four dudes...

are unbelievably freaking good. And now I've basically listened to Nothing But Goose ever since. I'm ruined. I'm ruined forever. It is really quite incredible. And the show was phenomenal. And we went with a friend of mine and it was great to have.

two fans literally on either side of me. And I cannot thank Marco enough, not only for buying these tickets annoyingly, but also courteously refusing payment for them. But truly, granted, this is a very small amphitheater in Richmond, Virginia. This may not be helpful to anyone.

else, but I tell you what, the seats Marco chose, they were... perfect they were absolutely perfect and it was such an unbelievable privilege and treat not only to be to be there with marco and my new friend tyler but also these seats were just incredible and the concert was incredible and what's great about these kinds of bands jam bands or what have you

is that the next day, their entire concert from the soundboard was available on Bandcamp. We'll link the show. You can download it for 10 plus dollars if you want, which is what we did. And it's incredible. And then they also simulcast... video so uh if you happen to know a guy who's good with command line tools as maybe marco does um you can get a one month subscription to nugs.net n-u-g-s i think it is about net um and you might be able to i don't know archive

something on nugs.net if you try hard enough. So that means, hypothetically, one could have an entire video recording of this incredible concert. So it was a really great 24 hours. It was too quick. I don't fault you.

for the time you spent here. I don't fault you for not making like a week-long trip out of it. But it was great because at the end of the trip, I thought, damn, that was great. I hope we get to do that again soon. And that's the right way to leave a vacation or trip or whatever you want to call it.

But thank you again, Marco, for being such a wonderful person to hang out with for 24 straight hours. It was really great. Thank you. And you had my favorite barbecue joint in town, ZZQ, and I like to think that went pretty well. Oh, it was amazing. And I think the best part of it all is that because I know Minecraft, I was able to talk Minecraft to Casey's son. And because... Casey does not play Minecraft. That made me the coolest person in the world in that moment. I know enough...

Minecraft to have a conversation with him. And I understand the general gist of it, but I certainly do not have anywhere near the experience that Marco does. And so again, speaking of trial balloons, I think Declan kind of threw up a trial balloon to see kind of whether... not marco would bite and because marco's a good person he did the kindness of biting and then it was basically like okay

let's talk Minecraft. So it was one of those situations where like Declan, come on, I need you to go do this or we need to go do that. I forget exactly what the situation was, but we got to go to the concert. I need you to wrap it up, big guy. He was overjoyed to talk.

your ear off, which was both adorable and also kind of funny. At least they didn't ask you to install any mods. That'll come in the next visit. I don't know how you two have managed to avoid that. I'm sure just give us time. It'll happen. It's too late for Marco probably.

Very true. But no, it was really great. And you know what? I was starting to go down this path. I got myself sidetracked. But again, I love live music. Even shows that I don't think I would enjoy, I end up typically enjoying because I just love watching live music.

I don't believe in reincarnation, but if reincarnation were a thing, I want to come back as a musician. Not even a good one, not even a popular one, just someone that can actually play music. And I am in awe at the amount of sound. I said noise. I think, on Friday nights because I couldn't find a better word for it. And I didn't mean it in a pejorative way, but the amount of sound that came from four guys, it was just unreal.

I don't know if Goose is anyone's particular cup of tea if you're listening to this, but if you are willing to just let a song... really and truly air out in a way that even a dave matthews fan would be like oh they really aired that one out um it really is incredible and i i really do recommend their stuff they have plenty of stuff on apple music and i presume on spotify as well uh but i ended up

leaving that show very, very much a fan. And I was getting to the point that I was a fan by the time I walked in, but I was very much a fan leaving that show. And they really are incredible. And I think Marco had said to me during, during the show, which was to, I know we're going on long. I apologize, but I can't help myself. There was a...

set break in the middle of the show. So they played like an hour, hour and a half, and then they had a set break for all the old dudes to go pee, which the three old dudes went and did, and it was incredible. But we're talking during the set break. Along with 6,000 other old dudes. Right, exactly. We're talking during the set break, and I think...

Markwood said to me, you know, what's incredible about goose is it's clear that they are on the rise and we are catching them on the early end of that. And I think from what I can tell, that's very much true. So if you want to get on the ground floor or nearly the ground floor, now's the time.

Go see them while they're still playing medium-sized venues sometimes. They've already sold out Madison Square Garden. They're on their way up. The venues are going to get larger over time, and the tickets will become more scary. and more expensive. It's very special to be able to see them in a medium-sized venue like this and to be able to get those seats was incredible. And there was a point in the second set, they went, I would say in Jamben terms, a little more atmospheric.

maybe the second set was a little more exploratory and there was some like, you know, kind of discordant.

sections that they were playing around with and i i kind of look at casey i'm like okay this is this was a bit challenging for a non-jam band person like i'm like kind of gauging like what's how is he taking this part and like and he got through it and i'm like okay i'm like if he can get through that i think he's ready for fish next all right pump the brakes there big shoes we'll see we'll see

I don't know. It's probably only a matter of time. But no, Goose, to my ears, Goose is, and you said this starting the segment, Goose is considerably more approachable and less esoteric. Now, maybe fast forward two years, maybe I'll have a totally different opinion. But sitting here now, that's how I would describe it.

But again, thank you for facilitating, for making it happen, for dealing with me kind of like half paying attention to you as you're trying to book tickets as I'm on the way to the airport. And again, for purchasing the tickets because they truly hand on heart. I cannot think of a better place to stand in that venue than where we were standing. We were incredibly lucky. So thank you much, Lee. Let's do it again. Absolutely.

All right, let's do some fun stories in Recognition Corner. Richard Ernie was recognized in an ATP Pixel shirt upon arriving in a place in Scotland. We'll get to that in a second. We talked about this last week. Matt Smith wrote in and said... I was that person that recognized the guy in Scotland. And apparently I just absolutely murdered the pronunciation of the city.

I am happy to make an attempt, but John, would you like to instruct me on the correct pronunciation options, please? This shades a little bit into, you did pronounce it weirdly, and this shades a little bit into the discussion I had in rec diffs about like...

Do you pronounce the name of a place in the native language of the place? But here's the thing. The native language of Scotland is ostensibly English or the most common language in Scotland is English, right? For a loose definition. It's very much English. different right okay but so that's that's like all right so yeah the example isn't rectif was like paris we say paris but french people don't say paris they say perry or whatever right uh

And are we pronouncing it wrong when we say Paris? No, because that's how you say the capital city of France in English. So how do you say this city in Scotland?

should we say it in a scottish accent or should we not and what is the what is the quote-unquote like american english way to say this city so you didn't say you just pronounce it phonetically right what i've heard in the united states is one of the pronunciations that a scottish person will tell you was just wrong they'll say it's not edinburgh like a borough of new york city there are five boroughs right edinburgh that's the scottish person will say nope wrong you don't have it i'm like well

That's not how you pronounce it, but I do hear that a lot in the US. But anyway, going by what Scottish people say, and I looked this up and tried to find some reasonable pronunciations, I found a funny one from someone saying, here's three valid pronunciations, which, like... based on how much of a hurry you're in, how much of you just swallow up the word. So one is Edinburgh, where it's B-U-H-R-U-H, Edinburgh. If you're even more in more of a hurry, you can say Edinburgh.

Now the borough becomes bruh. Edinburgh. Bruh. And if you're really in a hurry and you're native scholars, you can say Embra. Yeah. And now I'm not saying these with a Scottish accent, so maybe they sound weird. But anyway, Edinburgh. They definitely sound weird. And borough sounds to me like a Scottish way of saying borough, but I guess not. We can't say Edinburgh, so we'll say Edinburgh. And there you have it. We say Melbourne and Edinburgh.

Or Embra. Anyway, it's definitely not Edinburgh. And Casey, you said Edinburgh, which is definitely wrong. Yeah, I don't know where that came from. That is lunacy. I will be the first to fall on my sword about that one. That was lunacy. But you were just pronouncing it phonetically, which is fine. But that's, you know. Yeah. After college, I moved to Pittsburgh.

And then continuing in recognition corner, Santiago Hervella writes, long-time listener, first-time caller, and day one Overcast user writing in. On episode 659, you told the story about how Mark Christian was wearing an ATP shirt in Manhattan when they were tapped by some nerd who showed them their Overcast app.

listening to ATP. That was me. I'm that nerd. Mark was very gracious when he thought I was just grabbing his attention for something and even more so when I showed him my phone screen. It was hilarious to hear you describe that interaction while I was walking to the office not two blocks from that same spot. ATP is becoming a misconnection for...

nerds yeah i saw you on the the subway and you were listening to a nerdy podcast and i said hi but then i didn't get your number that's great love it make some love connections here

All right, let's talk AirPods 3 and particularly the ear lottery. Michael writes, I had the same AirPods Pro 3 experience as Marco, and I also ordered the AirPods Pro 2 again. I can keep them in my ear all day for getting there. I spent two weeks trying to get the AirPods Pro 3 working for me. It was okay. initially, but it started to hurt quickly. Franklin Delano Stallone writes,

I had the same issues market with new AirPods, but it went away in just about over a week. So I've either stretched out my ears or a level of earwax on the AirPods has helped. AirPods would always be a bit of a pain for me when I clean them fully. So there's possibly something there. But while the noise can... is better I kind of wish they'd go back to the old style

Matthew Schaefer writes, my wife has had AirPod Pro 2 since around the time they were released. She said they don't cancel noise very well. This made my ears perk up because pretty much everyone agrees that the ANC is very good. So I had her stand next to a running fan and switch the ANC off and on.

really wasn't much of a difference. She could hear the fan just fine. This was shocking to me. Apparently, she just thought her experience was normal this whole time. I had her put in my brand new AirPods Pro 3s, and her words exactly were, that's approximately 5,000 times better.

AirPods Pro 2 didn't fit in her ears regardless of which tips she used. I had no clue this whole time that they've been working about as good as cheap non-ANC earbuds. Obviously, I went out and bought her some AirPods Pro 3s right then and there.

Finally, Michael Gock writes, for me, the AirPods Pro 3 were slightly uncomfortable. I ended up going up in tip size. They didn't go in as far, excuse me, they don't go in as far, and they're great now. You mentioned trying smaller sizes, but did you try the larger ones? So, interestingly, so this...

When Michael said this, it kind of stuck in my brain. I had literally shipped them off to be returned that morning. Oh, no. You're so hasty to throw out your non-working keyboards and return your AirPods. At least wait one week for follow-up. Well, I didn't want to hit the two-week deadline. So I'm like, that's annoying.

And then there were these YouTubers who were like, well, if you angle them differently, because what direction are the stems pointing? Most people, it's somewhere between straight down and straight. like you know 40 or 90 degrees forward and it turns out a lot of people were saying like if you angle them too far down they fit wrong basically or they fit less comfortably for a lot of people

What you're supposed to do, apparently, with the threes is angle them so the stems basically form a line towards your mouth. So on that theory...

I think we've all seen people with AirPods of many different generations with those stems pointing in every direction imaginable. Yeah. Sometimes in just... ridiculous directions you're like there's no way those are in right like but hearing all the things about how from like the doctors about how the inside of our ear canals go off in all sorts of weird directions i do wonder if it's just like i mean the whole reason there's the ear lottery is like

everyone's ears are a little bit different and so for some people maybe maybe the when we see them with like the the stems pointing like up at an angle and out away from their head like antennas or something maybe that's how their ear is shaped and that's the best position for them or maybe they just don't know how to use earpods

I don't know. But like, I do feel like that there is a huge amount of variability in what the correct angle is for you. I know which video you're talking about. Oh, point it towards your mouth. If that works, you're great. But I feel like the lesson is. Try that thing pointing in different directions because who knows which direction will work for your weird ears. Yeah.

So between those videos and between Michael's post here, like kind of infecting my brain, like I didn't, I tried the default medium and everything smaller. I didn't actually try the large tips. So I'm like, you know what? Fine. Amazon could deliver me a pair the next morning. Oh, here we go. I've been testing them out with the large tips and with them pointing towards my mouth instead of a little bit further down.

they are a lot more comfortable that way oh look at that that's awesome comfortable enough for you to keep them though i think so in reality they are better in a few ways i do care about like they do sound better they don't sound massively better, but they do sound better.

As we mentioned in the past, the bass is a little bit better. The treble is a decent amount better. The soundstage is a bit wider. They do sound better, and they do isolate better during noise-canceling mode. Almost too well for walking around, actually. But there's lots of other times when you want to use them. So I think overall they are better. The water resistance is better. There's lots of things about them that are better. So I want them to work for me. Ultimately...

