Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts, but this week we're missing one. As always, I'm joined by Mr. Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Oh, Chris, I'm doing fantastic. Happy New Year.
we took a week off and i feel like it's been a million years since we've done this i know i was talking to danielle about this my girlfriend and it was like we recorded on a friday when we normally do then took a week off and then now we're recording on a monday because we're recording a little bit later because scheduling and uh it just feels like we haven't chatted in forever even though we talk over iMessage so it's it's nice to see you it's nice to chat with you
We are missing Neelion. She just had something come up. Should we have our audience send her something on like Mastodon or something? How about favorite cat gifts? Yeah. That's something she would appreciate. Cat gifts would be perfect right now. Yeah. Yeah. Send her some cat gifts. She's not here this week. She will be back. But send her your favorite cat gifts on.
Macedon or whatever. I don't know, all the places. Definitely Macedon. Definitely Macedon. Yeah, let's be honest. That's Nileon's place. But we still have a show for you all, and I'm excited about this one. I've been really excited to talk about the challenge for this, but that's at the end of the show. But you and I have a couple of things to discuss first.
I'm first up in the document, and this is something I've been thinking about a lot, especially the last couple of weeks, is my yearly theme. Now, for those that don't know, yearly themes are not resolutions. They're kind of a guiding North Star. And this is... 100 something i am stealing from the cortex podcast this is okay i'm glad you said it it's not i'm not trying to take credit for it at all 100 curbing this from them not
not original to us or me at all. I do not get any credit for this. In fact, we're going to put a link in the show notes to their... podcast i i highly doubt anyone that's listening to this hasn't heard at least heard of cortex but probably listens i'm i'm gonna go ahead and guess the venn diagram is a pretty close to a circle yeah exactly so i'm i'm not i i I'm not tripping over this one too much, but the general idea, if I could give, like, a TLDR is...
So New Year's resolutions, a lot of people will be like, I'm going to go to the gym four times a week or five times a week. And the first week you don't go four or five times, you've technically failed your resolution. But with a yearly theme, they're more of guiding north stars. So you would have instead of I want to go to the gym four or five times a week, you would have the year of fitness. And you're basically your goal, your guide for the year.
is to be more fit to do things be more fit and you know be like hey do i really need to order pizza for dinner or could i just you know make some chicken or something or uh you know i got some time to kill what could i do oh maybe i should go to the gym it's that kind of thing did you think i did a good job there explaining that matt
yeah that's pretty much it like it's it's more of a guide for when you have a chance to make a decision or when you are trying to be mindful of what you're doing your theme should be what kind of guides your choice like you said i'm hungry
oh, it would be nice to get a pizza right now. But if it's the year of eating healthier fitness or whatever, then maybe you do something different and you try to use that to guide yourself. So yeah, I like the idea as well. Yeah, the Cortex show is... fantastic one of uh one i've been listening to for many years and yeah their yearly theme episodes they get way into it probably more than we will because yeah
They go on for hours, but it's very, very good. It's a very cool idea and aligns better with what I feel is practical, because like you said, resolutions are tough and they're.
you just fail them most of the time yeah yeah right no no i don't think anyone's ever properly completed a resolution like if you say you're going to the gym four or five times a week you didn't most people probably didn't go four or five times a week that yeah first time like it's yeah yeah and they're like very ambitious that's the other thing that i think yeah
trips people up is like going to the gym four times a week well you go zero now so are you really going to make an enormous life change are you going to like lose 50 pounds are you going to write that your your first novel when you wrote zero words last year like
Yeah. Resolutions like to be like very ambitious and that's cool. And if they work amazing, but I think that is another reason why they kind of fail more often than they succeed is people overreach. But this is more of a direction you want to go. Yeah, and so for me, lately, I've been kind of reviewing all the business stuff, my personal life, and just kind of like reflecting back on how 2024 went for me. And for me, my...
yearly theme for 2024 was the year of growth. I wanted to focus on a few key aspects of my life, mostly personal and my relationship with my girlfriend and work stuff. And For 2024, I think I did a decent job. There's a few curveballs thrown in there. But the personal side of the year of growth, my girlfriend and I moved in together. I think that's a pretty huge step. That's a big one. Yeah.
That's definitely a very big one for us. So on that side, I think things went really well. Another, again, not a goal, but something I wanted to accomplish this last year was to... get a new studio uh i moved a couple years ago into a condo and i could not get my filming and studio and office set up to a place i liked it it was a really weird room
uh it was this long long but not very wide room it just it it was terrible terrible for my needs so um built a new studio it did great there the other thing i i kind of wanted to like really on was growing the channel and that didn't actually that didn't really turn out that great uh in 2024 it was kind of a weird year um And anyone you talk to in the industry, ad sales were in the toilet last year. Like the ad business was absolutely horrible. So I spent a lot of time.
uh you know i'll just say i spent a lot of time last year fighting sponsors uh trying to get paid like way more time than i've ever spent in fact last year i had a sponsor uh basically just close their doors uh before well it wasn't the let me back up it wasn't the sponsor a lot of times companies will work with these like advertising agencies to find youtubers and creators and stuff like that to kind of partner with well this middleman company
close their doors after i put out the ad in the video and this was something that took months and months of work i've never put so much work into an ad like hands down the most amount of work they closed their doors after the ad and the video was out and they got paid but before i got paid and uh let's just say yeah and let's just say the insolvency company is like yep we're more focused on paying back the banks than we are paying you so um that's channel one
It was a little rough last year. Yeah. Yeah, that is interesting because you're thinking more about business-wise growing the channel. Literally, because this is your job. I need to make money. I need to make a living. How did you do in terms of subscribers and viewers? over the years was that similar or was that more positive i i would say it's slightly more positive i i think i'm in this weird spot with youtube where right now
When I put out a video, if it's iPad related, it does really, really well. If it's anything else, eh. it might do okay most likely it doesn't i'm kind of like the algorithm has figured out i am the ipad guy And this wasn't a very strong iPad year. Yes, we got the new M4 iPad Pros. Those are great. They also launched iPad Airs at the same time.
because they launched at the same time the ipad air it kind of got swept under the rug forgotten about a little bit because there really wasn't anything that new that exciting about it yeah that was basically a processor bump right like i guess there's the 13 inch but like
It's bigger. I've, I've literally never, I've never seen a 13 inch iPad air out in the wild. My, my dad had a. first generation ipad pro was his his ipad pro and he or his ipad and he was like i need to update this he just bought a 13 inch air because he wanted the larger text size
Because he's like, I can still see everything, but the text will be bigger. There's one. So there's exactly one in the wild. Shout out to my dad. Keeping that product afloat. But yeah, I don't see a lot of them either. yeah i don't know because it works with the new magic keyboard too right like so no it does not it's the old magic keyboard so that's why so when i talk when i talked about uh i made a whole video dedicated to the new magic keyboard this year and when i talked about
it i love the new magic keyboard the new magic keyboard is significantly better than the old one in lots of different ways uh i i think we've even talked about it on the show here so i won't rehash it all but i was just like once i and the old magic keyboard and the new magic keyboard are the same price so it's like pay a couple hundred bucks more get the really nice oled display of the um
the ipad pro you get the m4 chip you get thunderbolt and you know what get the and if because if you're going to get the magic keyboard get the new magic keyboard get the new ipad pro because it's it's significantly better in just about every way you Like, in every complaint people had about the old Magic Keyboard, this new one is a bit better. So, yeah, I am a firm believer in the new Magic Keyboard. Yeah, for sure. I would go so far as to say if I had to...
