686: Write Two Letters

For spring break last week we went on a tour of Southwest Virginia, which uh was a lot of fun, uh despite there being very little in South West Virginia, but we we found what there was to do and did it. we're gonna hear from all four people who live there. Yeah, right. And I say that as someone who went to school in Southwest Virginia. Um, and I actually I wasn't planning on talking about this, but it occurred to me in the hotel in Blacksburg, the hotel room had the unthinkable within it.

And it made me exceedingly happy. What do you think was in that hotel room? Ethernet port. Correct. Nailed it. Not only was there an Ethernet jack, but it was connected and worked. Yeah. It was incredible. Uh so I was very mu very happy using my little uh uh unified travel router to connect to the Ethernet. But anyways, that's not actually why I'm bringing this up.

I'm bringing this up because there's a a trail, like a hike, about half an hour outside of Blacksburg, which I had heard about so many times when I was in school that oh, you know, we're gonna go hike the cascades, we're gonna go do the cascades, the cascades, the cascades, cascades. And I'd never actually done it when I was down there. But uh the the kids and Aaron and me, uh, we all did some hikes a couple of spring breaks ago in the Shenandoah National Park.

Really enjoyed that. And so during this uh three night vacation slash tour we did a trio of hikes as well. And the biggest one was this first one at the Cascades Trail. And you basically drive from nowhere to further nowhere and then drive through a neighborhood and spontaneously just come out at like a parking situation.

and like a little hut with a bathroom and then you start on this hike that goes to these really beautiful, um waterfalls. And and the waterfalls, you know, have the water cascading down them. I presume that's the Genesis of the name, right? Well anyways, on the way out of uh on the way out of the hike, you know, we did the two m two miles out, two miles back, kids were absolute troopers, you know, uh did a great job.

And then I was going to get in the car and I was wearing my beloved workout shorts and one of my ATP exercise t shirts, which uh we're sort of but not really gonna talk about in a second. And what do I hear as I'm getting an Aaron's Volvo for the second time in the last whatever it is, seven months, I hear clunk clunk clunk crash.

I just wanna pause here for a second and ask the longtime ATP listeners, how long into that story did you figure out that Casey was gonna tell us that he dropped his phone again?

That is a great a great measure because obviously Marco and I are cheating'cause we see the show notes and we know where he's going with this, but just I'm just curious for the people listening. How you're listening Casey's winding up. He's got a big wind up on his pitches, he's going along. When did you figure out Oh, Casey dropped his phone again, didn't he? I think it's probably a little bit more than a little bit.

Was it hike? Was it just like the d going on vacation? Was it middle of nowhere? Oh, it's so true. I want to be so mad at you, but I I you're absolutely correct. But yes, so at the end of the hike, we're g I'm getting back in the car car and I hear thunk thunk crash. And sure enough, my phone had fallen out of my workout shorts, which has happened from these same shorts once before. You'd think I would have learned, but no, no, I didn't.

You can get some new shorts with bigger pockets, get pockets with zippers, something, anything. These these shorts actually do have zippers, but the zipper broke unfortunately, and so here we are. Again, these this is a problem of my own creation. But anyways, I looked down and sure enough my the the the pop socket had yeeted itself halfway across the parking lot. Oh no, we are but we No, I think that's actually your generation. No it's it's no it's

Isn't that a millennial thing? Yeet? I think it is. No, it's absolutely much younger than that. Alright. Well anyway, I I I say you can say it, I declare that you can say it. Oh thanks Admiral. Because it's because it's out it's out of style now, so it's suitably unfashionable for you. Exactly. Well and definitely I mean it's definitely not a style now that we're using it. Precisely right.

So the the popsocket had launched itself across the parking lot and sure enough my phone was face down and it was on blacktop cement, whatever it was. And I think to myself, oh, all right, it's been about six months. That's probably about due for me to shatter the phone. And I picked it up. And it was pristine. It was perfectly fine. This is the second time this has fallen from a Volvo XC ninety out of my pocket onto the pavement, face down, both times it has been pristine. Yeah.

No case. No case. I I think now I'm going to absolutely jinx myself. So let me do a little foley work and Knock on wood. Uh, I think I can declare ceramic shield two. the real deal. And so I went back to the keynote from September to see who was introducing it, what they said. And it was Kyan Drance. And she said very little about it, but she did say there's three times better

scratch resistance and that they like infused uh ceramic in a different way and different like molecular or chemical bonds or whatever. But the only real like marketing phrase was three times better scratch resistance. I gotta tell you. So far, I might I think I might have noticed like a little baby scratch, maybe, which by now every prior phone I've had has been freaking ruined. That's why I went to the the screen protectors for the last phone, because which I was going through like water.

Uh because I was constantly scratching up my phones, my my the face of my phones, the screen of my phones. There's maybe, maybe one itty bitty scratch, and it has fallen from like waist height onto pavement, face down twice, hasn't shattered yet. I have to say, I'm very impressed. As much as I've been pissing and moaning about the fragility of the screens up until now in the seventeen pro, it's good sh it's good stuff. I'm very impressed.

Well I would r strongly recommend, Casey, that you not get the full de blood. I've actually I I I don't wanna belabor this pre-show, but I've thought a lot about what I'm gonna do with that. And I think uh this is classic Casey. I don't think I want a foldable phone because I think that's too much. And I don't think uh I I acknowledge, I fully acknowledge this classic Casey a hundred percent. Mm-hmm. What do you think, John? One week after it's released?

As as this one. I guess it's good that he can close it so when it's closed, like the screen won't be there'll be the outer screen. Anyway, I it doesn't seem like it's the product for you, is what I'm saying. Yeah. New frontiers and screen breaking. No, but I've been thinking about like I think for me the I I'm not in love with spending two thousand dollars on a phone or whatever it'll end up being. I'm not in love with

I don't think I want or need a foldable in my life, which again, classic HC, I recognize that. Uh but most importantly, I don't think I want to drop any of the three camera uh situations on my current phone and and everyone seems to think it'll be one or two lenses.

on the foldable phone. And so I've been wondering what do I do? And I think what I do is, assuming they all come out at the same time, which is also under debate, I think I do try a foldable phone because if nothing else, I should do it for the show. And then maybe on that jerk that returns it within two weeks, or you know, it returns it on day 13 after having tried it because I decide, you know, it's really not for me. But I think I gotta try it. Two cameras, by the way, Casey.

What's your uh position on having test devices for your life as an iOS developer? Yeah, I think. Ready reason to buy a new thing. I was gonna say I see the loophole building as we speak. I mean I that it that is fair and maybe that is the right is answer is I use a carry phone that is, you know, the eighteen pro or what have you and I have the foldable is the test device. I don't know, that's a that's an interesting point.

The reason I ask is that m one of the excuses I've always used over the years, um, is that when there is a like reasonably new and different form factor of a device. I feel like I should probably have one as an iOS developer. Um not only, you know, just to have like extra devices to like put betas on and stuff, but also like if it's a different form factor

I should know how that handles. I should know how it feels in the hand. Where should controls be? How big should controls be? How th should things be laid out? And you know, and sometimes you can just guess. Like when the when the phone gets A little bit bigger. If things are generally the same other than a small size difference, that doesn't usually require like I don't have every single iPhone model. I just I have a few.

Uh but when something is as different as like going from iPhone to iPad, you should probably have an iPad if your app runs an iPad. I think going from regular iPhones to the folding iPhone

That's pretty different physically. And there might also be very different software features. And yes, we will have a simulator that you can you can see how your app is laid out in the simulator. You can, you know, deal with probably what you know, whatever the multitasking system ends up being, like I'm sure you can simulate all that.

But I don't think that's going to replace the experience of actually handling it in terms of like knowing how to how your app should look and work on that device. I think any iOS developer responsible for design and layout and controls. who has any, you know, budget ability to do this is probably gonna wanna get g is probably gonna wanna have an iPhone fold of their own. Even if it's not their daily carry phone.

You're it's probably a good idea to have it and maybe live with it for like a week or two or something just so you can figure out how it handles and design your app accordingly.'Cause that's that is gonna be a pretty different experience for apps if the rumors are at all true.

All right, we have some important breaking news. The ATP store is back, baby. You can go to ATP.fm slash store where John will proceed to take us on a nickel tour of all the different things that he has in store for you. Yes, this is in fact the W W D C twenty twenty six store. Seems like the WWC store comes earlier every year, but really it's always around this time.

Um, we tried to get people their items in time to attend WWDC, which is a thing that is rare these days because it doesn't hold a lot of people and most people don't get to go. But you know that's the theory, so that's why it's so early, FYI. So get your orders in now. Here's what we've got. Um the first product is actually four products. It's the opposite of the iPhone intro.

Um, and I'll explain why. So this is uh it's a t shirt and it's ATP Neo, uh and these are shirts inspired by the MacBook Neo. because they come in the color combinations that the MacBook Neo comes in. They're called ATP Neo Indigo, Blush, Citrus, and Silver. Here's the concept. The shirt. Should be more or less the color of like the body of the Neo, and the logo, it's just the monochrome ATP logo, should be the color of the keyboard.

And as you know, the keyboards on all the MacBook Neos are color matched to the device. So even though when you look at like the pink one and like the yellowy citrus one, you're like, oh, they both have white keyboards. They don't. The pink one has like a lightly pinkish keyboard and the citrus one has like a lightly yellow keyboard, and it's the same for all of them. The keyboards are not the same color on these devices. So the logo is not the same color on these shirts.

Uh, and that's why they have to be four separate shirts because the way Common Bureau does it, if you have a different ink color, that's a different shirt because you know you're printing a different thing. So, and the other thing is to get shirts that are colored, like the MacBook Neo, we unfortunately don't have the clout to say, make me a shirt that matches this color. No, we just have to look at every shirt that's available for us to, you know, order blanks of.

And then find a company that makes a shirt in a color that's close to the laptop color. And that's what we've done. And we've picked out four shirt colors here. I think the silver one is the farthest off because it's a little bit too dark, but We did the best we could because we got all four shirts from the same company, the same like shirt model or whatever.

And that means that there's only t-shirts. So even though we've been rolling at all sorts of varieties or whatever, we can only get these colors from this one specific brand in t-shirt. So it's just t-shirts. Indigo blush, citrus, and silver with an ATP logo on it. Color match to the thing. The pictures don't really do it justice. We're trying to make it look subtle like the keyboards do on the MacBook Neo, but anyway that's.

There's four shirts. And unfortunately, because there's four, there's like a minimum threshold before they'll print each one. So I hope enough people will buy each one of the colors that they actually get printed. If they don't, oh well lesson learned. That's ATP Neo R tribute. to the MacBook Neo, uh great new Mac that uh everybody loves. And moving on to a very old Mac that nobody loves except for me.

We have the Mac Pro Memorial shirt. Um, we had the products for the store all set to go before they killed the Mac Pro, and so we kinda had to scramble on this one. And what you get is exactly what you would expect uh expect. In hindsight, it is I don't know um

Foreshadowing that the Mac Pro Believe shirt also looked a little bit like a tombstone because now what we've done is take the Mac Pro Believe shirt and instead of saying believe underneath that picture of the Mac Pro, now we've just got birth year to death year, twenty nineteen to twenty twenty six. Shout out to I forget the listener's name who made a mock-up that said Bereave.

Yeah, that's a good one too, but it requires you to know the other shirt and honestly it's not really bereaving'cause it r it really needed to be canned. But anyway. Uh it's just, you know, the year range. And some people thought it should have the year look of the original Mac Pro, but no, it's the it's the thing that's pictured on the shirt. The thing that's pictured on the shirt was uh introduced in 2019 and killed in 2026. And yes, I have already ordered one of these to go to John Turner.

That's incredible. And and we we are under the impression that he did receive the original believe shirt. Right. I know for sure that he did. Alright, and that one th again that's two shirts because the like the darker colored shirts have light ink and vice versa. So it's Mac Pro Memorial. Mac Pro Memorial Dark again, c ink color thing.

Um, then we have two shirts that probably should have been in the last sale, but I don't know, maybe it would have been too much. But anyway, last sale we did uh ATP T568A and T568B, our Ethernet wiring standard shirts. Where we replaced the uh Apple six color stripes in the ATP logo with the colors of the conductors in uh an Ethernet cable according to the T five sixty eight A and B standards.

Well, this time we have two more shirts, T five to six sixty eight A and B, but they're crossover cable. Uh you can well we put links on the store page. You can go to like the Wikipedia page. I th I'm pretty sure I got these right. I quadruple checked like a million times and did so many Google searches. Here's what Wikipedia says, here's what these things say.

