Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and every week I am joined by two insatiable co-hosts. As always, I'm joined by Matt Birchler, Matt, how are you doing? I am doing well. I didn't think of anything clever to say this time. That's okay, you don't always have to be clever. We're also joined by Niléane, how are you doing? I'm doing well, and I am clever. I appreciate it.
Yeah. So we have some stuff for you, but we have a little bit of follow-up. We recorded the last episode, a little later than normal. Normally we record on Fridays, but we recorded it on Monday. The very next day, and I'm so frustrated, the very next day, Sonos updated the two products, not their whole line, not a bunch of different things, just the two products that I happened to have bought and brought to the show the very last week.
So now there is the Sonos Arc Ultra and the Sonos sub four, and both from what I have heard are significant updates. So I am quite perturbed about this. It was quite the choice to review the just deprecated products the same week that anyone's ever been able to review. I'm so frustrated by that. Yeah. And it was, I thought about going back and recording like a little bit for the show and just inserting it in. But I was like, yeah, we'll just save it for the next next episode.
But I'm so frustrated. I was considering returning my arc and sub, but they're both very heavy. It's going to be a lot of work to do it. And like I said, last week, how I feel about them still stands. They sound amazing still. So I'm going to, I'm just going to keep them and I'm going to ignore the fact that Sonos literally updated it like a week after I got them. So may you stay strong? I think it's a 14 day return window. So I might still be in that window. I don't know. We'll see.
There's just a lot of stuff happening this weekend and well, we'll get to it all. But yeah, we have some stuff for you. I am first up in the dock because I have something special. I have here the new iPad mini. Oh my god. Yeah, you know, it's not even out yet. Aren't I special? Yeah, no. So I have the new iPad mini here. I'm curious to either one of you use the iPad mini? Nope. I've never held a iPad mini. Ooh. I've seen one install.
Yeah, I've used an iPad mini and it's barely bigger than a max iPhone. So I stopped using the mini. Yeah. So that's actually kind of an interesting point that I am going to expand on in a future video. So stay, you know, stay tuned for that. But for me, I'm loving this iPad mini. It's not a massive update. In fact, it's a barely an update at all, but it's got me back into using the iPad mini. So I do have the sixth gen iPad mini, the previous one. And I basically use it for one thing.
It's when I'm filming, I put my shot list as a PDF document and good notes. And I use the Apple pencil to mark up the shot list to basically be like, okay, this was an overhead shot. This was a B roll shot. Okay, I'm cutting this. Okay, I'm going to reshoot this. That's kind of my way of just marking things up and staying organized while I work. And if I'm editing a video in here, I will use that iPad mini. I'll put the script up next to it while I'm editing in Final Cut.
So this iPad mini is not a huge update, but it does have some really nice quality of life improvements. The first one, and I'm just going to rip the bandaid right off. Jelly scrolling is fixed. Ooh. So can you remind us what that was? Yes. So jelly scrolling was the big upset over the last iPad mini. And basically what it is is the LCD controller for it would get out of sync when you're scrolling fast or even medium speed scrolling.
So basically what would happen is the left side and the right side wouldn't line up. So it would look like jelly where like one side was like drooping down and the other side was up higher and stuff like that. Well the display has not changed in anything in this iPad mini. It's still the IPS LCD panel with the LED backlighting. It's not OLED or anything like that, which is a bummer. I'm definitely one of those people that would love an iPad mini pro essentially.
And I would give Apple all the money for that. But this one, there is no jelly scrolling. That's pretty much the only display change to it. So when you're scrolling the left and right side stay in sync just like it would with any other iPad or iPhone or anything like that. So that's kind of a nice thing. What was an interesting tidbit about the last iPad mini is my review unit. While it had jelly scrolling, it was barely noticeable.
But my personal one, the one I went and bought had it to like an extreme amount like to the point where like you can literally see it just wobbling like the text wobbling from the left and the right side. It was kind of funny. If I had used the iPad mini for more things than what I actually used it for, it would probably bother me. But considering for most time, I'm just using it to mark up a PDF document. It wasn't that big of a deal. This iPad mini now starts at 128 gigs.
There is no more 64 gig option. It goes up to 256, which I believe was the highest storage tier on the previous one. But there's also a 512 storage tier as well now, which I think is a good thing because once you start at if you or somebody that keeps like photos, music and stuff locally on your device storage gets eaten up pretty quickly nowadays. So it's I honestly don't understand how people get by was 64 gigabytes iPads.
So I said I was using one I got my wife's when she got a she upgraded is a lateral upgrade. But inside she went to the normal iPad, the no name iPad. And then she gave me the mini. Her mini was a 64 gigabyte one. I did a factory reset on it. I installed like two pretty small games on it, a couple streaming apps, but like I didn't download any like media locally to the device. And when an iOS update came by, it said I can't install it. There's not enough you need to make space.
I was like, I've done nothing on this iPad and it's already out of space. Yeah. It's shocking. So I'm super happy it's 128 to start, especially because it's still $500 I think as the base price. Mm hmm. Yeah, so yeah, yeah. So the base price of the iPad mini did not change at all. It's still $500 and that is for the 128 gig now instead of the 64 gig.
I even vaguely remember and I been meaning I need to go back and watch my review of the 6th gen iPad mini, but I vaguely remember even saying something about like do not buy the 64 gig one. This one actually starts at 256 and that's really the only proper option because 64 gigs even just what it was three years ago was not enough. So yeah, I'm glad 64 gigs is gone. I don't. I think the base iPad mini still comes in 64 gigs. Is that right? Just the base iPad does. I think yeah. Yeah, okay.
So that's the only iPad that still comes in 64 gigs, which I'm assuming when that gets updated next, that will go away because that's just that's just not enough space. Can we agree that it should be less expensive? Oh, yes. Yeah. I think so. I think so too. I think $500 500 gigs. $500 is a lot of money for the iPad mini, especially when you can get the base iPad. Well, it doesn't have, it's a little less, you know, turned down. It's not as high. You can get that one for like 329 now.
So that's yeah, it is a bit much. But also I see the people wanting like an OLED iPad mini and you know, like some nice quality of life improvements, like an OLED iPad mini would be an amazing ebook. Yeah. Yeah. Would be an amazing comic reader game gaming device. It would be it would be fantastic because of the size of it. And that form factor I think is it plays a lot into the popularity of the iPad mini, obviously, because it's really the only big difference.
But the iPad mini is the kind of device that if you're somebody that's traveling with like a 16 inch MacBook Pro or 13 inch iPad pro or something like that, you can throw an iPad mini into your backpack. It doesn't take up a lot of extra space and you have like this nice tablet for reading or playing games or even watching movies or whatever.