If it was technically possible and you forced me to like go back to the old iPad Pro or the old Magic Keyboard, I would keep the new Magic Keyboard and go back to the M2 iPad Pro. That's how much. I see what you, yeah. in the combo that's the part that actually brings me more value i think than the like the old screen is like it's an awesome product but like the keyboard is incredible
Yeah, the keyboard is one of those things. I use it so much. I mean, the old Magic Keyboard had quality issues. I went through three of them. I'm pretty sure I've publicly talked about that, but I broke two of them, just wore them out because of how much I use them. Oh, not from watching WWDC where they don't have any iPad updates for you. and you just slam it on.
the table yeah so that's the other side of the ipad story this year is there wasn't really anything in ipad os that was specific to the ipad pro there there were a couple of things like smart script i got i i did get to interview Yeah, yeah. So we talked about SmartScript and the calculation. feature math notes I was totally blanking on that for a second
But there really wasn't a lot iPadOS related. And that's kind of my bread and butter. Like I focus heavily on software. You know, I do do hardware reviews here and there, but I'm not one of those YouTubers that reviews the same piece of hardware. six times and just being like ipad pro one month later ipad pro two months later ipad pro three months later and so on and so on because it's just the same thing over and over again yeah well this is
Not to go down a rabbit hole, but this is one of the things that I think I see a lot is people are like, I don't want to see a review of a product you've only had for a week or something like that. And they're like, I want to see like an extended review.
The two things about that, number one, those extended reviews don't get as much interest. They never get as many views because people have moved on. It's not in the zeitgeist anymore. And two... I think if you're a reviewer who's been doing it for a long time and have experience and are good at it, you don't need that long to decide whether this is an iPad that's good, bad.
Same with phones. If you've reviewed 50 phones, you can tell pretty quick how this phone is going to be. You don't need months to just figure that out. I think it's totally valid to review them right away. I think the... later on ones can be interesting sometimes but yeah not quite as good but yeah uh getting back to the yearly themes so channel wise year of growth didn't wasn't great um but i feel like i kind of like
stuck myself in a corner so one thing i want to do and i i want to i'm going to address this year is i'm going to branch out a little bit more and it's going to take a lot of work because like i was saying the algorithm knows me as the ipad guy
And the way the YouTube algorithm works is you essentially are training it with what you're putting up. So if you're stuck as the iPad guy, but you also want to do... iphone apps or mac apps you just have to put a bunch of those videos out there and let it get kind of caught up in the algorithm and it'll kind of relearn and retrain and it takes a while and you're probably going to have some blunders but just you got to keep pushing through that
And then it'll kind of start to understand who you are and start serving your stuff up to other people as well. Interesting. Yeah. I'm curious. Did you have a yearly theme for 2024? I did not. Okay. I do have one for 2025, but I did not for this year. Okay.
I don't know. Thinking back on the year, what would the theme have been? What did I actually do? I honestly don't even know. I think maybe part of it was... This isn't a good... catchy theme but taking my side projects more seriously might be the theme um like over the course of the year i um put more work into YouTube. I think I did some good YouTube videos this year.
Two years ago, I adopted a seasons thing where I just like take the summer off and I do like a old school TV season through the school year, basically. And that's worked really well for me, like not getting burned out on like running out of ideas on what to make. So trying to do.
that and trying to be more mindful of what sorts of videos i make like you said you kind of you have there's certain things that work for your channel for your audience um i should really just make things videos and web browser videos and that would be perfect but let that get boring as well so yeah but anyway um worked on that trying to make that like a more serious thing
Actually, by the time this episode goes out, I might have my LLC open, so that'll be a big one for me. I know. Nice. So we'll see if First Tree Productions is allowed to exist in the state of Illinois. We'll find out. I know. But in addition to that, my blog, I introduced a membership for that, which has been more successful than I expected it to be. Made it easily the most.
profitable that project has ever been in the 15 years i've been doing it um so that was good and then starting this podcast um i was doing freelance writing um and i'm kind of stopped doing that so that i could do this podcast and while this isn't really a business yet we've had a couple sponsors but like it's not a big money maker by any means at the moment um i do think it's a good uh project and i think long term is going to be uh really good for
Hopefully all of us. But yeah, I think that's probably my theme is getting a little more serious about these side projects. Yeah, I forgot to mention this podcast of the year growth. We started this. And just like you said, it's not a big moneymaker. In fact, I'm pretty sure I lose money because I pay for Riverside. So I think I might be in the hole here for that. But I think long term, this is something that could be something quite big. So it's not something I'm.
too worried about right now uh i i guess actually if if you factor in our time we're definitely probably losing money because we've only had a handful of sponsorships and it's not it hasn't been enough to cover the hours a week that we put into
uh you know making producing prepping and all that stuff so um but overall i i wouldn't call my last year a failure i i wouldn't call it a rousing success but this year I focused on a theme that wasn't so much a general like, okay, we want to grow everything. It's more of a sub-theme of the year of growth. And I'll explain. Basically, this is going to help. Like, if I do this.
It's going to help grow everything else in the future. So my yearly theme this year is the year of consistency. Because this last year, like I said, I moved.
had some family stuff happen, had some personal stuff happen that just took a lot of time away from... work and i've basically most of the year i was like a month behind on everything like i was absolutely a month behind i was gonna take a couple of weeks off between like christmas and new year's and now and stuff like that but instead i i you i'm using this time to get completely caught up with all my work and uh
So basically, I just want to be consistent this year. So what that means is I want to be consistently uploading. Like if you've noticed, if you look at like my release schedules for videos and stuff this year, or in 2024, you will notice.
that... there will be like a week where i release like two or three videos and then like two or three weeks where i don't do anything because i was trying to like batch make videos and stuff like that and it was dumb it was stupid i never should have done that i don't know why i thought that was a good idea i don't know why it took that long for me to realize it was a bad idea that's kind of sad um but i'm i'm much more focused this year on okay
Each week, I want to have out one long-form video and one short-form video. And the idea is the long-form videos can be my typical, like, here's a bunch of apps.
i like or here's how i'm using obsidian or a task manager or hey here's some shortcuts i built you know the typical long form videos i've made for years now but the short form videos are meant to be something fun like hey here's this keyboard I've been testing or that I just built or here's a kind of a short one to two minute because YouTube shorts now can go up to three minutes but I don't make up three minutes two minutes max
Like here's like a short little walkthrough of this app that's like it's not like a complex task manager or something like that. Maybe it just has like one or two functions or something like that. So I'm much more focused on like just.
being consistently uploading uh and i also want to cover and i don't know how this works into consistency but it's just kind of part of the whole growth thing i want to cover more than just the ipad yes the ipad is my main thing it's the core of my channel i'm going to keep covering it Nobody freak out. I promise that's not going anywhere.
But the problem is, is when you have years like this last year, or especially 2023, when there is literally no iPad hardware except the USB-C Apple Pencil in 2023, there was no new iPads that year. iPadOS wasn't that exciting. You kind of get stuck and it's just like, well, what do I do now? So I have that M4 Pro Mac Mini that I talked about.
I want to start covering some more Mac apps again. I did that on the channel for a while. There's some really cool things you can do with Mac apps just because of the Mac ecosystem. Do more stuff with the iPhone. maybe even the apple watch i don't know i've been using it a lot more lately uh it's really hard to make videos about the apple watch i find like because it's so hard you can't screen record on it it's it's hard to film like it
it's a lot of like talking head stuff. So yeah, it's ridiculously hard to film is the hardest device I've ever filmed. Uh, and I, I've, I told the Apple Watch PR people that because they asked me about like, this was a few years ago, they were talking to me about the Apple Watch. And I'm like, I love the product. I'd love to talk more about it. It is the hardest product in my life is the hardest product.
ever had to film because you have to keep it you either have to keep it on your wrist or you're constantly unlocking it and like it's it's a whole thing um But yeah, so I want to do more of that. I want to focus being better on time for sponsorships and uploads and stuff like that. Like I said, I've kind of been all over the place lately. I want to post other places, not just YouTube. And I'm not entirely sure what that looks like right now.
Because Instagram is kind of really annoying me lately, like especially meta, like with some of their policies. Are you going to do TikTok dances? Well, see, that's the other thing is as of right now. uh true january 6th tick tock is still on the band train like i think they have like 10 days or something 13 days i think app stores need to stop serving it and we will see yeah So I'm like, I'm not going to invest in TikTok if they only have 13 days left.
uh meta like meta did that whole thing a couple days ago where they put out ai profiles on instagram and it's so unbelievably bad like so unbelievable so i don't know where else i want to post but i know i don't want my sole focus to be youtube i mean that was a big reason why i wanted to start this show was because i didn't want
all my eggs in the YouTube basket. I don't, maybe this means I start a newsletter. Maybe this means I do some other form of, you know, I, I'm not entirely sure, but I just know I want to. even more this year um last year like we've talked about added the podcast but i want to expand more i don't want to be reliant heavily on youtube and video sponsors and stuff like that because this last year i I'm telling you, I mentioned that one that the middleman company went.