I'm pretty sure that these are the correct wiring arrangements for a gigabit, not a hundred or ten, a gigabit crossover cable, which isn't really a thing I think you need anymore because don't all the ports auto sense and switch or whatever. But anyway, crossover cables are still a thing that exists.

And so now the colored stripes, the top half has like what one end of the connector cable should be, pins one through eight, and the bottom half has what the other half should be. And yes, there are different crossover cables for five six T568A and B. So we have the two crossover shirts. Um and they're really pushing the limits. Like last time we have like ugly shirts, like is the Ethernet wiring colours.

are not particularly attractive and now they're even less attractive'cause the colors are all mixed up, but you nerds love it. You you love those networking nerds want to have the most obscure shirt that someone is sure to ask you about and then you get to explain about Ethernet wiring standards. Um Then we have the uh M5 Pro and Mac shirts because uh since our last sale, those two chips came out.

Those chips are good. They deserve shirts. There are no chip designs in the back because we haven't done that in a while. But we've got M5 Pro and M5 Max in all the usual shapes and sizes. Uh we do like to bring back one old shirt in every sale, and this time we're bringing back uh a shirt that we sold a couple of times that has been very popular. ATP Pixels is back. This is the one with the six-color ATP logo on it.

But it's drawn in pixels, which is quite a printing challenge. I guess people who bought this shirt a while ago know how well it held up, but I have one as well. I think it looked, it came out really good. It looks really good.

Um it's chunky, as as the description said, it's non-retina. You can see the pixels. It's chunky pixels. It's the ATP logo in a bunch of chunky pixels. Extremely difficult to manufacture. Seemed to come out good last time, fingers crossed for this time. And then of course we have our traditional ATP shirt.

Our traditional ATP zip hoodie, we got the ATP polo because it's short sleeve weather, uh, and we have the ATP hat. That is our WWC twenty twenty six sale. If anybody orders a Mac Pro Memorial shirt and happens to go to WWC and gets it in time and can wear it there, make sure you stare Apple Executive straight in the eye and look as sad as you possibly can and then just point to your shirt. That's what we want. We want them to just feel terrible.

Oh my word. Now if you wanted to save a little bit of money on your order, John, how do you go about doing that? ATP members get fifteen percent off everything in the store. If you go to your member page, which is linked at the top of the store page, you will get a code. Remember that if you are logged in to ATP.fm, just by logging in through your account and you are a an ATP member.

then all the links that you click on should automatically autofill your discount code. But if it doesn't do that, you can always go to your member page and copy and paste it the old fashioned way. Uh, and based on how much these shirts cost, and yes, I know they're tremendously expensive, especially if you're in Europe. We apologize for that. Um

it behooves you to become a member at least just for one month just to get the discount on the shirt or two or whatever you buy, uh, because it's worth it to you'll you'll end up coming out ahead in terms of uh how much the membership costs. And again We apologize for how expensive these things are. This is not like

You know, I I'll buy a shirt to support the show. You want to support the show by membership. Membership supports the show. Shirts are a fun thing we do together, so we have cool, nerdy podcast shirts. That's what it's for. They're not economical. They're not a big way to support the show, but they are fun.

And we do it for the people and we try to come up with good shirt ideas every year. Uh so yeah, if you want a discount, become a member. ATP.fm slash join. There are links to that on the store page as well.

Excellent. And I will do my normal pitch. If you are driving, perhaps signal and then pull over. If you're walking, pull over to the degree one can pull over while walking. But Do yourself a favor and write yourself a reminder, send yourself an email, do whatever you need to do, use the DUE app, use Marco's not re not yet released reminders app, do something to remind yourself to make this order because

The sale ends on Sunday, April 26th, and every single time somebody writes, usually me, saying, oh no, I missed it. Don't care. Do it now or leave yourself a reminder. ATP.fm slash store. I've almost missed it several times. Uh to buy show. I I remember to do the John Turners thing now because I had to look up my old order to find his address because apparently wherever sent it last time worked.

So I did that again. Yeah. Um set yourself a reminder because you will forget. And you know, we've obviously we picked the dates so we can promote this on three separate shows. But by the time the third show comes around, like maybe you don't download that show immediately or maybe you don't listen to it immediately. And by the time you hear the third one, maybe the sale's over. So yeah, Sunday, April twenty sixth, it ends. Don't put it off. If you want something, get it now.

All right, let's do some follow up. Uh there was something that was very startling, and perhaps it wasn't new, but They really kind of chapped my behind about the Studio Display XDR. And when I was looking at it when it was first announced, I noticed that the Visa Mount uh version of it was the same price. as the version with the stand, which Seems a bit egregious to me, and I popped off about it on Mastodon. I don't know if I'll remember to dig up my particular toot about it, but

Uh it was big like what are you gonna do about it energies? I think what I said. And I that really made me upset. But I mean, I haven't ordered next DR. I don't think I'm going to. Again, famous last words. Uh but there was good news.

We'll see what happens. Uh there's good news. The pricing has changed for the Visa Mount version. The uh version with the stand is still thirty two hundred dollars, but the Visa Mount version is twenty eight hundred dollars. So that's now four hundred dollars cheaper. And friend of the show, Steven Robles, uh got wind of this. In fact, I believe it was him that I heard it from originally.

And uh apparently reached out to Apple via the business chat thing that I always forget exists, you know, in iMessage or whatever, and said, Hey, am I gonna get a refund here? And the Apple person said yes. And he was kinda like, Oh, okay, sure. And then sure enough, uh, a little while later, he got a refund for four four hundred dollars plus tax. So it turns out it's the real deal.

Yeah, that chat person in the chat said basically everybody who purchased it quote unquote recently will get a refund, so that's nice. Obviously you had to have purchased the VisaMount version to get a refund. Right. Thanks, everybody. But this is so weird because Apple! doesn't really drop prices as evidenced by the Pro Display XDR, the earlier XDR, uh never changing price for the entire life of the product, despite being what, five or six years old?

uh, you know, or the trash can or anything like that. But this is so weird'cause this product just came out and it was weird that the Visa Mount version was the same price as the one with the stand, but you know, not that weird cause Casey was like, What are you gonna do? Apple's gonna apple.

But no, maybe they just forgot, maybe they someone entered it wrong or something. Like it's so weird. It's not like there was big public outcry from people buying thirty two hundred dollar monitors that we we demand the Visa Mount version be cheaper. Like it just seems like someone made a mistake or something. So weird. Yeah, it was very unusual, but I'm glad that Apple is doing the right thing and uh fixing the issue.

Very out of character. And then the the same week that happened, I got an email from Google telling me that they were doing a price drop on my Google One subscription, saving me fifty dollars. When does that ever happen? Normally you get emails from like whatever thing you subscribe to and say, An update on your subscription. Yeah. It it's not uh it's it's ambiguous, but you always know this just means you're gonna charge more money.

But no, they sent an email and said, I forget what the subject was, it was something like an update to your subscription, like, oh, here we go. Ah, it's fifty dollars cheaper per year. So I don't know what's in the water, but uh whatever it is, keep drinking it. Right.

All right. Uh Ryan Himmelwright uh has a question for John. With the long anticipated death of the Mac Pro finally here, John has made it clear that he intends to become a Mac Studio user. However, I'm curious to know what he expects his typical upgrade cycle to be once he makes a switch.

He has an every other year cycle for his iPhone, and I think his iPad criteria tends to be, will this make my bedtime media consumption better? While the Mac Studio is far from Apple's most frequently updated Mac, it's still updated more than Apple's recent proper tower Mac. As such, John's previous criteria of whatever decade Apple decides to release a new tower Mac will likely be need to be revisited. Thoughts. Also, before you answer that, I just occurred to me a an ancillary question.

Did you ever use I'm sure we talked about this and I'm just it's slipping my mind. Did you ever use the Vision Pro in bed and was that enjoyable or did you not bother? You're just uh going for the double entendres this episode. Uh yes I did. I talked about it on the show.

I watch movies uh in bed with it a couple of times. Uh it I prefer the iPad is what it boils down to. And Ryan basically got it right. Like the iPad I am looking like is just gonna make my bedtime watching better because that's really all I care about. That's why I got the OLED one. I love it, I still love it. Um for the Mac Studio though My cadence is probably going to be not actually like uh as

as you know, more frequent as you would expect it to be. Because yeah, the Mac Studio is updated frequently. Like I I think they basically do it I mean the M3 Ultra One setting aside, it's I could get like a new one every year, every year and a half if I wanted. The problem is

the one I buy is going to be so expensive, especially with all the RAM and SSD price increases, because of the stupid eight terabyte SSD. And once I put all that money in, I'm not gonna want to buy another one for a long time. Like that just tends to be my inclination anyway. I've used all my Macs for a really long time because I tend to buy them stuff to the gills and back in the day I would buy ones that I could upgrade so I'd use them for a very long time. Like my my sit my Macs was like

Yeah, my line of Macs is is not that well populated. It was the original Macintosh, motherboard garbage updated to a plus, then the SE thirty Then I went from the SE 30 to I the PowerMax 6115 or the 6100 series PowerMax. And then from that to a G three tower, and then from the G three tower to the original Cheese Grater, the G five cheese grader, and then from that to the Intel Mac Pro, and then to the twenty nineteen Mac Pro. That's all the Macs have ever owned.

For the life of the Mac. So there's huge gaps in there. Like going I mean, I basically went from the S E thirty to the blue and white G three because the sixty one hundred was really my parents' computer. That's a that's a long time. But by the time I switched over, like my SE thirty had was maxed out on RAM, had a bunch of external hard drives, had a 24-bit color card and an external

Trinitron color monitor, like I used them for a long time as I stuff them to the gills. So with the Mac Studio, assuming I can even afford a stupid eight terabyte Mac Studio with a reasonable amount of RAM, That's gonna be it for me for a long time as my bank account recovers,'cause that's gonna be so I'm just dreading how expensive that be every day there's a story that's like, Oh, SSD prices are going up'cause if I ask like, I know. I know. And Apple's prices are always terrible. So

I it's not the the update frequency of the Mac Studio that or the Mac Pro or whatever that's stopping me. It's just how much it costs. And so, you know, it's kind of like as I always say to people like uh Maybe wait another year and save up a little more money. That's my mode for everything. It's like just keep putting a little money aside every year so that seven years from now you can get the new Mac that you want to get.

I don't think that will change much. We'll revisit this when we find out exactly how expensive the Mac Studio I want will be. Do you wanna place a bet as to how much that's going to be? I don't even want to think about it. This is how much college will cost for Maggie situation. I don't want to. The only thing I have going for me is like, well, at least I don't need another monitor. You hear that? You hear that? Do not break. Do not break.

Right. Because I'm reusing the monitor. I'm still using I'm gonna use this monitor for a long time, especially since Apple doesn't make one this big anymore. I just need the little box. I don't need a keyboard, I don't need a mouse, I don't just it's gonna be rough. Are the keyboard and mouse USB A? For what, the studio? No no the one that you're current the ones that you're currently using. No, I'm using the the one that came with my Mac Pro. It connects via lightning.

To what degree do you think you would max it out? Like would you get the highest ram ch ram amount offered, which is currently Uh well what we'll have to make predictions. What will be the highest RAM amount when this thing comes out?'Cause that's well true. That is not a given. Um I'm gonna feel bad getting a computer with less RAM than my current one, and my current one has ninety six.

But you know, I don't know what configs they're gonna make. I honestly I don't need ninety six, as I said when I got my my twenty nineteen Mac Pro. 96 gigs made me just not have to think about RAM. I haven't thought about RAM since I bought it. 96 is enough that I never, never, never have to think about RAM. I don't need a full 96.

I would be sad though to get a sixty four because, you know, it's a downgrade after six years. So we'll see. And then eight terabyte is my only choice that's bigger than four and I need bigger than four. So the Right, because that was so if you if you want above one twenty eight, you have to get the ultra chip in the current configuration. I don't want above one twenty eight. Like I don't I don't need any more than nine I'd be happy to get ninety six again if they offered it.

They well they do offer ID6 with the ultra. Or if you get just the max just the max chip. You're looking at the M three models though. Who knows what the the configs will be like for the M five? Right. You can do a one twenty eight with the with the regular max chip in the current configuration. Um and that would get you with eight terabytes, one twenty eight um max chip with all the cores, that gets you at about six grand.

Morgan. Yeah, I'm I'm gonna say you're probably gonna end up between six and seven grand for what you want. Yeah, that's probably about right. Although again I'm gonna go for the all the discounts I could possibly get through Apple connections, so hopefully I'll save a little money. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean I I I think that i if this RAM and SSD stuff continues to go on, there is a distinct possibility you will spend more on this studio than you did on your ninety five thousand dollar Mac Pro.