With the largest ear tips and with them angled towards my mouth, they fit comfortably enough that so far, I mean, I haven't tried them for more than like two hours straight. But for two hours straight, I was able to wear them. And it was fine. And that was not the case with the smaller eartips ever at all. So I've now gotten to the point where they are fine. The twos are still more comfortable.

but the threes are now good enough with these modifications. So I can keep them. I'm still not sure that I will keep them because the twos are easier and better for me, but I probably will keep them now. We'll see. So wait until you build up some earwax. Yeah.

All right, and then with further regard to active noise cancellation, Tony Denke writes, I used the AirPods Pro 3 on a recent long-haul 787 flight and compared them to the Bose QuietComfort Ultra over-ear headphones. The AirPods Pro 3 were massively... better than the Ultras. I was amazed. Combine that with the lighter, less vibration noise risk from contact with the hard surface in the seat, the AirPods Pro 3.1. Battery life was seriously impressive too.

That is a very real thing. If you've ever been on a plane, especially if you have the window seat like I always try to have. And if you're wearing over your headphones and you touch the outside of the case of those headphones to the wall of the plane. Oh, yeah. It's bad news, and that's much less likely to happen when you've got a tiny earbud in.

Yeah, I mean, the noise cancellation is so much better on the threes. And it was all like the twos were already good enough that I would use them on planes because, again, the bag space savings are just so big that it was always worth it to me. And then the threes take it even further. And so I think like as long as the threes can be comfortable for you, I don't see much reason for most people to get the giant.

headphones anymore like if you are getting them for noise cancellation on planes or during work or during walking around or whatever again if the if the pros threes are comfortable enough for you i think they're better than the over-ear headphones for most people most of the time

And then apparently, Marco, you've done a little bit of an experiment. Yes. I did too. Oh, cool. I'd love to. So. A bunch of people kept asking me, like, hey, have you done the live translation with the new AirPods? Like regular people in my life, like people in stores and stuff, friends, like people who don't follow the tech that closely, but they've heard about that. And they don't know they can probably do them with their own AirPods. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. So, yeah, number one thing to know, again, if people in your life are asking you about the live translation feature, keep in mind that it doesn't require the Pro 3s. It also works on the Pro 2s and the AirPods 4 with noise cancellation.

So if you have either of those models, you already have access to live translation. Download Apple's translation app if you don't already have it. And there's a whole tab, you know, a live... conversation tab so i've actually tried this now um we had a staff party for the restaurant and we had some chefs who speak spanish and so we tried it out like spanish to english i downloaded the model so it should be like maximum speed we had our server you know

speaking uh in english and we had a chef speaking in spanish and we had them kind of gauge like you know how accurate it was it was okay like so number one thing is like it is a little bit awkward when no one's done it before or seen it before. Like, you gotta be like, oh wait, who holds the phone? Where do I face it? Who's looking at what? Do I speak? Does it speak to me? Like, so getting all that worked out is, you know, it takes some doing. And then...

The Spanish option, it's like it's Spanish parentheses Spain. So this is like Spanish as speaking as spoken in Spain.

varies a lot you know as from like spanish in other regions and languages and cultures and everything like that and so and i i didn't say anything about that but like within the first two sentences our chef who was looking at the translation he's like this is spain spanish like he knew instantly he was like this is not what we speak in the kitchen this is this is a spain thing this is very different um so he instantly called it out um but overall it was good enough

to get the gist of what people are saying. It's not perfect by any means. It missed a lot of things. It missed a lot of nuance. It missed a lot of idiom slang. It missed a lot of that stuff. But it did communicate the gist of what was being said. It was not super reliable, it was not super graceful, and it was not super fast. But it did work.

And I tested it a second time when I brought it earlier today. I brought it to another place where some friends work, and they tried it with one of their people who speaks Spanish and one of their people who speaks English and did the same thing.

basically had exactly the same result like it's a little awkward no one knows what to do quite you know at first but then you try it it's like okay that's kind of the gist of what i said and you know and it's slow um so i think it is going to be the kind of thing that like it will be useful in a pinch certainly while traveling if you got to work something out with somebody it's not like very natural and conversational like you have to speak

pretty slowly. You have to speak pretty loudly for it to hear you or hear the other person correctly. Again, like it is slow and awkward when people are not used to it. So it's the kind of thing that I can see being about as useful as Google Translate has always been. And it's the kind of thing that I can definitely see Apple's version being fine, but Google and maybe OpenAI probably do a much better job of this.

And certainly as we go into the future, I can see Apple's version staying exactly the way it is now and Google and OpenAI's versions being a lot better. overall. So I'm glad this tech exists. It's very impressive, but it's not quite as natural as what everybody might assume or want it to be. And I don't expect Apple is going to be the best company to do this long term.

Now, very quick question. Were you basically a passive viewer or listener in this? Like you weren't doing any of the talking? Yes. Oh, and that was still supported. It's just whatever it hears, it's bringing in and doing its thing. Well, the listener was wearing my AirPods and holding my phone. Oh, okay. I got you. Okay. I was watching and kind of telling people because they would ask, wait, do I talk? I say, no, you talk. You listen. I was kind of telling them what to do. I see. Okay.

because they didn't really know. So it's a cool feature. It's not going to revolutionize communication any more than Google Translate does, but that's not nothing. That's pretty useful in a lot of cases. So I think it'll be a great casual travel aid, but it's not going to be as seamless as it was in the commercial. Gotcha. All right, John, you said you also tested it?

Yeah, I wish I had saved some of these things. First of all, I don't even remember if this follow-up ever made it into one of the episodes, but someone had sent this thing saying that Apple's live translation, despite the Translate app having the option of like, oh, we'll go to the server for this, but we'll download these models.

supposedly the airpods live translation only ever uses local models for some privacy reason that's if true and it seems like it was based on that link that i can no longer find that we may or may not have talked about in the past episode That is going to hold Apple back because obviously the models that run on the server can be way better.

than anything very locally now obviously have more latency when you go to the server but if you have a really good network connection that can be alleviated especially since it seems like most of the time you're waiting for the model to compute the result and maybe a server could actually even be faster there if you can get the audio up to it or the

whatever tech stuff do it as fast as possible depending on what it's doing um anyway when this came out like when when it was first available i tried it but i didn't have anyone to speak another language with so i tried to give it like what i felt like was a really challenging scenario where I'm going to sit in front of my computer screen and I'm going to pull up a Spanish-speaking YouTube channel. And that YouTube channel is not...

Doing like what you're being coached by a Marco and trying to speak in non idiomatic, very simple sentences to get your point across slowly and clearly. Right. This was just. you know rapid fire real like a youtuber but in spanish um and i was amazed that as far as i could tell it again it got the gist of it i can't judge the translation because i don't speak spanish but

looking at because it shows you both of them looking at like what it thinks the spanish is and then what the english is i can't tell you whether the english is a correct reflection of the spanish but i can tell you the spanish was looking kind of like what they were saying i was amazed that it worked at all honestly because this is not a real person it's a computer screen playing out of the computer speakers. I'm wearing AirPods. And yeah, there is a delay, but...

I was impressed that it did anything. I've heard people report. We had some feedback. Some people said, I tried it. Had these two people tried. Somebody spoke and the thing just didn't do anything. Like it didn't start translating at all. As with any of the stuff in iOS 26 or any of this new stuff, there are definitely bugs.

And I can imagine scenarios where it just falls on its face and doesn't think there's anything that's supposed to translate or can't understand it at all. Again, Marco mentioned the various different dialects of Spanish. There are enough of them and they're different enough from each other, including not just the pronunciation, but the actual words.

Everything about them can change in ways that can thwart the model. So Apple has added more languages and hopefully they'll add more like localizations of different kinds of Spanish.

Even within Spain, there's plenty of different kinds of Spanish within the regions. But it is impressive that it works at all. Again, it's not really an AirPods feature. It's really just a feature of your phone that is connecting to the AirPods, which is fine. But I was impressed that it was able to do a YouTube video.

I could probably watch the YouTube video. Now, honestly, it would be better if I just turned on the auto-generated English subtitles to the YouTube video because I can imagine Google doing a server-side is still better, but it was neat.

We are sponsored this episode by OpenCase, a patented iPhone case with a literal open space in the back of the case to make MagSafe accessories work a lot better. So here's how this works. The OpenCase, it has like a big oval hole in the back. where the MagSafe accessories go, things like wallets and whatever else. And the great thing about this is like, you know, with magnets, we talked about like the sandwich squishing force. I forget how I put it, like the sliding force. If you...

Try to pull a magnet off the back of the case, like straight off. It's hard to pull it off. But if you slide it, it's a lot easier. So what the open case does... is it gives a space for the wallet or whatever back there to stay in the middle and it blocks it from sliding easily, which means a couple of things. Number one, It's just thinner overall because you're not putting your wallet or whatever on top of the case. It's just going directly against the phone. But the main thing is...

it makes it really hard for it to fall off in everyday use. So it's much more secure. You don't have like your wallet constantly popping off the back of your phone. It also, you know, because it has this big cutout, it's also just a nice minimal, you know, case. Like you still get the protection around. the edges, where it really matters, around the corners and everything, around the camera. But overall, you save bulk, you save weight.

And you have, you know, a big window if you're not using a MagSafe accessory to see like the color of your phone. You got the nice new orange phone. You want to see that color, right? You can see the beauty of the phone. You can see the Apple logo, all that stuff. So it's nice. Open Case, it's a great option for cases. There's no vendor lock-in or anything. You don't have to buy their accessories. Everything fits in there that reasonably can.

It's a great option. I really think, honestly, I'm going to order one and try it because it looks pretty cool. And I'm always looking for a good case. And this was a great one. So you can see for yourself by going to theopencase.com. It's The Open Case. The Open Case. Use promo code ATP for 10% off. That's TheOpenCase.com, promo code ATP for 10% off. Thanks to OpenCase for sponsoring our show.

All right. With regard to last week's Ask ATP question about filling SSD and particularly iPhone storage, David Schaub writes, my iPhone 8 got full once, resulting in a reboot loop whenever Springboard loaded. Yikes. The solution.

accept a call from the lock screen, add a person, type in the passcode, go to control center, try and change the wifi, go into wifi settings. And then once in your, once you're in settings, delete all the things, uh, never let the David continues. Never let an iPhone have. less than about five gigs of free space. Why does iOS let you fly so close to the sun? Recovery should have a boot directly to settings option. Don't make the phones angry. They don't like it. Nope.

Additionally, with regard to phones, Mike Taffet did some science, which was very kind of him. Mike writes, I just transferred from an iPhone 17 Pro Max to an iPhone 17 Pro, both wired via two and a half gigabit Ethernet adapters that also take impact. through a 10 gigabyte or 10 gigabit excuse me ubiquity switch neither device ran out of power but also the unify interface interface allowed me to see the bandwidth being used by each port it seems this transfer was running on average about 500

to 600 megabits per second. So for simplicity, I don't see any reason why Wi-Fi isn't the best option. Again, the USB port is 10 gigabits. This was running at 500 to 600 megabits, probably because it was transferring lots of small files.

Uh, then we have some feedback with regard to Marco's USB Odyssey. This was Marco figuring out that, or just discovering that you couldn't. plug in a USB 2.0 device to your Thunderbolt hub, right? Is that a fair summary? Yeah, if any USB 2.0 device that was plugged in through any Thunderbolt hub in any method, except...

through the Pro Display XDR's back ports would not work anymore. And I had traced the problem to a bad cable that once I changed out the cable that ran from the Thunderbolt hub to the laptop, the problem was fixed. Jack Wolborn writes, I had a Thunderbolt cable fail on me a little over a year ago, and while it wasn't the same symptoms that Marco had, it did involve only some devices working. In my case, it was the USB devices that worked and the Thunderbolt ones that didn't.

Sid Polk writes, I'm starting to think that Tahoe in the latest version of Sequoia made a change in the Thunderbolt or USB that breaks older USB or Thunderbolt hubs. My OWC Thunderbolt 4 hub stopped serving USB. My CalDigit 3 at work now kernel panics my Mac unless I... unplug all of my usb devices i bought a caldigit ts5 for my m1 mac max macbook pro and it works flawlessly fabian writes uh in this fabian was

arguably the best person to describe what they were talking about, but we heard this from a lot of people, and I should have thought of this as well. But anyway, Fabian writes, my USB extension cable came with a sticker that reads, quote, USB 2.0 low-speed devices, such as a mouse, keyboard, USB 2.0 flash drive.

USB 2.0 of hub, et cetera. This is not Fabian's fault. This is the sticker. Can only work with one side of the ultra high rate extension cables interface. If USB 2.0 devices do not work as you expected, please flip the type C connector over and connect again. So Fabian writes, maybe that's why you had inconsistent results with the same hardware, an inadvertently flipped connector.