Kaplunk before they even paid me, which was one of the highest paying sponsors, or was supposed to be one of the highest paying sponsorships I've ever had. It was the one I put months. I put months and months of work into this.
sponsorship normally i don't do that normally it's like a couple of days of work this was months of work um i i've had some others that have just like completely ignored contracts and like uh like uh invoice due dates and stuff like that so the the sponsorship ad realm like you can can kind of feel it crumbling and just like it's the floor's about ready to go out from underneath it so
I don't want all my eggs in that basket. I want to kind of figure out something else, figure out kind of how to keep this going. Because at the end of the day, I love what I do. I love that I get to talk about computers and nerd out with people and help people with productivity. stuff and, you know, ADHD stuff and all that kinds of different things that I cover. I love that I get to talk to people about this stuff, but the business side of it is what has me worried right now. Hmm. Okay.
so consistency and kind of branching out i think that makes sense i mean and i think it helps you control a little bit more of your own destiny right like one thing i always hear The advice I got early on was like when you're setting like goals for YouTube specifically, don't set your goals necessarily on.
how many subscribers you get or how many views you get like you want those to go up but like at the end of the day you can't really control that like you can make the best thing you can and you can like try to tweak that a little bit but like if people don't watch the video they don't watch the video and you can't force them to so i do like the idea of yeah just being consistent um branching out a little bit and then yeah diversifying is
Always good in business, right? You don't, Apple makes all their money from iPhones. They want to diversify so you can get into services maybe. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to be launching LolliPlus. It's my new media streaming service. We're going to have all sorts of original content, and yeah, it's going to be great. Yeah, yeah, LolliPlus.
forward to wherever you get your streaming services um but yeah so that's that's kind of mine year of consistency i'm i'm hoping this kind of guiding star and so far you know we're only on the second week of the year But I feel like I've been really good. I didn't put out anything last week. So, you know, I'm not starting the put something out.
every week but i got a bunch of stuff caught up i got some stuff submitted for ad approvals and all that stuff but of course everyone's on vacation so nobody's you know in the office or anything to look at the sponsorship reads and stuff like that that is that is the one really annoying thing about youtube ads is that like everyone wants to see the video before it can go live now before anyone freaks out
Sponsors do not get any sort of control or say so. They don't get any editorial rights over the main part of the video. What they want is they want to see the sponsorship read part because they want to make sure you're being consistent. You're not saying that's something that's not factually accurate. Or if the promo code is correct or something like that, that's the kind of stuff that they want to check for, which makes sense. I totally get that.
adds extra days into the whole process because you're waiting for somebody to watch the video and be like, oh, yeah, looks good. OK, cool. But Matt, I am curious, what is your yearly theme? My yearly theme is the year of fitness. Which is as cliche as it can be. It's funny because I use that as the example and I did not know this. Foreshadowing. I purposefully did not ask Matt what this was before we recorded because I wanted to be surprised. So that is actually really interesting.
Interesting. So tell me about your year of fitness. Yeah. So it's mostly around something. there's a few different aspects to it um but basically it's just a thing that over the last like few months i've noticed um and it really came to a head recently i updated my life insurance policy and that came with a in-home like inspection to make sure i'm well um really that yes wow um and
uh i am however um one part of it had you step on a scale and i looked down and for the last like 10 years of my life i've seen a number between like a five pound range basically and it was like 10 pounds above it and i was like oh no that's not a number i'm used to seeing and i'm not like super conscious about my weight or anything but it was a change and it was enough of a change that i was like oh
Interesting. I'm trending this direction. And there are a few other kind of things related to fitness that I felt weren't as weren't at a place that they were a couple years ago. Part of that is just getting older. I'll turn 40 this year, which is a big number and something to process, but so far I'm doing okay. I definitely won't have a...
midlife crisis at any point during this podcast, I promise. That's okay. I had my midlife crisis early and bought a sports car, so it's fine. But yeah, so I was just like... and it was also the holiday season so i was like you know eating more sweets and stuff and i was taking two weeks off work and was just like getting lunch eating out every day um so anyway a lot of things can uh conflated into uh
yeah just me feeling like oh i could make some changes and move the needle so um the things i wanted to this is related to this year are um cardio health uh weight um and strength and muscle mass um so these are all things i can easily move the needle on um i don't need to make radical changes to my life um and yeah so basically
i like to run it's my favorite way to work out i like to run outside uh i don't like treadmills i don't like going to the gym i just like running around my neighborhood it's so low effort it is uh well it's high effort but it is uh easy to do it's completely free I refuse to pay to run. I just will not do it. The whole outdoors is right there. Just do it. I say that as it's like 10 degrees outside today and absolutely freezing.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's 41 degrees here, so I totally understand. Yeah, but like I want to do better. So according to my workout tracker, I ran 60 times in 2024, which is. good like that's more than one a week but the year before that i did 112 runs so i went down by almost half
I can increase that number. I don't have a specific number in mind, but just being more consistent, doing it more often. I did find a really cool app for tracking this, actually, I should call out. It's called HabitKit. And basically... you it's an iphone only app which is frustrating um but basically you set things you want to do on a regular basis and then you just mark them off and the cool thing and the thing that got me to check it out, is it displays the data like a GitHub commit history.
so like those like charts people like developers will post with like here's how many times i coded over the last year it gives you basically a chart like that which i find very satisfying to fill out so it's it's super simple i think it's a subscription so i'm paying more than i necessarily need to do this but um yeah i'm tracking my runs with the workout app but i'm also using that app
And yeah, so like cardio, I'm just trying to run more. And my kind of goal is to get closer to a 30 minute 5K, which I was able to do in my late 20s.
and i would like to be able to do again we'll see how close i can get to it but uh yeah i just think consistency is uh king here today so um yeah just want to run more and get my cardio health better because i used to be able to run quite a long ways without having to take a break and now i can like sometimes still see my house and i'm like oh boy it's really hitting me yeah one thing i i didn't mention a part of my year of consistency
but I'll throw it in here since you brought it up is to be more consistent with working out. Like I've talked about on this show, we have, we, my girlfriend is a part of the Peloton cult. So I inherited some Peloton. Equipment and the rowing machine. I hate running. Absolutely hate running. You'll never see me running, but I love the rowing machine. I could spend 20, 30 minutes on it a day. No problem.
love it uh so that's something i want to be more consistent about too so i i can see how our themes kind of like they do intertwine so yeah But that's good. I like it. I like the habit tracker app too. There's something about checking off a box saying I did this thing that is very satisfying. And I don't know about you, but it just hits that part of my brain.
where it's like okay yeah yeah okay now did it okay ready to do it again tomorrow do it and then like you just keep going and it's just checking that box off is satisfying and the visualization the momentum that you can kind of see as you fill things out i've done this on paper for other things before um but yeah it is just very satisfying to just see that like block of look at all this time i did this thing nice
Also on that front, because working out won't really change your weight if you don't change your diet, I'm trying to do some food tracking. I don't food track all the time. I don't think it's useful for me personally to do it all the time. Typically, I like to do it for like a month or two.
to get a baseline to like understand like how much i'm taking in um and so for that i'm using food noms which is so good i haven't used in a couple years but they've really improved that app um to the point where it's really really excellent like their food database is extensive their search is really good it does a good job of like when you search for something it separates out the things you've previously logged
which you are probably eating again as well as new things it separates out like generic listings with brand name ones it's really good if it's a If you use their barcode scanner, it pulls in most items. If it doesn't, it's like, oh, hey, could you just like scan the nutrition label for us real quick? And like it pulls in all the health data and it adds it to the library that everybody can use if you want. You can opt out of that if you want.
it has a uh they have a new ai tool of course they do but you can feed it we we like to find recipes online to make sometimes and you can feed it a website that has a recipe on it and it will read the article find the ingredients find the amounts and make a pretty good estimate as to how the nutrition benefits of it so really really good food noms
i'm actually very very impressed with it but that's helping me kind of figure out how much am i eating is it more or less than i probably should and then once i have a baseline about like how much um everything is I'll probably stop doing it in like February or something but right now it is good to kind of reset that kind of baseline and kind of understand because uh when I was I started tracking around Christmas and oh buddy those numbers were high
So everything immediately came into focus. I was like, oh yeah, that's too much. First breakfast, second breakfast, nearly daily second breakfast, don't do that. You just set up to lose at that point. Yeah, yeah. My family is, so both Danielle and my dad are big bakers. Like, they love baking. So around Christmas time, it's just there's cookies everywhere. There is, have you ever heard of Christmas?