Uh when you combine the monitor, that's not gonna happen. Well that's true. I forgot that's true. That's true.

Uh all right, let's talk about the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio in a different way. Uh we were talking last uh last week about how much like thermal and power headroom there is in the Mac studio and John uh it looks like you've done a little bit of science about this.

Yeah, this was d it came up because we were having conversations with uh our uh friends and fellow podcast hosts about the discussion of the Mac Pro and and uh the the title of the episode, which I believe was uh something that Casey said was uh the ability to get hotter, um, which is a thing that uh I think uh Apple could use in its desktop line because the Mac Studio

is still pretty small. Like it's a it's a plus size uh Mac Mini, but in the grand scheme of things it's not very big. It doesn't have a lot of air moving through it. It's mostly entirely filled with heatsink, but as I think someone pointed out, like

The the ultra model of that, though you g if you get the studio with the ultra, it comes with a different and better heatsink than the the max version. Like I believe the ultra comes with like a full copper heat sink inside it, which is another reason it costs more money.

And that's because like within those space constraints, yeah, it can handle an ultra, but you have to upgrade from what I assume is like an aluminum heatsink to uh a copper one, because you're really at the limit of what that case can dissipate. And I was

Gonna look up at the numbers and like, oh, this is gonna be a pain. I gotta find someone's review where they've hooked it up to like a power meter, but no. Apple has official support articles where they will tell you, according to their specs, what the max power dissipation of their computers are, and it's pretty comprehensive. So

On this page, we'll link in the show notes, the Mac Studio from twenty twenty five with an M3 Ultra, thirty two core CPU, eighty core GPU, five twelve gigs RAM, sixteen terabyte SSD. Like this, they give you the exact spec. So this is like The current Mac Studio with everything maxed out. I mean 16 terabyte SSD. How much does that cost? Anyway, um, that has the max power dissipation or max power drawer, whatever they're calling it here, of 270 watts.

To compare to my computer, the 2019 Mac Pro, if you got it maxed out, which I did not. With a 2.5 GHz 28 Coral Intel ZNW, two Radeon Pro Vega 2 Duo MPX module, so that's four GPUs inside there, 1.5 terabytes of RAM, of course, and also the afterburner card and a four terabyte SSD, that thing does 9021. So two seventy versus nine oh two.

Uh, that's how much more headroom Apple has. If Apple had some kind of case that could dissipate more than two hundred and seventy watts, and I feel like that's probably about the limit of the studio case considering they went to a full copper heatsink in there and it has fans already. There is a lot of room. That's almost three times the heat they could be dissipating. So hey, Apple.

If you want to use your new chip technology to make a chip with more transistors that dissipates more than two hundred and seventy watts for the CPU and GPU combined and everything else inside the Mac Studio? You're gonna need a bigger case with better cooling, and I think that's something they should pursue. But Apple seems to disagree. But anyway, how much hotter? The ability to get hotter? Three times hotter is how much hotter they could get.

And for the record I looked up uh there's also on these spec sheets, uh, how many BTUs per hour? A thousand seven for the studio, three thousand seventy-six for the Mac Pro. Yeah, but three three times the power. They had a case that could dissipate three times the power, but they did not want it anymore. Um and yeah, the slots are a whole lot.

issue. But yeah, just maybe just like uh you know, make the studio a little bit bigger, give it better airflow, uh, and maybe crank it up to let's say four hundred watts. Can you imagine? I mean gaming PC is like Four hundred watts is like a mid range GPU on its own, not even including the whole rest of the computer. So yeah.

All right, Ben Frierson writes, In episode six hundred and eighty-four, John mentioned that websites will let you pick if you have multiple uh passkeys. I found this true everywhere except Apple's own websites, which unsurprisingly don't seem to recognize the concept of having multiple Apple IDs IDs, I can speak.

Uh I know. Oh that's true. Uh I know this. See that's why I stumbled. I know this because every time I visit developer.apple.com and try to sign in with my works developer account using the normal two FA progress process, excuse me, I get interrupted by a prompt to use my primary Apple ID's pass key. This is true, but it's pretty easy to say, I would like to use a different Apple account, please. I don't I don't think I am as upset by this as Ben is.

Well, as far as I know th this gets me over time,'cause as far as I know, I don't think it's possible use pass keys for more than one Apple account on a computer. Yeah, tha that's what it is. Uh uh th this is this was discussed when Paskies first rolled out. Um and I experience this every single freaking day when I have to re log in to uh App Store Connect for the eight thousandth time.

Um, that I always have to do it with password and it always, you know, makes me do the the, you know, two factor thing that Apple thing. So here's here's the deal. Uh what I was told back when this first rolled out is that Apple is aware this is an issue, but this is not an issue that the pass key team can solve. It is basically whoever controls like the developer websites. Because Apple's Apple ID login, as should be obvious to anyone who has ever used it.

First of all, it predates pass keys. And second of all, It doesn't work like normal web things do. Like you can have a two-factor code. You could have had it, you could have had it in Google Authenticator or any of those other apps. Now Apple has first-party two-factor codes, or it's a you enter the six digits. You know the whole deal with that. That's not how Apple IDs work. What happens with Apple IDs is you get a whole separate different special

custom thing that brings up the map and shows you another thing with six digits on it, that's different. It is it has been its own thing, its own login process for, you know, presumably for added security, for ages. And it seems like Now that we have a solution that could like, you know, modernize like the, you know, uh stop using that old thing that you were using, start using this new thing. They haven't gotten around to it.

And so when you log into your Apple ID on Apple's developer websites, you have to use the Apple ID that you are logged into the Mac as if you want to use PaaS.

There is no way and this has been true since from the day Apple rolled out PASCIS. There is no way to log into, let's say, App Store Connect with a different different Apple ID than the one you're logged into. You can try the the the PASCE login and it will prompt you, but it will always Try to make you use the passkey for the Apple ID that you're logged in. And that's because Apple does its weird own thing with Apple IDs.

And every year, I hope this will be the year they'll fix their stuff. And it's been, I don't know, two, three years now, and they still haven't. So yeah, Ben, you're right. That's Apple's fault. It is not the passkey team's fault. It is the team who controls Apple ID login and or the developer websites that is making all our lives miserable. And it's also them that's making me get logged out of App Store Connect every 10 minutes.

All right, so uh with regard to Russian sanctions and things of that nature, uh this is a post from Hartley Charlton at MacRumors.

The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation said that Apple Distribution International Limited, or ADI, which is the Republic of Ireland based entity Apple uses to pay App Store developers made two payments totaling six hundred and thirty five thousand pounds to a Russian video streaming platform in June and July of twenty twenty two, at a time when they were subject to UK sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

ADI voluntarily disclosed the payments to OFSI, and the agency confirmed that no breach had been attributed to Apple Inc. itself, only the s the subsidiary. OFSI said Apple had relied on corporate affiliates to handle payment processing, sanction screening and due diligence, but that companies are ultimately responsible for ensuring their own compliance with financial sanctions rules.

This came up because we talked about ubiquity and things getting to Russians. We said like it doesn't really matter whether, you know, it wasn't us, it was like our subsidiary or a third party or whatever, ultimately you are responsible. And as soon as that episode the story came out about Apple getting fined for exactly the same thing. And yes, they voluntarily disclosed it because if they didn't voluntarily disclose it they would be fined even more. But uh

That's the law. The law is uh, you know, as Marco would say, it may not be your fault, but it is in fact your problem. Pay five hundred thousand. Indeed. All right. I wanted to quickly point out, uh, listener Naaman Goal, I'm so sorry if I pronounced that wrong, has created retinadisplays.com, which is a very useful resource. to figure out uh what your options are if you want a retina style display. And there are a lot of displays on here.

I haven't like personally vetted any of these or anything like that, but in principle, it what the couple that I looked at sounded right and seemed reasonable to me. Uh so this, uh, as Merlin would say, gives my gets my official okie dokey. So good stuff. Yeah, we still haven't uh I all the monitors that were announced to see yes, still aren't out yet because it basically takes the entire year for that to happen.

or for you to give up on the ones that really aren't going to ship. But this website in the meantime is great. You can filter based on size, uh technology if you care about that, whether or not it is shipping, whether or not it is discontinued. Uh it it keeps getting better all the time. So Kudos to Naaman about this website. It's very handy.

All right, let's talk about color spaces and CIE nineteen thirty-one and Apple's twenty twenty six CMFs. We talked about this, I don't know, like a month, month and a half ago. And I think I had theorized that nineteen thirty one was the time in which the CIE spec was created and I think there was some dubiousness amongst us about that, including from me.

Uh but many people wrote in to say, yo, that's right. It was in nineteen thirty one that the uh CIE nineteen thirty one color space was created. And then Eric Portis had a lot of really, really great feedback. Uh Eric writes, the CIE nineteen thirty one color matching functions are not just a monitor calibration standard, they are the foundation of the modern science of human color perception. There are three functions and I wrote about the three dimensional color space they create.

As an aside, hi, this is Casey. Um, I have never freaking understood color spaces. Maybe that makes me a terrible developer or an idiot, or maybe both, I don't know, but I've never understood it. And Eric's post about it is very, very good. Um, and we're going to talk about another post here in a second, but I I I really liked Eric's post. And if you have any interest in this or or want to learn more, I really suggest it. So that's Eric's post, uh, which we'll link in the show notes.

And then Bartos Schiwanowski. I hope I got that somewhat close to right. All right, we'll go with that. Thank you, Marco, for saving me on that one. Um, anyway, this uh person has done some phenomenal uh websites about or pages about different things, like the mechanical watch one. I still think that's one of the coolest things I've ever seen on the web. Like these are just incredible.

And I didn't realize, this was before I started following him, that he did one on color spaces. And I didn't have the chance to read the whole thing before recording. It's quite a bit longer than Eric's, so I you need to like properly have a sit down and read it. But it's also very, very good. And Eric had pointed to that. And said that he also wrote a great article with many cool interactive examples about the CIE 1931 XYZ color space.

And how it relates to familiar concepts like SRGB and the spectral locus, aka the XY chromaticity diagram that you've probably seen a thousand times. Eric then continues, the whole deal with Apple's twenty twenty six CMFs, as far as I can tell, is over time the R, G and B light sources that drive color displays have gotten narrower in the range of wavelengths they produce. The red, green, and blue light sources used a hundred years ago are

In the experiments that supplied the data for CIE nineteen thirty one CMFs emitted broader distributions of wavelengths in modern OLEDs and L C Ds. Narrower sources stressed in quotes color matching functions more revealing problems.

And by the way, this is a um uh thing that television reviews have really gotten into in the past few years as well, because they would measure the spectral color output of the R, the G and the B and whatever is you know, producing the R G B c light. Um And if you look at what the diagrams look like, what you wanna see is big spikes at R, G, and B. But if you look at T V from not it too many years ago, even just like a a W O led from LG for like five or six years ago.

It didn't look like spikes at all. You'd get like one pointy spike for the R, maybe, and then like the G and the B would just be this big plateau like a mound, like you could barely see any humps in it. You're like, Really? That's the light that's putting out'cause what you want is

pure red at a specific wavelength that you've decided is the reddest red. Pure green and pure uh blue. And then you can combine those in a predictable way. You don't want your green to have a bunch of red and blue and mixed in with it and everything. You want those spikes. That's one of been one of the advancements of

Uh quantum dot OLED TVs, they would show look how much pointier the spikes are when we went from regular OLED to QD OLED. It's like, wow, that's so much better. But apparently as these spikes have been getting narrower and narrower, it has been messing with the um

the functions in the CIE standard because they were built at a time when the the R, the G and the B were much more smeared and spread out. And I'm not sure what he means by stressing them, but maybe it just reveals more problems with the the functions and equations that uh that do the math on color. By the way, um just before we leave the uh Bartosz Chachanovsky uh area here, I know we ti kind of already did, but I was too slow. I cannot recommend enough. Uh you know, Casey promoted his stuff.

I cannot recommend enough that you go and read any of his blog posts. Yep. Because the amount of work that he puts into these. Every blog post is like some kind of explainer about usually some kind of sciencey thing. And not only is his knowledge incredibly deep, but you end up learning so much and and they're all filled with these interactive demos and diagrams and and like models and like It is incredible.

It's more like an application than than a post. If you're thinking, oh, it's a bunch of text and pictures, that's not it. These are basically applications. Yeah, it's and and you end up learning so much. Like I like I one of my favorite ones was the bicycle one. It's all about like basically like the physics of how bikes hold up and work and

I love Bartosz's stuff. I strongly recommend like it's the kind of thing this is the kind of thing that used to exist on the internet. It's just something that somebody put a lot of work into and is just putting out there for free and it's delightful and mind blowing and amazing. And there's not that much of that on the internet today, at least or at least if there is, it's very hard to find.