Like I traveled a little bit this year and I watched a Formula One race on my iPad mini because I was also doing work on my main iPad and that was just the screen I had the biggest screen I had available to me at the time and it worked out great. So this has the a 17 pro in it. Yes. I'm wondering have you noticed it get warm because the iPhone we talked about this couple weeks ago that iPhone got warm with that chip is the iPad. That was the 15. Yes.
So this is the the same chip with an asterisk that is in the iPhone 15 pro and the asterisk is it's actually a bend version of that chip. So it has six CPU cores and five GPU cores, where is the 15 pro version had six and six. Left overs. So at the factory when they're making these all the good ones when in the iPhones and this is the bin with all the bad.
I have a feeling this got the a 17 pro because they probably had a bunch of bend ones left over and they didn't know what to do with them because as we know and let me answer your question really quick. I have not noticed it get hot at all during setup. I was I've been paying very close attention to it because that was my first thought when I read that this was going to have the a 17 pro. I was like, oh boy, the thermals. It doesn't I haven't felt it got hot at all during setup indexing.
I did a little bit of raw photo editing part of the challenge. I did the challenge on there as well. Didn't notice it get hot at all. So that was really nice. I was I was really happy about that. And the a 17 pro is one of these weird chips because it was the first generation three nanometer chip and TSMC quickly moved away from that first generation one because of how hard it was to make and it just wasn't. It wasn't thermally efficient.
So they quickly moved away from that and went into the gen two three nanometer chip which is what is the M4 chip and the a 18 and a 18 pro. So I'm kind of surprised this didn't just get like the a 18 chip, but also I could see the Apple being like, well, we need to save all of those for the iPhone right now because of how close they're being released together. But yeah, I am a little surprised that it's the a 17 pro.
I saw Jason Snell say something on mass it on about he would be shocked if this thing goes another three or four years before being update, which is typically how often the iPad mini does get updated every three to four years because of how hard this chip is to make. So I kind of agree with him like I wouldn't be surprised if there is like a okay, we're going to keep making this until we get to a certain threshold of a 17 pros and then we'll update it to something else.
So that way those chips aren't being wasted. But you know, this is probably the first iPad mini that I could see being updated in two years and not three or four years. That'd be great. Honestly. Yeah. And I feel like the 17 pros probably enough performance for the iPad mini. I agree. The iPad mini is not an iPad you're going to be doing like a heavy creative workflow on or something like that.
Like normally when I do iPad reviews, I switch my whole workflow over to that iPad for that review period. Well, that's not something I'm going to do with the iPad mini for a lot of different reasons. It doesn't have stage manager. It doesn't have external monitor support. So the iPad mini you I have to review it in a very different way than I would review any other iPad.
I can't move my workflow over to it, but I did do a bit of photo editing and stuff like that in the light room and it handled it just fine. Even like using like the AI removal tools and stuff like that, it handled it just like the iPhone 15 Pro did. So despite the fact that's missing a GPU core, the lack of stage manager is a good thing. Right? Yeah. I don't I saw somebody from nine to five Mac posts something about the iPad mini need stage manager and I completely disagree.
The screen is not big enough for that. Stage manager works best when you have a keyboard attached to an iPad. That's that's when stage manager is at its best because you can use a trackpad and mouse and stuff to move windows around and keyboard shortcuts and things like that. But I do not think the iPad mini needs stage manager at all. And I am somebody that uses stage manager all day long on my iPad Pro. So yeah. Although it means that you can't use it with an external display fully.
Yeah. So that's an issue. So external display support for the iPad is still limited to the M series chips. So you have to have. Yeah. So the older like the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pros got support for stage manager, but they didn't get support for external monitor support. Oh, I know. In order to be able to plug your iPad into a monitor and not have it mirror to extend and not mirror, it has to be an M series chip inside of it.
So, um, but to be fair, I have been having so many issues with external monitor support lately, it has been so buggy and so slow. Uh, yeah, it's like this whole thing. I need to do, I need to make a video or something about it because it is, it has been really bad lately. I thought it was just like an iPad OS 18 beta thing and then 18 shipped and now 18.1s about the ship and it's still the same way. So it hasn't been great.
But uh, jump back to the iPad mini, uh, because it got the A 17 Pro, uh, it also got a couple of other additions, uh, mostly, uh, the big one being Wi-Fi 6E because it's all system on chip stuff. So it's got Wi-Fi 6E and it got Bluetooth 5.3. Uh, the Wi-Fi 6E is actually kind of nice. So one thing I've been doing lately is I set up my PS5, but it is just plugged into power and ethernet. It is not plugged into a TV.
I have been using mirror play and if you go back quite a few episodes, you'll remember I brought up the subject of my new Wi-Fi 7 router system. Uh, so I have been using that, uh, previously with my iPhone and the backbone controller to just play PS5 games on and there is zero lag. I'm getting 1080p 60 frames per second performance. The PlayStation is plugged directly into the router. My iPhone was connected is connected, which the iPhone 16 line has Wi-Fi 7 is connected to the 6Ghz band.
Now for the iPad mini because it got Wi-Fi 6E, 6E is what enables support for the 6Ghz band. So I have been doing the same thing with the Razer Keishi Ultra controller. I'm turning into John Voorhees. I'm buying all the controllers. Um, seriously, I have a drawer in my closet. That's just full of different video game controllers, but I needed something that supported the iPad mini and I actually didn't have one that supported the iPad mini. So I got the real one. You need Chris. Nothing else.
I'm just saying, oh, the Stadia one. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm describing for audio. Sorry, I had clicked away so I could see my notes so I didn't see you holding it up. Oh, okay. You'll take my face. I see. No, I'm just on an iPad and I can't see it with that. But no, what I really, what I like for like iPads and iPhones are that switch style controller where you have the controllers on the side of the display. I love that. The backbone controller feels really good.
The Razer key sheet ultra feels really good. Uh, I forgot to grab it. It's in my bedroom. Um, but yeah, that, that's been nice. So I've been using the app mirror play to stream PS5 games to the iPad mini and it works great. It is fantastic. Um, I'm really big into handhelds like our sister podcasts in PC. Uh, I'm really big into it because I don't live by myself. I don't get to control the, I, I can't monopolize what's on the TV all the time.
So well, yes, I would get a much better looking game if I took my PS5 and plugged it into my nice TV and played games that way. I can't always control what's on the TV. And this coming weekend, we have five people and like two cats staying with us. Like it is going to be, uh, it's, uh, yeah, you can, I'll let you be excited for that one. Um, it is going to be a nightmare. So the only way I'm going to ever be able to play video games this weekend is by doing this remote kind of play.
