684: It’s Not What Young People Do

I had a terrible cut this week. I cut the the Tip of my left thumb with a knife. Nice. Oh, I thought you meant like you cut something out of the show last week and you weren't pleased about it. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Cut something out of his finger and he wasn't pleased with it. Yeah, well, yeah, fair enough. Well so the problem with cutting the tip of your left thumb. is that well that's my phone thought.

Like'cause I you know, I'm a left hander so like already now using my phone through like, you know, a band aid capacitive band aids. Yeah, well I I mean, it works. It just works terribly. Yeah. And so it's like first of all, the entire left half of the phone keyboard when typing text on the phone, that is now horrendous. And so I mostly just have to use the you know the other hand. And then trying to navigate the phone because

I'm a left-hand phone user. That left thumb is my dominant phone, like one-hand navigation finger. So that's an that's a mess. And then I got to my Mac. And that's the command key thumb. Oh yes, that's true. I could switch the you know, which side is a spacebar. I don't care about that. But that I can deal with. I can't switch the comm the side of the command key. Yeah, I would die. Oh my god. I I thought about it. I'm just this is it.

This like I'm like, should I go on vacation? I don't know. Like I just I can't do anything. Fortunately I I have now downgraded to a thinner bandage as the cut heels and I'm almost out of this national nightmare, but man. But there is no worse.

like finger too heavy cut than your left thumb when you are a Mac user. Oh gracious. That is no fun. Yeah. And I you know, it's so funny. I'm a pretty good typist. I I'm not gonna sit here and say, we did the typing test like two or three years ago. I forgot which one of us was fastest, but I'm pretty good. I'm no Jason Snow, but I'm pretty good. But

You ask me to space bar with my left thumb or command with my right thumb, I I I'm sorry, be gun to my head, I guess I'm gonna get shot because I'd be I'd be doomed. I cannot do it. I don't think uh n you know, looking at my keyboard, I'm trying to like use muscle memory. I don't think I have ever used my right command key. Yeah, I'm not sure I have either. Command period you have. Uh oh yeah, you're right. No, yeah, I guess that's true. Other than that though. Yeah.

All right, let's do some follow up. And we have a lot of chatter, as I would expect, about overcast transcriptions. Uh and first of all, I'd like to say a thanks to the people who reached out and uh said that that was a really good episode slash segment. Uh, I'd like to uh congratulate you, maybe, or thank you, Marco, uh, for doing such a good job telling that whole story because I was riveted. You know, there's a lot of times that.

Uh I maybe not as much, John, but certainly I will play up the ignorant card just to move the show along, you know, something that we've talked about a few minutes before to set up set up a joke or something, you know, and I'll Oh really, uh tell me more about that.

Uh, but this is one of those scenarios where John and I, or at least I, I presume John also, had no freaking clue that this is where that story was going. Uh which On the one side is a little frustrating because, you know, I want to be along for the ride with my friend.

But on the other side, made for excellent programming. So this is a sacrifice we make in our mutual friendships uh for you, the listener. You're welcome. But uh all can do This is why I can do things like set up an entire data center worth of mag minus without ever telling you guys. The only the only person who knew about all this stuff as it was happening, I told underscore.

'Cause we're going to be able to do that that you know, that was we we kept it private. We both had a lot of fun, like, you know, anticipating like when you guys would finally find out about it. But yeah, and it's you know, like when I bought the restaurant, I didn't tell anybody on the internet.

Because it's like, well, this is this is and it's it's only'cause like, oh, this is gonna make for a fun ATP when I finally spring it on you guys live. Yep. And that did as well. Like when John quit his job. Also true. Yep. So we are terrible friends, but we make for pretty good ho hosts, is what I'm hearing. Uh but anyway, I I I'm getting on a tangent with the w what I was trying to say all

All all snark and jokes aside is that uh we really do appreciate all the positive feedback. So thank you. Tell your nerdy friends about the episode. This is a good episode it seems like a good episode to introduce people to the show. You can give them a timestamp link to the segments, they don't have to hear all our BS before and after it. Uh yeah, spread the word. Yeah, yes, please do. So all right, with that said, let's talk some follow up. Uh first of all

How is it, Marco, that you had never seen a data center before? You worked for Tumblr and were kind of their infrastructure or IT person for years. How d what gifts, man? Yeah, so this was a question posed on re on the Overcast Reddit. You know, to for people who don't who kind of aren't in this world or maybe are in a different part of this very large world, um it might have seemed ridiculous that I would have operated Tumblr for its first, you know, four years.

and never having and never had been in a data center before. And the reason why is because during those four years, two t it was two thousand six to two thousand ten, Tumblr didn't have its own data center. What we did was this was very early in AWS. W um EC2 didn't exist for at least the very beginning of that. But what we had instead, you know, what people did back before compute instances Uh which used to be called VPSs or virtual private servers, but what we all did before VPSs

was dedicated servers. So what this is, is now in the business, I believe they now call this bare metal servers. You go to a hosting company on the internet and you just lease a server You know, f through their web interface or their salespeople or whatever. And you have A server allocated to you that you never see. You never deal with the physicality of it.

They deal with it, but you know, and you have to do things like, you know, put in like a RAID controller and make sure you have multiple disks and if one fails, either their monitoring or your monitoring will have to tell somebody, hey, go replace this disk and you know like you have to deal with stuff like that. Your server can break.

and you just you're out of the stuff. If you don't have it backed up, too bad. Um there is not much of a concept of like upgrading to a different server because like well you can you know you can copy the data off yourself and copy it onto a new server, but you know the the concepts we have now like instances that it can be resized like that didn't exist.

you know, very little concept of like managed images and stuff like that. But this is how Servers were run by many people at that time at this scale. Um at that time it wouldn't have made any sense for us to buy a like uh to have our own data centers or our own racks and data centers because we started off.

The first few years of Tumblr were on rough uh most of the time it were on w we were on two servers, you know, maybe up to six or eight at you know, by the f end of the second year or something like that. I I put the timeline out all in there. That's what they were. They were dedicated servers and that's what everyone did before

you know, AWS, EC two and before um compute instances, virtual instances, things that we things that we use now. And again, that world still does exist. It's called bare metal servers, but I think it's a lot less of the business now than it used to be. Excellent. No, I found this uh Reddit explanation absolutely fascinating, so I'm glad you took the time to write it and explain it here.

Uh, some a bunch of people have asked this, uh, including Matt King, uh, how do you handle podcasts that include their own transcripts? Because this was what, like a year or two ago that

Um this started to be a thing. There was I I I don't know how the RSS about podcasts works, but there was like an enclosure or something that you could do. Yeah, yeah. The um the podcast two point zero spec people defined a transcript tag, like a podcast colon transcript tag years ago, it can point to for an episode, it can point to a uh SRT or Web VTT file.

And when Apple Podcasts launched their transcripts, you know, whatever that was, a year and a half, two years ago, they said, okay, well, we will do our own transcripts. But if you wanna supply your own, we will obey this tag. If you use this tag in your feed, the podcast transcript tag, we will show that

I think instead, I think not in addition to, um, but I haven't actually tested it. And the reason I haven't actually tested it is that very, very few podcasts so far actually do this. Um not none, but not a lot. Um so I didn't feel that it was necessary for m the my first beta release. I am in the process of building in the the architecture to support that. So I do plan to show transcripts.

from people's podcast transcript tags, uh, from SRT and Web VTT files, if they are present. I haven't quite decided though, I mean so one of the problems is If you include your own transcript, first of all, you then cannot use dynamic ad insertion because your timestamps will be all messed up. And there, there is not A well-supported standard to embed a transcript in a file that any podcast app would include. Now there actually is.

an old an old MP three ID three tag, I think US L T uh off the top of my head. Um but there actually is um or no that's unsynced. I think SLT, whatever it is. One of th one of those tags is an ID three tag to specify time synced captions to be displayed. So That feature exists in the MP3 ID3 spec, but I don't know of anything that uses it. Um so if you were to support like podcaster supplied transcript,

with dynamic ad insertion, something like that that comes with the file and therefore can be adjusted with the file whenever they insert and remove ads, that would be the only way to really do that. Um but given that these platforms don't even s like the DAI platforms don't even support chapters which work the same way. I'm not holding my breath on that. I I don't I think that's very unlikely for the for any of them to ever do. Um so because DAI platforms generally won't or can't do that.

And because almost all podcasts of medium to large size now are monetized with DAI, I can't imagine that podcaster supplied transcripts are ever gonna be that big of a thing. Now this could be wrong and another thing they could do is they could supply a transcript with timestamps that just don't include any ads.

But then the real time display of it will break it in the player. Like'cause if they you know, if they if their transcript is just their content and doesn't have any of the ad content in it, which it it wouldn't in this context. As soon as you reach a point in the show where they've inserted an ad for, you know, say two minutes, from that point forward, all of the timestamps in their supplied transcript will be off by two minutes.

And so uh the utility of that I think is always going to be significantly less than one that was dynamically generated in such a way that that it can it can synchronize itself back to the ad inserted version of the podcast that you downloaded. So in that way, I think my transcripts are probably going to provide more functionality. than many supplied transcripts will. Because basically, yeah, if if you supply a transcript and you have dynamic ads inserted, that's not gonna play well together.

So even if you supply your own, I I I haven't fully made this decision yet, but I think even if you supply your own, I think I should probably also offer mine. and maybe just have like, you know, a like a a a tab picker at the top of the screen that says, you know, my transcript, their transcript, something like that. Um, because I I think if I don't do that People might be disappointed if they are supplied a transcript that it has less functionality than my built in ones do.

Do you e so even if you accept these transcripts that are offered, which it sounds like you're not too enthusiastic about, there's no real standard for noting like individual timestamps for them, right? Like you know, you had said that you theoretically have the resolution by which you could do the like Instagram thing of highlighting individual words as they're being spoken. And that Presumably i there's no affordance for that right now, right?

Um well the so the the transcript tag the podcast transcript tag, it supports these the you know, Web VT T and and SRT files. Oh, okay. So there would then support Yes. Oh interesting. Okay. They they don't support per word. They do just timestamp line because they're they're geared towards uh subtitles that will be shown like on a TV screen, so it's like this time stamp show this text on the screen and then three seconds pass and then now show this text and it's whole sentences, right?

Well, it it is usually, but I don't think it needs to be necessarily. Like there's nothing stopping the authors of those files from having like one line per word and having you know, having each I mean It would look ridiculous in the file context, but you know, but I I think ultimately though You are right, Casey, that like in practice, the way these files are usually authored, the way they are usually used.

Um because they come from the world of subtitles from from video content, um, they're made to be displayed in sentences at a time. Sure. Sure. Um like in the the w the way closed captions would be displayed on on videos. So it is it is very unlikely, I think, that almost any producer who makes SRT or VTT files would give world level timing. I gotcha. And then I was going to ask, you know, would you create a spec, you know, kind of in the spirit of um

X callback URL, but it sounds like you don't really need to. You could just abuse the VTT and whatever the other was it SLT or something like that. SRT, yeah. They're very similar formats. Um you could have just abused that if you really wanted to go down this road. Yeah. And and you know, the reality is like I I can try to do a lot of features around these file formats, but

Again, because the world of DAI does not really support them, there's just not that much demand and there's not that much supply. I will support them in the sense that I will download them and parse them and have a way to display them and maybe even display them by default. I think that that would probably be the right move. But I don't think I'm gonna have them replace mine and honestly I would be very surprised if most of my users ever saw a podcast that actually had them.