Bartosha's posts are that. Like, it's exactly what nerds like us love about the internet. Like, I we can't believe that he put all this effort into it, and it's amazing. And it just makes you smile from end to end as you as you play with it. So definitely check that. And and if you want to compare it, like that's speaking of the mechanical watch one.

Just try uh, you know, a straight Google search or like look on YouTube, you'll find a thousand YouTube videos explaining how a mechanical watch works. Ninety percent of them will be AI generated garbage, but I guarantee you none of those videos is as good as his blog post. It's so good. Like sometimes a video is not the right format for a thing. You could make a really good video about how mechanical watches works, but man, it would be hard to beat his

Again, I don't wanna call them blog posts, because like you get to do stuff in them. You get to t like you read and then it's like and this is how it works and you get to like interact with the page until you understand it, until you get it, until you see how it works. A bunch of people have done this. He's not the only one. I th I think I saw one recently about uh What the heck was it? It was some something having to do with like pixel art or like anti-aliasing patterns or something.

Oh yes, I saw that too, but now I I don't think I can put my finger on it. But yes, yes, yes, yes. But like this but this particular format of like text images but also interactive like application y things that you can use, it aids understanding in a way that even a video camera.

I mean, for for God's sakes, the top of the mechanical watch post, there is an explosion, extrusion, what is the word I'm looking for? One of those things where you can see all the layers of it. Exploded diagram, yeah. Okay, an exploded diagram of a mechanical watch that's interactive. This watch has got to be rendered in JavaScript or whatever and you can explode out. It's it just blows my mind. I cannot believe this is done with web tech. It's so freaking

Cool. Yeah, whenever whenever there's a new Bartosz post in my RSS reader, I'll save it for like weeks until I have time to like really sit and like experience it. It's like saving up with like when like there's like a you know like a new movie that you want to watch or like uh like the saving up for like the finale of your T V show so you can really watch it. Like that's how I treat his blog post because they're just so good and so delightful.

Yeah, and uh he doesn't post often, but it they're all incredible. But he has a Patreon, which uh if you're not gonna go to atp.fm slash join, that's the next best place to go.

So you should check that out. I've been a patron for a while now, so uh you should definitely check it out. Uh going back to Eric Portis, uh sorry, we got sidetracked. Sorry Eric, it's really hard to follow that. It really is. Uh problems with the nineteen thirty-one functions have been known for a while. And the CIE itself updated its color matching functions in 2015. And Eric has provided a link, which we'll put in the show notes.

It's impossible to convert from three dimensional values, RGB or XYZ or l or XYY or whatever. Derived from one set of CMFs to three-dimensional values derived from another set of CMFs, because reducing actual spectral area, a continuous distribution of light across a range of wavelengths. To three values that represent the quote-unquote same color is a lossy operation. Approximately all digital imaging, cameras, displays, content is based on the CIE 1931 CMF.

And approximately nobody uses CIE 2015 CMFs because there's just no way to convert the 1931 based values to the 2015 based values. Apple had the bright idea scope their 2026 CMF to be, quote, white point only, quote, and there is another link that we'll put in the show notes. This means that the Apple 2026 DMF cali calibrated displays can render content encoded with the 1931 functions. and shift every pixel's color value by the measured error between the 1931 white and the Apple 2026 white.

as measured using the actual spectral distributions output by the display. I'm so curious, writes Eric, how Apple uh Apple's 2026 CMFs differ from the 2015 uh CIE CMFs and what experiments or data they use to create them. Yeah, I think this is such a great explanation and it it ties into the fact that CIE nineteen thirty one is literally from nineteen thirty one.

I if there are problems with the standard and it's not keeping up with modern technology as our screens get better and everything, why don't we change it? Well, I think uh that uh

Eric has explained here, like there's no way to convert from one to the other. So it's kind of like look, everyone has to kind of agree to to move to some new color measurement standard. And even though they made a twenty fifteen one, people couldn't even move to that. So Apple's kind of like, look, we can't just make a new standard and everyone's gonna use it.

We need to make something that we can convert from the CIE nineteen thirty one into this so they're saying we'll just pin the white point and move everything else. Like we're in a bind here because we're using

Technology and math uh made in 1931 that is outdated and inadequate for the current problem space of modern monitors. And yet we can't get everybody to just lift up and say, all right, everybody, we're gonna start driving on the other side of the road now, or like whatever analogy you want to make.

And so that's why we're using a standard from nineteen thirty one, because apparently getting off of it will require a degree of cooperation across many industries that is seemingly not possible. So yeah, nineteen thirty one. That's the year.

All right. Uh we had a bunch of follow-up with regard to Long Island and the mainland. Uh Craig Bauer's right. While for all visible purposes it would appear Long Island is an island, the US Supreme Court has legally classified it as a peninsula and thus an extension of the mainland, because of course the U the United States Supreme Court did. Something I learned about in my Long Island Studies class. Oh my god. When it was when it was filled with poop it was more like a land bridge.

Yeah, so the the the East River apparently does not really qualify geologically as a river. It's more I believe it was a tidal inlet or something. And so therefore Long Island is not an island according to the US Supreme Court, uh based on some, you know, debate about, you know, who how the states control different parts of it. Um so Uh therefore, John, I believe I am correct.

Well it's kind of like when the when the like the government declares pizza to be a vegetable for the purposes of school lunches, like the government says. Or like uh I think they did like tomato as a vegetable, not a fruit kind of stuff. It's like okay, but like Yeah.

There's there there is in fact water surrounding it, but not the right kind of water. I I do wonder, like, you know, we always just look at our current Supreme Court court cases and we can transparently see whatever is motivating the decisions, but like and whatever was in US versus Maine, like whoever was lobbying who To say no, it's it's not an island, it's a peninsula for the for the purposes of this thing, yeah, peninsula, sure.

Well, but I I I think it's it's pretty clear. I I think there's a pretty good history of New York kind of getting what it wants from the Supreme Court, you know? Especially versus main. Right. Or you know, look at like the Statue of Liberty debates with New J New Jersey. Like you know, there's there's been a lot over time of like New York kind of just taking what it wants and Problem solved. We will legally declare this not we will legally uh declare this not to be reality. Done and done.

Fair enough. I think it's the same thing with the pizza as a vegetable. That solves a lot of school lunch problems. Gracious. And then Joel writes, On the discussion in episode six eighty five about Long Island's location, John and Marco are both right and wrong. Section eleven two of the New York State Coastal Management Program describes Long Island as distinct from the mainland and from Manhattan, which is geographically an island but geologically part of the continental US.

Quote, Long Island is a detached segment of the Atlantic coastal plain, separated from the mainland on the north by Long Island Sound and from Manhattan on the west by the narrow East River and the New York Harbor. The Atlantic Ocean completes the island's saltwater encirclement, quote.

Then back to Joel. Interestingly, section two-five of the CMP also references the mainland of Long Island in a few places, two of which are here. Quote, The most extensive beaches in the state's coastal area are found on the barrier islands and mainland of Long Island, particularly along its south shore, and then the second instance, Barrier Islands earn their name in this way by protecting the waters of the inland bays and the shoreline of the mainland.

Hm, so it seems like mainland is used in lots of official government documents to refer to Long Island. Well, again, uh the government says lots of things, but I will point out that Casey, did you copy and paste these things from the email? Like they're direct quotes, the little passages? I sure thought I did yeah Yeah. So the part with the whole saying, uh, you know, that Long Island is a detached segment, blah blah blah, separated from the mainland of of north of Long Island, right?

Uh if you notice in that passage, it says separated from the mainland on the north uh by Long Island Sound, blah, blah, blah. But then in the other two passages where it says uh found on the barrier islands and the mainland of Long Island, mainland. has scare quotes around it in both instances. Separated from the mainland of Long Island. Kind of like when you see like fresh vegetables and the freshes in quotes, you're like hmm

So one instance of this requires no square scare quotes because it is accurate and direct, and the other one is like, well, you know, kind of like the mainland of Long Island, quote unquote. Uh anyway, the government doesn't know anything. Well, it does seem uh so this this usage reinforces the overwhelming uh opinion that we got from feedback and f that most, you know, like dictionaries and things seem to define, which is that mainland is a relative term. That's not what the dictionary says.

It depends on the book's dictionary. Um it it seems as though mainland i refers to basically the the larger body of land compared to where you are on a small body of land. You're making up your own definition now, but none of the definitions I don't know I don't know I can't say that that is an actual definition, but I think it is a pretty universally agreed

People want it to be. People do you Marco is right that people want it to be uh completely relative, but then they get angry when I say uh describe Fire Island as the mainland from a smaller piece of land. They're like, No, that not that. Not not the thing that I don't want to be mainland, only the things that I do want to be. And then there was like an island that's actually called mainland with a capital M as a proper noun. Yeah.

Yes, th yeah, there's a few a few things like that. And we did hear from a few people in Hawaii and New Zealand about how the term is used there. Um but and yeah, spoiler alert, Hawaii uses mainland to refer to the continental US. Um New Zealand is delightful and I forget what they said.

The the New Zealand has a thing New Zealand actually gets in under under the definition, which a lot of people didn't know until I sent the definition back to them, because New Zealand has, you know, as people said, seven hundred islands. But anyway, it's two big ones. Two big things that make up those New Zealand. One is bigger than the other.

And that one is differ referred to as the mainland because according to I don't have the text in front of me, but most of the definitions say like the larger part of a continent or country. New Zealand gets in on a technicality'cause the larger part of New Zealand is the South Island, and therefore it is the mainland. Uh but unfortunately uh that is not the case for Long Island because it is not the larger part of the United States of America.

Well, in conclusion, John, you are still wrong. However, I will offer um one more uh one more additional uh side note to the listeners. If you are trying to make an argument to us, uh sending us the output of an L L M Does not make the argument.

I wanted to say this as well, but I didn't want to be a turd about it. I'll be the turret. We've gotten so much people sending us just a transcript or perhaps a link to like a long-running conversation with the chatbot. Let me tell you, I do not want to do I there's very little that I want to do less than reading someone else's conversation with a fing chatbot. No thank you.

I mean it's kind of like reading their diary. It's like like I mean, like I appreciate the sentiment, but like it just feels weird reading like it's like reading someone else's Google searches. Like it just it seems too personal. Yeah, I think it it's for me it's like it's somewhere between Google searches and somebody telling us about their dream. Like the the thing is, you'll never find somebody on this podcast who who likes

chatbot LLM results more than me. I use them all the time. Um, but that's not a source. That's it isn't an argument winner. Uh it's a Summary and sometimes fever dream of facts that may or may not be real and may or may may or may not be helpful. That's something that you keep to yourself and you use for your own personal uses, but the output of an LLM is not information to win an argument.

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I'd like to do a little bit of I guess actually follow out. Sorry, upgrade. Um there was a podcast episode that came out, I want to say sometime last week, and it is entitled, I believe it's Knob Feel, the greatest podcast ad campaign of all time. So this is uh Rob McGinley Myers and Britta Green, and they did this podcast episode from their podcast phonograph. Uh, where they basically talk about the genesis of and kind of the contents of the ATP Cards Against Humanity toaster ads. And

John talked to these folks. I talked to these folks. Our good friend Lex Friedman, the good one, not the bad one, uh talked to these folks. And this podcast episode is really, really good. And I highly suggest you listen to it. I suspect, John, you have some more thoughts though.

Yeah, when I tutored, I said, like, I don't know if this episode is better if you already know the story of this stuff or if you don't know, but it is it is very much like uh I d I don't know how you would describe it like uh not this American life, but that type of like uh or 99% invisible or you know, like like a well-produced scripted

interestingly put together exploration of a particular weird topic. Um only only it's about us. It's just so weird to hear a podcast like that about something that you did. Marco's in it as well. You'll hear his voice. So like all three of us are in this podcast.

Um, so yeah, even if I I feel like if you know everything that they're gonna say, it's still just fun to hear because like, isn't it weird that they're talking about this the you know, our our weird little podcast on this other really like fancy, well-produced podcast? But if you don't know it, it's fun to see where the story is going. I almost wish the Casey hadn't spoiled what the uh the ad campaign is about. But uh Oh sorry.