So it's really nice that the iPad mini now has six E or Wi-Fi 6E support. So I can do this kind of thing, have a decent screen and play games. That's good. Um, Wi-Fi 6E also means you can probably play like Nvidia GeForce now, Nvidia GeForce now, right? Yeah. Um, except they don't have a native app. So I've tried Nvidia GeForce now and the game pass, the Xbox game pass one. You have to go through and you have to create a PWA for them. And especially the Xbox Xbox one is not optimized.
It is not very good. Like you really need the like the native app. Um, the Nvidia one was fine. It just wasn't, it wasn't as great. I definitely get better performance using MirrorPlay and my PS5 on my local network. But you are right. That is your only option. It will technically work, but I just get better performance by using stuff locally on my network. But there is something we need to discuss. And I have a feeling newly on is going to have a lot of opinions on that. And it is the colors.
So I have here the iPad mini. I have the blue one right here is the denim smart folio case, which actually looks really good. I actually like the smart folio case. In fact, the smart, since the iPad mini didn't get redesigned, the smart folio cases from the old iPad minis work on the new one and vice versa. So my orange one that I think newly on would approve actually does work on the new iPad mini. But this right here is the iPad mini in blue.
Now if you're watching the video feed, I have it here. That's great. Uh, yeah. Looking at it in person, it is gray with like a sprinkle of blue. Like it is, this blue is not going to show up on video at all. I don't know what it is with the iPad design team and them using the saturation slider. Uh, I know it's a little more complicated than that, but iPads have never iPads that come in like colors have never really been bright and vibrant.
Like the iPhone 16 line, like you give me that blue iPhone 16 and an iPad and I, I don't I, here's all my money. Like here, here it is. Apple, there it is right there for you. Just take it. Give me it. Uh, but yeah, the colors again, this year are really disappointing. Uh, and I think they're even worse than the iPad minis last year. If you give me one second, I'll grab my old iPad mini.
Okay. Well, because the old iPad minis were pretty, I mean, they weren't like super saturated, but they were okay. Like I had the purple one. And it was, it was definitely, you could definitely tell it was purple. Yeah. The baseline iPads right now actually do have a decent amount of saturation, I think. I mean, why is it as a pink one and it's, it's very pink. Yeah. So, um, this was the orange smartphone they'll cover. I feel nearly I'm going to prove of this.
Maybe not stickers, but, uh, the orange smartphone. It looks pink right now, but I believe you're interesting. Interesting. Okay. It's definitely orange. It's definitely not the compression is doing things. Like this is the old iPad mini and this is the one, this one came in Starlight. This is the only device I've ever bought in Starlight. I just wanted to mix things up and I, the space gray of this iPad mini was not very good.
Um, it, it, it honestly, like you can tell it's Starlight in person, but it's not, it's still a little grayish to me. Uh, I just, I just want, I just want an iPad in colors, specifically an iPad pro. For me and iPad pro in the, um, midnight MacBook Air color, that, that would make me, I, I'd be the happiest boy on the planet. Yeah. Get on a double. Yeah. So I just see this concept by basic Apple guy. Um, at one point, he made a concept of the, he, what do you say that? He rebuffed. I don't know.
He reimagined. Reimagined. Yes. He reimagined the MacBook, the, the one that was just called the MacBook. Um, very lightweight 11-inch display, uh, MacBook that came out, it was still, still back in the Intel days. He reimagined it. Uh, if it came out today with a name one, uh, or later chip and he put the iMac colors on it. And it looked wonderful. I want these colors. Yeah. I wish Apple would do more with the six colors like the, the, or not the six, well, the, the Apple iMac colors.
I, I started getting them confused, but I wish Apple would do more with those. I, you know, even if it was just like the base iPad line in those, that would be amazing. Um, but yeah, I, I, but I, I wanted to talk a little bit about the form factor of the iPad mini. Um, I think it, it lends itself to being really good at a handful of things.
Like this is probably the most specialty device Apple makes because it, the iPad mini is not a device people are going to use as their main computer, like an iPad pro or even an iPhone. There are plenty of people out there that use like an iPhone, pro, Macs or whatever as their main computer because they're traveling all the time.
I've seen people like with their like little Bluetooth keyboards that fold out and stuff like that and they'll answer email and stuff like that, but the iPad mini to me is, is, is, I, I have this theory and I've talked about it before and it's literally the opening to my review is that the iPad mini is everyone's second favorite Apple product. Uh, or at least everyone that has it's second favorite Apple product because it's really, it's a really niche device.
Like if you want an iPad that's going to be great for reading a book, the iPad mini is that it's lightweight, you can hold it in one hand. The, here it just might shock some people. The 13 inch iPad pro, not so great for reading a book in portrait mode. Oh, it's just not. It's really not. I've tried it. I've tried it several times and I used to do that. Yeah, it's, it's too big. So like if I'm going to read that read a book or something, I'm going to grab the iPad mini.
If something like Marvel unlimited, uh, the, uh, the ability to just show a single comic panel at a time works really well on the iPad mini. It's too small to display a whole page at once at least for me. Uh, so you can do like a single comic panel and like swipe through them. Uh, it's great for going through RSS feeds and, you know, you read it later stuff and playing a few games and stuff like that. It's, it's just a really specialty device.
So it's, it's kind of one of those things that's like, you know, you know, you know, you need it. You'll, you'll know if you need it, but most people probably don't. Yeah. I would agree with that. It's a nice second iPad to have. But if you want an iPad for, I feel like a lot of people would like a larger iPad.
Yeah. I, I think that the, the 11 inch iPad pro or the iPad air, the, the, the, I guess they call it the 11 inch iPad air now too, because there's the 13 inch iPad air, which anadote I have never seen anyone in the wild ever use a 13 inch iPad air. I pay so I, I'm one of those creeper people that always looks whenever I see somebody working from an iPad in public, I always check to see which one they're using. I have never seen anyone use a 13 inch iPad air. I see iPad pros all the time.
I see 11 inch iPad pros or 11 inch iPad airs all the time. I've seen base iPads, but I have never seen a 13 inch iPad air in the wild. I forgot that it existed even. Yeah, me too. Uh, yeah, I, I actually have a review unit of one that I've never taken out of the box because they released that and the M4 iPad pros at the same time. And I knew what the people wanted from me. So I, I should probably do something with it at some point, but I just, I never had the time to do it.
But yeah, so that, that's how my general use that is that is that a type of pro. That means all of us are going to have to do it. Okay. Well, Apple, you have my address. But yeah, that's kind of my thoughts on the iPad air. I'm going to have more to say on it in my review, which will either be out at the same time of this episode because I was able to edit this episode and get it out early or it's already been out for a few days in this episode, got released on Thursday. Like it normally did.