Christmas crack. No. So it's a Chex mix with a crap ton of butter, brown sugar, and caramel. And it is the most amazing thing ever. I love it. terrible for me it's amazing uh so like we just have that stuff laying around so i i totally understand uh just that time of year it's it's full of
So I think those are some solid yearly themes there. I really like yours. I think we should check in at the end of the year. We should make a note or something and maybe make this a yearly thing that we just rip off Cortex. just check in with each other kind of thing absolutely steal from a good podcast yeah steal from a great podcast we're just borrowing we'll return it i promise we're stealing like great artists steal of course
Yeah. We're stealing like how AI steals. Moving on. Matt, you have something in the document that I'm very excited to talk with you about because I have been doing some research. Tell me what you got. Okay, so I am looking at what I'm talking about right now. That is a new computer monitor. My first computer monitor I bought in a number of years. This is...
Give me a second to get it all out. This is the LG 32-inch UltraGear 4K OLED monitor, and it is fantastic. I love this monitor. This is the monitor I've been looking for for... for a year maybe i've been looking for a new monitor i haven't been super happy with what i had and there were a few features i was hoping to get and this one finally checked all the boxes um at a relatively reasonable price which was great so i was thinking i could go over some of the core specs of the monitor
to give you an idea for what we're getting with it. And then why I chose this over the studio display, which is, I feel like in our circles, the...
default display for a lot of people. I know you have a studio display, don't you? I do have a studio display. I love my studio display. There are some... issues with it that i think you're going to probably address with this monitor but there's some there's some stuff about it that i just i absolutely love and no other monitor has been able to give me that nice yeah so i think
The thing that's important here is that different people have different needs. And so while those things are awesome, my needs had different things. So anyway, so the first thing, the elephant in the room that is going to. send a lot of people away is it's a 4k 32 inch screen.
I see what you've written in the document. Yes. Go ahead, because I'm curious how you justify it. Sure. So... with where i sit in my desk at my desk which is about 28 inches from the screen it's a little over two feet that is retina by the definition that steve jobs used when introducing retina screens in the iphone 4 you can
Bring it up with Steve Jobs if you think he's wrong. But it is just barely over that. So it's pretty close. If I was like 18 inches away, it would not technically be retina. Retina is just kind of an arbitrary line in the sand. The gist for me is that it looks great. It looks less crisp than my 27-inch 4K screen I was coming from.
Obviously, but like only if I really look at it, like moment to moment, it's totally fine for me. I suspect this would be harder for people who have gotten used to a 5K monitor and don't want to go back. I totally get that.
but um i've never had a 5k monitor and don't want to get one in the near future so yeah um so retina i always thought retina was defined by like pixels per inch of re or it's the resolution of the screen size in pixels per inch so like by like apple's definition a 20 like a 4k monitor can't be bigger than 24 inches and if you do like if you do a 27 inch monitor it has to be 5k
but uh and like i think so the the vision pro actually is a very good thing to that introduced a lot of people to the idea of pixels per degree and pixels per degree is the thing with retina your television is super retina your television per like pixels per degree of your vision is likely the highest resolution screen in your life like it's 4k it's enormous but if you're sitting on the couch 10 feet away
you have absolutely no way to see those pixels you could probably not even see pixels at 1080p right like so if you are holding a phone which is the thing that's closest to your eyes that needs the highest resolution screen to be retina because it's super close to you but if you're further away then the pixels can be larger um okay that makes sense because there there are plenty of games that i'll play
on like my xbox in performance mode which dropped to like 1080p or 1440 and then that way i can get 60 frames per second and where i sit relative from my tv on the couch I don't really notice much of a resolution drop. I can switch between performance and resolution mode in a lot of games, and I can't see the resolution difference. The thing I can see is frame rate.
that's the that's the big difference absolutely so i i will fully admit it is much less crisp than a 5k monitor would be especially the studio display which is 27 inches and 4k so more pixels and less screen tinier pixels I will concede the point. Studio displays 5K. Yeah, 5K, 5K, 5K27.
So I think for me, because I've used non-retina monitors with my iPads and Macs and stuff in the past, and the thing that always killed me wasn't necessarily like... photo or video edit watching or editing or anything like that it was the sharpness of text in a text editor like obsidian how how's that so again it's gonna be less crisp but i do um do
integer scaling of everything right so it's instead of me doing so i think what a lot of people get hung up on is they want the ui to be a certain size and so they're going to upscale a 1440p image to 4k which is not a one to one you can't do like one four pixels equals one logical pixel or whatever the you know the perfect pixel double that we all like to have um it doesn't do that so so everything does look grainy um
or not green just like less crisp um but for years i have outputted my mac at 1080p up to 4k which does give you the perfect pixel doubling so while it is not as crisp as a 1440p upscaled to 5k perfectly doubled it is still very good in my opinion um it does mean my ui is larger than
yours is on the screen and that's probably another thing that's going to be weird if you try to use my computer but i actually like this because i do a lot of design work and a lot of the products i work on are used on people on laptops not desktops and so it gives me a better sense of like how much will fit on screen by having my ui a little larger um but yeah uh it i think it's great um but not quite 5k okay quality okay
No, I totally get that. Okay. What else does this monitor do for you? Okay, now here's the big two. next one is refresh rate it's a 240 hertz display variable refresh so just like promotion goes from 120 and can scale down as needed this is 240 hertz and can scale down as well does not work well on mac os for whatever reason whenever i choose the variable refresh rate mode in like the display settings i get like
corruption in the image I think whenever it tries to change the refresh rate like I don't know if it's my cables or whatever but like it doesn't behave that nicely so I just have it set at 240 Hertz all the time maybe wasteful but on windows works amazingly especially in games to get even frame pacing no matter what my frame rate is and there's a special button on the bottom of this monitor so right below the chin you can just kind of like tap this little button
and it does something crazy that i haven't seen in a monitor before i actually personally will never use myself but is there so i may as well mention it you are using your computer everything is great looking swell you tap this button on the bottom of the screen and the screen goes black for a moment when it comes back it's very blurry but it's refreshing at 480 What? That's insane. So it will output video at 1080p. And if you thought 4K at 32 inches was blurry, 1080p at 32 inches is insane.
You would never use your computer like this. However, the intended use case is for people who play games, competitive shooters, especially where Twitch reflexes are ideal. There's people out there who are. adamant that our displays won't be in they won't have enough refresh rate until we're at like a thousand hertz um because it's that's that's wild
I know it is wild, but like fast motion, um, still blurs on like these high refresh rate screens we have today. Like the Apple pencil updates is like 240 Hertz anyway. Um, but I use a 240 Hertz on my Mac. Um, and it's lovely um most things that's unnecessary like it doesn't really matter but animations are very smooth and i notice it most with the mouse uh the mouse just moving it around is like super super smooth and is very satisfying i also notice it when
typing like it's not a thing you might think about but like just like the delay from me hitting a button on my keyboard and seeing the thing on screen is just quicker and just feels sharper which is cool But maybe the more impressive thing or the more exciting thing is it's an OLED screen. And oh, buddy, it is. So nice. That would be so nice. See, that's the thing that kills me about the studio displays. It's still in regular LCD.