And check it out, like it's fine, but you know it's not it's not a super secret for anyone who's listening to it. Well, all our listeners would know from the title. Yeah, yeah. But like it it's a little overblown like the greatest podcast ad campaign of all time. But it was certainly one of the weirdest, that's for sure. I mean there have been weirder and some of the weirder ones are pointed out in the show. I won't spoil what those are as well. But yeah, it is very

Very focused on our tiny little circle of the world and it was a delight to hear and it was a delight to do. So check it out. We will put many links in the show notes because like I don't even know how to link to a podcast anymore. Obviously we have the overcast link, but that's not like the real site. That's just Marco's thing for it. I think it's the Lipsyn one is the official. No, no, it's uh phonograph podcast dot com. I've already got it in the show.

All right. Well okay. Well there's there's so many links. And there's also the pod dot link site, which is one of those sites that's like a landing page that says

It has like every podcast player app in the entire world with little icons and it's like s you know, listen in Overcast, listen in Spotify, listen and YouTube, listen in Apple Podcasts, listen just going down the whole side of the page and those sites I just assume will all disappear someday. But Anyway, uh Casey's got you covered, you can find this podcast.

Yep. And I also did a little write up on my side about that, which I'll link, which is not too terribly exciting, but I mean most of what it what I was saying was how freaking weird and flattering is it? that somebody's like history lesson is about us three dorks. Like that's really freaking cool and really freaking weird. But uh it's good stuff. It was it was delightful. I I was it was incredibly like

you know, heartwarming to listen to. And I actually I listened to it in the car on the way upstate with my family and so my son got to hear that. He's like, That's you and they're talking about you. And like it was it was a it was a a very nice experience for all of us. My father's voice coming back to from the carved player. It's recorded. Yeah. Woohoo!

And I think I accidentally blew them off and didn't get interviewed because I blew them off and that was not my intention. Sorry about that. But thank you for making this podcast. It was delightful. Yeah, I th I think when Casey presented the idea, it was like this person wants to talk about podcast ads. Like it wasn't clear that this was going to be'cause I was just as surprised as anyone and

And uh you know, and I said, Hey, I'll I'll talk to the person about podcasts. I don't know what they want to talk to me about, but I I know about podcast ads a little bit. And it turned out it was good that I did it because uh I featured in it more than I thought I would.

Yeah, and and it was interesting. Um I I think for for anybody who is interested in like the the kind of mechanics behind podcast ads, why everything's moving to DAI now, why, you know, ads like w the the kind we do seem to be, you know, significantly on the decline and, you know, going extinct.

Um there's a lot of good info there, both from you know, from us and from the reporters and also from Lex Friedman um and like information that like you don't usually hear podcasters talk about. Um just like how they're sold, what dyn what dynamics have gone on behind the scenes. So if you are interested in that whole market, I think there's a lot of interesting information there as well. But it's also just a nice story about our toaster ads.

All right. Uh Marco did the unthinkable, uh, what was it, a week ago, and you remembered how to post to your blog. I'm shocked that you knew how to do this. Did he remember or did he have to figure it out again? Did AI post to your blog, Marco? Did you like give the contents of the post to some AI and say, please figure out how to get this on Marco.org? Nope. And I and I also did not use any AI tools in writing this blog post.

Very well done. All right. So all snark aside, why don't you tell us about this, please? Uh you know, so everybody was celebrating Apple's fiftieth anniversary last week, and I do think it's worth pointing out that we didn't do anything on this podcast to celebrate That's uh I mean Casey's the one who should feel bad about that, but that is exactly appropriate for me. Yeah. He he's Mr. Anniversary. I'm Mr. No Anniversary no nothing, so I'm I'm on message.

That's true. And and honestly and you know, I I think like you know, the other podcasts in our in our kind of nearby podcast neighbor sphere, um I think they did a good job covering it and whatever they did would have is was m more of a like anniversary celebration than anything we would have done. And so I'm happy to have left that to the other podcasts. They they did a very nice job with it. So

For me, I you know, I was trying to figure out like, should I post something about Apple's fiftieth? I had a little bit of a hard time. Deciding on an angle because you know my feelings about Apple these days are are mixed. Uh they do a lot of good and they do a lot of bad. Uh and and I and there's a lot about them that I still love. There's a lot about them that I I will always love.

And there's a lot about them that I wish they would improve. And we often on this show push for that. Like, you know, we the reason we push for things to improve when we think they're they're in a bad spot is that We love these products so much. If Apple doesn't serve our needs very well, or if they stop serving our needs

The industry has made it pretty clear that they're not really gonna pick up the the mantle and and start serving our needs. Like they yeah, there's there's other things out there that are good, but the way that we love the basic computer, like the map. The personal computer, like the way that we love that, and and even to some degree the way we love, you know, other general purpose computing devices like iPhones and iPads, other companies are just not gonna do what we like.

in in those roles for lots of reasons. Many of them won't, many of them can't. Uh you know, the the market has moved on. These are mature platforms, mature industries. Things are locked down, locked out. So If we want computers to to be the kind of thing that we love, the way we've always known them, a lot of that responsibility falls on Apple.

With the fiftieth anniversary, there was a lot of looking backwards. All the good things that that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and and the older you know, the older company and then over time, like, you know, the the middle of the company's era All the great things they did. There wasn't a lot about the Tim Cook era uh in these retrospectives, um, except for like the you know, Tim Cook scaled everything up. Yeah, that's true. Okay.

I don't have anything really nice to say about the Tim Cook Tim Cook era beyond that. And so I decided I'm not going to address that. Yeah. But I also I didn't want to do a retrospective about just, you know, jobs and was because I I have I have thoughts about that um that I'll s I'll save for another time. And I also didn't want to just complain about everything in this blog post. We are obviously near the end of the Tim Cook era.

And j the John Turnus era seems like the most likely thing that's going to follow it. And so I kind of wanted to leave like, you know, a letter to John Turnus. In almost the way of like the way that I imagine like CEOs and presidents leave letters to their successors, like I I know that I that's actually a thing with presidents. Sit down and write two letters, right, Casey?

Um, I I don't remember where this came from. It's probably apocryphal, but uh or maybe it's a real thing. But anyway, the uh the thing is um I can't even give you the context. So basically like a new political leader comes into power uh and finds uh two envelopes on his desk. Uh and uh they say if if you get in trouble, open up the uh first envelope, if you get into trouble again, open up the second one. So he Oh, yeah.

He gets it eventually gets into trouble. He opens up the first envelope and inside it's a piece of paper that says Blame everything on me basically blame everything on your predecessor. Mm-hmm. Uh, and then he he does that and it works. And then time passes and he gets into trouble again. He opens a second envelope and it says, sit down and write two letters. Mm-hmm. Thank you. That's right. Good. A letter to John Turnus. Is it blame everything on Tim? Is it the first letter?

No, and so what I what I wanted to do here was basically like They don't Here podcast. Probably not, but at least not all of them. But I I was pretty sure that if I wrote this this way, if it was reasonably short, if it was reasonably constructive And if I named it a letter to John Turnus, I was pretty sure there was a good chance he'd probably see it at some point. From his vanity Google searches? Ha ha ha. Who knows? But like somehow this would be sent to him by somebody.

That like that I I think I think that the odds of that, knowing the way Apple's execs, you know, do read a lot of stuff that is, you know, posted by our community, I figured there's a good chance he'd see it. And if not, enough higher ups would see it, it would still do some some good. And what I wanted to do was basically just

Reinforce our principles. Not just what Apple stands for, but what like we who are on what we view as the good side of personal computers, like what we believe in with computers. And, you know, number one is we love computers. Number two is computers like serve us and they enhance our lives. Uh, we don't need c our computers to like, you know control us, restrict us, um, you know, take advantage of us, um, and that we

are the owner of the computer and we are the customer being served. We are not the resource being harvested by a barrage of upsells and privacy invasion and tracking and all that other stuff. I believe Apple best represents those ideals in the computing industry. By a mile. They are way ahead of everyone else in all of those ideals. But I also firmly see and believe while they are ahead of everyone else.

their own adherence to those ideals is declining and has declined significantly under the Tim Cook era. as they've pushed into m services and upsells, there are promos everywhere, there are ads everywhere.

the computer does feel like it is taking control away from its customers and owners and treating us more like resources to be harvested and annoyed. I think Apple is They're they're in a uh they're in a dangerous place here for their their ethics, their morals, their quality, and for the things that we care about. So what I what I was hoping to do with this is keep it very short and try to advocate for this mindset to not be forgotten.

Um and you know, a little bit of historical reference to Jobs and Waz because I do think Jobs and Waz both in their in their very different ways, uh both very much believed in these things. and practiced them. You know, it was on wasn't honestly there for that long, but you know, certainly the Jobs era, Jobs practiced this. Jobs pushed for this. He advocated for this. He cared about it.

Tim Cook doesn't care about this stuff at all, doesn't even know about it, doesn't care at all. Um I think I get the impression that John Turnus is a nerd like us. At least in in hopefully in the good ways. Ha ha. He's probably he's he seems like a generally better rounded human being than us. Um but

Hopefully he he does seem like he is the kind of person who would share these ideals. Somebody who loves computers and wants to make good computers that serve their customers, not just the vendor or not third parties. He seems like the kind of person who would believe in this. And so I wanted this to kind of get out there and reinforce these beliefs and bring them into the discussion.

And I think it did. I mean, I don't you know, I I haven't gotten like a ton of traffic or anything, but like it achieved what I wanted to achieve. And I and I think the way I wrote it, it is very likely to get to him somehow. Yeah, when I read this I was thinking Uh that I can I uh in my mind is like a companion to this that I'll never write. Um like'cause'cause when I think about stuff like this and this is this actually this it what you said about it actually reminds me a lot of um

my thoughts and some of my words about the uh the case for a true Mac Pro successor blog post I had all those years ago, especially in terms of like bean counters and car guys type of stuff or whatever. And it's the same type of thing of like

He well, mine was more of like a uh a story thing, but ever just like uh advocating for as you said, like v our values, what we love about Apple, you know, this is this is what we want, this is the good stuff. Um, and anything you're doing that is not this is not what we want, right?

Um, and I read this and I'm like, you know, having soaked in the last many years of uh Tim Cook's leadership, all I can think about is that I feel like what Turnus needs in addition to this is Like help with the situation that he's going to find himself in, which is basically There will be things. There'll be lots of things.

Trying to make it seem like the stuff that Marco is advocating is not the right thing to do. What are those forces? What are the forces that are going to be buffeting whoever leads Apple next? Trying to make them not do the stuff that Marco is describing. There are a lot of those forces. They are powerful. They are winning. like internal, external in the world within yourself.

There's a million reasons why things have been going the way they are at Apple. It's not like, you know, someone is like a mustache twirling villain or whatever. Forces are aligned to make it so that if you are in this position

You are like everything is telling you to do the opposite of what Marco is saying to do. And I feel like these what these people need is I don't know, a thought technology, something to hang on to, something to like like some kind of thing they can hang their hat on that will give them

enough stamina to withstand the the forces that are buffeting them. Jobs had it kind of easy in that like he never needed any additional support in that area. First of all, he founded the company, he just felt like he owned it.

So it's like you're not going to tell me what to do with my freaking company. So Turnus doesn't have that. Tim Cook doesn't have that. Jobs did. He was the founder. And he was attitudinal. And so he's got that holding up. And second of all, he was so stubborn and strong-willed to hand his own personal beliefs. that were sometimes weird or whatever, but in general like he didn't have like

problem advocating for what he wanted. Like he just but that is a not a a common position that people who are in charge of trillion dollar companies have. Most of them, with the possible exception of Mark Zuckerberg, who is mustache rolling evil, unfortunately. Um Like you don't like if you're if you're not the person who feels like this is literally my company, like I found it, it is me, it is my you know, like if you don't have that.

then all the world's forces come down on you and everybody around you and the board of directors and all the other executives and every shareholder and every and you can convince yourself that the customers want this too. They're all making you junk up everything and put in more ads and drive service revenue and cheap out on your products and do all this stuff and For years Apple held on to uh you know as much as it could the the thing that made it successful. Every when everyone else was

you know, making net books or doing, you know, doing the financially expedient thing. Apple under the Jobs Two era was doing the opposite of all of that. we are gonna do things that nobody else does because they seem too hard or too expensive or too stupid or too niche or

to esoteric and it's just like, nobody cares about this. Don't waste time on that. Don't waste money on it. It's not worth your time. This is why Apple is always doomed. This is why Apple will never succeed, because you're doing stupid stuff that nobody cares about. But if you do that hard enough,

it pays off in the long run. And that was the I feel like has always been the story of Apple success. Doing things that everyone else thinks is a terrible idea and that is better in ways that nobody values. And if you do it hard enough and well enough, it turns out people do value that. It's the argument I always make about like I always try to use analogies of like if you make an expensive product and it just gains a reputation for durability.

that you will have customers forever. You have like generational customers. Even though everything else in your industry is telling you, don't do that. Don't make your stuff high quality. Don't make your luggage like indestructible. Like you know, making some really high quality, indestructible luggage that costs five times as much as everyone else's luggage are like you dummy, you should be selling your luggage at Walmart. That's how you get rich.