Additionally, Keith Heaton provided a pinout or whatever you would like to call it, a pin diagram of the USB-C connector. And we will put a link to that in the show notes. And it says, Keith writes, USB 2.0 data runs on the A6 and A7 or B6 and B7 pins with type C connector. If only the A bank or B bank has an issue, you might be able to keep using that expensive cable by rotating the connector 180 degrees.

computer, both using the functional bank. Even without a cable tester, there are only four possible combinations. This is worth noting as well. So in my tailgate tub that we've talked about in the past, I have a GLiNet router that can take in... tethering including via phone via a usb uh a

connector but on the front of the tailgate tub i put in usb-c connectors and so internal to the tailgate tub i have a c to a line cable whatever and i've noticed that i need to make sure that i connected the exact same way so i drew

on the connector, you know, with like a silvery Sharpie that shows up in the black connector, which side needs to be on which side of the input on the tailgate tub. So basically I'm connecting the two sides correctly because I found, wait, why is this not working? Why is this? not working why is this oh flip there it goes works perfectly now and i didn't think of this when we were recording but i should have so my apologies to you marco well i mean if it makes you feel any better

I would not accept that solution. Because yeah, what it basically says is like, if one side's pins go bad or whatever part of that controller, like if one side of pins goes bad, the other side might still work. So flip it over and try it. That to me is not a solution. The solution is replace the thing that is bad because I'm not going to like it because it'd be one thing. Like if this is the kind of thing, like if it's part of my setup, I just plug it in once and it stays there for years.

Maybe I tolerate that. But this is like when I take my laptop to go somewhere, I unplug this cable and bring it somewhere. And then when I get back, I plug this cable back into the laptop and I would not tolerate it working half the time and having to flip it over.

for that situation. But to be clear, that's not really the cable's fault as far as I understand. It's just, circumstantially, there's USB 2.0 pins on both sides and perhaps... No, but they're duplicated. So... theoretically, it should be able to plug in...

a usb-c or thunderbolt cable in either direction on either end of the cable and everything should work if everything is working properly it does not matter which direction you plug it in what they're saying basically is like sometimes things don't work properly

And it can start to matter. But in that case, like something is broken. And so, you know, consider replacing it. Or that thing with the sticker that Fabian sent is probably they left out two conductors to save money. Right. They're trying to say don't bother with that. Which to me is.

broken yeah there was someone else wrote in i don't have the details of it it was just like wrote in uh just a couple of hours ago about the idea of a dedicated like the usb 2 alternate mode where you have dedicated uh pins on the thunderbolt cable just for usb

uh but the other version is where you don't use that alternate mode and you tunnel everything through thunderbolt the theory is that the xdr is tunneling everything through pcie and thunderbolt whereas the cheaper hubs and other things are using the usb alternate mode and having dedicated wires which is why If one set of those four wires, one pair of those four wires went bad on your cable, yeah, maybe it would work flipped, but I would definitely get a new cable.

Then with regard to active versus passive Thunderbolt cables. This was such a nightmare. There's like three things in here. But it's because I thought, oh, we'll get one thing in here. Someone said a thing. I'm like, let me try to get an authoritative source. And then. You'll see. It just goes down this terrible rabbit hole where there's no straightforward answer. But we'll try to give you three buckets of information. See if you can reconcile them without reading the freaking Thunderbolt spec.

So on OWC's website, they write that Thunderbolt 3 cables longer than seven-tenths of a meter are active cables which do not support DisplayPort. Thunderbolt 3, the cables that are one meter or longer, there are passive cables, which are 20 gigabit Thunderbolt 3. They support a 10 gigabit USB display port and works with a USB-C display directly. Active cables... are up to 40 gigabit Thunderbolt 3, up to 480 megabits.

bit usb does it does support display port but it does not work with the usb ck display directly so even that this is owc like they're a big hardware manufacturer for mac stuff you figure they're web they know what they're talking about they're pretty authoritative source right

already from these two bullet points they're contradictory thunderbolt cables longer than 0.7 meters are active but then it tells me about a passive cable that's that's one meter or longer but it's 20 gigabits like that they're two bullet points contradict each other

If I have a one-meter cable, well, I'm sure that it has to be active because it says that if they're longer than 0.7 meters, they're active. Except when they're passive. But then they're 20 gigabits, but then they have 10 gigabit USB. But if you have a 40 gigabit one that's active, then you only have 480 megabits USB.

Sure, that's just OWC. Then I'm like, because originally I came up with a Reddit result, but I'm like, no, let me find something more authoritative. Let me go to OWC. But nope, now I'm going back to Reddit. All right, so there's a Reddit comment from LaughingMan11 on active versus passive Thunderbolt cables, which reads, cables rated at 40 gigabits per second with a length of 0.8 meters of all kinds.

3, Thunderbolt 4, USB 4 are 100% guaranteed to be passive. If you see 40 gigabits certified cable at .8 meters or shorter, it is a passive cable. For distances between 0.8 and 2 meters, some cables are actually certified passive cables. I've seen cable manufacturers stretch and make 1 meter 40 gigabit per second passive cables with no problems. They managed to squeeze the extra 2 tenths of a meter and keep up the signal.

integrity just fine so again there's more info in that post i just pulled this out but at least it sounds very authoritative and you know laughing man is a reference from an anime series that i like so i'm on board with laughing man 11 from reddit versus owc the company um

But at least at least it's not self-contradictory, these two points, you know, and it does really outline that it is possible to have passive cables. In fact, passive cables that are longer than you would expect. Then, as with all things, we turn to Wikipedia and Wikipedia writes copper Thunderbolt four cables of up to one meter.

are passive cables, while longer cables must integrate active signal conditioning circuitry. Two meters maximum is the length of active cables available for most brands, including Caldigit, Cable Matters, etc., while Apple is currently the only company that offers a three-meter active copper.

cable it's madness it's like just i dare you to google this notice how all the numbers change one meter point point zero point eight zero point seven some companies have been extended to this thing active passive how fast things go The only thing I took from this stupid adventure that I spent so long wandering through, and I found way more than just OWC Reddit and Wikipedia, but this is a sampling, is that passive Thunderbolt cables exist.

that's it that's all i can come away with and they're probably short

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We spoke about some alternatives to Synology, I don't know, a week or two ago. I forget exactly when it was. Colin McKellar writes, have you ever considered QNAP, NASA's Q-N-A-P? They are fairly equivalent to Synology in terms of hardware and capabilities, but they have not followed Synology in limiting the drives that can be used.

So I looked at QNAP back in the day, and I looked again when Colin mentioned it. And they've come pretty far since I last checked them out. Their software stack looks very Synology-ish, sometimes down to the exact same name brand apps or similar looking apps. And the other thing QNAP has going for them is that they support ZFS, which I like. It is the thing about ZFS. And I looked at this when I was looking at the QNAP stuff is like, it's got way more features than.

It's got lots of cool features, like the automatic self-healing replication. It's got tons and tons of options. But it is very enterprise-y in that it is farther from the Drobo Dream. Then the Synology set up the Drobo Dream. People don't remember Drobo. You buy this big box full of drives, and whenever you need more storage, you add another drive of any size you feel like, and it just adds.

to the space and it maintains whatever level of data protection that you had and it dies disastrously right well that was the the pitch right because that that appeals to consumers consumers aren't going to buy fleets of things with giant hard drives that are like

I'm just going to buy as many drives as I can afford. And later when I want more space, I'll drive, I'll buy another drive or whatever I can afford and stick it in. And I don't have to have all the drives to be the same size or make subgroups or make separate V devs and add them to the ZFS raid. zpool and all like i don't want to think about that i just want to buy a drive for whatever amount of money i have and stick it in three years later do the same thing and stick it in and i want

Data protection, whatever data protection I picked when I set up this array, I wanted that data protection to be maintained as I add drives and I don't care what size they are. And that... is not what zfs delivers zfs wants you to add things in a more regimented manner it wants it's not as flexible when you add things you can't always add any drive of any size sometimes it does want you you can't add like drives in pairs and add

new uh things to your pool like there are ways to to get some more flexibility than just like you have to replace every drive like a traditional raid but it's it's more fidgety but anyway i do like zfs but then i looked at the prices and qnap stuff it's just as expensive synology so it's like i mean maybe not as expensive i think they have like

better cpus and more ram for the same as Synology's prices but anyway QNAP if you're looking for alternative Synology just looking at their product offerings they seem to be the closest thing to Synology that I've seen, their software stack really does look like they're copying everything that Synology has in a good way.

And they have the option of using ZFS. You don't have to use ZFS. You can use plain old RAID. You can use ZFS. Anyway, I was impressed with how far QNAP has come. Also, some of the recommendations people had for us were Ugreen, which is the company that I just think of as making like USB hubs and Ethernet hubs.

stuff like that but they apparently make nas hardware now too unraid is a software solution then there's free nas true nas there's tons of options for you out there depending on how much stuff you want to do but qnap look like the same type of solution as synology and that like you give us money we take care of everything

like it's not diy it's not like you can get down nitty-gritty and do like fancy stuff with cfs but if you just want to buy like an appliance and use an interface to set it up qnap will do that for you and it does have features that synology doesn't because it has cfs cool

Uh, that's all very useful and I appreciate all the feedback from everyone, but I have news as of about 24 hours from now or thereabouts. Synology has mostly. backtracked on their, uh, complete refusal to work with third party drives. So that's the knowledge of Europe thing we had last episode was right.

But YouTube put a stray YouTube comment from the official Synology at Europe account. Who'd thunk it? So Synology released Distation Manager 7.3 DSM as their operating system, if you will. And their press release reads,

Synology is currently collaborating closely with third-party drive manufacturers to accelerate the testing and verification of additional storage drives. And we'll announce more updates as soon as possible. In the meantime, 25 model year disk station plus value in J-series running DSM 7.3 will support the installation.

storage pool creation of non-validated third-party drives this provides greater flexibility while Synology continues to expand the lineup of officially verified drives that meet long-term reliability standards

However, the creation of M.2-based storage pool and cache still requires drives from the HCL. I have no idea what that means. On the hardware compatibility list. So basically the asterisk, it was a footnote one saying, we'll support the... creation of non-validated third-party drives footnote and the footnote was yeah except for m.21 so there's more detail from this space recs youtube channel here

All right. So from SpaceRex YouTube, the M.2 NVMe restrictions are still in place due to the highly diverse M.2 NVMe market in wide variation. We've seen many instances where consumer grade M.2 SSDs with low endurance performance and quality combined with poor firmware implementation. have directly contributed to system instability and data loss. And that's directly from Synology. This was the SpaceRex YouTuber asking Synology, hey, what's the deal? Why can't we do NVM? Why can't we use...

Arbitrary third-party NVMe flash drives, and that's Synology Exploration. Still only the approved list for those. And then Lee Hutchinson at Ars Technica writes, we asked Synology whether the requirements will also be lifted from previous generation Synology products, and the answer to that question appears to be a no. Quote, this change only affects the 25 series models, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Models in the XS Plus line are considered...

HCL is not hydrochloric acid, but hardware compatibility list. So this is why I said they mostly backtracked. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too. Like their enterprise product lines, this XS Plus line, still only Synology validated drives. Old pre-2025 products, that is Synology products that don't end in 25, because all they're on is like DS725, DS225. Those are all 2025 products. If you have a product that's not a 2025 product, you're not included in this either.

It's only exactly what the press release says, which is the only running DSM 7.3. And it's the plus value in J series, which I imagine are what consumers buy. Right. So they're trying to say enterprises with lots of money, we still want to sell you overpriced storage because that's what every storage company in the enterprise does. Like it's how, you know, these big companies make a lot of their money.

But for consumers, because you all got mad at us, we will let you do this. But only if you buy a new 2025 thing or you have one of the really older ones. If you got caught in that middle thing, too bad for you, which is still kind of crappy. Like I'm saying, like if you're going to if you're going to walk this back, walk. it back all the way they want they're walking it back halfway which is better than nothing but still not great yeah i i'm not sure what to make of this that

is probably enough to make me consider going on. I'm saying going back as though I've left, but you know, whenever the time comes that I replaced my like two year old model, this, if this continues for the home market. I'd probably stick with Synology, but it certainly kind of put a gross taste in my mouth, and we'll see how long that lasts. Yeah, a lot of the YouTubers, a lot of the various people reporting on this news are like,

in typical YouTube fashion, would come right out and say, this is because their sales got destroyed when they did this. And it's like, do you have their sales numbers, like, citation needed, as they say in Wikipedia? Probably their sales went down. We know that there was lots of people complaining about it, but like they just definitively say it's because their sales were, you know, in the toilet. It's like, well, you know, like I would like to see something. Anyway.

they the bottom line is they want to sell to enterprises everyone who sells to enterprises makes you buy their storage like you buy like emc or like dell owns them now or all the other big like i had to deal with all these vendors and doing like a uh what do you call it? Vendor evaluation for lots of big storage vendors for a big storage project back when I had a jobby job. So I got to hear all their sales pitches and they all want to sell you just the most expensive.

hard drives you've ever seen in your entire life like that it's like apple with ram and storage like storage that's where all their margins come from and you can see why synology wants to do that too their mistake was thinking they could also apply that to that to people who want to have like a two drive now

in their basement or something and that has not worked out so i think qnap is probably reaching reaping the benefits um i would definitely uh consider trying them but now this analogy is backtracking mostly on this and if i ever buy no one it'll be a 2025 model or later i'm like

probably just stick with Synology. All right. Let's do some more first impressions, but I actually have a very quick bit of, I guess it's sort of kind of follow-up, sorry, John, about the AirPods Pro 3. After hearing the discussion about, oh, you should try the bigger tips. I thought to myself, you know what? I should try the bigger...