It's an LCD, IPS, whatever. IPS, yeah. And it's 60 hertz, which the bigger... I have this theory, the bigger the screen, the more, no, wait. Yeah. The bigger the screen, the more noticeable it is to me. Sorry. I was, I got confused. uh the iphone uh not very interesting story i'm using the 16 plus right now so i don't have 120 hertz display can't really tell the difference i can kind of notice it when i scroll fast
but can't really see the difference. My iPad Pro absolutely can see the difference between a promotion and non-promotion. Absolutely. studio display can absolutely notice that it's 60 hertz uh so yeah that's i'm kind of and then the fact that it's an ips lcd display and not even mini led or oled so i'm a little i'm a little
Tell us over here about the OLED thing. Yeah. So perfect blacks, of course, um, incredible response time. So there's really no ghosting or anything when you're moving, things are moving quickly.
It just looks fantastic. It supports HDR and like actual HDR. It gets over a thousand nits when watching HDR content. And it really... it really hits home when you watch like something on hdr on a screen this big um it looks so good i don't know how else to describe it but just like it's fantastic and this was the big thing for me i was looking i had an ips lcd display myself before and i really felt like to get an upgrade oled had to be part of the equation and so this was
The right price and the right monitor and the right size with the right aesthetic. It has a matte finish. I know some people like glossy for OLED. I probably prefer it as well, but a matte finish has no reflections or anything, so that's nice. And then the last thing about... this that i like is are the aesthetics uh for a pc monitor or for a pc style monitor or for a monitor not made by apple
so 99.9 of the monitors um i think it looks really good i'm actually using it on its built-in stand partially because my amazon basics arm was not going to be able to hold a monitor this large um but it's pretty darn thin uh it's white I got the white model and it looks good the the stand is very very minimal it's very very flat so like it's not even though it's taking up desk space it doesn't feel like it I can just put things on top of it which I
do more often than I'd like um because I have a messy desk and uh yeah can rotate tilt it you can go full 90 degrees and you don't have to pay an extra 600 for a stand that does that which is lovely you can just include that in the normal price Yep, I definitely paid the extra money, and I don't remember how much it is, but I know it was a significant chunk for the tilt and height adjustable.
studio display because the regular studio display that's just tilt adjustable is too low for me. I'm 6'2". I'm a little tall. So I knew I needed the tilt and height adjustable one, and if I didn't get it, I was... going to be annoyed so uh i definitely got that but hey it's not the thousand dollars for just the studio display stand or not studio pro display xdr stand uh that that is ridiculous that that is um That's crazy. Still for sale at that price. Okay. So to close out this section.
There's a couple of reasons why I went for this over the studio display. And I think you would still prefer the studio display over this monitor. So I'm curious what you like about it. I would agree with an asterisk. Okay. A future asterisk. Okay.
Okay, so for me, it was the cost. The studio display with the adjustable monitor and the nanotexture matte finish would have been like 20... two or twenty three hundred dollars do you have a window behind you that you would need the nanotexture i don't maybe i wouldn't need it so maybe i could save like three hundred dollars but it would be unless you
Unless you have – so nanotexture. I'm a firm believer in this. If you don't have a window behind you or in like our case where – like I have big filming lights. So the nanotexture display on the iPad absolutely – make sense for me because i'm filming my ipad if i wasn't doing that it wouldn't make sense for me unless you're working outside have a window next to you or have big lights that are at glare you don't need the nanotexture okay so
if i don't do nanotexture i just priced it out it's a two thousand dollar monitor oh god which is a lot much money on that this this one is normal cost is 1400 but i got it on sale for 1000 so
Oh, wow. Half the price of the studio display. And CES is going on as we record this. So there's probably going to be a new generation of monitors from LG and everybody. So presumably this will be... around that thousand dollar mark for a while which is a ton to spend but this half of the studio display i would have got so um that was a big factor i'll put on a good monitor and keep in mind you're obviously you know this but
audience uh matt is a designer he does graphic design work he can't just have like the off-the-shelf 24-inch 1080p monitor you need to have something that's decent to show your work on and i play games is it more for the games or more for the design who can say let's say tax season's off you say it's for your work matt mostly the work um yes the other things very quickly um oled we already
talked about that refresh rate we already talked about that those are clear benefits to the studio display or sorry to the lg display and the last one i didn't even mention yet but io the studio display just has one thunderbolt input which is great if you're all in on apple devices but i'm not i have a windows pc and it just does not work well with studio display
The Thunderbolt output would not work well for my setup. And this has a display port and two HDMIs. And I don't even know if the studio display worked. works well if you're all in on the apple ecosystem so my problem right now is i have that mac mini i also have my ipad i work from i'm working from both i'm doing things from both of them i'm constantly having to unplug from the back of the mac mini and plug into the ipad
I've looked for Thunderbolt KVM switches. They technically exist. It is a flip of a coin. I've read all the reviews. I've watched videos. They don't work. consistently and they are very very expensive like we're talking multiple multiple hundreds of dollars and i'm like i'm not going to spend that kind of money on something that's not going to work consistent like if it was a 20 or 50 or even just 100
dollar thing i would roll the dice on it but we're talking two three four hundred dollars i'm not gonna roll the dice so risk Because I know you're a big PC gamer boy, you're a real gamer, does this have a built-in KVM switch so that you can jump between your Mac and your gaming PC? I don't fully understand what a KVM switch is, but I do not believe so.
The closest this has is a, it will detect which input is currently getting a video signal and automatically switch to it. So when I'm done working for the day, I just like lock my Mac, the screen goes off and then I hit the power button. PC and it just switches to that input. So that's essentially KVM. You can have multiple devices plugged into the one monitor and it switches between them. I'm sure if you go into the menu of the monitor, you can pick the input as well, which is.
Which is a built-in KVM. So for those that don't know what a KVM is, you mostly find these in like server rooms and stuff with like a crappy 13-inch 4x3 monitor sitting on like a makeshift stand with a crappy leftover.
computer uh p or pc keyboard and mouse and the keyboard's probably missing a key uh this is probably hitting home for a few people uh yes typically what you would do is you would take all your physical servers and you would plug it into the kvm switch and there be a physical button that you can jump between them and the input for the monitor mouse and keyboard would all change to that physical machine so that's
Basically, what you have is a KVM switch built into the monitor. I had this with, I had the really fancy BenQ 32-inch 4K, like, their fancy display monitor. sent me that years and years ago in fact i don't even know where it's at my brother probably has it um
They had like this little hockey puck thing that would sit in it and you can jump between your inputs. And if you plugged your keyboard into the back of it and if you had a wired mouse, you could plug it in the back of the monitor and it would switch. the monitor input, the keyboard input, and the mouse input to whichever machine you wanted. So yeah, a lot of monitors like that have a built-in KVM switch.
Gotcha. So yeah, it does automatically switch and it switches quick. One of the things I didn't like on my old monitor is it took a while to turn on. So I hit the space bar on my keyboard, my Mac would wake up and it would show the login screen, but it would take so long for the...
monitor to wake up and like light up that like this mac would turn off again before that would happen so whenever i like went to my desk i had to just like jam on the space bar key until uh the monitor turned on like 10 seconds later um this one turns on in like two seconds which is great Nice. I like this. So I'm looking for a small monitor for my studio in here when we have people in the house and I can't work at my desk.
I want to be able to work in here. I'd like to have an external monitor for that to plug my iPad into. I think 32 inches is a bit big because I would have to store it. I think the maximum I want is like 24 inch, but I'm not going to buy another studio display. Ideally, what I would love is to find like a 24 inch. OLED display, but I don't know if they make those or not. I'll have to do some searching. I don't know about 24. I know 27-inch OLEDs are starting to... Yeah, it's just a little too...
So like, cause what I'm going to have to do is I'm going to have to take that monitor and put it in the closet when I'm not using it. And I think. 27 might be a bit too big. I don't know. I might take advantage of a Best Buy return policy or an Amazon return policy or something and just try it out. Yeah, I want another monitor for in here, but right now...