Yeah, I get that. That makes sense. Oh, cool. Thank you.

Uh a couple of people wrote in, including Drew Stevenson, with regard to how you're managing all this. And Drew wrote for background cues, did Marco consider something like uh factory, F-A-K-T-O-R-Y? My jobby job uses it for processing media in the background on some Mac minis, and it's rock solid and covers all the edges around running job cues. Overcast infrastructure uses tools that were proven and boring in twenty thirteen. So what does that mean? It means things like MySQL.

It means PHP. It means memcache D. Redis, and Beanstalk D. That's my server stack. It's those it's those things. You know, Nginx with the PHP FPM plugin. Like that's that's what I'm using here. So What this Q is, is Beanstalk D, which is very old, very boring, and it works fantastically. It has almost no features. Almost no one that I've ever met uses it. Uh but it's fine and I've been running it forever. Um I do use Redis' cues for feed crawling because they allow me to

The way overcast is feed crawling, basically, I I have these crawl servers that run the Go process that I wrote a million years ago and then instantly forgot Go. Um I learned Go just to write that one process, haven't touched it since, and have since completely forgotten Go. Um but if I mean I think today if I ever needed to add anything to it I'd just have AI help me'cause I I've I it's like I need to relearn this entire language. Um but anyway, the way those work is they crawl the feeds

they stuff the content of a changed feed into Redis and then they add to a big Redis queue so that other processing PHP processes that that that parse those can go pick them up and and crawl them. Um Redis though is even heavier duty for this case than Beanstalk, which is Beanstalk D is like what if memcache D but for cues? Beanstalk is where I put lighter cue work in overcast. that that is not feed crawls. And that's things like checking for redirect.

Uh it's things like checking for artwork updates on on feeds, uh things like that, um sending notifications, sending uh processing my ping API, stuff like that. And so I built transcripts on top of the Beanstalk section of Overcast.

Each of the Q consumers that's running on the Mac minis just hits an API endpoint on Overcast web service and says, Hey, give me just give me some jobs, give me some jobs, give me some jobs. You know, fairly straightforward uh setup I think for Q processing. Now again, there's lots of other Q services, Q stacks, things like that. Um, I haven't used the services because they're just too expensive. Like again, like the What overcast processes?

overall f you know, in its job cues, especially especially if I include feed crawling. We're talking over a million jobs a day? Easily? Any kind of like managed managed Q service, when you actually price out what it would cost, it's a lot. um for at at this scale. So I I don't I don't use those. I just run it myself and it costs nothing. Because running Beanstalk D is incredibly lightweight. It costs nothing. Same that's the same reason I I send Apple push notifications myself.

I wrote a simple PHP class to do it. It's not that hard. And you know, I manage it through Beanstalk D and I send them and it's fine. Because I send probably millions of push notifications a day. And it cost me nothing. Cause like the the processing time, the server resources to send those is

as close to zero as you can imagine. Like it's just nothing. Whereas if you again go to some service to do it for you and you start paying, oh, it's, you know, just X cents per thousand notifications or, you know, whatever their pricing ends up being. For most apps that's fine. When you're doing millions of things a day, that could be like Tens to hundreds of dollars a day. And when you spread that over the, you know, twelve years I've been running overcast, like that's real money.

So if it if I can write if I can write it myself in less than a day and and have it work entirely with my own stuff, then it costs nothing to run over time. I don't have to worry about like what happens if this service is gets merged with some other company or shuts down or sunsets or, you know, changes their pricing model and now now they're now it's into enterprise and costs ten times more for my use case. Like

All those things that happen constantly in our business, I don't have to worry about them. So that's that's why I do a lot of this stuff like The boring old way with a few simple processes running on some Linux servers that don't need that much for me. It is not cool. It is not sexy. It is not trendy. It is not what young people do. And none of those things matter to me because it works really well for me.

Now, with that said, you did do a Marco thing. Well, you did more Marco things, I should say, because It's what I do best. I looked up for the show notes, the Beanstalk D website. And it is exactly the kind of website you would expect for a thing that's been around since the beginning of time. So uh yeah, this tracks. But uh you did another Marco thing, which is you wrote yourself a little app to manage stuff.

I did? Yes. Or at least it sure looks like you did. Uh you posted on Mastodon a screenshot of something that says overcast oh the tr yeah, the overcast transcriber. Oh yeah. Yeah. This is this is the actual thing that is running on the Mac menu. Like this is the app that transcribes things, that pulls the jobs from the servers.

and actually, you know, transcribes them. Oh, interesting. I'm sorry. So this is the app that's actually doing the work. Oh, my mistake. No wonder we were confused. My my apologies. Yeah. Yeah. One copy runs on every Mac mini? I select I assign each one like which'cause the the Apple speaks transcription API only supports three languages being installed at once on the system. For reasons.

I don't know. Maybe that made sense on the iPhone for some reason it's also enforced in the Mac. Uh but anyway, so it supports six languages but only supports three of them being installed at once, so I have a simple picker on top to choose which three languages They all do English and then they all kind of split the other five languages'cause there's just there's way more English than any other ones. Um

So that's what that is, and I pick how many jobs I want and I run them. And whenever this if this app ever crashes or if the computer reboots, no problem. Launch D just starts it back up again. And uh it's totally fine. And then this app checks in with my server, with my main servers.

Each one of these checks in like, you know, once a minute or something like that, and it reports its stats of how many jobs it has done uh in the last minute or or whatever. Um, you know, so that way how how many minutes of podcast has it transcribed? That way the servers can then

kind of watch out for anomalies. So if for instance one of the Mac minis doesn't respond at all, it will alert me and I can go reboot it or something. That doesn't happen very often. Um but also if one of the Mac minis Is reporting like a suspiciously high or suspiciously low job count per minute or transcription minute rate per minute. I can then go look take a look and see like some something might be wrong there.

And then the app itself, that the Overcast Transcriber app that you see here, that app also tries to monitor itself. So if, for instance, it can't get jobs for a long time, for more than a few minutes. Or if a job never completes and it never refills its jobs after a certain amount of time, it will quit itself. And let it and let longs d restart it. Like if so if something weird has gotten wedged somewhere. This kind of thing doesn't happen at very high rate.

But when you're running 48 instances of them 24-7 for months, you know, they do occasionally need like weird things like that to h you know, sometimes happen. Um so anyway, that's uh that's what that app is. That's very cool. And I'm glad you provided a screenshot, which we'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Aaron Dibner wrote, Given that Marco now has a forty eight Mac mini cluster, while they each only have sixteen gigs of RAM, it is possible to spread LLMs over multiple Macs these days. We've all probably seen the videos of four Mac Studios clustered over Thunderbolt, but you can also do it over Ethernet just a bit slower. And so I presume, John, you put in a link in the show notes to a Beowulf cluster. Can you explain that, please?

Oh that's just the old s uh slashdot thing. Marco remembers this, right? heard about them. I don't think I ever actually have seen one. Uh the meme was and I'm surprised there was not a like know your meme uh page for this. I guess it's so old. It's such an old meme that like it's not worth documenting as a meme on the internet. But uh Beowulf was uh like a

We'll put a link to the Wikipedia page. It was a system where you could just take a bunch of commodity servers and then distribute a job across them and you so you that you'd run Linux on these random PCs and you'd be like, But now I have five PCs, and if I have a job and I can break it up into five pieces, these five PCs can work on it.

And so all the Slashdot nerds back in the nineties were like, oh, Linux is awesome and Beowulf is awesome. And anytime there was any kind of hardware story on Slashdot. Uh, I don't know when it started, but people started posting, Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. And that just became a meme where people would say it about things that are not computers or whatever. Uh it was started half serious and became a meme.

And so Aaron Dipner basically just wrote Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these about your Mac minis. Like you could take one job and distribute it to all forty eight and they'd all work on it at the same time. Um and what he's referring to, we'll put a link to this in the show notes is uh

This thing where Apple gave a bunch of YouTubers a stack of Mac Studios. You've probably seen them in the thumbnails. I think it was like four Mac Studios with like a little little miniature, little cute little uh Mac Studio rack kind of. And it's. to promote their RDMA over Thunderbolt technology that was added in macOS 26.2. Uh we'll link to Apple's developer site uh about that tech.

Um what they say about it is RDMA over Thunderbolt enables low latency communication between Thunderbolt 5 hosts for use cases, including distributed AI inference using MOX. And so what the YouTubers did with this stack was they got like the biggest model that they could get.

that wouldn't run on a single Mac studio because it didn't have enough RAM, and they would run it on the four Mac Studios combining their RAM and, you know, do performance numbers or whatever. We'll put links in the show notes to two videos, one from Alex Ziskand, uh the title of uh his video is I ran a trillion parameter AI on a Mac. And then Jeff Geerling also has one that says Apple didn't have to go this hard, but there were others. Many YouTubers got this.

So if you want to see an example of a technology that Aaron is talking about, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. And it's the same type of deal. It's like, can you distribute something across multiple computers that wouldn't fit on one and can you do that quickly? And obviously doing it over Thunderbolt five with machines that are right next to each other is really fast. Doing it over Ethernet is probably a little bit slower, but that's what he's pitching.

Yeah, and so the main the main downside of this for my use case is that um yes as John said, speed of the communication is everything. Uh and You know, Ethernet between these Mac minis is just one gigabit because these are the base models. So they don't have ten gigabit ports. I also don't have don't have a giant ten gigabit switch there, but you know that could be remedied. Um but they don't ha they they only have one gigabit ports and These Mac Minis only have Thunderbolt four.

because Thunderbolt five on the Mac Mini currently requires the M four Pro chip, which like triples the price of the Mac Mini and does not triple the performance for my use case. So I didn't get them. So because I have the base models I could only do it over Ethernet.

And that would be probably s slow enough that it would probably not be worth doing. And the pitch for this is that you would use uh somehow use some bigger model than what you're using, because the model you're using now runs on your Mac minis. It fits in sixteen gigs of RAM. It's, you know, runs on the phone like

the pitch is well what if you wanted to run some more sophisticated model um that d wouldn't fit in the RAM of a single one you could s you could take lop off a portion of your forty eight and say this is like this cluster of four is the the big beefy uh transcriber for the top ten pop most popular podcasts and we run a bigger model.

Yeah, exactly. But right now, um this is something that like I'm I'm going to look at these kind of uses in the future, especially'cause like once I'm done transcribing the bat catalog for as many podcasts as I can. These are gonna be at like, you know, a third to half capacity. So I'm gonna have a lot of extra computing power. And I mentioned before I'm I would definitely want to move some of my heavier tasks from the main servers that are, you know, the m the main Linux servers.

I would I'd love to move a lot of those tasks to these, you know, to whatever degree that's reasonably possible, um, but that's not going to work for everything. So I'm still gonna need a bunch of servers. Um so I will have to maybe get creative on like what do I do with this computing power that I have here? And uh you know, I ideally like things that can stay within one machine.

are better because I I you know, it's easier to scale that. It's easier to share code between the iPhone and the servers. Um, you know, so ideally I would just keep doing more things with Apple's foundation models. And we'll see like, you know, this summer at WBDC, there might be updates to the foundation models. And maybe they get things like larger context windows, which should make them more useful in a lot of you know ideas I have on how to use them. So

We'll see we'll see how how these go in the future. Right now, they are being criminally underused, uh, in the sense that they uh let's see, my current my memory use, I just pulled one of them up here. Um one of them that's under like, you know, full transcription load right now um is using about seven gigs of its memory, of its sixteen gigs. So I have about half the memory that I could play with. Um also they are really not using their GPUs much at all.