What's it going to hurt? And even though I didn't feel like the tips were not snug in my ears, I thought, let me give it a whirl. And I've tried the bigger tips, which I think there's only one step larger, if I'm not mistaken, in the box from what they have mounted on the...

on the device and you can option into one size larger if i'm not mistaken and yes i tried that and i gotta tell you they fit they fit just fine and who'd have thunk it the anc got just a touch better i wouldn't say it was bad before i wouldn't say it's not night and day better than the AirPods Pro 2, but it's definitely a touch better. So even if you don't think you need the bigger tips, give it a shot. Can't hurt. Just like Marco was saying earlier. Marco, you have some case updates for us.

I do, yeah. So in the intervening time, last episode of this one, I have tried three new iPhone 17 Pro cases as I wait for my Suti leather back to be delivered ever.

I don't even think it has shipped yet. I think I need to email them. Speaking of your leather back, by the way, did you see that person who had your leather back and just cut the top off of it? I meant to say that when you were talking about cutting the top off of one of your older cases, but did you see that person's post? Yeah, I mean, certainly that person did a much better job than I did.

But you were using a leatherback for an earlier phone, sticking it on your 17. This person took the leatherback for the 17 Pro that you returned and just cut the top off of that one. I'm done rebuying things I've returned. I don't know if you saw it because it looked pretty good. Again, I don't know how well if any of those little things lifted up. I'm trying to find them. I mean, they seem to have a lot better Dremel skills than I have. So theirs looked a lot better than I thought.

think mine would but there it is omar shaheen um yeah it's looking pretty good i mean again i don't know if those little pointy bits i'll send you the link to i don't know if those little pointy bits might catch under your finger or whatever but it just that i immediately thought of that when you're talking about chopping up your things last time and i forgot to mention it yeah i'm hoping the sooty leather case comes also like what i'm what i'm also hoping to see i don't know if this

will exist because it seems like the the market for like leather magnetically attached phone backs that don't have any side protection seems like a pretty small market i mean it is kind of a weird thing like people usually buy cases for protection not back grip but true and i i also i did try um i found some amazon seller for like seven dollars

were selling this some kind of like gel uh back like oh my like like a stick-on decal that you'd stick on the back like jelly shoes for your uh phone it was Horrific I did have, for my Casey Goose trip, I did have just a cheap clear case from Torras, T-O-R-R-A-S, from Amazon. It was relatively inexpensive, I think, like under $20.

And it's like a basic clear TPU case, no MagSafe support. So it does, you know, it did kind of ruin MagSafe's strength, but it was cheap and it would come the next morning. So I tried it. It was fine. The only thing I don't like about the Toros clear case is that the lip around the camera plateau is very tall, which makes sense. It helps it stand off the table better, but...

it kind of protrudes and makes an outline on your pocket in your jeans. You can see the rim around the camera mesa as its own outline, and I didn't love that. Can't beat the value. Yeah, on that topic of having tall rings around the Mesa, I've seen a lot of people complaining about this, and I don't think people have thought it through. They're like, they made this big full-width camera Mesa Plateau thing.

But the cameras still stick out from it. So when I put it on the table, it still rocks because the cameras stick out, you know, more on the side where the three lenses are than the side that doesn't have any lenses. Like, why didn't they just make it flat all the way across? If there was first of all, the cameras are not.

sticking out just for the hell of it that's how deep they are that's what they can fit there's the screen on the other side of them those are the cameras believe me there is no empty space that they're wasting inside there and given that if you made the iconic plateau

Even with the tops of the camera lenses all the way across, that would look like this case that you're describing. It would be huge. Like you don't realize how prominent that sort of five head would be to borrow a phrase from the flop house.

It would just be gigantic. And granted, they could probably put more stuff in there or whatever. But like, I don't think you want that. Like, it's a shame that the camera lenses stick out as far as they do. But you don't want the whole plateau to be even with the tips of the cameras, because that would just be very top.

heavy and weird and leave weird prints in your jeans. Well, interesting that you mentioned that though. There actually is a slightly better solution, but I'll get to that in a second. So I also tried John's favorite, the bull strap case with the open bottom. This is a nice leather case.

I got the black one. It looks very nice on the phone. And with the open bottom, you still get to see the nice orange strip of your phone on the bottom, which I found to be a nice feature. I don't like the way Bullstrap... partially covers up the camera mesa. I like when cases leave the mesa itself like the full round rect shape and don't try to like...

just leave the cameras open in a square and then have like, you know, the two holes for the two things on the right. Although in this particular phone, because as we noted on an earlier episode, that sharp edge around the camera plateau is the place where the anodization will come off and the bull strap case. It does protect that whole sharp edge with leather. It does. And the bull strap, the way the case rises up around that, it doesn't create any sharp or like...

you know, blunt edges. Everything is rounded. Yeah, that's one of the things I like about my 16 Pro bullstrap case is that the thing around the camera is kind of smooth and slanted and leather. It's not a plastic frame, a metal frame, a chamfered metal. frame you know like lots of cases do that that i don't like feeling that in the back of the phone i like it to be smooth up there my wife's got the bull strap case too and i don't like how it looks when it covers that

the fold with plateau, but I do like the protection it provides and the fact that it's leather like in more places. Yeah, honestly, it looks like a car bra. It really does. Like going back to our very first podcast together, like it looks exactly like... a car bra but it has the opposite because it will protect the thing under it instead of getting grid under there and causing abrasions and

having it all yeah but it's I wish it was more open but anyway otherwise the bull strap case is pretty nice the leather feels fantastic it's a great quality leather even like after only a couple days of use it already feels amazing

Amazing. The black, I think, is a really nice color combo with the orange. And overall, I'm very happy with the bull strap, except that the sleep-wake button... is not a good button feel yeah the buttons aren't great this year on the whole strap case yeah that and that really hurts it like it's it's the kind of thing like you know you push sleep wake and like you think it pushed but you don't really you don't really feel that click the way you do with a good button so like double clicking it to

like for apple pay or something like it feels awful you also might have a you might have a bad one like there i think i feel like the quality control of the buttons is variable because again the buttons on my bull strap case from the 16 pro they're okay my wife's buttons i think are worse than mine but

they're still clicky so i mean i don't think you want to return it or whatever but like no i don't want to go through that but but their buttons like something i've heard about the apple case was it the apple cases they said like the buttons are much improved this year or whatever like the the tech woven

good buttons versus bad buttons is there's a wide gap with cases and it's very difficult to tell what you're getting by looking at the pictures on the website yeah apple tends to have the best buttons um like that that's just the reality of their cases like if you want all the clear cases

like the buttons on a clear apple clear case compared to the buttons on an apple like like the tech woven or fine woven huge difference because the clear case yes it kind of has to be like all one thing and they're not great That's true. Yeah, the clear case, it's not nearly as good as the others. But yeah, overall, Bullstrap, best looking case I've seen.

Best feeling leather I have found in a long time in a case, but the buttons are not amazing. Open bottom is great. Covered up plateau is less great. So it's kind of a mixed bag, but overall a very strong showing. And then finally...

I have, for the last few days, been using the Peak Design case. I got that in a couple days ago, so I've been trying that out. I've had great success with these in previous phones, and the Peak Design, if you've ever used the Peak Design phone case, it's the same case.

It's like they just keep making the same thing over and over again. But that's a good thing. It's a good case. I really like the Peak Design case. There's a couple things about it that I don't, but mostly it's a very positive. So first of all... i think it looks fantastic like this is this is the material that tech woven wishes it was but it's not i don't know why but peak design material

They have a couple of material choices. I still get the gray one that has the original nice gray weave. The other... Choices are getting poor reviews, so I would say be careful with those. But if you get the woven texture ones, it's the same old texture they've always had, and it's great. The rim around the camera plateau is a little bit... pokey, but not nearly as bad as the cheap case. And it doesn't stick up quite as far overall. So, it's...

it's overall like a nicer ratio for that. You do slightly see the outline in a pocket, but it's very, it's much more subtle. I love having the little square indentation on the back to kind of put your finger in as you're like resting the phone in your, in your. grip it kind of serves as like an inverse pop socket in that way um

It does have a covered up bottom, but it does not obstruct the speakers in any meaningful way. Charging cables, even the thick anchor cables go in it just fine. The buttons feel great. Peak design buttons are... Almost as good, maybe even as good as Apple's buttons. They're very, very good.

They have a camera control button this year, which is also sort of the bull strap, by the way. Both of those camera control buttons are very, very good. The Taurus cheap clear case does not have a camera control button. It just has a cutout. Bullstrap and Peak Design, great camera control buttons. They feel good. They're easy to push. They click in nicely. So overall, Peak Design is good. The main downside of the Peak Design case is that it's just bulky.

And that's just – their cases have always been this way. It's a tradeoff. It is not super slim. It is not super lightweight. It does cover up most of the orange of the phone, although you do see the entire camera plateau, which is nice. It's a mixed bag. The Peak Design case, it's like the mid-sized SUV of phone cases.

It will take you anywhere you need to go. If you're going to have one case on your phone all year round and you want it to be relatively protective, you want it to be able to get wet unlike leather and still be okay. The Peak Design case is a great choice. Does it not have a lip around the screen that sticks out farther than the screen?

It does. It's just, it's not very tall. I mean, it's a pretty shallow lip. I was just looking at some of the reviews for the older cases, and they're complaining that the lip isn't enough to essentially, like if you put your phone face down, that your screen will actually be touching it versus like the bull strap case, for instance, a grain of salt.

could very easily be on the table and not touch your screen if you put a screen face down on the bull strap case no the peak design case actually i'll compare them for you the peak design case it it does have a raised lip it's not a very tall raised lip um but it definitely does have it here i'll pop it into the bull strap now let's

stop taking your phone in and out of cases you're upsetting me i i get my phone to be used i don't care if it gets like minor little dust here and there no it's every time you put it in and out of the case you're risking you're stretching out the case you're making the fit worse and you're risking

Probably not risking bending your phone. I would say the bull strap is about the same depth. Maybe the bull strap might be a little bit taller ridge around it, but it's not a meaningful difference. But yeah, overall... I would say bullstrap for formal occasions, peak design for general utility, and a cheap clear case if you want. you know, clear view of the phone. But ultimately, I'm still waiting for a good leather back. And I still like, you know, kind of more like minimal cases than these.

But for now, this is good. The Peak Design also, for whatever it's worth, if you have any needs for a strong mount on something, like if you have like a bike, you want to mount your phone on your bike, Peak Design makes mounts like that.

latch in way stronger than magnets. They latch into the hole in the back of the case, the square hole, and it's like a physical latching mechanism, so it's much stronger than anything magnetic. That being said, for whatever it's worth, the Peak Design case also has...

by far the strongest MagSafe strength I've ever seen in a case. Like, when you put this on the MagSafe puck, when you want to take it off the puck... you gotta pull hard which is actually really nice in a lot of cases like i tried earlier in my car mount i tried to like jiggle it off the car mount to see like will it fall off a mount

And the entire mount moved before the phone did. Like, it's a very strong magnetic connection on the back of the Peak Design case. Way more than the bull strap and any other case I've ever had. Way more than the naked phone, even. And so... If that's a relevant thing to you, again, the Peak Design will probably win that comparison as well. So overall, it's a great overall case. It's just a bit bulky, but that's kind of the nature of it. And otherwise, it's very, very good.

Cool. So you seem like you found at least a couple of winners. Yeah. I mean, like last year, I'm probably going to change it up throughout the year as seasons and needs change. But overall, I'm happy with what I have found. But I do wish that my Suti leatherback would ever ship. I'm so sorry.