I'm just because right now when we have people over like if it's my mother-in-law or my girlfriend's not working that day because and I'm working I just my ADHD kicks in if I'm sitting at my desk. people in the house i want to distract myself i need to be able to come in here and close the door and and just focus on my work so right now i'm just working straight off the ipad and the 13 inch display with the magic keyboard and it's fine for the most part but it does get a little cramped
Gotcha. Nice. So the studio display, I think, still wins. That's a built-in webcam. The LG does not. Oh, it's not a very good webcam. Yeah. It is there, though, so it is at least. built in which is which is nice part of the all-in-one um what's the difference there's a there are speakers on this that are terrible um that's that's like a given for any pc monitor
I'm trying to think, is there anything else special with the studio display? The studio display speakers are pretty good. It also has USB-C. ports three extra usbc ports on the back and they are us i think they are the I want to say they're the 10 gigabit per second USB-C ports, but they may be the 5 gigabit per second USB-C ports, which is better than the Pro Display XDR because, yes, it does have USB-C ports on the back, but they are USB 2.0. Ooh. Oh, 2.0?
2.0 they they usb 2.0 speeds because the uh because of the fact that the pro display xdr is 6k it maxes out the bandwidth for thunderbolt so they have no extra bandwidth left over to do any sort of of high data transfer. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I still think the student, like if you were buying, if you're going to buy an Apple monitor, well, the mini led of the pro display XDR would be nice.
Unless you really, really need that, I would just go studio display. I think it's because the Pro Display XDR doesn't have speakers and it doesn't have a webcam either. And it's $6,000. And it's $1,000 plus $1,000 stand. Yeah. that's so expensive it's so expensive and you know what
There was a time I almost bought one too. There was, there was a time I almost bought cause I was so sick of, cause I, I was like in the wilderness for a while using like different PC monitors. I used that BenQ 32 inch.
like super high-end design one i also bought that lg 5k 2k one which was technically an ultra wide retina monitor so it was technically a 5k monitor that ran at like 2.5 uh so it was technically retina but like everything was just massive on it because of that uh i i was in the wilderness for a good while and then apple released the studio display and i couldn't order that thing fast enough nice okay yeah all right well i think you have something related to monitors in our challenge
Yes, so the challenge this week, or I guess technically this last two weeks, was mine, and it was to change something about your desk setup. And speaking of studio displays, I just took it off. I took the studio display off my desk. I had no monitor. You know what I had sitting on my desk? The M4 Pro Mac Mini, a keyboard, and trackpad because I used my Vision Pro as the monitor.
uh and it worked really well so this is the virtual display pass-through and this was actually the first time i used it because since the vision pro was out i didn't really have a mac i i mean i had the mac that i used to record comfort zone here uh that's underneath this desk it's just the m2 mac mini but it's the base m2 mac mini it's eight gigs of ram
256 gigs of storage like it's not enough to use it for anything in my workflow i i never wanted to set it up with like obsidian or my task manager either like i didn't want to deal with any of that stuff so i never used it for that so this was the first time i've used the virtual display option with vision pro and i have to say this thing is amazing this is the killer feature of vision pro which is
Kind of sad that it requires a whole separate computer. With Vision OS 2.1 or 2.2, something like that. One of those, yeah. Yeah, they added the wide and ultra wide mode. So before it was just like a standard 16 by 9 screen. But now you can get a wide and an ultra wide view where it stretches the image out. I like the wide. The ultra-wide was too wide. Have you tried this, Matt? I have, yeah. I felt like I was turning my head a lot with the ultra-wide. Yeah.
so yeah i not not a fan of that one but i i do think i do think the wide is if you do feel cramped on the 16 by 9 if you're like a two monitor person yeah then yeah the wide i think is probably a good compromise Even if you're not a two monitor person, like I, so what I did is I put it in the wide mode, opened up Obsidian, made Obsidian, you know, the whole screen. And I had multiple documents, you know, like how in Obsidian you can add a document.
to the right of your screen. You can basically do a split view within Obsidian kind of thing. Yeah. uh i did that and like it was really comfortable to write in uh the text was really nice and crisp the one thing i did do is i changed the resolution from the default to 2520 by 1080 uh
Because it made everything a little bit bigger. The default resolution is a little too small for me. I typically wear reading glasses and stuff when I sit at a computer. It was a little too small for me. The text was a little too small. I felt like it was a little hard. to read um and a couple other things i did i'll talk about in a second like everything was a bit too small but when i changed the resolution it all just clicked for me right away yeah this is um
Just real quick on the resolution thing. So we're talking about pixels per degree, like 4K versus 5K screens in the physical world. The studio display has about 112 pixels per degree. So keep that in mind. Your studio display is 112 in sharpness. My 32-inch garbage 4K monitor is about 73 pixels per degree. Okay. less, but around 60 is kind of the cutoff where people generally consider it retina. The Vision Pro, 34 pixels per degree.
Interesting, but I have a feeling it's because it's doing the foveated rendering, right? No, so that's before any foveated rendering. So that's the physical screen. It's 34 pixels per degree of vision.
at peak crispness and if you're just curious what 34 is in like physical world that's a 27 inch 1080p monitor at about two feet from your face so interesting this is why this is i think this is a very interesting thing because i know a lot of people who love using their macs in the vision pro like they really enjoy that and they're like oh it looks like so the screen image looks so good and like it does look good but it is interesting that like
In the physical world, we have very high demands. And in the headset, like a much lower resolution screen feels better for whatever reason. So yeah, just an interesting thing. I wonder if it's because it is closer to your face or. Well, cause the physical pixels per degree are like a thousand per inch on the vision. They're so tiny and they're so high resolution, but like, they're so close to your eye that like, yeah.
And again, on top of that, the Vision Pro is OLED, whereas the studio display is the LCD IPS thing. So I definitely noticed like, oh, all the blacks and the colors look a lot better. on the Vision Pro as opposed to what the studio display would look like. But I did have a couple of issues. I think the big thing that I had was an issue with the keyboard and trackpad pass-through. So what's supposed to happen is the keyboard and trackpad you have paired with your Vision Pro, the Magic Keyboard.
Magic Trackpad is supposed to pass through and let you control the Mac. And this would work like half the time.
Sometimes it just wouldn't pass through for whatever reason. So what I eventually did is I just gave up using that. And I would use the keyboard that was plugged into the... mac mini and the trackpad that was paired because i would use my mechanical keyboard i i that that was the other thing is i wanted to use my mechanical keyboard i would much prefer to use a mechanical keyboard but for some reason vision os does not support mechanical
keyboards uh with the quick type bar and the pass through and all that stuff so um i used the mechanical keyboard that was plugged in the mac mini and the magic trackpad that was paired to the mac mini and that seemed to work a lot better the issue is is if you went a hundred percent
on with your the the virtual environments like i typically like to do because it blocks out distractions there's no keyboard pass through so you can't see what you're typing and stuff like that so what i would do is i would go to about 60 percent So I could see like my keyboard, my trackpad, my Dr. Pepper. But if I would look to see where the monitor. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The necessities.
But if I was sitting at my desk and I would look and see where my monitor used to be or would normally be, that would just be the environment and the virtual display. And that seemed to work really well as kind of like a comparison. compromise it's still blocked out like if there's anyone else home it's still blocked them out walking past me or something like that so i wasn't getting distracted uh that that worked okay for the most part
Um, the one thing I did notice is when the keyboard and trackpad pass through did work, when that did work, the trackpad scrolling was really sluggish. Have you had that issue? Um, I don't.
Not really sluggish. I have noticed a little bit of latency from when I type to when I see it on the screen, but minimal, I would say. Enough to notice that it's not as good as just looking at a normal screen, but like... not bad i wouldn't say see for me what maybe maybe it's the trackpad or something maybe i need to unpair i don't know but
what I was doing is for the trackpad pass through. So the trackpad that was paired to the vision pro and it was passing through to the Mac, I would scroll aggressively and it would move very little. And I am somebody that I, I turn up.
trackpad scroll like trackpad scrolling sensitivity and pointer sensitivity i turn that up because i think the natural or the the default options in mac os are a little too slow for me uh and it was just so maybe it was just a bug on my end i don't i don't know but um using the trackpad that was paired with the mac mini that one worked fine matt apple please
the love of god add the ability to support multiple devices for one magic trackpad i currently have three i have three magic trackpads sitting on my desk one for my ipad one for the mac one for the vision pro yeah It's ridiculous. I know people like to make a big deal of the charging situation on the Magic Mouse, which is stupid, but...