That will change once I move image resizing to them, but it won't change that much. So I I think I'm gonna have a lot of CPU or a lot of GPU capacity that I could use. And a decent amount of RAM. So we'll see how I can play with that over time. But right now, I I'm still going through back catalogs, and maybe we'll see what the summer brings. John, I would be remiss not to mention System X, do you remember this? Hmm.

This is a zillion, I believe it was X Serves all networked together to be a very impressive. Oh, the Virginia Tech thing? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I didn't know that. I'd I've forgotten that was the name of it. Uh d is that considered a Beowulf cluster in your mind? Yeah, no, it was exactly the same thing. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. I mean, obviously they're not.

It's not like liter Beowulf is a specific piece of software, but it just became a meme of whenever you take a bunch of stuff and connect it together and make it do something that no individual part of it could do.

Coming all the way back around to Aaron Dibner, who started this whole conversation, uh Aaron writes Uh, this Apple Insider article is a bit outdated, but the idea is there. It's totally doable for a setup of your kind. And this was, I believe, pre uh the thing where you can chain them over Thunderbolt. I think this was done Via Ethernet, if I'm not mistaken, but you can look and we'll put a link in the show notes you can look at it for yourself.

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The entire internet wrote in to tell Marco about back fleet management advice. I did ask for it. Yeah, no, well first of all, you asked for it. Second of all, it was helpful. And I don't think I saw any of them being like, eh, how did you not know? Everyone was very helpful and and very kind. So even yeah, on on Marco's behalf, I I was fascinated reading it. I'm sure Marco was too and and we appreciate it. Uh but uh apparently there are many, many different ways of approaching this.

I'd like to leave aside the announcement from today, yesterday, whenever it was, uh, for just a moment. But based on what you have read, or maybe you haven't had the time to read anything, what what would you say is your summarization of what you've learned? So what companies do that have to manage large fleets of Mac?

of course is not setting them all up one by one like I did here. Like that's no one does this. No one should do this. Um what companies do is they have this thing through um what I believe until yesterday was called Apple Business Manager.

uh and or something like that. There's a lot of words that all sound very similar. Um but Apple has like a business API, you can configure machines to be set up for your business and lock to your business with MDM, which is the framework they use to like to manage like corporate iPhones and iOS devices and Mac.

You can buy these things through your Apple business rep, through Apple's business channels, or through certain authorized resellers, and have the machine's serial numbers automatically enroll to your company when they connect to the internet for the first time. So you can they call it like zero touch deployment, I think. So that you can like ship a laptop to a remote employee and when they plug it in and set it up

It gets activated to the company's management system through Apple. That is very cool. And gets all the stuff it needs to get right from there. Um is very cool. And once you are in these systems, you ca you have full management over them. So you can do things like push software updates and stuff like that. And, you know, run you can run programs, you can change settings, you know, whatever it is, like you can have all that centrally managed. So that is

basically what I want. And the the only downside is when you already have the machines pre-existing like I do here, everyone said like in order to enroll them into this kind of management, you need to wipe them and you need physical access. So it would be a process of, you know, I would like, you know, go You know, go to the data center one day, bring a big cup of coffee, you know, keep it below the Mac Minis, John. Um and and and just

Go through like one by one, all right, reset this one, reset this, you know, just take take'em down one by one, reset'em, wipe'em, put'em in the put'em in the thing. Um but the before this announcement of Apple Business, which happened, you know, yesterday, the day before, um yesterday.

Before this announcement, the there was like the second part of it, which was okay, Apple Business Manager would have like the the component of like registering the serial numbers, associating them to a business that had an MDM thing.

But then what everyone else did was have their own MDM providers through companies like JAMF, former sponsor of the s of the show a long time ago. Um th this is what most big businesses do, is they have one of these MDM apps that The problem with those from my use case.

And you know, they provide a huge amount of functionality, because usually it's not only providing like the basics of MDM configuration and stuff like that, but they also usually have additional services they layer on top of it, like security packages, stuff like that. Um The problem is that all of those MDMs, or at least most of them, you're paying something like six to twelve dollars per Mac per month. And, you know, again, when you have forty eight Mac Minis that literally don't have users.

That's not a great selling proposition for me. Like All of the features of these MDMs that Do like, you know, user security management, making sure your users have good passwords and making sure they don't browse weird things on the internet. Like that's all stuff that businesses do need for their computers, but I don't need for these computers.

These computers have no user. They ha they run one app. You've seen it now. Uh like they it's a very simple arrangement. And what I'm doing right now to keep them up to date. Their their software I don't really keep up to date yet'cause that hasn't really n had a n had a need yet. I guess I'll get there. Um and that's that's why I'm looking at something like like an MDM.

Uh, mainly for OS updates. But there's one other software package that I use on them that's pretty important. Casey, you're gonna love this. It's Tail Scale. Also former sponsor, maybe current sponsor, I don't know. Um So the way I access these machines, because they're all behind the router at the data center, so they all run tail scale. And that allows me to say, you know, SSH uh you know into scribe twenty three. And it just gets me there.

So what I do now, when I have to update my transcriber app, is I do, you know, an archive build on Xcode and I export the binary after it's signed. and I just use SSH to SCP it over to each of these Macs and like, you know, the and part of the SSH script is like, you know

Have LongsD stop the app, SSH the new one into place, have Longs D start the app again. And it just goes through the forty eight servers and just does that to each one in succession, and I can push an app update to all of them in about thirty seconds. So I've kind of already built a lot of what an MDM would give me, um, and in a more nerdy way. But I would what would be even better. is if I didn't have to run tail scale on all of these.

So if the MDM situation can do things like, you know, remote desktop or, you know, remote viewing, th remote control, if it can do those things. and give me network access to them directly without me having to run something like Tailscale on them, that's great. I don't know that it can do that yet. May maybe some of them can. I I haven't had time to look that much, but um

For the most part, most of the features that the MDMs offer are mostly things I don't really need. Um, so it's not really worth me paying a lot for one of these services. Um, but there are some like really cheap ones.

And getting to the announcement now, coincidentally, Apple announced yesterday that they've merged all of their various like business back end services into the new thing just called Apple Business. Yeah, so Apple Business is apparently uh a thing where they're I guess doing their own MDM or providing their own sort of solution. Uh I'm a bit fuzzy on it, but let me read a couple of things that John was kind enough to pull out of the newsroom announcement.

Uh Apple today on March 24th announced Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that includes key services companies need to effortlessly manage devices, reach more customers, equip team members with essential apps and tools, and get support. Apple business will be available on april fourteenth as a free

service in the US and two hundred other countries, Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect. Those will no longer be available once Apple Business launches. It's kind of slurping all those up and making one unified interface.

It sure seems to me like if I were you, I would at least kick the tires on this first and see what it's got. And then if you need to go the route of like jam for something else, then so be it. Yeah, that's m that's my current plan is like Now that Apple ha is launch has is about to launch I I think they said April yeah April fourteenth, yeah. Um now that they're about to launch their own first party, like better, more featured version of this.

I would rather just use that. Um, and so I will look at that when it comes out. In the meantime, my pile of hacks is fine but I will look at this especially like as I approach this summer's beta season. If I do end up wanting to run betas on some or all of these, that's going to be a burden. So, you know, having like, you know, centralized software management will be a lot nicer. So uh we'll we'll see when the time comes.

My one suggestion and a lot of other people wrote in with a suggestion as well is like it does seem like you need something probably from Apple that can handle OS updates and stuff like that, although the various reports we got about the quality of Apple's previous Apple Business Manager software and their MDM stuff is Not all glowing, but you know, and and this is the this is a new product, Apple business, supposedly, so there might be some growing pains there.

But the other part of it, the part where you're the part where you're SCPing a file onto a bunch of uh Macs, like everyone uh this is where the second piece of advice we got is like, Unix nerds are saying there's a million uh, you know, f free open source command line packages for

uh configuring a whole bunch of Unix E servers. And yes, they're not you know, you it's a Mac, but it's also a Unix E server. And if all you have to do with if all you're doing is essentially something that you can do with SCP now, rather than

doing SCP in a loop and dealing with that and everything. There's a million software packages, most of which probably run on the Mac that you can try. A lot of people suggested Ansible. There's also CF Engine. Back in the day there was Puppet. I don't know if it still exists.

A lot of those things do have a way to run on the Mac. They're, you know, they're Unixy command line things and you have to figure out how to get th that installed on the Macs, but If if you're the only job of that part of the system is, oh, and by the way, there's something that uh that I want to do that I can do from like a shell script or whatever, just you can do that outside of Apple Things. And the reason I worry about it having not used these products is like

You have a new version of the transcription app that we we just talked about before. You want to get that to all the machines. I'm sure Apple Business Manager has a way to get the new version of your transcription app to all the machines. I'm also guessing that it takes its time. Because in a business environment, everyone needs the new version of Outlook. It rolls out when it rolls out.

There's no like I want it to go all to all forty eight machines now, now, now. Yeah, I can't imagine it's taking thirty seconds. I I I Yeah, even if they offer that as an option

It's just like that's not what those things are made for. Like you you probably never even want that in a situation where you're deploying to two thousand max. You don't want them to all instantly get the new version of Outlook. You want it to roll it out. So Maybe depending on if Apple Business Manager or whatever if Apple Business

has some gaps rather than saying, oh now I need one of those commercial MDMs that charges me uh an amount per Mac per month, at least look at like Ansible and some of the other Unixy stuff that basically are a fancy distributed way for you to run Unix commands on a fleet of servers without you having to like deal with the plumb. I mean so my argument to that would be though like I already built that with SSA expensive.

I know, but like it's it's just you know, how good is your error checking and how uh how parallelized is it? How fast can it do all forty eight machines, yada yada? Like there's a reason these things exist. People th things like Puppet sprang into existence because people used to write Scripts that would loop over things and distribute tarballs and untar them and do you know, like they and then they made products out of that because doing it manually kind of sucks.

Yeah, I mean and again, like this is the kind of thing like what your needs are determines a lot about what the you know, what the solution here should be. My needs are so simple here that if all it's gonna save me doing is like, you know, right now like I I have it's just a simple, you know, text file that's about thirty lines long that is my instructions for setting up a new Mac mini. And there's not much it's not that hard. You know, it's like I set I I changed like five settings.

And you know, mostly about power management, like stay on, really stay on, no, really always stay on and and you know, give it my SSH public key and say, All right, what you know, accept anything from this. Go and oh and turn on remote desktop. That's about it. Like that's roughly all I do. If something is like, well, you know, you can you can have c more control over it by installing this this different product.

Okay. But right now I install no different products and I have the I have all the control I need. So to me, I would say like that additional complexity, even if the product is free. setting aside any kind of cost The additional complexity of having another thing being involved. That's another moving part. That's another company that can go out of business or another thing I have to keep updated or that might break in three years with new, you know, OS update that Apple gives or whatever.

Every one of those moving pieces I I evaluate. Like Is this good is this giving me enough benefit? over my current situation to be worth its additional risks and complexity. And because my needs for these are so simple, the answer to that for a lot of these things is no. Now not for everything. And again, like software updates are the big thing that that I definitely would like to be automated uh better.