For what it's worth, I got a considerable amount of amusement with Aaron and Marco tag-teaming me on making fun of my blue phone and saying how much I should return it and get an orange phone. Oh, my God. I stand by. I stand by. my blue phone that's sometimes purple but occasionally blue i don't think i want an orange phone every time casey referred to the color of his phone on the trip it was

resignation and slight displeasure. And we're like, you're within the return window. You obviously don't like the color you picked. Just return it while you still can and get the one that you actually want. I genuinely don't think I want the orange phone. He just doesn't want to go through the phone transfer process. Also that. Also that.

Very much that. And I mean, there are definitely times where I really, really do like the look of this and the color of this, but I wish for a stronger, bolder blue. That's all.

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Let's talk iOS 26 first impressions. And John, it seems like you would like to start. So please do. Because I didn't run iOS 26. You two have had it, obviously, for your betas of your apps and everything like that. But I was avoiding it. because i had heard terrible things about it and you know i'm like i'll wait till the release version comes out oh quick update by the way the 26.1 beta 2 and tahoe beta 2 have made tethering less broken

Once you connect now, it will stay connected. But the initial process of connecting now takes like three times longer because it can get into a state where the little... circle next to the you know marco's iphone 17 pro like the tethering circle in the menu is lit up but then the menu bar item still shows like no wi-fi and you have to like deselect it and then reselect it for it to actually connect and

make you connected to the tethering. So it's still a mess, but at least once you are connected, at least it stays connected. So it's less broken, but still broken. Cool. Yeah, so I installed iOS 26 when the release one came out. I don't have the beta that Marco was just referring to it, and I'm not on the beta train. I'm just on the release train. So I'm running 26.0. And...

Again, I've been using Tahoe since it was released in all the betas, so I'm familiar with how that looks, and I don't like it, and how it works, and I don't like it, but whatever, got to deal with it with my apps. But iOS 26, like I...

I've seen all the screenshots. I'd heard YouTube talk about it. I heard Marco talk about it at length and his experience with his apps and everything. But I didn't really quite know what to expect other than I knew that I wasn't going to like how it looked because I'd seen how it looked.

So now having used it, I don't know, for a couple weeks now, here's the few additional things I have to say about it on top of what you two have already said about it during the betas. To find at least two... nice things to say about ios 26 wow okay um first um in previous versions of ios uh, various things, especially in like top navigation and stuff like that, like the back button or like, um, you know, I don't know the, the thing that you hit to close a sheet or whatever.

The touch areas may have been the same size as they are in 26, but 26 due to its different style where it draws like, if you have like an X button, it draws a circle around it. Or if you have like a toolbar, it draws like an outline around it. The touch areas in iOS 26 look bigger. I don't know if they are bigger.

but they look bigger because visually you used to have like the word back and a little left facing chevron. And I'm sure the touch area for that was probably huge, but you didn't see that because you just saw like the background that it's on and you saw the text and you felt like you had to tap the text and the text can be small. Like the capital B is big, but the.

ack or small and you're like do i have to hit that no like the touch error was probably huge huge but it felt smaller with the big actual outlines around buttons like the big circle around the x or the big circle around a chevron or the big circular capsule shape around like a toolbar at the top or checkbox or whatever or a checkmark or whatever

Those touch targets feel bigger to me, and I like that. Number two, second nice thing. In earlier versions of iOS, in the post-iOS 7 era, When there was any kind of state change on touch, like you touch that back button, you touch the little X thing or whatever, it was pretty subtle. Maybe the word back would change from light blue to dark blue or some other kind of highlighting type thing. iOS 26, usually the entire background of the thing that you hit does some stupid glowy effect.

right but it's not you you won't miss it like it's sitting there and when you touch it it like i don't know if hdr lights up but it like lights up and like this little transition and glow goes through it and there's an animation or whatever But that happens as soon as you touch it. And imagine having things react to you activating them is a good thing in UI design. One of the things that we kind of sort of lost in the iOS 7 transition because that became so much more subtle.

So those are my two nice things to say about iOS 26. Oh no. The touch targets feel like they're bigger, even if they're not. And more things that are buttons like, that are button-like in the UI. Make it clear when you hit them immediately. As soon as your finger hits them, they do their highlight thing. Everything else about it is what we've said before. And in particular, I felt like doing a blog post about this because I feel like the three...

like the three main sins of the 26 redesign, not just iOS, but across all the platforms are like, uh, how it looks like subjective stuff, which is like, you might like it, you might not, but I don't. So that's just the subjective thing. Um, moving everything away from the edges like and you know the the whole like not having things go edge to edge and having them be inset in capsules and whatever the third one is that i put in my notes documented they can't remember now but like um like

Those are, like, there are a few fundamental, oh, and the third one, I remember it immediately. Showing stuff through behind. you know like i can you know why do i need to see through this control to the content that's behind it or whatever right those are the three main sins as far as i'm concerned of the entire os redesign and we keep thinking like when they come up with the 20th anniversary phone or the folding phone with a wraparound edge to edge screen this this

design will quote unquote make sense and i don't think that's true because all you'd have to do is change a safe area insets with the old design and it would make just as much sense like it's no you don't need them to be floating lozenges you don't need to see the content through them you don't need to see the content behind them but yeah those are the three

main things that I object to this entire OS design. I think it's ugly. Your mileage may vary, but just subjectively, I think it's not attractive. I think... You know, in setting everything off of the margins and making them floating and having to have margins around all the buttons wastes space and is bad. And the content that and it makes problems with the content being able to be seen, not underneath the controls, but around where there are no controls. And then.

Finally, having the controls show content that's literally underneath them is a terrible mistake. Those are the three big ones. There's a lot of smaller nitpicks to pick, but nothing about using the iOS 26 has changed my mind about any of that. It's just as bad as I thought it would be. Much like Tahoe, like I said about Tahoe.

You get used to it. It's fine. It's not a big deal. I said this from day one on Tahoe. I hate how it looks. I think it's incredibly stupid, but it's fine. You survive. It's not the end of the world. It could be worse, right? And this is coming from someone who doesn't even like how it looks. And I feel that way about it.

ios 26 now on ios 26 i have been i'm still am and have been trying to like just leave it on the defaults because i didn't want to be like oh day one i'm putting on reduced transparency i'm putting on like i just want to use it like like it shipped just so i have a legit experience from it

And so far, I'm mostly sticking with that. There are all sorts of situations where things are legible on the screen. And like, I basically got burned out on those before the thing actually shipped because we've seen so many of them, but they're real. They come up like. In particular, the one that blew me away on day one was like, if you take a screenshot on iOS 26 and then you look at that screenshot and the stupid photos app with the stupid iOS 26 design, guess what?

the screenshot which is a picture of your phone screen that has like the time at the top on your battery shows right underneath the actual time on your screen in the battery when the screenshot is shown full screen and why because the photos app

has a completely transparent status bar that shows the photo underneath it. So you get to see the time. You get to see what the time was in the screenshot exactly superimposed on top of the actual time. And it just scrambles that whole top of the screen and it looks... It looks ridiculous. I can't even believe that they shipped something. This was so dumb. But in the grand scheme of things, when that happens, you pinch and you can see what time it really is.

There are always ways around it. It's not the end of the world. It's fine. Your phone will be fine. And practically speaking, I still haven't turned on reduced transparency. I just deal with, because I think it looks even uglier with reduced transparency, honestly. I just deal with the way it looks.

Well, also, 26.0 has some pretty bad bugs with reduced transparency, especially in dark mode, which I still... continue to hear from customers every single day about i cannot wait for 26.1 to be lured to the public as long as they fix tethering first but yeah i cannot wait

yeah i wish they would fix these other obvious things that are just like fundamental to the design but it's like i don't know what they can do about it but anyway uh and then finally on the sort of keeping the default front there was lots of discussion on earlier episodes of youtube going back and forth about uh the whatever compact uh toolbar in safari

at the bottom right you can have it be two stack and you get the immediate one tap access back to your tabs and stuff like that i've left it on the default just to see if i could tolerate it and the answer is yeah i mostly can i find myself using

Most often, the double tap on the three dots button, which is a nice gesture. I think it seems like it might just be a consequence of like, oh, actually, you're just catching the animation in the process. But I think they programmed that in. I think they made sure that a double tap.

Like, I don't think you're catching the in-transition animation of the pop-up menu. I think they're just registering a two-tap gesture and doing it. So I use double-tap. Occasionally you swipe up from the little bar thingy. And the reason I haven't gone to the two-stack is because I don't want more.

it eating into even more of my space. It's bad enough that I have that stupid useless area on the bottom where there's nothing. Then I have the floating toolbar. I don't want to waste more space for the second row. So yeah, I've been using stock iOS 26. I've been surviving. It's fine, except for all the parts where it's ridiculous and stupid. And I hope that someone comes in and changes this in the next five to 10 years. Wow. Cool. All right. So I was in Memphis when iOS 26 dropped and I...

Was around a bunch of Allsac employees. Again, Allsac, what is it? American, Lebanese, Syrian, something, something. I forget what it means. But anyways, it's a fundraising arm for... for St. Jude and an associated charities. There you go. Uh, anyway, so I would ask these like regular people, what do you think of iOS 26? And did they have it on their phone or you asked them to be your phone? No, no, no, their own phones. And I think, in fact, I think a lot of.

them had it pushed to their work devices, which they were not happy about. But anyways, for the most part, the reaction was not great. And the only consistent feedback I got that was specific. was a lot of people really hated the way messages looked, particularly the lack of like a opaque bar at the top. And at least one or two people commented, and I have the same issue. A lot of times when I want to send a screenshot of a messages conversation.

I want to send like a comment or two. Like I don't need the whole damn conversation. And what I would do in iOS 18 is if you're quick about it, you can scroll, scroll, scroll so that there's a big gap between the last message and the keyboard. And that would shove.

the last couple of messages all the way up to the top of the screen, right? And then you can take a screenshot and then crop that screenshot. So you've got the top of the screen, you've got the header and the navigation bar with who you're talking to, and the last couple of text messages sent. And I do that oftentimes too. to call attention to the specific context I want, or maybe it's private information that I'm not trying to share above that. But I do this not infrequently.

That is effectively impossible now because there is no top navigation bar in the same sense that there was an 18. And what's there is translucent. And there were a handful of people that really didn't like that. So then I get home. I transfer Erin's old phone to her new one, which means she's getting iOS 26.

And the first thing she said to me is, how in the name of Zeus's butthole do I close a tab in Safari? Not her words, but you get the idea. How do I close a tab in Safari? And I explained, well, you know, they really rejiggered everything and I tried it for a few days. I couldn't handle it. I really did give it an honest thought.

but I couldn't handle it. And so I went back. To the best of my knowledge, she hasn't yet, which probably relates to the fact that she has about 11 billion tabs on her phone. It drives me bananas, but it works for her. But the one positive feedback that she gave me, most of it she was like, whatever. But the positive bit of feedback she gave me, which I am also enjoying, but I think she's gotten genuinely quite a lot of love out of, is being able to see typing indicators.

in group text. Because it used to be you could see a typing indicator in one-to-one chats, including an RCS. But you can now get that in group chats on iMessage. And she was really, really into that. And I thought that was interesting. So that's my feedback. Has Tiff had anything interesting or worthwhile to note about it? No, she's basically been like, it's fine, whatever.

Fair enough. Yeah, my kids haven't gotten it yet, but they're going to get it with their new phones. So it'll be interesting to see what they think. Because again, like I said, my daughter, when I put Tahoe on quote unquote her laptop, which is not really hers. Wow. She did not like it. She was like, no, no, don't want, don't want.

I'm like, all right, well, you know, she's got a new laptop now that doesn't have Tahoe on it. And I had both my kids turn off auto updates before Tahoe came out because they both expressed that they did not want it. So now they don't have to get it. Eventually they probably will. But anyway.

I bet they'll probably be fine with it on their phone, but my daughter has complaints about a lot of things, but eventually she gets over it. It's just... like i said i this is a blog post that i almost made like three times so just those those three things that apparently i need to write better in my notes document of just like how it looks i think it's ugly uh moving things in from the edges and the fact that you can see through stuff

And those are the three like top level, top three sins of this design. And they spread to all the OSs and they're just, they're bad ideas.

They're just bad ideas. And we get to deal with them everywhere. And I mean, obviously, look, if you like the look, it's two bad ideas, right? But for me, it's three because I don't like how it looks. All right. Tell me about iOS, or excuse me, iPadOS 26.1, John.