We will see. We will see. Yeah, well, and now the audience because I'll probably leave this in. Any questions on the iPad mini before we move on? Thumbs up or thumbs down on the update. No nuance. Is it a good update or a bad update? Bad update. I think, look, here's the hot take. The iPad mini gets updated every three to four years. And really the only thing that got changed is the chip and jelly scrolling. So what? What could they have added to make you happy with it?
How could they get that thumbs up? Oh, look, I totally understand an OLED iPad mini is probably too much to ask for right now because that would that would jack up the price. But there has to be either mini LED or something. There has to be a better screen technology than the IPS LCD panel with the LED backlight lighting. Like, there has to be better, a better display tech out there.
But just anything like I, one thing I like just like if you're going to do an update like this, have something new, have something that that makes the device compelling because like there is nothing. I was sitting there, I was sitting around the other day just thinking about this iPad mini and how I was going to review it. And I was like, okay, what's the big headlining feature? What's the big new thing that make is unique to this iPad mini?
There's no redesign, there's no new, like the chip isn't new to it. In fact, it's a worst trip that's in the iPhone 15 Pro because technically, you know, technically it's a Ben chip. The screen is the same. Yeah, okay. Like it is nice that like small things like Wi-Fi 6E, a better based storage. The Apple Pencil lineup got cleaned up, which is really nice. Matt, you wrote a really good article about that.
I thought we all kind of knew that this was going to happen as like the iPad mini and the base iPad got updated, but it seemed like it surprised a lot of people that, oh, the Apple Pencil 2 is no longer supported. Like, I thought that was kind of an obvious one, but I guess not. But the Apple Pencil lineup got cleaned up. So you're forgetting one. Oh, yes. Okay, the big headlining feature is Apple Intelligence, but you want to know a secret. It ships with 18.0. I know.
As I put many ships with 18.0. It does not have 18.1 in it. So everyone that's going to open it up next Wednesday, you're not going to have Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence isn't coming next week or this week. Whatever week it is, it's such a weird rule out. Anyway, we don't need to get into that totally, but yeah, another product that comes out where like Apple Intelligence is the headline feature and it's not even there.
When you look at the comparison sheet on the website on Apple.com, it's like the only thing you notice is just that a new one has Apple Intelligence. 100%. And this, oh, this iPad mini does have 8 gigs of RAM. That's the other thing too. I will confirm it does have 8 gigs of RAM. But yeah, that's the iPad mini. Any other questions on it? No. All righty. Well, Matt, what do you got for us this week?
You put something in the show document and actually both of you have put stuff in the show document that made me raise my eyebrow and go like, okay, let's see what is going on here. I want to highlight that in the show notes, you've put an emoji and on my end, it's italicized and it looks really, really funny. Perfect. Perfect. Awesome. Awesome. I love when apps don't actually do italic text. They just skew. Yeah. No, that's what you got to give away. Yeah. So I didn't bring a product.
I brought more of a concept to the show this week. And interestingly, Chris, what you talked about is relevant here because I for 20 years have been using RSS to follow the news, follow tech news primarily, but also like media and politics and other things. But like, I get a constant stream of tech news in my RSS reader. Like for many years, I built up my subscriptions and I probably get 300 posts in my RSS reader every day. And that gives people, that makes people like shaky.
Like they're like, oh my god, how do you do that? How do you handle that? That's like, that's normal for me. That's about what I get to. Okay. Okay. And but what this has done for me over the years, again, for like over a decade, at least, I just have a constant stream of tech news coming into my life. And I am on top of everything right away. I know when it happens and I do this by following a bunch of blogs, but I also follow like the verge, which posts like 30 things a day.
I follow tech meme. I follow ours. I follow all these sites that post a lot and I get just a ton of stuff. And it's just kind of like always washing over me. Like this constant wave of stuff hitting me. And I decided like a month ago, maybe I should stop that and see what that life is like that way. So I unsubscribed from all of the, what I called firehose accounts, which just like have tons of posts every single day. Now I just follow like individual blogs and some enthusiast sites.
And I'm down to like 40 posts in my RSS reader a day. And it's very different. And I feel like a different person. So typically I would have, when that iPad mini was announced last week, I would have gotten a, I would have seen like four or five posts in a row from like nine to five Mac from Mac rumors from the verge from all these places that would say like new iPad out. And here's all the specs.
I didn't hear about it for another couple hours when I randomly logged on to social media and saw a few people. I think Chris actually saw your post as the first one that was like iPad mini's here. And that was just weird for me. So yeah, I don't know. It was just a weird, I'm getting these things recently where I'm like, what if I change how I've done things for a long time and see if I'm still doing the right thing. And I don't know if this is better or worse.
I feel more normal like a normal person now, where I don't know everything. I have to like hear from other people sometimes. That's something that's happened. Interestingly I've stopped using RSS completely for the past month. Yeah. Well, you've gone too far. The main reason was that the new reader came out. Because the new reader doesn't have red counts and red counts and stuff like that. And it just syncs your timeline. There's no concepts of keeping up with what you have subscribed to.
I've tried going only on that approach. And what I realized is that in the end, I just never open a reader anymore. I just went to websites directly just to check up on them on my favorite websites and blogs and stuff like that. And at some point I just stopped using it all together. And it feels good. I think I like it because yeah, the older reader, I always struggle. Old with it. And I mean, any RSS client, the habit of checking with RSS feeds. I was struggling with it.
And just like you, I had a few hundreds of subscriptions in there. So I think it's good. I think I like it now. I like it that I don't have to check. And in the box of RSS feeds and I just go to the browser, check up on my favorite websites and readings and mastodon works really well to keep up with people. I like it. Yeah. So I'm kind of in a similar boat as you. I've been really rethinking because of the new reader up there. I feel like reader caused everyone to read out their news.
Interesting. Interesting. I tried so hard. I tried so hard and got so far. Sorry, I couldn't help it. Yeah. No, I tried so hard to make the new reader work. And I tried everything of just following RSS posts, doing RSS mastodon YouTube podcast. I tried all the combinations and I just don't care for it because it doesn't have support for RSS syncing services. So I use feed bin for all the R for syncing all my RSS.
But also feed bin gives you an email address and I use that for all my newsletters as well. Because as I've discussed on this podcast a few times now, I get a lot of email. I don't want to add more to my inbox. I don't want to add newsletters to my inbox. That's not where I don't sit down to do email and read newsletters. That's just not like those two things should not go email and newsletters should not go together or email and blog posts or whatever you want to call it.
They should not go together. So because it doesn't have feed bin, I've been looking at a lot of other services. I've kind of settled on the lear right now. But honestly, if it wasn't for newsletters, I think I would abandon RSS together and just follow specific sites on mastodon. I did that for a while with Twitter is I just I stopped using RSS for like a year or so and just followed all the websites I liked on Twitter and kind of saw things in real time and stuff like that.