But any adding any other layers, any other packages, any other products, they all have to pass that test before they're gonna be worth it for me. And they're gonna be worth it for a lot of businesses before they're gonna be worth it for me. Yeah, I wasn't suggesting you get rid of your little thirty line thing that you run. I was suggesting you just get something else to be the plumbing to run your thirty line thing. That's it.

Because, you know, again, if you just it it it'll do it more in parallel, it can monitor if it's been successfully done in all the machines. If you update the machines, it will immediately redo it because it'll see that it hasn't been done, that type of thing. That's that's what you're getting. It's just the plumbing. It's basically a fancy

uh remotely run a bunch of commands on a bunch of machines for me and make sure that uh if they if the those settings ever get changed or if anything changes in the machines that you set them back to the way they were and it's also a fancy plumbing way to say, oh, and if there's some files you want to be on those machines, like your app,

Uh just tell me where it is and I'll make sure it's so with the latest version is always on all the machines. And that's what you'd be getting. I've I haven't actually used Ansible myself. I have used Puppet and I hated it. So there is, you know, like there's

There's something to be said for uh doing it all yourself, but uh if it turns out to be tedious and you're spending a lot of time dealing with that, uh those unic I would what I'm saying is I would look at those Unix things before I would look at one of the fancier MDM.

All right. Uh anything else with regard to overcast? No, I think I'm just I'm working through all the You know, bugs and reports and fe the other thing is. I said uh that you know, that I was I I had spent a huge amount of time last summer um getting an algorithm to fingerprint the audio so that I can align it around uh dynamic ad insertion. Uh I did not realize that Shazam Kit was an API.

And it offers exactly that functionality. Oh no. So I haven't actually like I I am going to try it. I'm gonna see like, you know, is their signature better than mine? Like is their fingerprinting? Is it better? I don't actually know. Uh so I'm going to experiment I'm not gonna do that like you know this week or anything, but sometime soon I'm going to experiment with that to see like should I basically start using their their alignment instead or in addition to mine.

Um, but that was kind of a little bit like, oh no, did I did I spend months doing something from scratch that Apple has an API to do? We'll see. Yeah, I got it. Uh I I know Guy Rambo had reached out to us to tell us about Shazam Kit. Perhaps you heard it from others. Yes, that's that's right. It was from Gee. I yeah, that that that is that is indeed where I heard about it. And yeah, I'm like, Oh, oh no. But we'll see. Like so part of part of my fingerprinting algorithm is it has to be very um

very low granularity of time. Like if if the if the block size it's working on is like a ten or fifteen second chunk. that might not be good enough for what I'm doing here. Like what my my fingerprinting, the sample resolution for it is something like a quarter of a second. And it also has to be a small enough data set that like whatever the fingerprint that you generate for an entire podcast.

It has to be a reasonable size. It can't be like many megabytes of data if you're gonna do that resolution across a a three hour show, you know. So I I'll see, you know, I don't know what what exactly their data is stored and what resolution it is. So that's all going to be part of the experimentation phase and see like, you know, should I switch to theirs or not? Well depend on things like that.

And in a final piece of follow-up for today, AirPods Max and their popularity in New York, you had commented that everyone and their mom has a AirPods Max in the New York metro area these days. Uh, how is that possible, especially when some of these people are kids that you know, like fifteen, sixteen year old kids or whatever? Uh apparently all of them, or maybe most of them anyway, are fakes, which I did not know.

Yeah, I so many people have written in to say either they either they suspect they're fakes or like they live in Manhattan and they see that they're fakes. And I can I can verify when I'm in Manhattan about about once a week, uh I do see like The you know, the guys on the streets that sell all the like the fake luxury goods.

on those little tables. Yeah, there's always AirPods Max lookalikes on those tables too. And every like all like the store windows that are like the like the random little electronic stores that you look and you're like, I bet most of the stuff in there is probably knock offs, like, you know They also all have AirPods Max look alike headphones. So I'm sure many AirPods Max looking fakes are sold. Um but

I I'll I'll tell you, I'll be damned if I can spot one. Like people say like, oh you can you can tell, they look cheaper, their finish is wrong, they have a plastic crown, like different different things people have have told us to like try to spot them. But at the distances that you know, I'm not gonna like

you know, hover over someone's shoulder and start eyeing the details of their digital crown to see like, hey, is that plastic or metal? Can I tap that for a second? You know, like I'm not gonna you know at at regular distances I can't tell. Um, so I I assume I'm sure lots of them are fakes, but I also think a lot of people are probably buying them because they are like visually iconic and Apple is still selling them and you know they i if Apple wasn't selling

these, you know, in any meaningful quantity, they wouldn't have even given them the two half butted updates they did give them. They would have had no update forever. So someone's buying them. But yeah, I bet a bunch of them are fake. We are sponsored this week by Babylon. So if you've ever shipped an app internation, you know that localization pretty much goes one or two ways.

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WWDC twenty twenty six. has been announced. It is June eighteen through twelve, so happy birthday Marco. Uh anyways, uh suffice to say, uh June eighth through twelfth. Apparently in episode six hundred and seventy three back in January, which for my purposes is like seven hundred years ago, uh we talked about what we were looking forward to in twenty six.

I have zero recollection of what I said, but um I I I don't know, it I'm sure there are things I mean there are definitely things I'm looking forward to, but nothing is like leaping out at me at right this moment.

So John, other than the Mac Pro I'm not looking forward to that. There's nothing to look forward to. No, I I think best case scenario, the Mac Pro gets killed at WDC. Yeah, I mean I don't understand why they haven't killed it yet. I don't know what they're waiting for. But anyway uh Well they're waiting for the Mac Studio. Like that's

The Mac the Mac Studio will be updated at some point in the future and at that time they will discontinue the Mac Pro. Like that I think that is the most likely way this goes. Yeah, I d I don't understand why they're waiting though. It's not as if the Mac Pro is filling some need waiting for the the Mac Studio to replace it. Like you know what I mean? It just doesn't make any sense. Anyway.

Yeah. I b I what I re remember from the January episode is that we were talking about like thing tech things for the entire year, narrowing it to W W D C I think the subset of things that I talked about on that episode.

are still basically the same. I'm still looking forward to M five Ultra or whatever whatever new chip that they haven't yet announced. And presumably that will be in a Mac Studio. And I'm looking forward to it both because I'm interested and also because I'm probably gonna buy one. So I'm kind of, you know

Was looking forward to and now kind of a little bit scared about how much it's gonna cost to get that eight terabyte SSD and the amount of RAM I'm gonna want. We'll see how that goes. And then the other thing that I also talked about, I think, in the January episode was um Let's see how Apple does with their AI stuff. Like they were supposed to like roll out a bunch of new series stuff.

In supposedly 26.4, which was just released, but notice it didn't arrive in twenty six point four. In fact, we had an item in the show notes that just kept getting pushed off wherever that was basically like

Hey, remember Apple's dates that it set for itself that they were gonna do some Siri stuff in twenty six point something, and then more in twenty seven? Well, it looks like they're missing the twenty six something date. Uh and so maybe it's just we're just waiting for a WWC for Siri not to suck as bad.

Um so that's it. Uh let's if Siri can get any better and uh M five Ultra Max Studio. Hell, even M five Max Max Studio, even if it's not if there's no Ultra at all, just the M five Max Max Studio and see how that's priced and for me to figure out what I'm gonna get. That's what I'm looking forward to slash dreading. I I I feel like the the obvious answer here is okay, what is the AI story? I mean, that that's the the elephant in the room, right? And I don't know. On the one side I'm I'm not sure.

sure what it is that I want them to tell me with regard to the AI. my story, but then again, Apple is so very good at telling me, Oh, you never knew you needed blank, but you did and then I say, Yes, you're right. I absolutely did. What you wanted to tell you is Siri doesn't suck anymore. That's that's what we're all waiting for is

just because almost i I almost feel like everything else like the world is passing them by and all the other areas, like it doesn't need Apple's help to do any AI stuff. People are doing it anyway. But Siri is the one thing. that the world can't make better. Only Apple can only Apple in the way that they never mean it. Only Apple can do that, which is we're all stuck with Siri until Apple fixes it.

Uh In with regard to development. tools and things like that. Um, I think there's a couple of things that I'd really look forward to, uh, but I I'm skeptical that any or all of these will happen. Uh number one, I would love them to start really leaning into documentation even more. They've been doing better over No, no, they've been doing better. They really have. You make fun of me with Mac Pro Hope.

Jeez. That's true. You're right. Actually, y you are not wrong about that, John. I really want to argue with you, but you are one hundred percent correct. That's like hoping for lower app store fees. Good luck. You're both right. You're both right. I cannot argue. But a man can dream. Um so yeah, so I mean I'd love them to I mean, I don't think they would ever come out and say, Hey, we're actually gonna write documentation now but

It would be cool if they, you know, just did a better job of it. And again, in their defense, they've been getting better and better over the years, but there's still a long way to go. Yeah. Getting better isn't better. Right, exactly. Getting better is a direction.

But it does not express the position. Yeah. Speaking of documentation, like just one of the things that's been bothering me lately because I've been Really like sort of digging down to some really minor stuff in my apps because I'm not adding major features and just looking for like really obscure bugs and stuff.

God, can you imagine if Apple wrote in its documentation what threads things happen on in their in the functions that they provide and the APIs they provide? Oh my god. Because it's really important for me to know, hey, hey, what thread is that callback going to be called on?

Hey, when when when this block it's called what threat what thread is it? What threat? And you can guess and you can check, but if you check at runtime, it's like it seems like this is always called on the main thread. Is that always gonna be called on the main thread? Am I just getting lucky? That would be an example of where you would add documentation. Or give us a source code. One or the other, please, Apple. Yeah, definitely. Um, another thing I'd like is. Please, Apple. Please.

For the love of all that is good and holy in the world, can you make tab management and X code make any fing sense whatsoever? It's not possible. Any sense. Any amount of sense. It's never made sense to me. For the love of God. Anything would work. other than what you've got right now and the seven tries you need before it because oh my god, tabs and X code are they're the bane of my existence. Maybe I'm a moron. I don't know.

I I don't think a lot of people are very enthusiastic about this, but it drives me nuts literally every time I do my job. It's just ignore just ignore the tabs and pretend they don't exist. I have tab blindness in Xcode. I like I don't even see that strip of the UI. I don't interact with it. It is dead to me. If only. Yeah. I because I never I ne I've never once learned how to navigate via tab. So I just don't. I navigate from the sidebar only.

Yeah. I the only thing I do with tabs is I have a my own custom keyboard shortcut, which I I'm really regretting'cause they have no way to sync these, but anyway, I have my own custom keyboard shortcut that I have to constantly change as they mess with the tab system. Which adds a second uh pane with the same file that I'm editing to my right. And then I use the X to close it. That's my only interaction with that bar. Yeah, well make it make sense, Apple, please.

Um, and then, you know, obviously, uh just in general, um new APIs are fun, uh uh especially if they're, you know, mostly fully fleshed out. But that being said, I would also love for Apple to just tell us, you know what, we've gone through and we have improved all the existing APIs. You know, with the things that aren't async await friendly already now are. You know, I would love

The proverbial snow leopard year for APIs as well. But I again I'm barking up a tree that that w they'll never they'll never commit to this. But we'll see. Yeah. I don't know. What do you think, Marco?