I'm even more wary about the other OS's. Obviously, like with the iPad, I mentioned we were talking about the beta. It's like, oh, slide over is gone. That's like my main use case for using my iPad as I watch full screen video because it's like my little bedtime TV. I watch full screen video. And then I have social media apps and slide over from watching like some, you know, thing that I don't need to pay tons of attention to like some crappy reality TV. And.

i have stuff in slide over slide over like my normal slide over apps i have these days are uh slack ivory and tapestry tapestry is the thing i used to read blue sky most of the time um and it's nice I got full screen video. When I want to see something slide over, I slide it over.

uh and if you swipe at the bottom of a slide over thing you can cycle through which thing you're seeing in slide over so i can rotate through those those things that i just said with the slide over staying there it just goes like a little bunch of cards one two three just goes around in a cycle swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe and when you're done with the slide

over you just chuck it you can flick the slide over to the other side of the screen if you want on the left instead of the right you can hide it that slide over and i heard that ipad os26 doesn't have it i'm like I'm all you know, I don't the winning features are not for me like I don't I don't use my iPad in that way But like I don't mind them should all be fine

But I want my slide over. So everyone was all excited when iPadOS 26.1 beta came out. Slide over is back. Slide over is back on iPadOS 26.1. Everyone's so excited about it. And so I foolishly updated from 18. to 26.1 beta just to get slide over and i think that they did a bad job oh no what happened well so first of all the thing that everybody knows is now you can only have one app and slide over which doesn't make

any sense to me. Because like I said when we talked about iPadOS 26, SlideOver fits perfectly with the windowing system of iPad 26. It's just another way of dealing with windows. It makes your windows tall and skinny and it puts them off to the side where you can't see them. And when you swipe in from the edge, they come. And when you cycle through it, like it.

It fits perfectly. There's tons of other things you do with Windows and windowing mode on iPad that are just like that. This is just another one. It's just another place where you can make Windows. You know, you got stage manager, you got the windowing thing, you got all sorts of ways to deal with Windows and iPad. And this fits the paradigm perfectly. It doesn't require the...

windows to be anything but what they are it's just an automated way to have them off screen and then on screen and cycle through them but they said no you can only have one of these in 26.1 beta i don't know why but that's what they did second they put a translucent sort of liquid glass whatever outline around the thing pretty big like half a centimeter outline around the thing to indicate that it's not like other windows like it's going to behave differently you know

At least I'm guessing that's what it's for. So you don't think it's just a regular window because it behaves like a slide over window. You can gesture to chuck it off the screen. You can gesture to pull it on. That's not true of other windows. It's true of slide over. Fine. It's an affordance. Didn't need to be there before, but I don't object to it at all. The real thing they screwed up, well, a couple of things. One, if you remember...

The original iPhone, one of the cool features they had, and it's still there to this day, is if you're doing something like, say, scrolling a web page, if especially back in the olden days of the original iPhone. Not a lot of websites were updated for mobile, as they say. They were just regular websites that would render on your iPhone. And sometimes the text would be real small and you'd pinch a zoom, blah, blah, blah. But they weren't like sort of mobile savvy. So I mean like tearing fireball.

Yeah, exactly. I said I needed a website to test this on and I immediately went to Darren Fireball. Sorry, John. There it is. Because he hasn't updated his website. And here's the key thing. When you have a sort of a non-mobile savvy website or any kind of content, any kind of content on your phone screen that you can scroll.

up and down and left and right there's this more to the left there's more to the right there's more up there's more down this can be an image this can be whatever but very often non-mobile savvy web pages are like this right but what the iphone would do from day one is if it sensed that you were trying to scroll vertically it would lock you into like a rail vertically. And even if, as you started showing vertically, your, your finger.

went off to the left or your finger drifted right a little bit the content wouldn't go off to the left or drift right it would be like it was stuck on a rail it's like ah you're vertically scrolling i'm not gonna make you

carefully, perfectly move your finger in a straight line down the screen. I'm going to let you, once I realize you're vertically scrolling, I'm going to lock it in there and just makes it, we take it for granted, but this is a thing about the iPhone. If you've ever noticed this before.

Go load Daring Friable and try it out. As soon as it figures out you're going up and down, it locks you into that. And so even if you move your thumb side to side, it won't do that. Slide over 26.1 beta miraculously undoes this. Because when you try to chuck the slide over thing back off the screen.

You're like, why is the thing moving up and down? It exactly tracks my finger. I'm trying to like alt slide over. And when you chucked it, it would be like, oh, I see you're trying to dismiss that. And it would move it exactly to the right.

exactly east right or exactly west and the current one tracks your finger so it looks like it's like it's all loosey-goosey and it's like it's going up and down and it's like that's stupid like i why would that how could they screw that up and then on top of that In my context where I'm watching full screen video and sliding the thing over and back, first of all, when I swipe it in from the edge of the screen, it doesn't slide in from the edge. It like fades into its final position.

Like, what the hell? It's called slide over. Slide it over, people. Like, just slide it. Slide it from the side. It, like, crossfades into its final position. And then it makes the full screen, like it has a full screen flash.

of both windows like a flicker like a one frame flicker frat flash when the thing comes in like i brought my ipad to just try this out because like it's so it's so maddening to me that like that they managed to screw this like i should slow-mo it because i think it like it half animates but then fades into the final position and if you're playing video it makes the whole screen flicker every time it comes in and out now granted this is a beta maybe they'll fix this stuff i'm like

How do you screw up slide over so bad? It's a feature you already had that you could have taken exactly as is and put it into the OS. And so they found a way to make it less useful and screw it up in every possible detail. Oh, and the final thing is, and this is not the fault of iPadOS 26, I guess, but lots of the apps I use don't understand iOS 26 windowing system. So, for example, in ivory.

If you swipe left and right and like the toolbar on the top of the thing, you can change accounts. But when you're an iPad OS, the windowing system grabs that swipe and thinks you're chucking the window to the left. That's not what you're trying to do.

in tapestry when you tap a link in the thing and it brings up like an in in in-app browser sheet type thing and you dismiss that sheet by hitting the big x in the upper or whatever to dismiss like the web view sheet thing It dismisses the web view, but it also registers it as a tap on top of the timeline and scrolls you immediately to the top.

because of the confusion about who is controlling what safe area inside or whatever these are a combination of like apps not being updated for ios 26 and beta bugs and stuff like that but the overall experience is that

the thing i was trying to avoid i did to myself i feel like casey i was trying to avoid messing with trying to avoid messing with my workflow like watching full screen video and having apps and slide over and i messed with in every possible way because now i'm constantly accidentally scrolling tapestry

all the way to the top and have to use the jump back button. I'm sliding things in and out and having the screen flicker every time it happens. I'm being distracted by the fact that the thing is wobbling up and down as I move it in and out. I'm being annoyed every time the fade animation comes in and I'm being annoyed about that big outline. I don't, I don't know how they managed this. It was an existing feature, but they, they re implemented it.

poorly with fewer features so it's better than not having it like i'm saying it's better than not having it but i kind of regret upgrading wow so other than that did you like the play I mean, if you think of how I use my iPad, what else am I getting out of iPadOS 26? Like, I'm not a power user of iPad. I got this thing for the freaking OLED screen so I could watch TV on it and also have slack and ivory. tapestry and just it's kind of sad but you know i will endure i'm glad

All right. So we have more first impressions to talk about. We're going to have to shelve that because there's been some news this week. Apple has pulled IceBlock from the App Store. Richard Lawler at The Verge writes, Apple has removed the IceBlock app from its app store. The IceBlock app is intended to be used anonymously to report sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, officials, and see sightings reported within a five-mile radius.

Block rose to the top of the App Store's charts this summer after being targeted by Trump administration officials, with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem calling it an obstruction of justice, and Attorney General Pam Bondi claiming it was not a protected speech.

On October 2nd, Bondi took credit for the app's removal, saying to Fox News Digital, we reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the IceBlock app from their app store. And Apple did so. IceBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs. And violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line. that cannot be crossed.

Excuse me while I pick up my eyes, which has just rolled out of my head. Oh, I'm going to have a lot to say about this. No, we have to be quick. It'll be fine. Don't worry. Eyespluck developer Joshua Aaron is quoted in the same report as saying it counts over 1.1 million users. that Apple has claimed they received information from law enforcement that ice blocks serve to harm law enforcement or officers. This is patently false.

Apple made similar claims in 2019 when it removed HK Map, an app that allowed Hong Kong protesters to trace the movements of law enforcement, with CEO Tim Cook telling employees that

Over the past several days, we received credible information from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police were present. At the time, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle...

spoke out against Apple's censorship of apps. A letter signed by four Republican and three Democratic members of Congress, including Cruz and AOC, if I'm not mistaken, said cases like these raise real concern about whether Apple and other large U.S. corporate entities will bow to growing Chinese demands rather than lose access to a billion Chinese consumers.

You know what would be great? It would be really great if we had an alternative way of getting apps on our phones. Let's just get through this before we do the commentary. But yes, it's true.

Reuters says Apple removed more than 1,700 apps from its App Store in 2024 in response to government demands, but the vast majority, more than 1,300, came from China, followed by Russia with 171, South Korea with 79. Over the last three years, the United States has not appeared as one of the countries... where apps are removed due to government demands, according to the company Application Transparency Reports.

MJ Sy writes, back in 2011, a group of Democratic senators asked Apple to remove DUI checkpoint apps from the App Store. Apple's position at the time was that these apps were a net positive in terms of public safety. Then the government brought the Apple VP of software technology, Bud Tribble, before the Senate. Judiciary Subcommittee where Senator Schumer demanded and Senator Udall lambasted and Apple changed its mind and banned the apps.

Cool. So this last bit of context here. So the Verge story is like, here's the deal. Here's what people said about it with the Ice Black app. I think the Reuters and MJSI story provided some important context, in particular that... 1,700 apps were banned in 2024 due to government responses. Like, government asked Apple to pull an app, and they said yes.

1,700 times. Again, most of them from China, followed by Russia, and that the U.S. was not on that list. But then MJ Tsai points out, actually, the U.S. has made Apple pull down in apps, and it was... Kind of similar, like law enforcement related to remove DUI checkpoint apps. You remember that happened back in 2011? These are apps that would tell you, like, here's a place where police are checking for drunk drivers and you could note them. And, you know, again, Democrats.

republicans asked apple you need to pull these apps apple hadn't pulled them even though people had asked them to and then they brought them in front of the congress and they said you got to do this and eventually apple

pulled the apps right and obviously the the hk map one is very similar like tracking protests or whatever again a law enforcement related so i feel like the story here is that apple has always been pulling apps when governments ask them to, but usually those governments are China and Russia?

And it has happened once or twice with the US when it's related to law enforcement. But now it's happening again with an app that very much looks like a law enforcement type app. You know, knowing where ice is or whatever. And before we go wandering off into.

ice ice block and the current context which is much more dire for us than the dui checkpoint time was in 2011 let's say um but actually is very similar i do want to say that this whole this whole thing is a good example of the limits of Apple's strategy because Apple's strategy with the Trump administration both times has been essentially appeasement.

Try to make nice with them. Try to make them not mad at you because when they're mad at you, they are, you know, it's a corrupt administration and they will do things to harm your company individually in a vindictive way because they... because they're just you know mobsters and bullies right um they'll they'll specifically hurt your company and we want them specifically not our company so we're working within a corrupt system to try to get favors blah blah blah the problem with that strategy

is the strategy is not to make them mad. And you can blow that whole strategy. Appeasement stops working and becomes pointless the second you push back at all. and make them mad at you because then it's like well what did you do all that appeasement for so it leads to like the sunk cost fallacy of saying well we already made nice with all these things we already did all this stuff when they ask us to pull the ice block app

If we say no, they'll be mad at us. And it's like, well, then what did we do all that appeasement for? What did we sell our souls for before? And so you're inclined to say yes and say yes to the next thing and say yes to the next thing. And it's a slippery slope of appeasement. The word comes up in the context of World War II all the time. Appeasement looks great right up until...

you have the rise of Hitler and then doesn't look so good anymore. Does it? Because you're like anyone who was on board with that appeasement thing tends to look bad. And I have history of saying you were appeasing this monster. And you're like, well, when I was appeasing them, they weren't really that monstrous. They were just on their way to monsters.

have to piece in them and but eventually i found my limit and apple apparently has not found its limit and i'm and it's not just the you know the fact that we have a terrible corrupt administration now again in 2011 situation was different it was still apple was still making the same calculus

oh, the government wants us to do this thing. We don't really care one way or the other. We'll probably get bad press from this if we say it's helping people to drunk drive. So we'll do this, but we'll still leave the speed, you know, the speed radar checkpoint things in the Apple Maps app like that.

didn't get rid of that but dui is over the line like they're always doing this very cynical corporate calculus of if there's too much public or government pressure to get rid of an app in the app store we'll do it in the end we control it and it's our decision but we will do it and devoid of any context i feel like the ice block app feels exactly like that it's like oh some government thing doesn't want us to have a thing and

oh, this is harming law enforcement, or so they say, or they lie about everything, but half the country believes them anyway. So whatever, we'll just get rid of it and it'll be fine. But that's missing the wider context, which I'm sure Marco will get to in a second, which is 2025 is not 2011. the current administration is not what it used to be and appeasement in this scenario even though it has been apple strategy from day one uh it has its limits and apple

so far has not found that limit for them. But I think a lot of their observers have said, you need to like, you need to just get over the sunk cost fallacy. And give up on the appeasement strategy and throw away all the stuff that you've done and screw your whole company over. Because if you keep down this path of just always saying yes and always agreeing.

that's not going to lead anywhere good. Like we all hope that they're going to find a line somewhere, but every time something like this happens, people like Marco.

flip out justifiably and say i guess there is no line i guess there's literally nothing that could they can ask for that they won't do it's not that again not removing ice block is not the biggest thing in the world but it's like you just start extrapolating well what if they ask for this what if they ask for that because again the appeasement strategy requires you to not make them mad. And saying no to them will make them mad, which means you will say yes to anything. Marco.