But I just don't care for I don't know. I just have I feel like I have too many inboxes right now that I'm constantly having to check and stay up on. And my job is to cover technology. I need to know what's happening. So yeah, I don't know. I'm kind of the same boat, but Matt, where are you going with all this? So I still want to get the news like I still love technology. I still want to know what's going on. So I'm not like just not paying attention. I'm just going in different ways.
And so I the main way I've solved this is I have basically moved a bunch of those fire hose sites to a folder in my browser called news and I can just command click on it and it opens all those front pages in tabs and I can go through there and I'm browsing websites. Like it's 2002. It's great. But like it is there's an app specifically for like six or seven websites that you might have heard about. I heard about this. I've heard you're one of the six or seven websites. So I think so. You are.
But yeah, so like I'm just I'm like seeing the Verge's home screen and I really like the Verge's design and like this week they've been doing a whole series on looking back at things from 2004, which was one of my formative years of technology. And like they have like this custom UIs for every page where like they have an article about dig that looks like dig from 2004.
They've an article about Gmail being introduced, which I love that young people don't understand how unbelievably good Gmail was when it was new. We didn't understand. And you had to know somebody to get in. Yeah, the know somebody. And it was cool then it wasn't like it is now where it's like, oh, it's a waitlist great. Yeah, you had a Gmail address. You were one of the cool kids.
I bought I went I started college in fall of 2004 and I had a Gmail address and I bought my Mac book, which might be relevant for an ex-segment. The I had a Gmail address that I gave the person at the Apple store and they were like, ooh, it was a very. Very fancy. But anyway, we had like 10 megabytes of email storage and then one gigabyte. Jesus Christ. It was insane. You had to delete your emails. There was no archive. You would delete your emails once you had them. It was crazy.
Anyway, this ending was president too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were just coming out of the great war. It was a different time. But so I'm using those and I'm browsing the web and I'm enjoying that. And I'm also I subscribed to a couple of newsletters. I subscribed to Casey Neeson's platformer. I subscribed to Oliver Darcy, I think his name is. I haven't known him as long but his status newsletter which is more media and news stuff. And they put a bunch of links.
I used to always skip over those because I was like, I know all this already. But now I'm like using those links, like cool links of the day section because I don't actually know what's all happened. I'm listening to podcasts. I listened to Connected and learned new things about Apple news. And I was like, I usually come into these conversations knowing everything and just, oh, that's true. So yeah, that was a weird one. I wasn't used to that one.
The trade off I think is that when it was all just like a stream of like headlines and articles that all looked the same and felt the same, I was prioritizing what was important. But now since I'm going to like home pages and stuff, I'm letting other people curate like what's the important stuff to see which I don't love on the whole but it does kind of help me focus a little bit.
And this all comes back to a blog post from Sean Blanc from like 10 years ago where he called Margin where he basically talked about how if you have Margin in your life in different areas of your life, that's what makes you happy. That's that that can help just make you feel more comfortable, more fulfilled. Like you don't need a million dollars, but you need a little margin in your budget so you can make unexpected expenses so you can treat yourself every now and again.
You can buy those new Sonos speakers, whatever, you know what I mean? And then have them updated right after you bought them. Yes. But like I think for like news consumption and like my brain, just having space to think about things and not just be like in the title wave of constant news happening, I am wondering longer term if I'll feel better and have like more time to think about things or if I'll go back to just subscribing to everything and kind of like deciding for myself and everything.
So I don't know. We'll see how it goes, but it was a big change for me. It felt like a big change because like I said, I've been doing this for like 20 years. I've like the RSS list that I have today started in Google reader forever ago. And I've just been migrating it over the years and adding to it. So yeah, that's really it. Mostly vibes feelings, feelings. Sorry. I love you too. Chris mentioned feedback, which is also the service that I used. And I forgot to mention it. It's a funny thing.
That's why I want to mention it. One of the reasons why I stopped using RSS is because I made a mistake. So when last month, I wanted to just try and stop using RSS altogether. And my feedback annual renewal came up. So I thought, okay, I won't renew it because I will try living without it. What I did not realize is that if you don't renew your feedback subscription, everything's gone. You lose everything. Oh no. Yeah. Your account is gone. That's a little dramatic on there.
Yeah. Maybe I did something wrong. I don't know. Maybe I missed something. I missed an export somewhere, an export button somewhere before unsubscribe. But I do know they have an OPML export because I exported mine to put into reader to when I was giving the new version of reader a shot. So I do know they have an OPML export. Yeah. I know they do. But for some reason, I just thought I was going to be able to export after the fact that I was going to go into a read-only mode or something.
Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Good tip. Anyway, I thought myself to stop using feedback. Yeah. That'll do it. That'll do it. I like this map. Yeah. It's definitely, I was on clockwise this week. And my topic was basically asking the other host how they got their news and how they organized all their stuff because I feel like I'm in the middle of a renaissance. I haven't settled on what I'm going to do.
I definitely want to clean up my feeds a bit more because when something happens in tech, I get four or five of the very same articles from different sites and stuff. And I'm like, I don't need all this. I don't need five articles telling me there's a new iPad mini or the Kindles came out or something like that. So, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, Neumann, what do you have for us this week? All right. I wanted to try something new because it is the concept of this show after all.
I thought that we don't know each of us that well. And the dating questions at the end of the show, they're not great. I know you're doing your best. Ouch. So I thought I should inaugurate today a new segment that will maybe come back. We'll see. And that's called our tech stories. Episode one. So today on the first episode of tech stories, I want us to just talk about our first computer we've ever had. Nice. Okay. And let's try not to ramble. Just keep it to the, just out your first computer.
And maybe next time we'll discover something else about ourselves. Okay. Just our first computer, not our first Apple computer, just our first computer. Yeah. What was your first computer? Is there like a story about it around it? Just anything you want to say about your first computer? I can start because I again, we're going to have to go back to the Truman era, the Truman administration. But my family got our first computer in 1995. It was January. He was right. Right after Christmas.
Excellent. I was minus one year old. Oh, Jesus Christ. And my dad saw an infomercial on TV for an Apple Performa Something or other. I don't, to this day, I don't really know what it was about that pitch, but he was just like, son get in the car, we're buying a computer. He just went from, we don't really need a home computer to, this is the one, with this Apple infomercial. And we went to Sears, which is a, used to be a big tech, I guess technology, gadgetie store. Maybe everything store.
It was kind of an everything store. Yeah. We went there to buy it. And I don't know how much it cost. It was probably a lot in retrospect. Apparently that was the lowest of the low points for Apple computers. They were as bad as they were ever were is the impression I get. But it was incredible to us. And yeah, we mostly used it to play monopoly. And to use claris works, which was a real problem for school stuff because we used word at school. And I loved that thing. It was so great.