For me, I really just wanna see the the AI tools keep keep going. Uh yes, that's a good call. Like what they added last year, you know, that like the first year of quote Apple intelligence was for developers, nothing. Like we had nothing that we could possibly do for iOS eighteen. Um last year with iOS twenty six They gave us a lot of APIs that I think overall look pretty good. Most developers I know have not had a ton of time to build with them, and I certainly haven't for the most part.

because of liquid glass really took up a lot of our resources and a lot of our time. And, you know, the one big one obviously that I did use was the speech transcriber API, which is great. Uh you know, a couple of weird little things here. Like if you've If you've seen a podcast that uses the word billion in a sentence, w how how the speech transcriber transcribes the word billion.

is one zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero whatever the whatever the number it's like a one follow by like nine that's how it that's and so you see this with no commas, no thousand separators. So you see this one gi you know, this one followed by nine zero.

In the middle of a sentence. It's hilarious. I just got a notification today that said you're getting a call from one billion two hundred and fifty thousand friends. Like it read out a phone number as a as a just a long integer. Yeah, that's actually that's one of my longstanding gripes. is like, you know, oftentimes I'm wearing AirPods when a message comes in and it will announce the message and It never knows what numbers are.

It'll be reading an address to me and it'll read the ad it'll read like the zip code as like, you know, one thousand five you know, the ten thousand and but the best is when it reads out tracking numbers from shipment notifications to you. Oh yeah, that's a long. It'll read through the whole thing. Like and Oh my god. Anyway, those th those in whatever whatever part of machine learning or Siri is being used to announce messages to you in AirPods.

is really primitive and I would love for that to get better. That's that's separate. This is a diversion from my other main topic because th that whatever that API is that's generating that speech is really dumb. And also unreliable. Like Still, I will still like I'll I'll have a message you know boodoo So and so has sent you a message, but I can't read it.

And I go and look and it's like it's like a regular sentence. I'm like, what you couldn't read that? What what something broke? Or it'll say, So-and-so sent you a message, and it'll start reading it, and then it'll just stop. like halfway through a sentence and just fail. I'm like, uh okay. Thanks, I guess. Anyway, that that area needs attention. It's needed attention for a long time. Anyway, but what I'm what I'm looking forward to for WDC, uh

Continued progress on the AI-related APIs for developers. Last year was a great start. We still are nowhere near the vision of Apple intelligence originally with like the App Intent powered system to do all that stuff. That we are we are constantly rumored to get it. It's like next year is gonna be the year of Linux on the desktop. Next year is gonna be finally the the OS release that we get the app intent based uh Siri intelligence system.

We'll see if that comes out. I w you know, there's a lot still to do in terms of Integrating AI with the system, giving developers ways to integrate AI into our own apps, and making the AI that's tying all this together better. We are in the infancy of that.

process on Apple's platforms. So as that gets better, we are going to be able to make much better apps and our customers will be able to have much better experiences. And our apps will be able to do do better things with the system and with other apps through AI integrations and everything. But right now we are almost nowhere along that that path. So that's what I really want to see is like, give me the next step on that path. What else can we now do with AI on Apple's platform?

without like bundling in our entire you know, bundling in a a three gig model with our apps, you know, like what if we just use Apple's platform things like w what can we do now that we couldn't do before? W what limits are raised, what new capabilities are added? And then finally.

I just really want to see some revision to liquid glass. Now I know, I know, we talked about it in overtime l last week. I know that we're not gonna have a huge undoing. We're not gonna they're not gonna throw it all in the trash and give us something that looks like I was eighteen again. That's fine. That's not what that's not what I'm asking for. And I don't think that that that's not what most people are asking for.

What I want is revision, improvement, iteration on the on the concept of liquid glass. The number one thing I want to see. is there should never be a common pattern in Apple's stock UI that puts blurry text under other text I'm trying to read. Now, that's not all of liquid glass. The biggest offender here is barred.

Text like toolbars and navigation bars. Navigation bars in iOS Prolents are the bars on top of a screen with the title bar and a couple of buttons and text that scrolls under it. Toolbars are the same thing at the bottom of the screen where you have buttons in the bottom. With liquid glass, there are no bars anymore. Your content just blurs and scrolls under everything. That's not

helping anybody. And when most people have trouble with liquid glass, either conceptually or really, like in terms of reading it. That's like the number one thing on the hit list is the lack of solid or mostly solid bars and having to blur text under other text that which makes it difficult to read.

That is not an easy problem to solve. With the design language they have chosen, that that's gonna require a d a decent amount of design to really to go back to some kind of defined bar with a defined edge. And then the bar itself maybe is made of frosted glass or something, you know, and you know, pretty heavily frosted hopefully. And that would that would alleviate almost the entire problem. Like if they just made bars.

a defined area with a border that ended and a background that is mostly mostly solid. You fix this problem. Uh we'd be shocked if they did that, but if you uh look in Mac OS twenty-six point four, they did do something that you can see in the system settings app. Lots of people used to post uh, you know, screenshots of the system settings app which has a search field on top of the left sidebar. And as you scroll the left sidebar, the left sidebar has text items like general sound, whatever.

that text would scroll underneath the search field. And as soon as you scrolled anywhere other than at the very, very top where it basically where there was any text below the search field, the search field has placeholder placeholder text that says search.

And then you could also read whatever the item was that was underneath it from the sidebar that had scrolled up there. And so it was like search with a word superimposed on it. And then you would type into that field and it was terrible. In 26.4, the search field

is a lot more frosty and you can no longer read the text underneath it. You can still see some of the text through it. You can tell the text is there. You can see a black shadow scroll by as the text goes underneath it, because it's real important that you do that for some reason. But you can't read the text anymore. So that's my guess of what they'll do in 27 is

not actually have a defined bar, which I agree would be way better. But I my hopes are uh my expectations are set at the twenty six point four level, which is like, no, they're not gonna bring back bars because they're too stubborn and it would be too hard. But what they will do is crank up the frost dial. and make it so that you can't literally read text that's underneath control. I mean that that will help.

It is not a solution. It is a band-aid. No, I agree, but I think it's what they'll do. Yeah, agree. Yeah. Like I I I'm with you. Like I I am not this is not something I'm optimistic about. This is not this is a wish, not an expectation. Like Casey with the documentation. That's it. Yeah. I I'd say I have similar odds of uh of success here. I I trust that Apple has really good design talent. And I know that they could make

defined bars look good and look modern. It isn't we don't have to like it's been done many times before by Apple. And and you can keep like so much of the liquid glass design language is not necessarily at odds with that. You could keep so much of how controls look, toolbars, buttons, the animation, the way they blob up and blob back together, and like so many of those things. are totally doable on a mostly solid bar.

With a border. Like, and even if the whole bar could be a capsule, who cares? Like, there's so many different ways you could do it. And you could make the bar frosted, you could make the whatever you wanted to do. There are ways to design this to make it look fresh and modern. It doesn't have to look old, and the old way wasn't the only way to do it.

They can do it. There's lots of options. It just it just takes the will and maybe the humility to some degree to realize, like, okay, this this direction of liquid glass has too many problems in real life. Let's rethink some of that. And it you don't need to throw away the whole language to do it. So anyway, that's that's what I would hope to see is those those two big pillars. Better AI APIs and liquid glass being more usable.

And I think I'll get probably both of those things, but probably neither one done to the level I want it to be done. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm interested to see how this goes. I I think to some degree there's, you know, settle what is the term uh term a phrase from Godfather sett settling the family debts or whatever it is? Settling all family toolbars.

They need to do that with Siri. I concur with you that I actually especially on iOS, I mostly like liquid glass, but the thing that drives me nuts is the toolbar treatment. I mean there's other things as well, but the thing That drives me nuts the most often is that I am looking directly through a toolbar and don't even know it. Uh and so I completely agree with you there, Marco. But

We'll see. I mean, time will tell. I'm excited to see what happens. Uh I'm excited for us to do our Monday night show as we always do. Uh we I as far as w I know, all of us will be remote, so I'm not trying to quietly announce anything, but Um anyways, it should be fun and I'm curious to see what Apple does.

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All right, let's do some Ask ATP. We haven't had the opportunity to do that in a little while, and we're starting with something that could have been written by Casey Lisp, but was actually been written by Philip Miller, who writes Paskies have me befuddled. Amen, brother. When they first emerged, I took a wait-and-see approach, and that's where I remain today. Again, amen, brother, even though many sites and services pressure me to adopt PASKIS.

Are all three of you fully embracing passkeys now? What are the biggest pitfalls of or excuse me, what are the biggest benefits of passkeys for someone like me who's a faithful user of tools like OnePassword for managing traditional passwords and two factor codes? What are the real risks of pass keys? Am I being foolish to worry about scenarios where my Apple devices are all lost in a house fire? Now I'm locked out of every account?

With one password, everything is backed up in the cloud and I can keep my emergency logging credentials on a single sheet of paper in a safe deposit box. Are PASKIS equally resilient? And I will also add a fourth question. What about family passwords? I on my understanding is that you can share pass keys or may maybe not originally, but certainly now.

But there's a lot of stuff that, you know, one of the great things about OnePassword is that it has family vaults, or you can get a family account with a family vault where, you know, Aaron and I will share a bunch, if not most of our passwords.

So I know nothing about this, even though I should. Uh I don't know, Marco, if you have thoughts on this, uh, but and let's start with you if so, but I'd very much like to hear John's perspective as well. I have some thoughts and then we'll kick it to John who will have the right answers. Um

The way I've embraced pass keys is when a website asks me, Hey, you want to make a pass key? It's much better, blah, blah, blah. Um, I will usually at that point say yes and do my fingerprint or whatever. Um I have also found that as I am still bouncing between Apple Password or App yeah, Apple passwords and one password. Um although more more one password these days since I'm still using Chrome as my default desktop browser. Um The way

Both of them handle pass keys is fine. You know, with Apple, you go to a website, if you want a pass key, it'll show you the standard like touch ID, face ID, prompt. And you, you know, you you do you you authenticate that way and it gets you in. With one password, if you have the browser extension, it just if it's if it's unlocked already, it'll just show a little thing in the upper right corner and it's like, you want to use the pass key? Click to log in. You click to log in and it logs you in.

Um both of those are fine. The one password one is I think a little more convenient of just providing the security in a different way, but it's they're both fine. My main issue with pass keys.

Is that it's kind of like that old XK C D comic that's like, we have too many standards. Here, I made a new standard. From a like technical and security perspective, they're amazing. They're way better than everything we had before. But from the actual user experience, of using them in practice most of the time It's just a another thing that gets added to the pile of things that we are supposed to keep track of and, you know, have in a password manager or something and

you know, ha try to share maybe with mixed success with family members or coworkers or whatever. It can be done very well in an ideal implementation of passkeys, uh, both on on like, you know, the platform side and on like the the website side. They're better than everything else. The main downside with PASKIs so far is that the way that I see them being implemented by websites and services. is not as a replacement for passwords, but as your as a replacement for two factors.