Please go. Okay. Understanding I would like to go to bed at some point tonight. I'm going to go, and you're going to have to bear with me here. So this entire premise— is predicated on a lie. It's predicated on the idea that they had to remove this app because it was dangerous to law enforcement. That is a straight-up lie. If you think about, okay, what...

What unreasonable danger is posed to ISIS? They use the term officials. I would use the term kidnappers and murderers. What unreasonable danger is posed to ISIS, kidnappers and murderers? by people telling other people where they are. They're the ones that have the guns, zero accountability,

And the complete support of a fascist federal government behind them. They are kidnapping and murdering US citizens. And we are supposed to believe that they are the ones that need protection from people knowing where they are. ICE agents, just like Donald Trump himself, are pathetic, weak, thin-skinned racists who only know how to demonstrate strength with cruelty, violence, and punching down.

They are cowards and they hide their cowardly faces behind masks because the only real danger they face is cameras. And they're such cowards they can't even handle that. Now, just like... When racists twisted Black Lives Matter into Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, the idea that the ICE agents are the victims in need of protection from the people they're assaulting and killing...

is a dangerous lie, and that lie will be used to justify using more deadly force in retaliation. And Apple is now complicit in that lie. And the context of this is very important. The Trump administration is literally waging war on America on Americans. This is not a metaphor. They are waging war against U.S. law, the U.S. Constitution.

And U.S. citizens in the U.S. They're deploying military troops intentionally into liberal cities that will probably result in them shooting liberals. And this might sound like an exaggeration, but if this does... Ask, say, your parents, if you're maybe under age 50 or so, or ask Neil Young, what happens...

When a thin-skinned Republican president does deplorable things, and then when people start protesting, they deploy National Guard soldiers against them. This is going to escalate. People have already died. a lot more people will probably die as this escalates. And Apple, in this war against Americans on American soil, has chosen not only to not fight against it, but to explicitly and repeatedly support the aggressors of this war. Tim Cook's legacy will forever be tarnished by his Trump support.

And not only is he destroying Apple's brand and reputation by doing this, he's supporting the destruction of our democracy and our home country. Tim Cook has shown us exactly who and what he is. He is cowardly. And I would say at this point, irredeemable. But there are other people, powerful people at Apple, who can still make a difference. So Tim Cook is a lost cause.

He has shown us who he is. Believe him. I urge the rest of Apple's senior leadership to do some serious soul searching right now and consider what they're willing to support. what they want their careers and legacies to mean, and what they would like to tell their grandchildren in the future about how they handled what's going on in America right now with the power they had. Please, Apple leadership. Really do some soul searching and consider how you want this to end.

It's pretty concise. I disagree with a lot of your more extreme statements there, but the justice that I think we're all more or less on board with, like the lie that they're perpetrating does have a foundation in plausibility, which is like, in theory.

knowing where law enforcement are located could cause them to come to harm because now people who are trying to harm them know where they are and can ambush them and so on and so forth. In practice, has that happened? No, not to my knowledge. So it's just a theoretical thing that could happen. It's the same thing with the Hong Kong protesters.

trying to avoid the armed forces or whatever. It's like, yeah, you're you're you're picking a side. You're picking the side of law enforcement saying we don't want people to know where we are. Despite the fact that in our country, anyway, it's perfectly legal to take pictures of police in public and so on and so forth. Still. The story that our government says to Apple is like, you know, Apple even says, they told us that...

law enforcement officers are coming to harm because of this. Could it have happened? Maybe. But our government lies so much about everything routinely all the time. Like, look at all the court cases. They just straight up lie. ICE, in particular, lies like crazy. Again, as proven in court multiple times.

it's hard to take anything they say uh as truth but in theory it could happen so like the issue is actually somewhat nuanced kind of like the dui checkpoint things like do you want people evading dui checkpoints when they're drunk probably not um

As Casey pointed out earlier, this whole thing is a problem caused by Apple being the only way you can get apps because if Apple wasn't the only way, fine, let them ban whatever they want. We'll just get it from an alternative app store. But that's not the world we live in, at least in this country.

um so yeah it's problems on top of problems on top of problems and like the the appeasement strategy like it's just it's it's essentially a trap like it's it works fine right up until it doesn't but when it doesn't it negates everything you've done. It's like, well, what was the point in all of that? What was the point in all the harm that we caused if it turns out that the strategy is not sustainable?

And I really feel like the strategy is not sustainable at this point. Like, it's just, it's not the fact that they pulled an app. That's not the thing. It's everything that Marco said, that what's happening with ICE in this country is just very, very bad.

it's very bad it's not like the dui checkpoints nothing like this was happening in that context so it's like oh apple pulls an app it's kind of crappy but whatever and now it's like okay well apple's apple pulling the app is part of what part of a thing that is happening that is Terrible. And it's just getting worse by the day. I'm a little bit more optimistic than you are, Marco, that I'm hoping that the people wearing dinosaur suits in Portland will actually not.

get themselves shot and killed by ice but you never know what's going to happen so i'm you know i'm hoping that uh ridicule and peaceful protest and uh you know we'll we'll keep this from escalating because i'm hoping that our side is

Not going to escalate this because honestly, like the premise of all this of sending, you know, sending the National Guard into cities like the cities are war zones. Everyone's dying, which is not, which is obviously not true. But part of the whole fascist thing is you just make up lies, get enough people to believe it. And then you send in troops.

And then the troops, you know, cause violence to happen. And they say, see, look, we told you there was violence. And it's a terrible thing. But hopefully people know that that's what's happening. I can do things like dressing up in silly outfits to combat it. But anyway, it's yeah, it's grim and Apple is not helping. I hope you are more right than I am. I don't think you will be, but I hope you are.

yeah we'll see like it's you really can't tell how these things are going to go but like for people in positions to to influence it like you know obviously individual citizens protesting and voting and so on and so forth but like

and positions of power like apple or any of the other companies that are or universities or any of any other of the large institutions in our country that are being that the government has essentially captured with this with this appeasement as the path of least resistance strategy

they can actually make an even bigger difference. And it's sometimes heartening to see like a couple of universities actually standing up for themselves, but it's incredibly disheartening to see Apple and all the tech companies and Columbia University and all the other things that just have folded like a house of cards.

not pushing back. And like I said, it's because the second they push back, they are self-negating their entire nine-month-long appeasement strategy. And that's going to feel bad for them. It's a sunk cost fallacy, but they probably need to just get over it. And also, I think at this point, it is very clear that Apple needs to, at this point, recognize what they are and stop quoting Martin Luther King on their homepage.

And also, I would say other people who would have pretty strong opinions about what they're doing right now, stop quoting them too, including Steve Jobs. They should never... quote Steve Jobs again on their homepage if they're going to act like this. Because a lot of people say, what would Steve do? And a lot of times it's wishful thinking. Steve would not do this. He was a hippie. He was there.

He would do a lot of things for the shameless seeking of money and success. He would not do this. I don't know. He did do that thing of colluding to not let people change shops for more money with Pixar and everything. That's pretty close to this. Again, not great. He did a lot of not great things and had a lot of not great opinions. And he was a master BS artist to try to rationalize what he was doing. But he would not do this.

Well, anyway, what we really got to be hoping for is what the next CEO will do. And Steve's not going to be the next CEO. And neither is Tim. So fingers crossed. That transition cannot happen soon enough. did you see the recent story they're talking about all the like that jeff williams leaving and stuff like that a german had a bunch on it and it was mentioning like if tim leaves he might still be chairman of the board like no tim just go to an island

do not stay honest chairman of the board please i mean at least it would be at least it would be step one like step one is get out of the ceo i know but like you know i know obviously he's going to be around for a while not to turn this to a succession topic but like One of the things that Tim had, a quote-unquote problem that Tim had, is just the long shadow of Steve Jobs. So for his first few years, it was like he was steering the Steve Jobs ship.

and they didn't let him become his own ceo which you know for better for worse and we would say for worse at this point right yeah um but like i'm so afraid that like the next ceo will feel like they have to like be steering the tim cook ship for the first two years like no like

That's why I want him to get it. I don't want him to be on the board. I don't want him to be there looking over anyone's shoulder. I want the new CEO to say, I'm the new CEO. I have different ideas. Clean break from the past. But I'm not sure that that's going to happen. I mean, we'll see, like, you know, the recent reigniting of the rumors that John Ternus might be the one kind of slated up in line next. You know, we don't know that much about...

John Turnus in ways like this. We don't know what kind of CEO he would be. But so far, honestly, if you look at what at Apple is working really well and what could use some help, hardware is going really well. But the hardware is not, there's nothing, not much political in the hardware, so it's hard to tell where he stands on that stuff, you know? Yeah, like, we don't really, we won't know that unless we actually, you know.

have that situation and see how it goes and that's the worst that's the worst thing about like the like the second and third level of the org chart on apple you almost have no idea what the hell they're thinking because everyone speaks with one voice and is so aligned on the message you know what i mean yeah and it's it's kind of like when you're electing

politicians you just hope that like this politician did what it took to get elected but once they get in there they're going to do all this great stuff almost never happens like because to get that far to become the senior vice president at apple you have to be so willing to you know be on message and be aligned with the leadership that

are you ever going to get somebody who spends all those years working all the way up, but in their secret heart is like, what's what I get in charge? I'm going to change everything. No, I feel like you don't like the breed, you breed like the only way you get that close. The only way you get to be second in line or whatever is to be like, to essentially just. drink the Kool-Aid and be like, yep, no, I agree with all these Apple things. And just that's.

And like Ternus is just a cipher in this because, you know, again, in hardware, you don't spend a lot of time having to make any kind of decisions that touch this at all because it's like it's microchips and like, I mean, I guess maybe like sourcing parts and like sweatshops and stuff like that. But even that is more of like a Jack Williams. type thing. Anyway, I'm ready for it to be an uncertain future. I'm kind of over the present.

i mean it's an i think it's uncertain future now like we you know we don't know i'm ready to be in the uncertain future like i'm ready to be like in in like oh there's someone new and i don't know what they're gonna do because i know what the current people are gonna do and it's not good yeah i mean like yeah

We need a lot of turnover right now in a lot of different ways in a lot of different places. That's what the German story is about that we're referring to. Jeff Williams, I think we mentioned this in the show ages ago when it happened, bringing his second command up and he's on his way out the door. Lots of people...

are kind of of that age in senior leadership where they're going to retire within the next few years including tim cook we all hope um and so there could actually start to be some turnover at the top level of the company which is an incredibly dangerous situation things could go terribly wrong but it's also your only possible hope for

you know, positive change. Yeah. It just sucks. It all sucks. Everything sucks from top to bottom. And I feel like it is, I'm casting about trying to find something to be. excited about something to feel like, yes, yes, this group or this person or these people, they get it and they're fighting for the same thing that I am, to whatever degree I'm fighting, fighting for. I feel like I have yet to find that person, that group, et cetera. They're out there. They're just losing all the time.

I guess, yeah. That's why if you follow all the court cases, you can enjoy all the lower court decisions before the Supreme Court overrules them all and says Trump can do whatever he wants. So if you can just enjoy the in-between period after they win decisively in the lower courts and you get to read those court decisions.

they just take the government to task for being terrible you know just bad all over and then just don't pay attention as it wanders up to the supreme court and they say no actually it's fine Well, let me tell you, I'm sure the Democrats are fighting tooth now. Never mind. No, they're not. Some of them are, but most of them.