The biggest issue for me is not that it's the multi-device usage. It literally will not work with multi-device at once. That is way more. And before anyone tells me, use the continuity iPad thing where you can move the mouse.
between the Mac and the... uh ipad that only works is if you have both the mac and the ipad on and next to each other i don't always have that so um multi-device pairing would be really important would be great But overall, the performance, I was shocked how good the performance of the pass-through is considering... it's a wi-fi 5 chip in the vision pro i was editing video in final cut pro and there was no latency at all
i was editing videos chopping it up i edited so i have coming out i have an apple intelligence video and i have a video uh it's a sponsored video but it's uh about a robot vacuum cleaner i edited both of those in using vision pro and this mac mini and it worked
fantastic i could not believe how well this worked um this was the thing that made me give up the ultra wide because it was way too much head turning uh because like like there's things in final cut that are in the top left corner and like
your timelines in the bottom right and like it was it was a lot of head turning um so that is what made me go wide uh as far as the monitor view but it was perfect for that um And the thought I had about this too, about the Mac pass-through, is the fact that there is not a lot of apps. for vision pro right now uh and in fact there's a good chunk of apple's apps that are still just the ipad versions reminders you would think they would have a dedicated reminders app by now for vision pro
It's just the iPad app right now running in compatibility mode. A lot of apps are still running in compatibility mode. And even more apps just aren't even there. Like there are a lot of apps that aren't even there. So this gives you the ability to use all the Mac apps on Vision Pro, which is kind of nice. But it leads me to my big thought. Why is there no iPad pass through? Why? Why?
That's the thing. I would kill for that. Well, not really kill, but you know what I mean. I'm exaggerating. But I would love an iPad pass-through so that I could... use my ipad like even if i just had to use the magic keyboard uh that like the magic keyboard for the ipad even if i had to use that and and that trackpad built into it i would love that give me let me have my big ipad display let me have all my apps there um and it's not like
ipads don't support like external displays already like it doesn't even need to be just like a floating ipad it could be you could have the wide Or normal wide and ultra wide screens. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Just make it the external model. Absolutely make it the external model. Well, and the other thing that it supports is the Vision Pro is now an AirPlay receiver for all iOS and iPadOS devices.
believe technically the mac 2 so you can air play your ipad display to the vision pro and you could sit there with your magic keyboard and trackpad and use it but it lacks like there's major latency like it was fine for writing some text but like the minute i tried to do something in final cut or photoshop or lightroom it fell apart so like it seems like the pieces are there
Just put it in, Apple. Put it in. Give me a reason to use my Vision Pro more. Vision OS 3. Add it to the wish list. So kind of like my summary of this is works great with the Mac. Love it. probably not a great idea to invest $3,500 into a monitor for your Mac. But if you're like Matt and I and you are a sucker and bought one right away, it does give you things to do. I thought that was going to be the thing that I spent most of the year covering.
Nope. But ultimately, I mean, it's cheaper than the... pro display xdr i guess there you go yeah that's a way to look at it yeah yeah yeah i was i couldn't afford not to matt you know i had to do it the opportunity cost was way too high you had to go in Yeah, but ultimately, I would say just get a studio display. Yeah, it's cool. It's nice. You can have this wide monitor, but...
I mean, I'm going to put the, as soon as we're done recording, I'm putting the studio display back on my desk and stuff like that. Mostly because I use it with my iPad. But yeah, I... I like this. I think it's a great feature between this and the personas. I think those are the two killer things of Vision Pro. The issue is personas require you to know other people that have a Vision Pro, which I would not say is very likely for me.
most people and on top of that uh and then for the mac virtual display it requires you to have an m series mac which is also an expensive purchase so uh there's not really a dedicated standalone killer feature for Vision Pro right now, which was kind of my takeaway. I think that is totally fair. I bet the Vision Pro didn't think it was going to get that feedback during a desk setup.
challenge yeah yep yep yep yep yep but uh i mean it it works out great but it's just i i mean i wouldn't want to spend $3,500 yeah just to use this with my mac uh there's there's better solutions well also like the headset messes up your hair do you want every time you use an external display to have your hair messed up and potentially red rings around your eyes yeah i still haven't updated my persona to the new version because
I like every time I do it, it messes up my hair and it makes me look funky. And I'm just like, I'm like, I just don't want to do this. And I need to, because I had a call and it didn't work right because I was on the, I hadn't put on the new one and yeah. same situation here but yeah yeah matt what do you uh what do you have for us well mine was very simple um i recently got a new desk um and the new monitor i guess a big desk month for me and uh We talked about this.
weeks ago, months ago, maybe at this point, when I talked about my OWC Thunderbolt dock, which is the heart of my desk setup, everything plugs into it, and the one Thunderbolt cable just goes into whatever computer I'm using at the moment. And I love... But that did mean that I have this Thunderbolt cable just winding its way across my desk. And I've had this for five years. This has been an issue. And so, you know, real desks have wires. You know, it's okay.
But it is annoying that it's there. And I was like, okay, this is a great opportunity for me to find a way to move this Thunderbolt dock somewhere on my desk where I don't have this wire just constantly going across half of it. So I've done that. very successfully. I forgot to put pictures in our show notes, but they will be in the show notes when you're listening. I have used command strips and I have just...
slapped it to the side of the leg of the desk. Nice. And I've kind of run the cable with these cheap little clip things. I've run it up the side of it, and then the Thunderbolt cable is just kind of up at the... front of the desk right where it plugs into the laptop and it's great it's really nice um i also have a capture card
that i use for recording this video that runs my video for my camera into the computer and that had a similar situation where it had a wire just kind of randomly strewn across the desk and i did the exact same thing slapped it right next to the thunderbolt dock and now uh that cable kind of goes up as well that one's messier because it has to travel farther for the camera but um yeah i uh finally have a relatively clean cable setup
it's still not i'm looking at right now it's still not perfect but uh yeah it's certainly better than it was and that pet peeve of mine is no longer an issue and will save me hundreds of dollars from wanting to buy a Thunderbolt dock that fixes that issue in the future. Which is what I did. Yes. I just sent you a link to something in our iMessage chat. This might help you even further.
This is a shelf that mounts underneath your desk. And on the backside, it has basically a spot for cables to come out. So this is the desk I'm sitting at right here. I have one of those right underneath here with my audio interface.
uh so basically xlr cable and headphone cable go out the back and connect and then over here there's also on this left side my left side there is a shelf for the m2 mac mini as well so i have a bunch of stuff mounted underneath this and then on the back side of this desk you can get cable trays So all the cables come out from these two shelves, go to the cable trays and kind of get tied up there and then go to their destinations.
Nice. Yeah, this looks good. I want a wider version of this. My dream, because you'll be able to see in the picture, but I have my work laptop. from like my day job and my personal laptop, and they're just stacked on top of each other. And I plug into whichever one. I'd love to get those under my desk as well. So what I've been looking for is some sort of this under desk shelf.
That's more of like a pocket, but that could fit the laptops. Gotcha. I wonder if this would... That seems... Do you have to unplug... Are you unplugging a cable from one and plugging it into another? Yep.
That might be annoying. I feel like you could get like a dual laptop stand. Like, do you use them in clamshell mode? Yeah. Oh yeah. My screens are almost never open. I feel like you should be able to get something that like, like slots them in and then you could just like unplug it and plug it in. Yeah, you'll see in the photo. They're literally stacked, so the Thunderbolt cables are right next to each other. Oh, okay. Unplug in and plug in.
It is the smallest amount of effort. Oh, okay. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. The physical effort I can possibly have for it. See, if Thunderbolt KVM switches were actually a thing and reliable, then you could just have a button on your desk you push and it would switch between the two, but... We don't live in that world. No, we do not. I really want a Thunderbolt KVM switch. That would mean a lot. But no, it's good. I love a good cable management setup. One of my first projects of this year.