So it's actually just taking this other complex thing and replacing it with a different complex thing. Now the security of a passkey is way better than, you know, most of those other systems or alternatives to it. But The user experience of it is still really clunky in a lot of places. And ideally, it would replace the entire login. Like ideally, you could just

Have it like automatically if you have a passkey for the site you're on and it shows you a login screen, it just prompts you to use it and it logs you in all the way. That would be the ideal case. And you occasionally see fights like that, but it's not it's not the common case. Um so that's that's kind of my my my my kind of mixed opinion of them is that they are a great technology that solves a lot of problems. They are also they also create a lot of inconvenience in certain contexts.

And they are not really making logins on websites that much easier in practice, not because of their inherent technology, but because of the implementation decisions of those websites.

Yeah, I've really come around on pass keys for the past six months or so. Um I was always trying them out whenever they were offered or whatever, but now having uh implemented them or having uh asked uh uh coding agents to implement them for me, more precisely. Um And seeing all the details there and and uh all the different trade offs and everything.

Um I still think implementing them is the most annoying part of um fast keys'cause they implement I like I if they want to get better adoption on websites and stuff, they should really, you know, streamline that and w work harder to give like friendly libraries that are easy to use with good documentation. Hm, Casey. Um but anyway the coding agents can do it, so it's not that bad. Um

But just a c a quicker view, like what's good about passkeys, why would you want to use them instead of passwords or whatever? They have a bunch of security advantages that uh passwords and two factor stuff are never going to be able to match just because they're inherent in the technology. The first is that um when you use a password on a website uh the server stores something on its side that could potentially compromise you.

You hope they don't just store your password in plain text, but as we've seen Some websites do that, and you have no way of knowing if the website is incompetent and is storing your testwords in plain text. So there's that. Second, so they don't store it in plain text. Let's say they instore a st store a cryp encrypted hash of your password, which is what they should be doing.

What algorithm are they using for it? Has the algorithm been broken? Was the algorithm secure ten years ago, but now it's not anymore? And all this is relevant because websites get hacked and what people leak from them is

account information, which is usually your email address, which whatever, people don't like that to leak, but you know, i your email address is not a secret. Uh but also some hashed thing for your password. And you're like, well that's secure. They can't get my password from that, can they? Well Again, what algorithm are they using? How it maybe they can't get it now, but three years from now they'll be able to do it with some NVIDIA GPU or something that can crack it.

PASKES do not store secret information on the server. Again, you're assuming that they're implemented in a sane way, but I can tell you that passkeys don't involve the server storing something that is secret. The server what the servers store is public information. They store your public key. It is pu anyone can have it. It's not a secret. You can give it to the world. And they use that to verify through this protocol that you're being signed in or whatever. Um so If a website gets hacked,

The only thing they can leak about you is your email address, which again I don't think is actually secret because spammers just spam every email address in the entire world. They just go through every combination of letters and numbers, like anyway. Um, so that's good. Second thing is you don't have to make a human decision about where to enter something like a two factor code or a password.

You're not involved in that process. The passkey system has the computer do that for you. Yes, you're still vulnerable to like DMS poisoning or something else, but the point is social engineering is how people get hacked. They throw up something in front of them that looks like a web page for the website they're familiar with, and they just blindly

enter their password in there. And yes, password managers like one password, which by the way is a current and former sponsor. And the reason we recommend them is you should be using a password manager because they will automate a lot of this for you.

But you can always manually and people know how to do it because they're like, Oh, I don't you know, the password autofill is not working or whatever and people learn you can right click and do autofill or they I've seen even technically non savvy people. Go find their password in whatever their password thing is, usually Apple passwords or whatever, and copy and paste it into a text field. People do that today because they have to.

Because it doesn't, you know, autofill isn't everywhere or they don't know you can right click and autofill on the Mac and recent versions of Mac OS. So they make human decisions about where to put things like their two factor code.

And their password, which is why every two factor code comes with an all-cap screaming at you saying, Don't show this to anybody. We'll never ask you for your two factor because it's so insecure. People get social engineered all the time. Paskeys will never make you make a decision about where to put things.

It's automated based on the identity of the server as verified by TLS, blah blah blah. Again, DNS poisoning and man in the middle and stuff like that that's outside the scope, but the point is That that will obviously work with all the other uh all the other password systems as well. But they don't ask you to make that decision. So this whole realm of social engineering is eliminated because humans don't can't, literally can't and don't.

decide where to put their credentials and that prevents you from screwing yourself when you get like phished or whatever and you think it's a regular login screen. Um and then finally they're secure I think this is one of the the big advantages that starts to shade into the social, which is For most accounts these days.

Like if it's something important, it's like, okay, you have a username and you have a a good, you know, generated, long, complicated password that's stored in a password manager of your choosing, right?

and also a second factor to make it even more secure. And that second factor, sometimes they make it do SMS, which is incredibly insecure and websites demand that you do it, but a lot of places will let you use an authenticator app, like Apple Passwords or Authy, or OnePassword or a million other apps.

that will that are better than SMS and they'll do that, you know, six-digit code or whatever. And they need those two factors because th there's so many other vulnerabilities in terms of phishing and getting your password cracked and reusing passwords and all sorts of stuff like that, but they need the second factor. Passkeys are secure enough that you don't need a second factor. And nothing drives me more crazy than having to log in at a two-step process.

I don't want to get an email and enter code and do a thing. Even on sites where I have a password, they insist on like mailing me a login. Like it's like what's the point of me having a password? Like just let me pick what I want to log in with. But Multiple steps are annoying, which is why when I did all my personal sites. I use pass keys only.

Because it is a one step login process. There's no second screen after you log in with a passkey where it should ask you for a two factor. Now to Marco's point, Lots of websites say, Oh no, we're gonna we're gonna use the PASKIS as a second factor, or we're gonna make you PASCE login and then ask you for an SMS code. It's like why, why? So there's a learning curve there. But the potential is because they are secure enough for all the reasons that I said before.

They can be the only factor which simplifies login. So every website, every web service that I use that lets me only use a pass key to log in, I'm like, thank Thank you. This is the way it should work. And there's not many of them and it's taking a long time, but I see progress. I mean hell, ATP.fm does it now. You can choose to use a password, a passkey.

uh or you know, neither one of those or an email login like you can do all those things. Now there's still the question of like, okay, but if you can do email resets for forgot password, doesn't that make pass keys less secure, blah blah blah? I'm like, don't don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Pass keys are

I I to answer the first question, are you embracing them? I am embracing them to the extent that websites will let me. I'm embracing it with the websites that I maintain, that I build for myself, for my little toy things, and every time they are there I always use them and I You know, don't like it when they're not the only factor to log in, but they can be. They can be. And I feel good about them being that. And you can you can share them.

Um with like Apple passwords, you can you have family passwords and passkeys and stuff like that. And it's good about and one password to the same deal. And it's good about like most of the browsers are good these days when you log in. It's like, well what if I have more than one passkey to a website? It will let you pick.

And you know, they're identified by like the email address or username or whatever. So you can have multiple passkeys to a website and it's, you know, everything's great. And in terms of like the um failure scenario, uh losing stuff. Like like the name one password, again, current and former sponsor, you can have one password that you actually remember to unlock your password vault. Same thing with iCloud Keychain, Apple's password manager.

Maybe that's the one password that you should actually memorize and have it be complicated. Don't have it be simple. Because that is sort of the keys to the kingdom there. What if your house is on fire? What if you lose all your devices? What if you're on vacation and your phone falls into the ocean? What am I gonna do?

I uh this is one of the complaints I hear about pass keys. It's like I can't just write it down like a password. I can't just print out a piece of paper with a password on it and have it there. Well, first of all, you can write down your like Apple ID password, which is the keys to your, you know

iCloud keychain. You can write down your one password password and put it in a safe deposit box or whatever. So you can do that. But second of all, Most sites, even if they do like passkey as your only login, will also give you backup code. But just like print these out.

And in case of fire, like put these in a safe deposit box in a remote location on a piece of paper, and a lot of them will force you to prove that you wrote them down somewhere by asking you to enter them or whatever later. You only see them once and you're never gonna see them again. those are your like lifelines. It's not you like people like, I wanna I wanna see my passkey. I wanna see the like the giant base sixty four, you know, like the p pass key systems.

hide that from you as much as possible. And the reason they hide it is not because they're trying to like lock you in or whatever. The reason they hide it is because they never want a user to be able to get at that. Because if the users can get at that, people will fish it.

People will say, oh, we're having trouble with our passkey login. Go grab your private key from your password manager and paste it into this text field, and people will do it. So that's why they make it basically impossible for a regular person to get at that data. But websites with accounts. Almost, especially if they're important and they're technically decent, almost always have backup codes. Print out your backup codes.

store them off site somewhere, have multiple copies of them in physically secure locations. So if everything burns down and you lose every single one of your devices and you're like, How am I gonna restore my digital world? Backup codes is the answer and also email based pass key password resets. But if you really get hacked or something and you can't get your email, backup codes. Backup codes are the are the answer. So

Yeah, I'm I'm uh enthusiastic about pass keys. I was less enthusiastic when they first rolled out, but again, like I said, now having implemented them a few times and using them more every time I find a site that uses one, like yes. Yes, more of this. Just this one thing and nothing else. And I feel good about them.

All right. Well, it sounds like I'm gonna need to start embracing them then. Uh I mean you probably already are, but it's like Marco said, What if your site you use makes you use it as a second factor or something like that? You just have to wait or maybe send them an email and say, Hey, I wish you did something different. Yeah.

John Fabridius writes, Do you think that the eight gigs of RAM constraint in the MacBook Neo helps keep or make macOS lean a self-imposed limitation that can prevent lazy bloat? Or the is the iOS team cursing the hardware cost-cutting people? Well, probably a little of both, right? Uh I don't know. I I will say that.

Um, I'm friends with a handful of Apple engineers and without disclosing and well they they've never told me anything secret, but without like blowing up their spot or anything, I will say that all of them talk about perf or performance. A lot. Like, you know, the j just, oh, I've been working on some perf stuff lately. And that's all they'll ever tell me. It's never anything more than that. But I hear that not infrequently. And if you think about it,

you know, i if things perform well and maybe not specifically around RAM, but if things perform well, that can also reduce like uh battery uh drain and strain and so on. So Uh maybe John's up you got a point here, but I think Apple just genuinely really cares about this stuff, irrespective of the fact that they have low RAM devices still floating around in the world. Yeah, I think the the main The main f um thing to keep in mind here is that when you look at where RAM goes on a Mac.

Mac OS is not what you have to worry about. What you have to worry about is everyone is all the third party apps. especially apps that use things like the the web frameworks like Electron and stuff like that. Um so you have, you know, Chrome itself. Chrome is a big, you know, resource hog compared to Safari in in most ways.

Um and then all of the you know all the electron-based apps, they just gobble up RAM like crazy. There's not a lot Apple can do about that, really. Um you know the OS does its best, but for the most part that's what you have to worry about. Um and now that being said, like, you know, when you look at the when you're designing an app like that, you look at the installed base of what people actually use and if computers that many people use are

gonna run that kind of app very slowly and it's gonna bloat their computers up, um, you don't care because the entire industry doesn't care and you just have to suck it up as the user. You like you don't you want to think that they would look at, you know, the entire field of computers out there and be like, Should we maybe not use all the RAM in the world? Should we maybe put

a second of effort into not duplicating this thing over here. Nope. Nope. No one thinks that way at all. No one pays attention. Not a single software developer ever cares about that kind of stuff when making things like, you know, various Electronic apps and things like that. Apple does care a lot. No one else does.