It had a floppy disk drive. It had a CD drive. It was gray as can be. It was lovely. Beige, was it beige? It was beige. Yes, it wasn't gray. But beige is nice. Yeah, I don't really know. It was a nice computer. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Okay. But my, our first computer back in 1995, that's wild. That was the same year. Solid year, different, different story. My dad had bought a computer at a yard sale.
And his intentions were actually to open it up and melt all the gold out of it because computers, they have quite a bit of gold in it because it's really good. Yeah, it's very, it's a good, it's a good, um, it was a different time. It was a different time. You wouldn't understand the early 90. It was a 90. Yeah, it was, you milked the gold out of it and you take the gold and you go to a gold cash for gold place and you make some money. So he bought a yard sale. It wasn't working.
But he opened it up and he was like, this doesn't look too difficult. So I remember hanging out with him and watching him fix it. And I want to say the issue was the RAM. And I think this, this is where my memory gets a little fuzzy because I might be mixing this up with another computer. So if I, if details of this are wrong, don't hold me accountable. I'm sorry, I was, I was five years old when, when this happened. We called it a fact check.
So I think, yeah, well, what I'm about to say could be fact checked, but I, I, so I could be mixing this up with another computer. But this is what, how I remember it is that we went to CompUSA, which was a computer store. And, uh, we bought one megabyte of RAM, one megabyte. And we put that in. And we reinstalled Windows 95. And, uh, yeah, got it up and running. Uh, remember, we play, we mostly used it to play games. Uh, mech warrior was the big first one that I can remember. Uh, that was fun.
But yeah, no, that, that was our first computer. And then, uh, my dad started working in an IT and, uh, we built custom computers from there. So I only had custom computers until I got my first Mac. Oh, that, that's not a show off thing. That was a, hey, I just took parts off of a shelf and just put them together kind of thing. It's not show off. Yeah. But I'm not trying to be one of those nerds like, I only use custom built PC's. But yeah. Yeah. That's, that was our first computer. All right.
Uh, my story is, uh, so the date was, I believe, um, I'm not sure. So around 2008, 2009, something like that. I was, uh, wait, math. Okay. Raycast 2008 minus 1996. So I was 12, around 12 years old. And, um, I inherited my, the computer, um, my dad's computer. And that computer was quite something because already back then, so I, at 12 years old, in 2009 or eight, I don't remember, I already told myself, whoa, this looks old. Like I already thought this to myself.
Um, and that computer, he, my dad worked in the French, uh, the French Marine, I guess. What, what's that called? The, the, the army on the ocean, something like the Navy, the Navy. Okay. Not marine. Um, in, in French, it's a, a marine. So that's why, um, fancy. And, yeah. And that computer on the, uh, was on his boat. Um, and he took it with him on year long trips around the world, uh, on the oceans.
And I remember something very specific about this computer the first time I turned it on by myself. Um, was the high score in the pinball game included with Windows XP. And that high score, I don't remember what it was, but it was huge. Like immensely huge. And I asked my dad, wow. He said, how come you're a pro player at pinball on Windows XP?
And he told me that, yeah, he spent years, um, year long trips playing pinball on this machine on your ocean with no, uh, no connection, of course, back at, uh, at the time, uh, you couldn't get any internet or anything on your ocean, right? Yeah, even via satellite or anything. So no connectivity, just this computer and he did nothing on it but play pinball. And he even admitted to me in one day that, yeah, that computer was useless on the boat. He didn't have to take it.
He only took it for pinball. Um, so that's not bad. I love it. Yeah. Uh, so the computer, I don't remember what it was. It's just a beige random PC, uh, with a huge, uh, a huge old school monitor. Like with the election, uh, can see, see, see, see, see, see, yeah, yeah, uh, an old CRT and that CRT stayed with me, even though I got a new computer afterwards, a new computer afterwards, I kept that CRT because my parents wouldn't get me a new monitor.
So I kept that CRT for years, even though like they were all that's heck. Nobody had CRT already. Um, so I kept that computer at that monitor for years for years, uh, but I played my favorite game of all times on it. That was simcity 3000 and then simcity four, uh, on that CRT. So it served me well. I don't know where it is today, uh, uh, RAP, uh, that's the story of my first computer. A computer that traveled around the world and got the highest call in the world on pinball. That's awesome.
That's really cool. Yeah. That's really cool. Nice. So I like this. This was a good topic. Yeah. I think we should do this again. Um, every so often, I don't know about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I completely agree. I think this is a great way for us to get to know each other, but also our audience to get to know us. So plus we can flex our nerd cred. Uh, exactly. All right. So the challenge this week, Matt, it was your challenge. What do you have us do?
Uh, so mine was just pretty fun. Uh, find a game that you can play for free, uh, on the app store and bring it to the show. That's a nice. Neelion. What do you have for us? Okay. So I've got a funny one. Um, and a bonus pick. So I will, I will talk to you about my bonus pick first, um, and keep the funny one for last. And my bonus pick is a game called Light Chess. If I don't know if that's how you could pronounce it, um, guessing, L.I. Chess.
Um, it's a website, actually, light chess.org, I believe. It's an online platform, multiplayer platform for playing chess with people online. You can play against the computer, but you can play against people and it's pretty, pretty popular, um, you can play ranked games. Uh, there are tournaments. Uh, and it's also a great, uh, a great, uh, place to learn to play chess, uh, difficult tutorials and guides and you can ramp up the difficulty against the computer to get better.
It's, I think it's pretty nice. And the design of it overall is very simple. It looks really, really clean. Uh, the chess board itself is in 2D and everything super fast, like it runs super fast, uh, even in an old browser. Uh, I would think, uh, just, uh, from the design, it looks like it could run in an old browser. It's very, but it does look nice. It looks very simple, but very nice.
And, uh, so light chess is available as an app on iOS, an A data, an A TV app on iOS, and it runs really well on iOS and it's completely free. So you can start playing chess by yourself or you can get matched with people online. So that's really nice. I think, uh, you should check it out if you like playing chess or just want to get started playing chess. chess, not chess. Um, so that's my bonus pick. My main pick. I like it because the name is okay. Okay. I'm looking at the screenshots for it.
And I'm very, uh, it's very upsetting. This is very upsetting. Yeah. So it's a pay what you want game. So you can download it for free and play for free and you can use it in purchases to, if you want to pay the developer, but you don't have to, uh, you can play for completely for free. And, uh, so this game is like, um, very straightforward puzzle game where you have, you have a tiny circle on screen and shapes. The circle, the small dot, is what you launch to bounce off the shapes.