At this point, I love that everybody has the quaint idea that the courts are going to save us. Look at how much they have saved us so far. That's not going to happen. They're not going to save us. The courts won't save us, and the Democrats won't save us.

you know, keep looking. Well, the court, the Supreme Court won't save us. The lower courts, the government's losing all the time because they're wrong and breaking the law. Yes, but then when it gets to the Supreme Court, they're going to win again. Yes, that's right. So just enjoy that brief period.

between those two things you know look we've the entire first trump era was defined by you know like you know max's old joke like this time we got him this time and like we never we never are going to get him that's it you want to get him this time you've got to be rooting for heart disease

Yeah, like nothing will ever get him. Except for heart disease. We can all pray for... that but uh nothing else will get him and nothing else will stop him and you know if you think this is all going to be over in three years i got news for you about that too like i wouldn't necessarily count on that either uh until until time saves us all. That's, you know, don't count on anything coming to save us. Anyway, what a great show. Thanks for listening. This would have been fine as an after show.

No, you can't end on that. It's terrible. We'll have the after show to pick us back up. Thank you to our sponsors this week. Squarespace, Delete Me, and Open Case. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the new meta Ray-Ban display glasses and Apple's...

changing plans in response to that. You can join to listen atv.fm slash join. Thank you very much, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. is accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into mastodon you can follow them at cas

E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T. Marco Armin. S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental.

So this after show is going to be potentially fun for Marco and I, and real sad for one of us. Oh no. There's only one left. Uh, John news broke over the last, I don't know, 24, 48 hours as we record this, that TiVo is exiting its legacy DVR business. Oh, you're going to have to wake up and join the 2020s. What are you going to do? No, this is not really sad for me because, look, TiVo, I'm proud of TiVo for a living as long as it has. Yeah. Because it's been a while.

TiVo, kind of like a couple other companies that I've previously enjoyed, like they lost the ability to make good products several years ago. It's the reason I'm still running older TiVos. Because they're literally better spec-wise than the stuff they were selling. They stopped selling DVRs that had the hard drive capacity of the one that I bought ages ago. They just made them smaller and worse and put...

smaller diameter noisier fans in them and crappier hard drives and just their products got worse right even as technology marched on and they never really made the treasures into the 4k era mostly because cable card didn't make a transition to the 4k era like they're that's not true Time has passed them by.

We have 4K cable cards? That's a thing. Yeah, I'm almost sure of it because I get 4K from my cable card-powered HD Home Run. I might be wrong, but I'm almost certain. No, I think we went through this when we did the HD Home Run thing. It's not the cable card.

the problem remember i was saying like the only channels i get in 4k are like when they have those red socks games locally every once in a while but everything else is 1080 oh that is 100 yeah that's basically what i mean like their idea was they would take quote-unquote cable television and record it to a hard drive and if the cable television is 1080 But you can get 4K on Netflix. But anyway, the streaming area obviously came and passed them by. And even though I still have...

TiVo is connected to both of my televisions. I have a good one on my downstairs TV and a not so good one on my upstairs TV. uh you know my our viewing is just basically transitioned away from them almost entirely almost but not quite entirely to streaming services so i got i mentioned this on ages ago that i got rid of hbo and my cable plan and just subscribed to it in the streaming app because the streaming app had higher resolution right? You know, streaming has come and displaced TiVo.

And so it is kind of amazing that they've lasted as long as they can. It is also a shame that as this transition happened, they lost the ability to make good products. They could have done more of like a transition into like a more niche.

consumer product type thing but like again they're they're constrained by the fact that the television coming to the house either over the air through cable uh lost the spec race to the television coming into your house through streaming services because streaming services just went to 4k faster and higher bit rates and hdr and uh cable was still jamming lots of channels over a single wire and blah blah blah so

You know, time marches on. I still have my TiVos. I'm still running them. I still will continue to run them. I still pay for quote unquote cable television and I get stuff on there. But these days, for example, and I'm watching the Super Bowl or something when that's on. Rather than just going directly to TiVo and watching the Super Bowl, I'll check if it is in higher resolution on a streaming service somewhere.

just to try to get a better version of the super bowl the answer is usually it's not it's usually basically the same because sports is still kind of behind the times for a variety of reasons but anyway So yeah, TiVo is no longer making a thing with hard drives and computers that will record cable television to the hard drive and let you play it later. But I do want to say, pouring one out for TiVo, even though I don't drink, is that...

The original TiVo, back before high-definition television, was just, you know, standard-definition cable television. analog cable television coming over a cable, going into a cable card that was stuck into one of these things that had a computer and a hard drive in it, was one of the best consumer electronic products ever made.

Both in terms of how good it was at doing its job, but also in terms of how it changed the lives of people who had it. It's not iPhone caliber. Obviously it didn't take the world by storm because it was kind of geeky, but like. I mean, if you talk to anybody who was around back then and got one of the early TiVos, the way it changed your relationship with television is actually analogous to the way streaming services have changed the way that everybody deals with television.

Because it lets you pause live TV, lets you record multiple shows without using VHS tapes, lets you fast forward and rewind and skip commercials, which is the big thing that changed everyone's lives. And eventually it's recording six shows at once, which is the thing only the people would like.

17 stacked VCRs used to do. And then you had to rewind all the tapes and blah, blah, blah. But the real thing this thing was so great at was, you know, that little peanut shape remote and the fact that that thing was so responsive back in the analog cable days. I don't even know what resolution it was. It was like 480. i480p with like mpeg1 code or whatever garbage like low resolution primitive algorithms we had that was the signal i was recording anyway so responsive

Pause, immediately paused. Played, immediately played. You could fast forward and rewind in increments of X number of seconds as fast as you could hit that button. Just incredibly responsive, incredibly easy to navigate. The Apple TV cannot touch the TiVo up, down, left, right, select button. Like every menu was like the old iPhone. You go right to go into something, you go left to go out, up and down to scroll up and down. The whole interface.

was that so fast so simple so readable from the couch everything was instant play the show it's playing pause the show it's paused skip commercial it's like And as time went on and as HD came out and so on and so forth, the TiVos got worse. They became less responsive. The interface went through a terrible transition where it got way, way worse. And some of the interface was in non-HD and some of it was in HD or whatever. And they, you know, they...

They declined. They diminished. They got worse at what they were doing. Streaming came and wiped them off the face of the earth. But today, with TiVo stopping the production, you can't even buy these anymore, although you shouldn't buy them because they're worse than the old ones. But stopping production of their hard drive-based DVRs, it's worth remembering just how good the TiVo was.

in its heyday and how it totally transformed my relationship with television. It stopped being a thing that I had to sit down at a certain time and watch or whatever. I stopped seeing commercials entirely, which kind of disconnected me from popular culture for a while because people would talk. about commercials that were on tv and i'd never seen them that's still kind of true this day because i think a lot of people add support to streaming services and i don't

But what a piece of hardware. That remote, still amazing. By the way, if you have old TiVo remotes, you can teach the Apple TV to use them as long as you have IR line of sight to the thing. I don't necessarily recommend that because in some situations, the swipey pad is faster than the five-way.

button, but in every other respect, using a TiVo remote with your Apple TV is a much more pleasant experience. If only the Apple TV with eight bajillion times the computing power was as responsive as like a series two TiVo was back in the day. I'm sorry for young people who didn't experience this, but.

believe me like same way you don't believe that changing channels used to be as fast as it was back when we were little kids because you've only ever seen a modern tv where changing channels takes for freaking ever whereas the channels used to change as fast as you could turn that dial like

Yeah. Analog. It had its downsides, but it also had its upsides. Anyway, with TiVo going away, I just want to remember TiVo for the great. I will always have great memories of it. It made my life better. It continues to make my life better, even as the company. Not goes out of business, but stops making those products. It still has a place in my entertainment center until the thing finally dies. And then...

I guess maybe someday I'll eventually be a quote unquote cord cutter because one thing I'm not doing is ever having a cable company box in my house. And that's the thing that I never did because TiVo, this is another thing TiVo did. TiVo saved me from ever having a cable box. Every time I went over to someone's house and they had, they had cable. to use the cable company cable box.

Man, it was grim. TiVo was just living in the future for at least a decade. And it also happened to coincide the time when both my kids were born, or at least my first kid and a little shading to the second. I do not know what I would have done without TiVo.

giving me all that stuff to watch at 3 a.m. as I bounce my children on a bouncy ball trying to get them to sleep. You know, again, in the same way that I give Marco a lot of stick about fish, even though I bet you I would enjoy it a lot more than I admit. I give John a lot of stick about TiVo, particularly running it in the year of our Lord 2025. But with that said, what John described, I cannot begin to tell you how revolutionary it was. I mean, my children don't understand.

And, you know, there was no cable company DVR that I was aware of until TiVo existed. I mean, it really was revolutionary. If you're born in the new millennium, if your birth date begins with a 2, I don't think you understand how incredibly revolutionary a DVR was.

You know, my kids don't understand that there are things that you can only watch when they're airing. Yeah. You know, as an example, there's a brief window of time over the summer where the family really got into Jeopardy and then school happened. We've mostly fizzled about that, but they didn't understand. Yeah. What do you mean? What does that even mean?

What is a channel? I hear you say those words, but I don't know. What is a channel? What does that mean? You mean like a YouTube channel? Exactly. Exactly. And so all of that, to me, Genesis.

was the TiVo. And even though I think it's ridiculous to continue to use a TiVo in 2025. It's not ridiculous, though. If it keeps working, the ridiculous thing is paying for cable. That's the ridiculous thing. But having a TiVo in the house, if you are paying for cable, it's just great. It just makes cable better.

But so does Channels. Like, there are much more modern versions. Yeah, yeah. I mean, remember, I did try Channels, and I do believe my current TiVo is still nicer than Channels, because I tried it. I tried Channels. I did it. Channels is really good. If TiVo didn't exist, maybe I would do it, but... my team was better than channels i'm not sure i agree but you might be right if the content was 4k channels would be better but it's not i mean

what if the channels will slurp up whatever you give it so i know i just but i'm saying like i don't files doesn't deliver 4k except for and remember we went through this like the the red sox games every once in a while and a few really high number channels but almost everything else is not 4k

Well, on the exact same day that TiVo stopped making DVRs, we also lost another revolution. AOL dial up service ended. literally the same day september 30th both of these things died it is kind of remarkable to think that those both had the same Lifespan. Although I would say that AOL dial-up service was revolutionary for a lot of people, but its useful lifespan was way shorter. Yes, agreed. But also probably 10 years earlier.

But yeah, the remarkable thing in both cases, in the case of AOL dial-up and of TiVo DVRs, in both cases, most people hearing the news today, the reaction is, you could still get those. Yeah, didn't they say like how much?

How many people were actually using dial-up when I stopped it? It was some number that's way bigger than you would think. It was a couple hundred thousand, I think, or something like that. I just wonder if those are like accounts where there's no, that's just like some auto pay thing going on. And there's like, I have a hard time believing.

That is 100,000 actual humans dialing up to AOL. But maybe, you know, like really old people. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, figure like maybe if you live somewhere rural where like you haven't had good internet service options for most of the time, you might still not. And you have really simple needs and you've been...

doing the same thing for 40 years like maybe yeah okay i would think the capacitors would blow on their pcs you know what i mean like how is the modem still working yeah well i guess like You know, people still make like all-in-one printer scanner fax things. So like the components must still be made for the fax modems in those. So I guess like you can still make a modem. But I mean, how would you like...

how do you get the computer version like who even still makes like i'm sure somebody makes like a usb one yeah i mean you know it can happen like hey i've got my uh synology down in the basement i was at 13 years old of continuous running and i've used my mac pro for 10 years so like i don't know 30 40 you could get lucky But I bet though, I bet Casey's right. I bet it's like mostly probably like subscriptions that were just never canceled.

That was John that said that. But either way, I was looking for a link to put in the show notes, and I stumbled on a Tom's Hardware link. In the U.S., there are still some ISPs which can make good use of your old U.S. Robotic Sportster 56K or Diamond Super Express modem. Diamond. No, the Sportster was the best one. Come on, we all know that.

We all know that. We've been through this many times. The biggest name alternative is MSN Dial-Up, which is $22 a month. There are also dial-up services offered by NetZero and Juno. Remember that name? Juno still exists? That's a name I haven't heard in a minute. I wonder how many companies that's been passed around through. That was my first...

you know, quote internet. I mean, that was when it was back when it was just email. Like, that was my first internet. I miss netcom. Netcom.com. What a domain name. That's incredible. Finishing up from Tom's Hardware, we recently also had the pleasure of seeing a pair of network enthusiasts bond 12 56k modems. together to set dial-up broadband records. They managed to achieve a record 668 kilobits per second using multi-link PPP technology. This is like the floppy disk raids.

Right? Exactly. One of those. Oh, gosh. Incredible. The term broadband is being used pretty generously here. I mean, maybe they need broad like physical width. Yeah, right. All those modems lined up. You line up those modems. It's pretty broad.