Yes, the eight gig RAM constraint in the Mac Neo keeps Mac OS lean, but Mac OS wasn't your problem. Your problem is everyone else, and they're gonna do whatever they're gonna do. And the best thing Mac OS can do is have really good swap and virtual memory support. And it does.

The macOS can use a lot of memory, especially when things uh run away. But the real question is, and this was the question when the Neo came out when we were discussing it, if you're gonna roll out a brand new computer in twenty twenty six with eight gigs of RAM. How long will macOS run on that computer? Because that's the question. Like I don't think their Apple will feel constrained to keep macOS lean. Because they needed to run on the neat.

I think they'll decide based on wherever Mac OS is going how long the Neo will be supported. And I'm sure it'll be supported for years'cause like not being able to run on the Neo. Like, oh, you can't even boot Mac OS with eight gigs. No, it's fine. You'll always be able to boot it out. But like there is a certain point where maybe they'll add some feature to Mac OS thirty one or something. They'll be like, well this feature

We just can't fit it in the Neo. And at that point, the Neo will no longer run. Mac OS 31, it'll it'll 30 will be the last one that'll run. Whatever, I'm just making up numbers. Like that will happen and I think because the Neo has so so little RAM, it is definitely in danger of being the first. line of max to be dropped from a software revision.

Obviously like with the process of transition, like the Intel ones get dropped or whatever, but just look at like Apple's support, like how far back they go on the on the MacBook Pros for various versions of Mac OS versus the MacBook Airs versus the minis and stuff like that. Apple will drop hardware when it becomes unfeasible given their software plans. And so I don't think

Apple will feel constrained by the NEO. And I think there is a potential for the NEO to fall off the end of the supported list. longer than let's say it's contemporary M five MacBook Air with 16 gigs. I think that one will last longer than the Neo for multiple reasons.

So yeah, I'm not optimistic about Apple feeling constrained by the uh by the RAM size. And I don't know if if uh software people are cursing Apple's hardware choices, but I I have to think some of them have to be because it's like you have all these grand vision and you know when we got the big Apple intelligence dividend where all the Macs went to sixteen gigs, like finally, finally we broke out of that eight gig jail and

And we fell back into it. I'm not slamming the Neo for it because it makes sense on the Neo. Like I understand that, but part one of the things that is going to hold back, especially this first gen Neo, is It arrives at a time where eight gig is the especially with the whole RAM crisis and everything. It arrives at a time where eight gig is it's the only choice for that machine, given the given the prices and given the current RAM scenarios. Like it could have been way worse.

Uh and currently eight gig is a little bit under what you would want from even a low-end machine, but it's just it is what it is. Now when the next one comes out, presumably with 12 and the A19 Pro in it. Twelve is a little bit better. It would be better if this one had twelve, but it doesn't. Like I feel I feel like if Apple continues to use the A series chips and does not adjust their A series chips.

to be up to sixteen, like to try to keep you know,'cause it's possible they'll do that because We all know the Macs gets stuck at the base ramp for way too long. And right after the base RAM on the max gets bumped, that's the best time ever. And as time goes on

Or like we all love that the MacBook Air has 16 gigs of RAM. In ten years, we're all going to be complaining that the MacBook Air has 16 gigs of RAM in the base model. Because Apple just does not change the base RAM to keep up with the times. And so there's that curve they're going to walk. Is it the case that the A series chip?

will just eventually hit sixteen and stay there? Is it the case that the A-Series ships will end up with eighteen while the Macs still does have sixteen because the phone just outraces them because the Mac stays static for so long? We'll see how that turns out down there. But like We're currently in a situation where the A series has half of what the base Macs have, and that's probably the worst I imagine the worst it will ever be. And I'm hoping that gap will narrow.

as Apple i again if Apple keeps doing the A series chips on these, I think they'll start designing the A series chips like for the three years from now, with the Mac in mind for like peripherals like USB and stuff like that. And maybe, you know, we'll reach RAM parity there. So Yeah, I'm I'm not optimistic about the positive effects of the eight gig RAM and Neo. I just think that uh maybe we have uh better RAM days to look forward to in the future.

Finally, Keith Heaton writes, How long until we see an iPhone with an M-chip or an iPad Pro with the ability to plug into a Thunderbolt dock or a studio display and present mac OS to you? I just know that a Mac inside your pocket will eventually happen. Michael Cook writes, Does the MacBook Neo now mean that Apple will likely never allow the iPhone to plug into a monitor and be used like a computer the way you can with an iPad or a Samsung Dex DEX? I just I I think this would be awesome.

Except I don't think it would be as awesome as I think it would. And I really just don't see Apple doing it. I I think having this mythical like dual boot or dual mode iPad would be incredible, but I just really don't see Apple doing it. I mean they they're they're steadfastly refusing mostly

to allow windowing on a on iPad OS. I know obviously that's different now, but they certainly stood past steadfastly refused it for years. I just don't see this happening. And I don't think it really has anything to do with MacroConio. I just don't think this is Apple stock. Yeah, it's uh it's like incoherent from a software message. Like technically possible, sure, but it's like Apple seems not to, and I kind of agree with them, make um

Toaster fridges. Jekyll and Hyde kind of uh devices where like it runs two different OSs. Yeah, sure. You could do that from a technical perspective, but it's it's weird that like it's a phone when it's in your hand, but it's a Mac when it's not, and like

How to synchronize the world of the phone and the Mac with each other. And obviously you're taking up more disk space and you kind of need to have power being supplied when you're hooked up to the monitor too, because otherwise it'll drain your phone battery and like it's just It's a weird product to pitch, even though this is exactly what I pitched in one of my early Macworld uh backpage articles, which was like

uh a laptop with a screen that folds back on itself and when you fold it back it runs iPad OS because those those are the pieces available at the time. And it's an interesting idea, but like Apple never took us up on it. I think what people mostly are looking for here is like Either they just want like an ultra portable, like Mac like experience that goes everywhere with them and like maybe the folding phone will help with that or whatever.

Or they're just they're really what they just want is like wherever I go, I want my whole setup with me. And they're just what they're asking for, I think, is um what Apple would hopefully deliver. Well, I don't know. over the years is a better cloud sync experience. Like because that's that's the way this is done, like in the Google world, for example. Wherever you go with your Google account, there is in if you're tied into the Google world, there's all your stuff.

You got your mail, you got your Google Photos, you got your Google Drive, you got your Google Docs, like It doesn't really matter where you land, all your stuff is there, whether it's a phone or tablet or whatever. And if you have that experience, and you know, if that's working well.

You don't need to plug your phone into a monitor. All you need is to be able to just like log into a guest account on that monitor thing and just get all your stuff and use it kind of like more like a thin client or whatever. But yeah, I j I just think this is a product choice that Apple doesn't want to make and like I said, I kind of agree with them because it's just weird.

to run iOS and Mac OS off the same device. Setting aside the the amount of disk space you're wasting and and having to divide it up or whatever, it's just it's not an efficient use of resources and it's a difficult product to explain to people.

And it's a difficult product for people to like if if you had this and you used it you'd be like, Yeah, but it is kind of weird that I run Mac OS and then I run the iPhone OS and the only place they sink is through this sipping straw of like iCloud stuff and it's just I d I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it's gonna happen. Yeah, I I think that's the kind of product that

It sounds like a fun, interesting idea, but I think the reality of it would be weird and would disappoint people. Um and Apple is pretty good uh in most cases, Vision Pro, from keeping products out of the market that that would end up that way. All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Babbleon, Squarespace, and Delete Me, and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join, one of the many perks of membership.

Is ATP overtime our weekly bonus topic? This week in overtime, we're going to be talking about how Apple is going to add touch support to Mac OS. Speaking of which so this will play right into what we were just talking about here. Um there's been a new German report. We'll be talking about that in overtime. You can join us to listen, ATPFM slash join. Thank you, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

K S E Y L I S S. Easy list and So I've been I don't know if quiet quitting is really the right term of art slash phrase for what I've been doing, but I've been, for lack of a better way of describing it, quiet quitting my Synology. I still in and of itself. I still actually really do love my Synology. I have a DS 1621 Plus, I believe.

Um, if I can, I'll put a link in the show notes. Uh, but it's I don't think it's made anymore, so I may or may not be able to find a good link, but I'll put something in there. Um But I have been working on trying to set myself up to have the Synology go away and be okay with it. Now. I would still need a giant ass array of disks because I have a gazillion files. I think I have something like ten to fifteen terabytes worth of stuff, worth ac of active like stuff on the Synology.

You know, and then another like uh and about that much again in free space at the moment. Um but but I I've really been disappointed with the path that Synology has been going recently. Which, if you squint, doesn't look that different than Apple Services. It's a different application, but looks kind of similar. Uh but that's neither here nor there. But I mean that's probably not a coincidence. Like Apple inspires

companies how to become gatekeepers to make more money. Right. Right. And honestly, that is the executive summary of what I'm about to tell you, which is that You know, a couple of years back and we talked about it on the show, but a year or two back they said, Okay, all future Synology uh you know, NASA's disk stations as they call them, they they will be

forced to use first party Synology hard drives, which are themselves, you know, relabeled like Western digitals, I think, or something like that. I the the details honestly don't matter. Even if they are legitimately their own first party drives, honestly I don't think that really matters either. But this thing that was always and forever

Uh y uh you could put whatever drive you wanted in it and they would slurp it up and it would be fine. But they've announced that oh no, no, no, no, no, you must use our first party stuff. Now, in the defense of Synology, I can make some arguments in in favor of that. You know, it's it's far easier to control these things, it's far easier to guarantee that it'll work the way they want it to, and thus the way you want it to. Like you can

figure out legitimate reasons for this. But I feel like even though they are not taking it away from legacy users like myself, um, it's still gross because at some point I'm going to want a new bit of network-attached storage and I I don't want to have to fill that with very expensive Synology drive.

In the same way that all things being equal, I would put third party RAM in a Mac, hi John, or you know, potentially a third party SSD in a Mac, hello again, John, if such a thing were possible in the Macs that I buy, but it isn't, not without, you know, a ton of work.

So I've been trying to set myself up for all right, what would the future look like if I gave up on my Synology? And to be clear, I think this will happen, but I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon. I'm talking like Maybe five plus years before this happens. But I wanted to set myself up for it. And so what I've been doing is trying to treat the Synology less like a computer and more like a giant array of discs.

And that's in no small part because I think uh what I am likely to replace the Synology with if I were to do it tomorrow is a s is a almost a Synology is a Ubiquity UNESCO, which is a giant array of disks. But it's very little else. I mean, obviously there is a computer in there, but not really from a user's perspective.

By contrast, a Synology will let you, you know, you can run a shell on it. Well, I mean you can do that on the UNS as well, I believe, but you can you can run stuff on it. You you can install software on the Synology, you can run Docker containers on it. And I was running

a zillion, like 10 plus Docker containers on my Synology, which, by the way, even despite having added third party RAM to my Synology as an add-on rather than a replacement, um That didn't go exceedingly well because while this is a computer and it is meant to serve things. It's not really meant to be a server, if you ask me. And maybe, you know, you listening might disagree with me, but that that's kind of my perspective on it.

It's it's supposed to do basic service stuff, but not be like your one server for your small business or for your home or whatever.