And the idea here is that you have to clear the shapes off the canvas with a single launch. So you have to draw a line from the dot and just hit all the shapes with a single launch. And if you can get all the shapes with a single launch like this way, you win the level and you go onto the next one and it gets increasingly more difficult. And that's it. It's pretty simple. Uh, it's actually pretty fun.
So you're saying these fingers that are all over their promo screenshots are not part of the game. Those are your fingers. They're not, uh, they're not in the game. Those fingers. They can't write them off the screenshots because it's, I, I'm clicking away. I can't, I can't keep looking at it. Oh, my gosh. Very disturbing. I don't know why it's just making me upset. They're like the hot dog fingers. It's, uh, it's very scary.
The simple images with the long fingers is when God metan stole the game, actually. So that, okay, okay. We're two very different people. So the name, okay. And the long fingers, the awkward fingers, yeah, that got me to install the game. Oh, did they find out? How did you find this one? It was in the top charts, top, uh, pretty low down, actually. It's not a hugely popular. Uh, at least in, in the French top charts in the up store. Okay. That one's, that one surprised me.
I don't know what I was expecting, but I don't know. Yeah. The concept of the game sounds good, but the problem with images are making me very upset. Like I just can't stop by the problem. I need it. I need to, it's going to take me a minute to get past those. Just click get and install the game. It's fun. Okay. I'll try it out. So that's my pick. Okay. Chris, what do you got?
So I went the Apple Arcade route, mostly because I tried finding a proper free game that was fun to play and didn't have very scary promo images. I couldn't, I couldn't, it's a real struggle out there. There, there's not like free games on the app store are not really free. Uh, that was, that was the struggle for me. So Matt did say we could either go the Apple Arcade route or the Netflix game route.
So I went the Apple Arcade route and I'm going to start with the bonus pick first, like newly on. I, somebody had to bring it up. Bella outro. I don't even know if I'm saying it right, but it's, it's the game everyone's playing right now because it is the most addictive iPhone game I think I've ever, or most of, it's not just on the iPhone, but I've only ever played it on the iPhone, but it is the most addictive iPhone game I've ever played.
It's a poker like game mixed with a rogue like game where you're not really playing poker, but if you know the poker hands, it's helpful. Plus there's Joker cards and there's way to like upgrade your deck and it is incredibly satisfying, especially when you beat it. And I, I've had a hard time pulling myself away from it. I played a little bit on the new iPad mini. It's very difficult. I just going to say I fully endorse this pick. It's a hard game to describe to people. Yeah. I played it on PC.
I have about 30 hours. I was just checking my steam profile. I have about 30 hours logged on PC and I've probably done another like 10 or hours or so hours on the iPhone and I don't really know what it's about. Do not download it. I really want this is the ultimate ADHD trap. It is it is 100% the ultimate literally I have lost afternoons to this game like whole afternoons to this game. You're right. It's very good. It is very good. It is very addictive. But it is a very well thought out game.
It's like it's not poker, but it helps if you know poker. It's very hard to describe like I've heard other people describe it on podcasts and I'm like this doesn't sound that fun, but then I went and downloaded it and I was like I'll just give it a shot and I haven't been able to put it down. Like it's it's fantastic. Do you want to learn how to say Bellatro in the French way? Bellatro is that is that is it? The French way no. How so he said. Okay. Try to pronounce it otherwise I won't say it.
Okay. But I see I thought it was Bellatro. Okay. It's Bellatro. It's Bellatro. Bellatro. In my getting right. Bellatro. Say they are. Tro. Bellatro. See. Okay. I have a Bellatro. It sounds so easy when you do it. It's the best question I've ever asked on this trip. Yeah. I'm just going to keep calling Bellatro and I know that's wrong, but Bellatro. Bellatro. Bellatro. I am sorry. This game probably doesn't have anything to do with friends by the way.
I'm just asking this because I want I want it to hear you say this. Yeah. It took a fun fact. When I was in high school I had to take a Spanish class and the Spanish teacher actually wanted to fail me because I cannot roll my hours. Like I physically cannot roll my hours. I can't. I can't. So yeah. I've always had a. In fact, when I was younger I had to go into like a speech impediment class because I like I just I struggled with ours W's and L's. But yeah, that's that that was that.
But okay, my actual pick. Let's let's get this going. My actual pick vampire survivors. I know I am late to this game. Whole I've seen screenshots of it. I've seen other people play it. I didn't get it until I actually played it myself. Holy crap is this game amazing. Is this you? I don't know. I don't know. I don't think this has anything to do with Starcraft. But this is a row. This is another rogue like game where you literally all you're doing is just can moving your character around.
There's no attack button. There's no jump button. There's no button to pick up items or anything like that. All you are doing is controlling your character and it auto attacks all these vampires and bats and demons and goblins and ghouls and all these different things. It auto attacks. There's a bunch of different characters. There's a bunch of different weapons and upgrades and all these things that you can like it totally like ballot ballot, ballot tro. I'm not going to be able to say it.
I'm trying, but I'm just not going to be able to do it. But it's like that where like you're you're doing upgrades that can build that that you can bring over and you want to constantly just like you just keep going and going and going and like you're going to die because like any rogue like game you're going to die.
As you die you the player learn a little bit, but also like you can get up, up, up, up, unlock upgrades and things like that and make the game a little a little bit easier to beat and a little bit easier to beat and like there's different characters that have different abilities and stuff like that. It is so much fun. They're both on Apple Arcade. If you want to sink a bunch of time into mobile games that are actually like really good mobile games, these are it.
I believe both of these games were on like Steam first and then came to the iPhone later. But honestly these games make so much sense on the iPhone. Yeah. And Vampire Survivors is free off Apple Arcade as well. There's ads in it. Oh, nice. But yeah. And I have 43 hours and Vampire Survivors on Steam. So yes. Fully endorsed both of these. What's your starting weapon, Chris?
I actually like the start guy, the guy with the whip because once you upgrade that, you can up so you can keep upgrading your weapons and the first upgrade he does a front and back attack.
But you can keep upgrading it and like once you upgrade it's you basically like unlock like this legendary version of it and like he just whips it all the way around and it just creates like this like perhaps or it creates like the circle around like a whole circumference around your character where you can just like completely keep enemies away from you. Yep. I'm a garlic man myself, but oh interesting. It's pretty good. You can just stand there and bats come and they just die. It's great.
Wonderful game though. Nice. Nice. Nice. All right, Matt, what do you got for us? Okay. I brought two brand new games to me. My bonus pick which we'll start with is Zenless Zone Zero, which is an action RPG game, which is completely free and I think is from the same company or the same general group that does a Genshin impact. I know it's also very popular. It looks like that by the artwork. Oh yeah. It definitely looks like that kind of game.