Why are you doing this? And it's like, well, if we do this for fifty years, we will have such loyal customers because we will gain reputation as the company that makes the luggage that doesn't break. Our zippers don't break, our things don't break down. Like, even though it costs more.

We make it better. Or whatever. Whatever whatever attribute you want to be a thing. Like and that is so hard to do because first of all you gotta wait fifty years. And second of all, everything in that industry is telling you Don't do it. Make your things cheaper. Make them uh reduce the cost of your materials. Manufacture them wherever it's cheapest, no matter what no matter what everyone else says. Uh make sure it's sold through Walmart. Like just do all this stuff and

It's so hard for I and I know it seems like the isn't that a a a far cry from what Apple does today? And but like with every passing day, every single thing that Apple does, I look at the the decisions they're making and saying, you are giving in you know, inch by inch to the forces that are trying to tell you to do the expedient thing that everyone else is doing. And service revenue is just a perfect example of that. So anyway, I look at this, I'm thinking Turnus or the next Apple leader needs

A really good understanding of the things that are going to be the the forces that are already aligned against them. The day one they get in there. So many forces are aligned against them inside the company and outside to make them do the wrong thing and make them think it's the right thing and then give them some kind of

Something to hold on to to let them fight that. Again, you're not they're not gonna have what Steve Jobs had is like, oh well, this is my company and I own it and I do what I want and I also have really good taste, right? They're not gonna have that. Maybe they don't even have good taste, but they need something. They need

I know someone somet something to hang on to or some movie I was watching uh recently or I don't remember what it was saying like uh how do you get your motivation? It's like I I don't find a reason to do this, I find someone to do it for. Like whatever whatever whatever makes it work, whatever will give you the strength to make different decisions when everything in your world says that you should not. That is the only thing that can

continue to allow Apple to be what it is. And Apple's got more of that than any other company to Marcos' point. Like they've got more of it than anybody else. Like I'm not saying though Apple's just the same as Dell. They're not, okay? But it's the trend line that we don't like. And so from the outside, everything still seems like it's mostly okay, but the trend lines are

All going in the wrong direction. Mildly, but they're all going in the wrong direction. Luckily Apple started out way far above everybody and everything, but yeah, that's like this letter is one thing. And then I feel like And you're gonna read this letter and you're gonna be like John Turner's like nodding his head going, Yeah, no, I t I believe all that. That's great. Thumbs up, I agree with you, Marco, I'm gonna do all that, but then you're gonna get into the job and you're not.

You're not gonna do it. You're gonna continue to do what Tim did, and everyone's gonna tell you you're doing a great job when you do that. And that's where things go wrong. So Yeah. I don't I don't know what the solution is, but uh Turnus doesn't listen to podcasts, so this is not gonna help him. Boom. Well maybe he'll uh maybe he'll get your t shirt and then be like, you know what, I wonder about this John Syracuse. No, I just want him to feel sad for one point five seconds and that's it.

No, it was a good post, Marco. And you know, I I understand for a million different reasons why you don't really blog anymore, but I do miss the Marco that was at at maybe not a prolific blogger,'cause I know that was a lot and it took a lot and blah blah blah, but I miss the at least periodic blogger and I hope you consider doing it some more.

This is kind of like the uh the uh speaking of your efficiency, efficiency minded or maybe pragmatic. It's like Marco knows he's not gonna shout Apple into doing what he wants, but he's like maybe if I just And I'm always thinking, that's not gonna work. They need tools. They they're they're gonna be buffeted by forces in every direction and they're gonna agree with you tacitly, but they're just they're just gonna put more ads and things. I mean this is this is the best tool that we have.

Apple is a gigantic company with gigantic forces acting upon them from everywhere in the world. People like us don't have a lot of influence on that. Um, but we just we have a little tiny bit. I I think over the years I have developed a pretty good sense of like how and when to exercise this little tiny bit of power that I do sometimes have. Ha ha. And it doesn't I'm not expecting to move the needle in a noticeable way.

But maybe in a very, very tiny way, maybe this plants or reinforces some idea in some heads and maybe it makes it one percent more likely to to do the right thing sometime. That that's worth it to me. It's almost like parenting in that regard. Yeah, right. You you have a tiny bit of power and you have to pick and choose when you're gonna use it and don't have two great expectations about how much it's actually gonna do, but you're if you can make a one percent change, just declare victory. Yeah.

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Let's do some SKTP. We're gonna we're gonna do just a touch tonight and Johnny Decimal Noble writes during the recent Mac Pro discussion in episode six eighty five, there was talk of RAM prices. and how they're affecting the availability of certain configurations of the Mac Studio. I'm confused. Memory's unified. The memory in in these chips is unified. It's not like Apple's buying DRAM transistors in the open market, are they?

My mental model is that some giant machine in Taiwan is given a sheet of silicon and out the other end pops an M five with one hundred twenty eight gigs of RAM. It's not like the RAM is brought in, cut or bought in, cut up, and fed into the machine and soldered onto that chip, is it?

I don't understand how the global shortage of RAM affects the production of the M series chips, and I don't understand what effect it has on Apple at all. Nothing's changed inside those giant ASML machines in Taiwan. It doesn't care about global DRAM pricing. I'd love to know where my thinking is wrong. Everywhere. John, where did where did Johnny get this wrong?

I already replied uh on uh Mastodon to this, but I think this is a was a good topic because I w do wonder how many people also have the same incorrect idea about what unified memory means. It's another one of those terms kind of like the the Mac Pro bere shirt where you kinda have to know about the shirt and stuff that came before it to make sense of the bereave thing.

unified memory is like that. So the quick answer to the question is uh next to the uh the SOCs that TSMC prints uh in your Mac, you will see A bunch of little RAM chips that Apple buys from the same RAM vendors that everybody else buys their RAM from. Yeah, SK, Heinex, Micron, Samsung.

Yeah, Apple buys RAM chips from the three companies in the world or whatever it is that make ninety percent of the world's RAM, and that's why the prices affect them. So that's that's the quick answer to the question is yes, they do buy RAM chips. The RAM is not Uh

you know, printed on the SOC, which is a thing you can do. Uh yeah, there is S RAM on there and stuff for the caches, and there was ED RAM on like the uh the GameCube, I believe, and like but whatever. Uh when you buy a Mac, there are RAM chips. uh next to the S. You can see them when you look at the the pictures of like a logic board or whatever. But now why is it called unified? Why what's what's the confusion here with the unified memory? What is unified about it?

Um and it has nothing to do with where the transistors that make up the RAM are, although they are very close to the SOC. Because again, if you see like an M2, I sent a picture of an M2 chip, it looks like a little square that says M2, but like three-quarters of the square is the M2 SOC, and then one quarter of it is two RAM.

And they're just just they're like touching it. They're so close to it. They're right there. And this they are soldered down next to it, but they're just plain old ramp tips. But that's not what makes it uniform. What makes it unified is that in the olden days

When you made a computer, you had memory or you know, the RAM or DRAM that was in, you know, SIMs or DIMS or whatever, uh, that the CPU would read and that was your computer's memory. You've got a computer with, you know, one megabyte of memory or whatever. But then if you had a video card in that computer, 3D, 2D, any kind of video card, sometimes the video card would have its own memory just for the video card. And that was called VRAM for video RAM.

Uh and the video RAM would be used like in a 3D card. It would store textures and geometry. And the video RAM, especially on fancier, yes, the you know fancier 3D graphics cards, would have huge bandwidth to the GPU that is on the video card. Like just really, really wide buses. Uh they're optimized for moving huge amounts of data into and out of the GPU.

And how did that data get into VRAM? Well, the computer would ship it over, probably out of its regular RAM, and it would say, Here, video card, you're gonna need these textures and this geometry to do your work. Would send it over the bus, PCI bus or whatever, AGP bus, whatever motor bus was the bus of the day, and it would go into VRAM and the GPU would read and write to VRAM and do all of its stuff.

So you had these two pools of memory, regular RAM that the CPU used, and then VRAM that the GPU used. Unified memory means not having a separate pool of VRAM and regular RAM. Max and the Apple Silicon Age have one pool of Right. by the GPU as its quote unquote VRAM and by the CPU as its regular memory. And it's any part of the RAM can be used by either one. And they both have a really fast, really high bandwidth connection to that RAM. That's how it works, right? Um

If it was just like, uh, you know, just ha have a uh have a GPU and a CPU and just one pool of RAM, that one pool of RAM would be too slow and too low bandwidth. That's why they had VRAM, special VRAM with really high bandwidth to the GPU.

But what Apple did is they said we're gonna take our RAM and we're gonna make it a huge, wide, fast, low latency bus and solder the chips right next to the SOC, and now that pooled memory can use by both. And this is one of the reasons why the uh uh early days of people saying like Oh, it's okay for a ma uh for a Mac Apple Silicon Mac to have a smaller amount of RAM because it has unified memory and that makes it use less RAM. The opposite is true.

In back in the day, if you had like, you know, one gigabyte of regular RAM and five hundred and twelve megabytes of VRAM, you had a total of one point five gigabytes of RAM in that machine. 500 gigs for the video card and one or five hundred megs of video card and one gig for the RAM, right? If you unified that, you'd want it to be combined. We say, okay, well, I'm just gonna throw away the VRAM and leaving you with just the one gig. Now you have less RAM. So

You it seems like you have less memory. It's like d now I have the the GPU fighting with the CPU for who's gonna get to use what part of the one single pool of RAM and and in Apple's case that one single pool of RAM isn't any bigger. So yeah, the it it seems like you're using m uh wasting more memory unless you always have The same amount you would have. Even today, if you buy a gaming PC.

You can get a gaming PC with sixteen gigs of RAM and you can get a video card with like I don't know like eight gigs of of V RAM in it. That's still to this day how gaming PCs work. They have dedicated video memory on your N video card that's just for the GPU and then they have dedicated RAM that's for the CPU.

But that's not how Apple things work. And believe me, Apple does not take s a sixteen gig computer and then take the eight gigs from the video card and combine them. No, you just get the sixteen or eight in the case of the uh Neo. Um so again, the way they make this work is because the RAM is

Very fast. We always talk about those memory bandwidth figures that we give. Very fast, very high bandwidth, very low latency. And it is equally fast when the CPU using is using it or the GPU is using it. And the CPU and the GPU are in the same SOC. Even if they're not on the same die as they are on the M5 Pro and M5 Max. So anyway, that's what's unified about it. It has unified VRAM and regular RAM into a single pool of RAM, but that single pool of RAM is on RAM chips.

made by the same RAM manufacturers to make everybody else's RAM chips. And that's why I'm going to pay way too much money from MX Studio. Ha ha ha. Job done. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, 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? Every single episode has about twenty minutes, maybe, of

Extra content, one new topic that we couldn't fit in the main show. That's overtime. This week in overtime, we're gonna be talking about the Claude code leak and how Claude actually works. Uh, that'll be really interesting. So join till hear that. ATV.fm slash join. Thank you so much for listening, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week. C A S E Y L Mm-hmm. ISS

A few weeks ago I uh did an after show where I tried a Garmin smartwatch or sport watch, whatever whatever they're called. A Garmin watch uh instead of an Apple Watch. And my conclusion was basically I see why other people might want something like this, but I don't want something like this, and it seems like it is a very bad smartwatch in order to be a a a pretty possibly good uh sport or activity.

Um and I got a lot of feedback about that. I wasn't happy with how I tried it. I wanted to give it a better shot because one of the things I said in the episode was I figured out pretty quickly that I had not really gotten the right one. Um I had gotten one of the like, you know, smaller models, uh like a smaller, simpler model, and Garmin has a thousand models of their smartwatches uh and and I really did not

I I I I realized it pretty quickly, like, this is this is not the one that I would get if I was keeping it. But I decided not to keep it and I returned it. But in response to, you know, people making very good points, I'm like, I really should I should have given that another try or a better try. So this time, I decided, you know what, I'm actually going to Try again, but I'm gonna get something that I'm pretty sure I will have a better experience with.

That was not a Garmin watch. It was a Sunto watch. Uh so I have I heard lots of good things about this brand Sunto. I I I I think that's how it's pronounced. I forgot to look it up. Uh sorry. Sunto makes Uh you know, similar looking watches to Garmin's, like sport watches that are designed for super long battery life, you know, endurance and like you know, really, you know, strong conditions that maybe you wouldn't want to bring something like an Apple Watch.