And so what I've done is I feel like I've talked about a little of this on the show, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but if you recall way back when, a year or two ago, I got a little tiny nuck, a little tiny uh Intel PC. uh that I had shipped off to my dear friend in Connecticut with an antenna with the intention of Streaming New York Giants games.

from Connecticut to me, by slurping them up over the air. Apparently that's my word of the day, I'm sorry. By scooping them up from the air and um and and uh you know using the the absolutely excellent channels app. uh sending them you know t sending what the antenna got into my house. Um that didn't end up working out because my friend lives far enough into the middle of nowhere, Connecticut, which is a thing, despite what you'd think, uh, that his signal from his house was basically useless.

And I had left the computer, the knuckle there for the longest time because I don't know, there was no real need to repatriate it, for lack of a better word. But then it occurred to me, you know what? You know what a nuck would be really good at? Running a bunch of Docker containers. And so I realized my home lab experience is finally leveling up and I need to do the thing that all self-respecting home lobbers seem to do. And now I'm gonna get all the home labers yelling at me for saying so.

But nevertheless, it seems like all of the home labers that I know and respect, like my friend uh Alex, who's from Tailscale, uh who does incredible videos on the Tailscale channel um uh about home lab stuff. Uh so tailscale on YouTube that is. So anyway, Alex is a big fan of Proxmox, a P R O X M O X. uh which I am not really well qualified to describe, but I would say is basically like an OS that lets you run VMs and LXCs, which is sort of kind of, but not really like a Docker container.

Or you know, you can run uh a virtual machine that itself is basically its only purpose is to run Docker containers and so on and so forth. And so I repatriated the the knock. I put Proxmox on it. That's been working pretty well. Uh it only had, I believe, stop me if this sounds familiar. When I had bought it, I didn't buy it to do this sort of thing. I bought it to be a channel server.

And so it only had um eight gigs of RAM on it, which once you start running five, 10, 15, literally 20 Docker containers. And by the way, home assistant and pie hole all on this device. I quickly found that eight gigs of RAM was not sufficient. And so for the tune of like $180 or something like that. Just a few weeks ago, I bought sixteen gigs of RAM.

Which I think a year ago was like literally thirty or forty bucks or something like that. But now it was a something to the order of a hundred and fifty dollars, which I think on the spec front now, um is the nucle More powerful than your Synology? Does it have more RAM? Is the CPU better?

Uh, I believe the CPU is better. You know, it's a fair question, Twitch. Honestly, I don't know the answer. I have to assume yes. And I can tell you based on the behavior of the NUC and the way these containers run on the NUC. It is way faster.

Way way faster. How much RAM does your Synology have with the up upgrade? Do you remember? I want to say it's the same. I want to say it's sixteen gigs and uh I will try to look that up as I continue to do that. Obviously Synology is doing other things because it's

doing disk serving stuff. But I do wonder, like you you're like, oh, the you really shouldn't use your Synology use your home server. So I bought the smallest, tiniest, least powerful computer I could get that's not a Raspberry Pi. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. And I mean actually and now that I think about it, maybe maybe the crux of my problem, which didn't occur to me until just this very moment, is that there is literally no storage on my Synology that is not

a spinning platter. I don't have any sort of SSD in my Synology in any way, shape, or form. Oh yeah, no, that's will definitely make your Docker containers go slow. No, that that's very true. Um and so perhaps maybe that was it. But even if that is it. I still stand by, I want to try to do what I can to get myself in a position that if I decide to leave Synology behind. I'll be okay. On on that front, by the way, we should note that uh we had this story on a show a while back with the

The Synology partially reversed its decision on the hard drives and only they only do it on the enterprise ones now and the consumer ones. You can put any drive you want on them or whatever. We we talked about it in the past, but like they're not going to be able to do that. They walked it back a little bit, but your point stands is that A they did it in the first place and B they didn't undo all of it.

Right. Exactly. Uh and I apologize. I meant to say that and I got myself sidetracked, so thank you for uh bringing that up. Uh total physical memory on the Synology twenty gigabytes. So a bit more than the NUC actually. Um, maybe it is as simple as an SSD, but uh like I said, I stand by going down this path just to see what my future would be like. And truth be told.

I think for the most part, it's gone really well. It was a disaster at first when I still had eight gigs of RAM and was running, you know, 15 or so containers. Um, that was not great. But once I put in the sixteen gigs, and I don't think this particular NUC supports more than that, uh, and certainly it'll cost a second mortgage to get more than that, but

Um, this seems to be fine for now. And I am currently running, let's look at Portainer. I am running uh, let's see, something like 22 containers on it of all various shapes and sizes. Most of them are very small, a couple of them are not as small. Uh and in addition to Home Assistant, in addition to Piehole, and it's it's been working great and I'm really, really happy with it. Proxmox has a bit of a learning curve, but

Um, it's also really good. Uh there's a listener to the show whose name is escaping me. I'm so sorry, I don't have it in front of me, but I will link their website. I believe I brought him up earlier. Uh he has a bunch of really great information. Uh about Proxmox and uh Home Assistant and these sorts of home labby things. Um So I will put his website into the show notes as well.

Um but between all these things and between Alex's, you know, tutorials on YouTube, I've been able to stand up this little Proxmox node. I have now decommissioned every single one of my Raspberry Pis. Uh the one in the garage got decommissioned a couple of years ago because there's a home assistant integration for my garage door opener, so I didn't need that anymore.

The one in the bedroom, uh, or well, I should back up. The one in the office was running pie hole and little else. That got decommissioned once the pie hole moved to the knock. And then finally the one in the bedroom was running the little LED attached to my bed. And that got decommissioned for an ESP32 uh dev board that's running ESP home. Uh, so that's driving the LED, which I presume takes even less power than the uh Pi Zero that was previously running it.

So I'm really, believe it or not, mostly simplifying my life in terms of uh computing equipment. And so at this point, I feel like if I were to leave Synology's ecosystem behind.

I think the only thing I would really miss is Synology Drive, which is the kind of faux dropbox that I use. And I've talked about this on and off over the years. Well one of the great things about the Synology Drive application is that not only does it, you know, you're you are your own cloud, which for me in this context it's a feature, not a bug. I could make an argument uh in the opposite. But one of the great things about it is you can use technologies, I think it's cloud sync.

to take your Dropbox and basically put that inside your Synology drive. So when I want to upload like the file that I'm recording right now to Marco for him to process later. I don't have Dropbox running on any of my computers and I haven't for like five plus years. I simply put it into the Dropbox folder within my Synology drive.

and in the appropriate folder in my Dropbox in the drive, you know, root, and it will go ahead and sync that to Dropbox's cloud so that then Marco can can pull it down. And that's worked incredibly well. I think I can replicate that with some open source stuff. It isn't quite as slick and it isn't quite as nice, but the combination of

Oh shoot, what was it? Um Sync Thing and something else. Shoot, I forget what the other one was. Oh R Clone. Sync Thing and R Clone. Um the two of them put together, if you squint, are kind of sort of what Synology Drive and Synology uh CloudSync does. Uh and I did trial that like a year or so ago and it did do the trick. I just like I said, I don't love it quite as much as I like Drive, but

At this point, I am in a position where I think I can divorce myself of the Synology and be okay. And at that point, Marco, we're gonna have to figure out what the virus vibrus lap is used for. Well we might have to get a new sound for you because speaking of spinning discs in your Synology it made me think when you were rattling off all the things that you've consolidated onto this nuck. How are you backing this nuck up?

Uh it's funny you bring that up. Uh there is uh she what is it called? Proxmox backup server PBS, I believe, where it has its own um mechanism for doing this, and basically all of that is going onto the SNL. I mean so because uh the reason I ask is because like you have

So much set up there, like the time you've invested into setting up those twenty containers and consolidating everything. And it's not redundant storage like the Synology spinning discs, the little cruddy rust that uh presumably you're you're not using rate zero on the whole thing, I hope.

Um so you have some re hardware redundancy. Oh, what if the SSD goes bad? What if a kid spills a drink on it or whatever? Do you want to reset up your entire life on that nuck or do you want to restore from a backup? And then the question is where you put the backup, and as you noted, it's on the Synology, so you may not be out of the woods yet.

No, but that is actually one of the only things that the Synology is still doing other than drive that would be hard to replace. I would probably have to do Something else because you can do a cloud backup or whatever. It's just a question of like making sure it's some automated process. You actually are protected because one of the things the Synologies have going for them is that if a drive fails, you're protected. If two drives fail, maybe not.

Yeah, no, you're you're exactly right. I I have no no reasonable way to contest what you're saying. And that thought has crossed my mind. The good news is a lot of this stuff, uh not all of it, but a lot of it, a lot of these containers Uh let's just say as long as I have the Docker compose somewhere, which I do, I have that in a private GitHub repo.

most of this I could stand up again pretty easily. And most of what these containers emit, this is not everything that I do with containers, but a lot of it, most of what these containers emit is stored on the Synology anyhow. And it's one of those things, if you know You know.

Uh someone in the chat room mentioned R2 and uh you mentioned R clone and for some of the stuff that I did for my private website. Uh I ended up using R2 because it's part of Cloudflare. Um and it's their S three replacement. But uh transmit, my favorite uh file transfer client, does not talk to R2 for some obscure technical reason. I think they don't do uh chunk transfer encoding or something. Anyway. I couldn't use transmit, so I had to find

a nice app to a GUI app and then a command line app because rsync doesn't work with it and transmit doesn't work with it. So I ended up using R clone for the command line because R clone will talk to R2. And I'm using Forklift, which is a

Mac file transfer app that's been around for a while. I wonder if their name is a play on the transmit truck. But anyway, Forklif exists and it also talks to R two. So this is I guess this is an endorsement for R clone, which is I mean I really feel like R Sync should get support for R two, but R two is a little bit of a well it's S three, but the letter is one lower and the number is one lower and it's

Almost compatible with everything, but not my favorite apps and not my favorite command line tool. So I'm glad our clone exists and I'm glad Forklift. Yeah, I had not heard of Forklift before. That that's interesting. It's pretty old. It's been around for a long time. Uh Cyberduck also works with it. Someone mentioned that. I've used I use CyberDuck as well. I liked Forklift a little bit better. So

I don't use R two for backing up the Synology. I have other means for that that I'd rather not discuss here, but Uh part of the reason I don't use anything to back up the Synology, anything like that to back up the Synology is because it's something like 15 terabytes and that is prohibitively expensive. Even like the um What is it? Ice or something like that. There's uh I use Backblaze B two to back up my Synology and it's not that b I don't have as much data as you, but it's not that bad.

It's bad enough for me that I I can't stomach it, but I'm also frugal as hell, so what do you expect? Um, but no, I've been really, really happy with this. Um, it's been thanks to uh the unnamed listener. I want to say his name is Derek. I'm so sorry. I will put a link in the show notes though, um, who had helped me a lot, both but in terms of his website, which is excellent.

And um in terms of, you know, actually some kind of personal email support, which was very kind of him, uh, I have sent him some ATP stickers as a thank you, don't worry. Um But uh that in you know Alex on on Tail Scales YouTube channel has really, really opened my eyes into a different way of approaching this. And I'm actually really, really happy with it. Now, ask me again when this knock you know

poops itself tomorrow and I lose everything. But sitting here now, it's been going really, really well, and I'm really happy with it. And and if I decide to get rid of the Synology and go a different route entirely, like in UNAS. Uh, I think I am mostly ready to do that, leaving aside, you know, transmitting transferring all this data and so on and so forth.