So this, I wanted to mention this one because you can play it for free. I'm sure there's an app purchases at some point that they're going to try to get you to do, but you can play totally for free. And this game looks astounding. I know there's been a lot of excitement over the Resident Evil games and Assassin's Creed coming to our playable on iPhones. It's impressive those run, but they are bad versions of those games.
This game is so good looking and runs incredibly smoothly on an iPhone 16 Pro. It feels like a console game and not like a barely running console game, if you know what I mean, it's really, really cool. It's not exactly the game for me, but I wanted to mention it because I did try it as one of my attempts at this challenge and it is really cool. If you have a newer iPhone, if you can just crank up all the settings and it looks like a console game, it's cool.
The artwork for it is as the kids say, very thirsty. Yep, it might be. That's just all I got to say on it is very thirsty. Spice and up the podcast. My real pick is very weird by comparison. It's Gubbins, which is a word game where you kind of, oh, how do I describe it? It's kind of like Scrabble where you have a bunch of letters, but some of those letters are connected to each other. So you can't just play the S, you have to play the STE or whatever.
And you place these on a Scrabble-style board and eventually you form words and you slide to select the words and then you get points and you get more points for longer words. And this game is really addictive. It's really fricking weird. The vibes are very funky. And it's really fun. They have a daily mode, which is of course what I'm leaning towards. And every day I'm playing this board that you try to clear and it is really fun.
I know there's a lot of purchase this somewhere, but I haven't been prompted for anything and I've just been enjoying it for free. So yeah, Gubbins is pretty rad. The artwork for this is absolutely lovely. Like this is very, it is a, just, I'm just looking at the screenshots right now. I'll play it later. But this is a very, it's very whimsical. That's the word that comes to mind is it's just very whimsical. I'm installing it. Yeah, I'll play this later for sure. But those are my picks.
No, I won't pick. I won't pick. Nice. Well, we'll have to bring back democracy for this one. Yes, this one feels much better than voting for what's the best accessibility feature. Yeah, that came out of my mouth last week and I'm so glad Neelion caught me because I was like, yeah, as it was coming out of my mouth, I was like, yeah, no, that's, that's, that's horrible. Don't think that. That's horrible. Yeah, it was just, I think it was a force of habit kind of thing. But yeah.
So those are our picks. I like all these. Like these are all interesting. I think my long fingers will win. Yeah, speaking of thirsty picks, man. Oh, yeah, that's where I forgot about that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's thirsty right there. No, thank you. All right, we're going to move this along because I'm getting uncomfortable now. So it's my challenge this week. And I want you to try a new version of multitasking. I, yes.
So you are both mac people, but you're both Mac people. I, I'm going to say you, you guys have way more options for this than I do. That's going to say do you have any options? I do. I have, I have exactly two options. But for you Mac people, you can obviously install a bunch of different third party apps that change up how multitasking works.
You can enable stage manager or if you're using stage manager, you can disable stage manager or if you want and you know, this is where I'm going to go with it. If you want to work for your, from your iPad for the week and try stage manager or split view out, you can do that. Because I am a big 13 inch iPad pro person and I use my iPad pretty much in the keyboard case all the time.
I primarily just always work from stage manager, whether I am using the keyboard or just in tablet mode or if I plug it into my monitor, I'm pretty much always using stage managers. So for this week. And I think I'm going to put an asteristh on this unless I'm doing a video. But for this week, I am going to just use split view when I'm working at my computer from editing videos, writing, email, whatever. I'm just going to be using split view.
I'm going to go back, I mean, obviously I had used split view before, but since stage manager, since iOS iPad OS 17, I pretty much just been all in on stage manager because they fixed a lot of the big issues, but it's still really buggy. Now I would like to point out before you remind me how much you hate me for this one, I am giving up something really big here. I am giving up the ability to use external monitors because there is, you can't use split view on an iPad on an external monitor.
It's only stage manager. So for this week, I am giving up using an external monitor. So you guys go whatever route you want, if you want to just work from your iPad or if you want to try something new on your Mac and your app or split view or stage manager, I mean, go for it. No, I hate you. It's because for the past months, I've only done this.
I've only switched up my multitasking habits, left and right over and over again and I've tried so many things and I was finally settled and now I'm back into it because I was finally happy. Yeah. And just pull me back in. Well, I will apologize, but I think that will make for a good challenge. I will apologize, but yeah, I think this can be an interesting one. So I'm curious to hear what you guys bring.
But yes, for me, the obvious thing is I'm just going to spoil it now because I really only have one option. I'm going to disable stage manager and go on split view and I'm kind of curious how, because stage manager, well, we'll save it for next week, but yeah, that's the challenge. So to wrap up the show, we have a question. I've kind of stopped using the app because I agree with Neely on our dating questions at the end of the show. I've not been great. So I've been coming up with my own.
So I want to know from you all, what is the one tech device or one device, I guess I guess I, we could say that you wish Apple would make, but they don't. Oh, I've got one. Okay. Go for it. Make a router. Please make a router. I knew somebody was going to pick that. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. That is one of mine. I also wish they would make a printer. And most importantly, I wish they would make a mechanical keyboard. Oh, but Matt, their keyboards are mechanical.
If you ask them, I want the keyboard like their old Apple extended keyboards with touch ID and actual clicks and I would love to have it. That's you know, they won't make their own switches and you won't be able to customize it. Not if they want to sell in the European Union. Got to use Cherry MX compatible switches. Okay. Got to work with Android too. Okay. I don't know. We could do a whole hour on that, but we're not going to. I think for me, it's a game controller.
I actually think a big part of the reason Apple's gaming setup is being held back is they do not have a first party controller. They talked when the Apple TV got app support and stuff like that. They talked about, hey, here's all these great games and you compare third party controllers or use that terrible, terrible serial remote.
But honestly, I think a lot of Apple's issues with gaming would be solved if there is a first party controller people could walk into the Apple store, go to Apple.com and see, oh, hey, there's a controller and it supports all these devices and then buy it and developers would be a lot more likely to make bigger games that are controller required.
Like literally, that's one of the things about the app store that bugs me is that there should be a flag that developers can check that this game requires a controller. If you go to buy it, you get a little notification saying, hey, this game requires a controller. You've never paired a controller with this device before. Get a controller before buying this. But yeah, I think that would solve a lot of Apple's gaming issues. Yeah, that'd be great.
Maybe the controller could run iOS so that you could just connect it to a display. Oh, that would be interesting. Yeah, yeah. That could be really interesting. Interesting. I like that. That just about does it for this week. Thank you all so much for listening. Matt, Neelian, you have anything you want to promote? Say goodbye, whatever. Goodbye, whatever. Goodbye. And whatever. And a huge thank you to Max Stories. After Max Stories podcast, after all, and goodbye and whatever.