And they seem very well regarded. Um, in in particular, um, I know our friend underscore David Smith uh told me that I should probably look at them and it seems like they they have a lot of fans. I looked at their I I was looking at their offerings the first time when I when I ended up with the Garmin, um, and I didn't I I couldn't quite decide what to get and I went with Garmin.

But this time I try the Sunto Race S. Part of what I wanted was a good offline maps situation, and in Garmin's models, to get offline maps you have to get a pretty large watch, and in the Sunto lineup, you don't. And so I what I went with was the Sunto Race S titanium model.

This is in uh in most ways identical to the regular Race S. Um it costs a hundred bucks more and it's t a t titanium case and one of the uh big advantages of that is it's you know very much uh lighter weight compared to the regular one. Did you get graphite or canary? Uh it's gray. But they're both gray. But they're all great. Dark ray or slightly less dark gray?

I believe yeah, I got the dark one. So but it but I I uh I ended up buying the they have an orange strap version that I just bought the strap separately on Amazon for I think fifty bucks. Um so here's my impressions of the Sunto Race S. Now as for context Um I took another very long walk and I was wearing both the Sunto and the Apple Watch Ultra. Yeah, do the underscore pose. I was gonna say the the protocol prototypical underscore pose. Very well.

Yep, I was definitely uh you know doing my best underscore impression. You didn't make his face, though. No, I c I mean who can do I can't I can't totally rip him off. You know, identity theft is not a joke, Jim. You should be wearing way more watches. Right. So anyway, I did I did this long walk, I did um twenty three miles, one arm with the Apple Watch Ultra and the other arm with the Sunto Race S. How long did that take? Uh about eight and a half hours. Uh eight forty four. It's a long time.

Yeah, there were a couple of breaks in the middle, you know, like ten, fifteen minute breaks, but yeah, so eight forty four rough it was the total time. I've also been using the Sunto Erase S for my regular uh three times a week workout.

These are kind of like, you know, mixed full body, you know, some weightlifting, some Pilates style stuff, some, you know, training kind of stuff, just kind of mixed workouts with a trainer that we do all sorts of stuff on mats and with dumbbells and stuff like that. This time, again, my my goal here was let me give myself the highest chance of liking this that I can. I decided not to have it forward notifications from my phone.

So it is just a sport and activity watch. It does not try to be a smartwatch. Because What I have learned is you know, I learned from the Garmin experiment, and the Sunto is no different in this way. the abilities of non-Apple watch watches with iPhones are pretty limited in terms of notifications and, you know, there's no Siri access and stuff like that. And so I'm like, you know what? Just to maximize my chance of liking this, let me try using it for what it really is.

and not try to make it a smartwatch that that it really isn't. Um so first impressions, it is so light. Now and and this is like, you know, the race S is their, I believe their second smallest model. Th this is a category of very large devices, generally speaking. So their second smallest model is still substantial in size. Like I would say it is Similar in overall size to uh kind of between the Apple Watch series forty six uh line and the Apple Watch Ultra.

So it's kinda it's like right between those two, I think, in terms of like how big it generally looks uh on your wrist. But compared to both of those, it feels So light. The Apple Watch Ultra feels like a brick by comparison. The Sunto straps. Way nicer than the Garmin strap that I had. Now, again, Garmin has a very big product lineup. Maybe the one I had was was a one of the bad ones. Who knows?

The Sunto strap, very nice. Silicone, you know, it's nice and flexible, it's light, it I think it looks pretty good, if you know, for what it is. Much, much nicer straps on the Sunto. Also keep in mind as I'm comparing this, I'm gonna I'm comparing it to the Apple Watch Ultra. But the Sunto is only three hundred dollars in steel, four hundred in titanium. The Apple Watch Ultra is eight hundred. So this is half the price, or less if you get the slightly heavier model. But it still offers

similar battery life in terms of like if you're doing a long workout. It like if you need like long workout time, if you're gonna be on like a twelve hour hike or whatever, the the battery life between this between this smaller Sunto and the biggest Apple Watch is

in the ballpark of each other. They're they're pretty similar. Um and if you want even more, you can get the bigger models, but I didn't want to do that. So anyway, the screen, nice and bright, totally serves its purpose. I will say the always on screen Kind of sucks. Uh but it's mostly

It sucks if you try to use it as a smartwatch, which I was I was try like when I tried the garment, I was like, let me try to make this a smartwatch. With this, I'm like, you know what? These suck as smart watches. Let me try to make it a sports watch. So I'm not wearing it all the time. I'm wearing my Apple Watch most of the time and when I am doing an activity that requires a s like sports tracking, I put this on, either instead of or in addition to the Apple Watch.

And so w by using it that way, a lot of the the other decisions they have kind of make more sense. So the always on screen, when you're in an active workout, it shows the workout data always on. And you can turn it off to extend battery life further. But you know, it shows shows the workout data exactly as you expect. It dims it, you know, if you're not if it's not like active, but otherwise it's there. When you're not in a workout.

This has a customizable watch face. Just like every other, you know, smart-ish watch. You can you can customize their they have complications. They have a few different faces you can pick. There's like a face store you can go into on their app. By the way, the app and the setup process. Way nicer than Garmin's. Garmin's it's Garmin's apps

Plural and setup processor, obviously like burdened by lots of legacy and complexity and kind of just scope creep, I think, over time. Sunto, I believe, is a is a significantly younger brand. Uh they have a lot less crap in them. They're much more like simple. There's a lot a lot less that it's that's like trying to get you to upsell to other things. It's just like a nice, simple and in my opinion, better graphically designed platform.

Everything about it was way nicer than the Garmin experience for me. Including the experience of actually navigating the watch. Maybe if I had more time with the Garmin, maybe I would have gotten faster navigating it. But the Sunto seems like it just makes a little bit more intuitive sense. Like there's a there's a couple of buttons to learn, a couple of like standards, but for the most part I learned it a lot faster. And again, I th I think the

the general graphical style of Sunto is nicer. And frankly, I think their hardware also looks nicer. I mentioned already the straps look and feel and work better than the garments that I had. The Garmin that I had. Um but also just like the watch case, I think like

It's a little bit more tasteful looking. The Garmin's have like a certain look of like extreme and sport activity, you know, and they they kind of use color in weird ways. And I think Sunto just has a better style overall. Um Then it came time to charge it. Their models have different chargers. And so this one I think is one of the older ones, because the race S is a is like a couple of years old.

And the race two is the newer model, but it's it's only the big size so far. This charger is USB A only. There appear not to exist any USB C options. Um and because they're not all the same.

That introduces some interesting complexities. So for instance, if I want more than one cable, I'm going to have to buy more um and you know keep them wherever I might be. Um, you know, maybe put one in the backpack, you know, like if I wanna have it like charged n like on my bedstand my bedside table or whatever, like You quickly realize that the Apple Watch, by being the dominant platform, has certain kind of built-in advantages. And one of them is that.

There's lots of accessories out there made for Apple Watches because Apple sells tons of Apple Watches and has for a decade, and they've always used the same charger. So people have had time to make third party cables, third party docs, third party battery packs that all can charge Apple Watches directly, like on them.

And in this ecosystem, that just doesn't exist. You know, the Sunto ecosystem is way smaller and way younger. And because they use different chargers for different models, like if you say, you know, if you brought this on a trip somewhere and if you need to charge it now. It does have a very good battery life in standby mode of like an if you're just using it as a watch, it'll last many, many days. Um But if you n if you were like in a bind and needed needed a charger for this.

If you were wearing an Apple Watch, you could go to any drugstore, any like airport kiosk or whatever, and you can get an Apple Watch cable to charge your watch. If you have something like this, good luck. You probably won't be able to find what you're looking for without like, you know, going to you know, ordering something online and having it delivered to your hotel, maybe if you're lucky, you know. So

Does this charge the same way as the Apple Watch does? Like inductive, like a pad or a thing that like Um it's not inductive. So but th there's not a all right, so there's not a port, but it's just like Yeah, it's like it there is a magnetically attaching disc that attached to a USB cable. Um and it it is it but it's a proprietary charging system that uses two pins on the back.

Interesting. I wonder if you could just like uh buy any charger at a gas station and and uh rip open the wires and just take the positive and negative and hold them to the two contacts on the bottom of the wire. Just apply five volts across these terminals and hope for the best. Yeah, I mean like it's that's what I was asking whether it was inductive like that you needed some kind of coil that exactly matches and aligned to the thing, but if it's too like pin contacts, that's real old school.

Yeah, I mean that's I maybe that would work. I don't know. But anyway, so it it did it is like Again, it adds to the friction. If you wanted to make one of these your daily driver.

It just adds to the friction that it's not a standard charger and unlike the Apple Watch, which is also like not a standard charger, so so to speak, but like it also is not dominant in the world and hasn't been there for long. And so odds are you won't be able to charge it with in any other way other than one of its official cables or a clone from Amazon that has all the same problems that the official ones do, all the same limitations.

So the charging situation is bleak, but the battery life is so good that like you can if you're just like keeping it around for doing occasional workouts while you're on a trip, you wouldn't really need to charge it if you know, unless your trip is longer than you know, a week or two maybe.

As for other physical characteristics, the speaker on the watch. is just like beeps, like a cheap digital watch, like that it can do like, you know, it can play different tones of beeps, but it doesn't appear to be like a real like PCM speaker. Which is Interesting. It it's like using like back uh John wouldn't know this, but Casey you would. I know about PC sound. I used to laugh about it.

Yeah, like PC sound like if you just had the PC speaker you didn't have a sound blaster. Mm-hmm. And it's that it's that kind of You can do you could get the Atari Lynx voice uh not the Atari Lynx, the uh the Lynx uh golf game voice. I bet I bet the uh Sunto watch can make that noise. Oh I'm I'm it can it can make some noises, all right. Um yeah so that's that's interesting. But what I learned using this thing is that generally speaking, as a computing device.

it is very primitive compared to the Apple Watch. And you see that in a few different ways. So one of them is yeah, like the PC speaker kind of speaker. Um also the watch seems to have not really any concept of like multitasking, so to speak, in a practical way. So like for instance, the app the the watch will only sync to its app if the watch is on its home screen, not in an app. The Sunto app on your phone will yell at you, put the watch back on the home screen so we can sync data. Yeah.

Lovely. Um there was a point where during my big walk, I wanted to change a setting. I wanted to turn off. the always on screen during the big walk to try to conserve power. And it turned out I didn't need to do that. It it it had plenty of power. Um it it finished a a you know, an eight and a half hour walk with sixty six percent battery left. So it was fine. And that's with the always on screen on heart rate tracking and GPS.

Does this have the fancy GPS that y you really, really wanted from the uh Apple Watch Ultra? Yes, it does. It has dual band GPS, L1 and L5. So uh it ha so again, like it's it's very ultra in a lot of these features. Like it it competes directly with the Apple Watch Ultra in a lot of these features, but again at at half or less the price. uh and much lighter weight and in some ways even better battery life. Not always, but um in some ways. So

The always on screen when you're not in a workout only shows a dumb clock. Like when the Apple Watch is in like power save mode. It only shows the time. If you want to actually see your watch face, you have to like hit a button on the watch and that will bring up the watch face. And so the value of things like watch faces and complications, I think, is somewhat limited by that. Ha ha.

Um the situation with watch faces and complications, again, they exist. They're very limited, very primitive. Um a lot of things are missing. So like they have built-in weather widgets and stuff that you can put as complications, but There's very few metrics you can measure. Like there like one of the things I was disappointed by is that there's no UV index. And what I always have on my Apple Watches is temperature, UV index, and timer as my bottom three complications.

All that stuff is very primitive and also so it has it has this feature where you can you can download offline maps to it, which is great. Um It's not super granular. I had to download all of New York to have any of New York, and all of New York is a gig, and it takes a while to send it. It takes like

an hour to send it over to the watch. So it's uh you know, it it's a slow progress, but it does actually work. Once the map is on there, map navigation works great. You can you can zoom in and out. You can, you know, it it's All that stuff is great and and I needed offline maps for this because this was upstate where there's not that not very good coverage of any kind of any sort. And also, by the way, these watches do not have a cellular option.

Uh Garmin does on some of their larger models. Um as far as I could tell, none of the Suntos do, I don't think. Certainly this one doesn't. That's another thing. Like if you want the if you want this watch to have cellular for things like if you want it to maybe take a run without bringing your phone with you, this isn't going to help you.

Um similarly, most of these watches don't support like local music playback to Bluetooth headphones. So some of the newest ones do, many of them don't. So Again, like I I think the Apple Watch has spoiled us for how good of a computing platform, how good of a smartwatch it is. Again, this is half the price and way lighter and with very good battery life. So I think we can forgive a lot of those things.