It wasn't really cable management, but it was organizing the tool chests that I have in my closet that are full of cables and gear and all that stuff. And it was nice to be able to do that. But I want to rip all the cables at this desk out because they are kind of messy right now.
and tie him up a little bit, Niter. Niter. Niter. Niter? Why did I say Niter? Nicer. Niter. Anyways, all right. Well, that... is our challenge i think it was a solid one uh we'll we'll let neilion decide who won um that that one she'll just pick her yep she somehow won she's not here but she's still somehow won All right, Matt, what do you have for us? What's our challenge for the next week? Our challenge is to just bring a movie that has tech you wish you could use in real life. Ooh.
I wish you would have said movie or show, but okay. Okay, movie or show. Oh, okay. I didn't mean to change a challenge, but... I mean, unless we're going to do bring a TV show. with tech you on in the future we may as well do them both at the same time yeah yeah yeah yeah no okay there's one that just just straight up jumps to mind that i'm like yes i've wanted this for a very long time but we'll save it for next week okay Yeah, I think it'll be fun. A little different.
Yeah, that is a little different. I like it. I like it. All right. Well, that just about does it for the show. But before we wrap up, I have an intro question for you. And since it's just you, I figured I would ask something video editing related. though i guess neilion did mention she is getting into video editing so i probably could have saved this for her but uh it's the question i came up with and i don't have time to come up with something new so we'll use it um i want to know
What is your favorite video editing app that assists you in your work, in video editing, but not Final Cut Pro or any other nonlinear editor? Hmm. Ooh. Oh, that's a good question. I can go first if you'd like. Yes, please. So, mine is Hush. um hush is an app that basically you drop your audio clips in and it cleans up all the background noises it eqs everything and there's literally there's not a ton of sliders a lot of these apps like um
I know the big one for a lot of podcasters was, what was that app? It was like stupid expensive. Everyone used it to clean up their audio tracks. What was it called? I forgot what it was called. I know what you're talking about. It was ridiculous. I tried using that once. There's so much happening. I...
i've been in video editing i've been editing video since i was 12. i had no idea what was happening in that app there was so much this one there's literally a slider that you just select how aggressive you want it to be i put it at about 80 it cleans up all the background noise Somebody was mowing their lawn while we were recording this. Hopefully, if you don't hear it, it's because of Hush.
Because otherwise, I could absolutely see the levels going when I wasn't talking because somebody was mowing their lawn. I use Hush for not just my videos, but obviously this podcast as well. You probably would have noticed a difference. I think I was like... Somewhere in episode 10 to 12 or something like that, the audio quality just completely shifted. of the podcast it's because i started using hush it cleans up air conditioning noises fan noises background speaking it does a great job
The first time I used this was for that Apple executive interview I did about SmartScript and MathNotes. We filmed that at an Apple office that was not set up to record audio. It was incredibly echoey. Used it. cut out all that echo did a fantastic job it's like 80 bucks or something like that it's a one-time purchase amazing purchase love it it was fantastic i would buy it again i if it was a subscription i would subscribe No problem. I use it for everything. Okay. That's a good one. Mine is...
I feel like a thing I talk about all the time. Mac Whisper. It's great. I knew you were going to pick this one. I was hoping you would pick this one. Mac Whisper is a tool that uses a bunch of different... ai models to transcribe audio video whatever it's really fantastic it runs 100 locally on your device once you've downloaded the model so Works really great. If you have a fast computer, it'll go very fast. If you have a slow computer, it'll still work. It'll just take a little while longer.
It is free to do kind of the basic models, but if you want the really high quality transcriptions, you have to pay for Mac Whisper Pro, which is a one-time 50 euro. fee it looks like i'm on their website right now i think it's a subscription i i'm subscribed oh i'm not Oh, maybe you got in earlier or something. I think I'm on a subscription. Hang on. Let me double check. You talk about it. I'll double check, but I'm 90% sure I am.
but yeah it is it's super valuable so i use this for youtube videos i will as soon as after i export a video i feed it into mac whisper while i'm finishing up other things and it spits out a high quality uh transcript for me that i upload to youtube so that the video has better transcripts than youtube's built-in ones
And I use it for this podcast. Every time we record a podcast, once Chris, you finish editing it, you send over the file to me and I do all the audio stuff. And I will transcribe the whole podcast and I have a custom GPT. in ChatGPT that I feed the transcript into, and I have a few questions that it is supposed to help me with, so it helps me find all the products we talked about. It looks for any time we say, that'll be in the show notes.
tells me that's when we set it and what the product is which is very very helpful because sometimes you forget um and does a few other things but just like it it's very very nice to have a transcript of video and audio stuff um and so yeah it's it's invaluable It's part of all of my video productions at this point. And yeah, even though I speak about it all the time, it is the answer. So yeah. I'm using this for all of my videos now to do proper subtitles. I was asked...
for years to do proper subtitles and not just rely on YouTube's auto-generated subtitles, which are really, really bad. But... And there have been services and stuff out for years, but they were not affordable because they were people manually going in and transcribing your videos, which takes a really long time. So it was never something that was tenable.
Uh, this to me is the best kind of use of AI where it is assisting you in a task that I don't think I could sit down and type out the transcription for one of my 40 minute videos. I really don't think I could do that. I wouldn't. But this is... does all the time code and everything you like, if you're a YouTube person, you just go to the subtitles, you click, you know, in our case, English, you upload the files, you select with timing, add the SRT file and boom, Bob's your uncle. It's just.
there um my i am paying 25 bucks a year as a yearly subscription i'm wondering if there is a lifetime purchase that i missed normally i go for the lifetime purchases um but i have a link Yeah, and I have, well, I signed up.
not too long late last year so i'll just switch to the lifetime purchase when that this is about ready to go up but for now i'll keep it the way it is but there's also a monthly for nine bucks and a weekly for five bucks and i this is one of those apps that i actually think a weekly option makes sense that if you're just like hey i'm working on this one-off project and i need subtitles for it five bucks to get really good subtitles is not bad at all no
Yeah, no, this is one of those things that you told me about this, and I've not looked back. I've done this for every single one of my videos. It works great. I want to go back and do my... back catalog of videos uh that's just going to take some time to get all those files together and and do that properly but uh yeah i i absolutely love this app completely
Cosine agree with you on this one. When I came up with this question, I was hoping you would say this one. I'm glad to delight. Yeah, the one bummer about this is that it's Mac only. They had a beta. for an iOS and iPadOS version of the app, and it just disappeared. I don't know what's going on, which is a bummer. I really hope that comes back because I'm having to like, I'm editing all the videos on my iPad. I'm having to move the file over to a Mac transcribe it.
and that's just like it's an extra step like it's not great it's it's not a good process at all um it's fine because then i take that file and move it to my nas but i mean i could just move it to my nas for my ipad but It's not great. I really hope that the iPad version comes back or at least another kind of app like this pops up. Every other app that I've kind of looked for on the iPad that does this is very scammy and not.
not kind of the same quality and style as Mac Whisperer. Yeah, there are some apps that do... the same thing i mean the models are available to anyone like a lot of these are open source um but yeah i agree for whatever reason the ones that are available on ios and ipad os they don't match mac whisper in quality or reliability 100%.
All right. Well, that just about does it for the show. A huge thank you to Max Stories for having us. We are a Max Stories podcast. After all, go check out the other shows on the network. There's some great stuff happening, especially because as of right now. John Voorhees and Brenda Bigley are at CES right now. I'm a little jealous. I was originally planning on going this year, but I had a bail at the last minute. So I'm probably check out next portable computer.
our next portable console. Uh, I heard NPC and I thought computer for a second, uh, with all their stuff. Um, Matt, you have anything you want to promote before we jump off? Um, you should go check out my video I made about the monitor. If you're like, I want to hear that again, but with video, there you go.
And I think I explained the retina thing in more clarity there, less off the cuff. I had an actual script for that one to make sure I said things right. But yeah, same answers every time. Check out my YouTube. Check out my YouTube. I'm going to have a lot of stuff coming out here in the next few days or so. So be sure to check that out. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day.