Okay, um I'm almost done here. At some point in the last couple of weeks there was a software update. That just happened automatically. I didn't it didn't ask me, it just did it. And when I woke up the next morning, my watch face and complications were blown away, reset to defaults, and my offline maps were deleted. Oh. Yeah.

Um before that, the uh the complications on the watch face didn't quite fit the layout of the watch screen. Like there were some that were like overflowing their bounds. After that, that was fixed. So Okay. It feels like I'm using a beta. Um Sunto, I guess they they are a younger company. It shows. Uh their software is still

a little a little rough uh in a lot of those ways. Um so after that I reset up my watch face. I downloaded the New York map again and had it send it over to the watch for over an hour again. But I did get it to work. Um but having a software update silently wipe out my entire watch face configuration and offline maps was a little disconcerting. Um all right. As for actually using it during workouts and during the giant walk. Workouts first.

It's really nice during workouts, actually. So this confirmed first of all that I don't need it to be any bigger. One of the problems that I have with the Apple Watch Ultra in my regular workouts is a lot of times we are like on our hands, on the mat. or I'm lifting a big dumbbell with a workout glove, like wait like a weightlifting glove. And a lot of times it's easy for

like my wrist or the edge of the glove to accidentally push buttons on an Apple Watch. Uh and I d I don't have the problem that assumes the buttons are a little harder to push, so that's good. Um and also That's also why I don't want one that's any bigger than this. Because if it becomes bigger, then it starts getting in the way of my wrist movement, like if I flex my wrist up and stuff like that. So

I was very happy to have the size that I have for that. And there's never been a a moment during this trial so far that I've needed the bigger s a bigger screen or a bigger battery or anything. So I'm glad I have the smaller one. Um'cause again, even smaller. It's not small in absolute terms, it's just smaller than other sports watches of this type.

During workouts, I like that it's giving me every second it's giving me heart rate updates on the screen, always on all the time. So if I'm feeling like I'm really pushing myself in a workout I can just quickly glance at the watch and I can see it does this nice like ring around the outside of like heart rate zones and

you can customize those zones, which I found very nice. So I was able to set like, you know, the of like the four or five zones that go around the face of the watch, you know, they're color coded, you know, like in red, yellow, green. Um, and I was able to set like where the boundaries are.

to match kind of, you know, what I want those to mean. So I can tell, am I pushing myself, you know, as hard as I expect to be or want to be? And I can adjust in response to that. That was very nice. And when doing these workouts, that's when I realized, oh Round is the right shape for fitness watches. I get it now. But I still maintain that round is not the right shape for smartwatches where you need to be reading text frequently, like from notifications.

But now I understand round was nice for a lot of these things. It isn't always ideal, but it was nice for a lot of these things, including that like kind of radial d display of the workout. The way the screen is designed And I felt this way about the Garmin too to an extent, although I didn't get too much into customization of the Garmin, but the way the screen is designed, it makes it obvious that like these watches are designed by people for sports and activities.

Whereas the Apple Watch, even like the Apple's workout app. It's designed by graphic designers to make it look pretty, but a lot of times the functionality is not quite there. Like with Apple's workout app, I often have trouble like distinguishing what the different numbers are.

A like at a quick glance you have to kind of oh wait, that's the time. Oh okay, oh that's not the heart rate, that's the pace, or you know, whatever it is. Like it's a little bit you have to like kind of look a little longer than you than you maybe should to to distinguish'cause it's all just like a bunch of left aligned giant numbers.

Whereas these watches, the way they design their faces, I think they use the shape better, they use the space better, and they have more differentiation between the metrics they're m they're showing you. So it's easier for you to see at a glance.

So that was I I f I find the sunto to be very nice during workouts. Also, on the big walk, I found it to be great for kind of just general like motivation. Because it it had a few different modes you can switch between about like you you could see like how far have you gone or you could switch it to a countdown to like how far it is back to where you started or um if you load the route onto it you can see like how far it is to the end of the route.

So that was all very nice. I also loved that every mile the Sunto would give me a nice little beep, like doot doo doot, like a little like encouraging beep. Hey, I did another mile. And I found that to be like a little delightful thing. I would actually look forward to it as I knew I was approaching a mile marker. Like, ooh, I can't wait to get my my beep, my celebratory beep.

Um that I found I found delightful. And I also really enjoyed that the Sunto app afterwards, when you're reviewing the data. It has a lot more detail than the Apple um fitness app does for reviewing workout data. Um and it it allowed me to like dive in and see like Yeah, I can customize, I can see different charts and graphs and lay one on top of the other to see different metrics. Like, oh I if I if I put like elevation over

s over pace, I can see how how I slowed down when I was going up the elevation and stuff like that. I c or you can see where your brakes were with in the pacing and everything. And you could break down like by by mile. It didn't matter that I like pushed the lap button accidentally a few times. Um it also

kept an automatic quote lap of each mile I did. So I could go back later and review like speed per mile and, you know, pace and heart rate and all that other stuff. So that was actually really nice. I liked the workout data review in the app. Um I don't know if it writes to HealthKit. So far it isn't. I don't know if that means it can't, or if I just haven't enabled that yet, or if there's some third-party tool I'd have to use to do that. But right now it is not writing to HealthKit.

For my purposes, I don't think I care, but that could be a big deal to a lot of people. Um But generally speaking, I really enjoyed it on the walk. It again, it because it's so light. And it did a perfectly good job of tracking the things I needed to track on that walk, I was really very impressed by it. As a smart walk, It's terrible.

All of these devices are terrible as smartwatches for for iPhone users. I mean, maybe it's better on Android, um, but for iPhone users, I wouldn't recommend anything except an Apple Watch for a smartwatch. If you want general purpose smart watchiness.

You want notifications to pop up on your wrist maybe. You want to have like a nice watch face that has a lot of complications maybe that tells you useful things throughout the day. You want to see your calendar. You wanna, you know, do all that stuff. The Apple Watch is the one you should get.

If you want kind of the the best generalist, you want maybe music features, you want cellular, uh all like for all of those kind of like if if any of those edge case or if any of those use cases are important to you, you want an Apple Watch. If you only want to have one watch in your life.

You want an Apple Watch. If you want easy charging on trips, like all there's so many things. The Apple Watch is the best answer to so many of those things. If you want Siri, if you want to be able to remotely unlock your Mac or your phone with it, like So many advantages to the Apple Watch. But if you wanna watch for workouts and taking on long treks like this or similar kind of extreme, you know, sporting uses. I think the Sunto is better.

Um but that's a huge amount of ifs. It is a much more primitive device in a l in all those other ways that allows it to be a better sports watch in a lot of ways. Again, it's also half the price, and very light. Eight point six grams is that weight difference you're feeling, by the way. Eight point six grams. Yep. I don't believe that for a second.

I'm looking at Apple spec page. Now what it might be factor in is because I'm assuming these weights on both Apple's page and Sunto's page are um just for the watch body. And so maybe the stra if you're wearing a really heavy like you're using like the link bracelet on the ultra or something? Hold on. I'll I will tell you. Give me one moment, I'm getting a scalar. Alright, the Sunto Race S titanium with its strap is fifty-three grams. Yeah, I guess they're including the strap and Apple's knot.

Yeah, so the Apple Watch Ultra without strap is sixty two. Um if I toss on here, I mean I have a couple of straps here. So Sixty I think you mean sixty one points. Uh Sure, okay. So uh if I use the um the ocean uh band, their silicone one for the Apple Watch Ultra, the total is ninety seven. Um if I use the leather loop, which I actually like a lot, the total is one oh one, a hundred. Um so yeah, so the Apple Watch Ultra is with a strap about twice the weight. Good and you you feel it.

I guess the Asunto one includes the um it uh includes the strap in its weight because it includes the strap. Although no the the ultra comes with the strap too, doesn't it? Yeah, so just the Sunto titanium without the strap, I just took it off, is only thirty five grams. And and the ultra is sixty two. So it's that's a huge difference. And you really feel it. Anyway, I am going to keep the Sunto. Uh I it's not replacing my Apple Watch.

but I am going to continue to use it during workouts if I have it. So like if I'm on a trip, I'm not gonna bring it. You know, like that's uh there's no reason to for me to do that really. Although it is light and doesn't need a charger for a long time, so maybe. But um

But you know, for my for my regular workouts, I'm going to keep using it. For the big walk, I'm definitely going to use it, although I think I'm going to use it and an Apple Watch Ultra, uh just to like have multiple tracking things, you know, as backups and th things like that. But I'm very glad I tried this again. Um, so thank you everybody who told me that I gave Garmin's uh kind of a short shrift there. I still don't like Garmin's, but I do like Sunto.

Do they have the Sunday you took those straps off pretty quick? Do they have like a mechanism like apples that like makes the straps come off easy? No, they have um what the rest of the watch world calls calls quick release spring bars.

Um so it's like it it's a regular twenty-two millimeter spring bar mount on the watch and the straps are just regular spring like you could put these on any any watch with a twenty-two millimeter uh spring bar setup, but they have these little tabs in the back you can you you can pull to one side and they pop off. Which I think I think that's what Garmin did, but I I forget off the top of head. Oh, that's...

Very fascinating. I I was expecting that you were gonna say, Oh, I bought the wrong garmin and uh such and such other garment is the right answer, but it seems like no. It uh at least as far as you're aware sitting here tonight. Uh it's not the garment that's the or it's not the particular garment that's the problem. It's that you shouldn't have gotten a garment at all.

Well I think it again, it depends on your use case. So Garmin has a number of significant hardware advantages um and maybe software advantages too. I didn't I didn't get too far into that. Um What I really wanted was something that was small enough that it would not, you know, interfere with my workouts or shirts or things like that. Um and uh you know, lightweight was a was a plus.

And I wanted offline map support. Garmin is pretty stingy with which other models get offline maps and uh the so the the one I got was the venue uh four, which that was the wrong choice for me. I think if I was gonna buy a Garmin today, I I would probably get the um the Forerunner. There we go. Um so the Phoenix 8 is their like flagship kind of everything watch. I would probably look at that, but it's it's pretty chunky for my taste.

Um the forerunner line of Garmin looks like maybe a better fit for me, but you have to get the giant one, the 970, to get the offline map support. For I for reasons I don't understand. I think it's just like market segmentation. And also keep in mind that model is as much as an Apple Watch Ultra. It's like 750 and up.

So again, Sunto has a pretty big price advantage here for, you know, generally similar utility to to what I'm what I'm looking at here. Um but Garmin also, you know, Garmin has some watches that have cellular, they have better like music capabilities on many of their models. Um they have They have um their high end ones even have satellite connectivity, which the Apple Watch Ultra three does. The Sunto doesn't have anything like that.

And Garmin has like different screen technologies. They actually offer a micro LED screen for like sixteen hundred dollars. But you can if you want, you can buy a Garmin Phoenix 8 like super edition that has a a real micro LED screen. Remember when Apple was gonna make those for its Apple Watch? Like they invested in this. They were they were gonna build their own micro LED screens for the Apple Watch and they after a couple of years they said, Ah, never mind.

Yeah, right. Well Garmin did it. Like you can you can get a Phoenix eight today, uh sorry, Phoenix Eight Pro Micro LED, seventeen hundred dollars, excuse me, and only available in fifty one millimeter size. So it's

huge and very expensive, but they do they will sell you one if that's what you want. If it it's like super, super bright. So ultimately this this has taught me That I appreciate this category of watch if I change what I expect it to solve for me, if I change the role that it has in my life, kind of scale back what I want it to be, I appreciate what it is.

And it also makes me really appreciate that Apple's done a really good job with the Apple Watch. Like when you when you see what else is out there. Yeah, I I wish Apple would would have every advantage that every other watch has. They they won't, they can't. They've you know, they so there are certain trade offs inherent with the decisions they've made.

And and I will, of course, reiterate that I think the Apple I think Watch OS in general, um, is a really underinvested in platform by Apple and there is so much potential that they just ha have chosen not to address yet or ever. But The Apple Watch really stands up against its competitors in a lot of ways. Like if what you want is It's not even close. It's definitely the Apple Watch. No question.

And y you should only be looking at these other categories of watches if you know for sure that the Apple Watch is not satisfactory to you for some reason. And you're willing to give up all those other things to get, you know, to to use something else. But these do have a place in the market. And so I'm I'm glad I've gone on this experience to like

figure that out better and and to experience these, to have, you know, maybe maybe a new better workout watch for myself. And again, if we're only three hundred bucks or f or four hundred bucks for the light one, I think that's a great deal.