Hello and welcome to Connected episode 545. for March 26th, 2025. Sometimes we say the date, sometimes we don't. It's kind of confusing. My name is Stephen Hackett, and I'm joined by my friend and yours, our annual chairman, Mr. Federico Patigi. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Hello. Hi, Steven. How are you? I am good. You doing all right?
I am doing fantastic today. Good. I'm really, really happy to do the show with you. I'm bringing a fun topic that we'll talk about. Actually, two fun topics that we'll talk about later. So yeah, I'm good. Yeah, you got some great stuff in here. But we're going to start with follow-up because that's what you do at the beginning of a tech podcast in our universe. That's right. Talking about the rumor design of the next generation of iPhones with that camera bar across the top of the Pro phones.
Evan and many others, I'm giving Evan credit because Evan was first. Okay. Evan said, I've always assumed, but haven't heard podcasts mentioned, that the extra space will be filled for... filled with camera improvements. The telephoto lens in particular would benefit from a deeper area to run its Tetra Prism design across. I don't see Apple adding extra weight and dimension to the phone needlessly. And...
This does, this is me, not Evan. There is a rumor that the telephoto camera on the Pros will go to 48 megapickles up from the 12 that it is now, which would be awesome. And so maybe they need that extra space for like the 48 megapickle. I know I said it wrong, so I'm just staying with it now. That sensor will be physically bigger than the 12, I think.
And so maybe they've got to shift it over or maybe they want to have even further zoom. But in addition to the area, like it gives them depth, right? Like the depth of the phone is really what limits the cameras. That's why we have. the camera bumps to begin with and so maybe this gives them more space in there but i do agree with evan i don't think they would do this just as a
Like just as a design feature. Like if these phones come out and iFixit cracks it open on day two and there's like nothing in there or like there's no clear reason that that camera bar exists on the pro phones. I would be surprised. So, but help me understand something. So, are we thinking that the Tetra Prism design would, like, when Evan mentioned, runs across the area?
like are we saying that apple is going to extend that camera system like horizontally across the surface of the camera bump like is that the idea i think so i think so like a periscope lens huh
Well, that's something I was not thinking about. That's interesting. You can do that? Maybe. I think some of the other phones that have the periscope lens, it's more sort of... long and skinny the tetra prism that apple designed you know the light bounces around a few times and it may be that if they stretch that design out and it has fewer bounces or turns of the light maybe the quality is better
Maybe the layout just has to change if they go up in density on the sensor. But it's definitely interesting to consider what Apple could do with that extra volume in the phone. Hmm. Interesting. Well, I was not considering this option. Hmm. Okay. Yeah. And then we have to talk about the iPhone Mesa. I'm sorry. An anonymous... Anonymous listener wrote in and said, I worked on some Apple commercials a few years back.
At that time, Apple internally referred to the physical camera area of the phone as the, quote, camera plateau in discussing on how they wanted the product to appear. This name, of course, never appears in public-facing documentation, but it was their, quote, official name inside the company. So my question to you, Federico, Plateau or Mesa? Plateau, because more people understand it, because it's also the name of the Great Plateau in The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. So...
I think Mesa is just a name that, you know, people want to use because they think they sound fancy. You know, a lot of people in the Apple community have Apple marketing syndrome in which they think they work at Apple. Apple marketing and they can come up with nicknames because they have been imbued with the culture of Apple marketing. Plateau is a name that more people understand. And I think it's a more reasonable name. Okay.
I love the feedback. That's awesome. We got some follow out. That's where we tell you to go listen to other shows when you're done with this one. Episode 428. of app stories was a special one will you tell us about it yeah we had uh you know this this guy uh mark german i don't know if you've heard of him i have we're going to talk about him again in a minute The sheriff has been, you know, on AppStories. We talked to Mark about his Apple reporting career, how he got started.
You may not know that Mark actually started making dashboard widgets. That's really cool. When he was in high school. And then obviously, you know, when he started reporting rumors for 9to5Mac and the move to Bloomberg in 2016 and sort of like...
what the Apple rumor industry looks like today, you know, all those things. And I think it's been an interesting conversation with Mark, especially, you know, sort of talking to the person instead of... the byline that you see on Bloomberg necessarily, like actually getting to ask Mark, you know, how do you actually...
got your work done what is you know how do you make a decision as to whether you want to report on something that you heard or not and those were like uh i you know i asked mark hey what do you think of this new generation of leakers uh that you see these like it was a fun conversation and so yeah i'm really happy that that we were able to have that episode with mark yeah i thought it was great i really enjoyed uh really enjoyed the interview
I think what was most interesting to me is that he writes in the CMS. Like, Mark, don't do that. That's a terrible idea. Like, don't write in the CMS. I was also surprised that he's been at Bloomberg for nine years. That feels new to me. You know? I know, right? It feels like, I don't know, three years, but no, it's... Yeah. But no, it was great. We're going to talk about some more German stuff in a second, but congratulations on the interview. You got a great job with it.
I was on upgrade episode 556 that came out on Monday. Mike, of course, is still on paternity leave. And so Jason has had. people filling in. I got to say, I love being on Upgrade. Jason and I don't get to talk about tech very often in public. We talk about it privately.
And Upgrades is such a great show. And so we talked about a bunch of stuff. He's been on a bit of a journey with some TV streaming stuff. We talked about that. We talked about some rumors and some legal stuff. It was a lot of fun. So upgrade 556 and AppStories 428 both get the seal of approval this week. Yeah, thank you.
This episode of Connected is made possible by Ecamm Live, the leading video production and live streaming studio built for the Mac. Ecamm is great at simplifying your workflow because you can do it all in the Ecamm app. Get started quickly and have everything on hand to create whatever you need to with video. It's great for streaming, recording, podcasting, and presenting. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need high quality video and Ecamm delivers.
With Ecamm, you can screen share, use multiple cameras, and direct the show in real time with their live camera switcher. Plus, you can add logos, titles, lower thirds, and graphics. Drop in video clips. bring on interview guests, use a green screen and so much more. Ecamm Live truly does it all. My favorite feature is that the UI makes it easy to manage all of these things.
Doing video stuff can be really complicated when you have a bunch of sources and Ecamm has thought about it. They've made it easy to use for a Mac user because it is built as a native Mac application, which I love, of course. Ecamm's members are entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, podcasters, educators, musicians, church leaders, bloggers, and content creators of all kinds. And if you're on the pro-level plan, you can enjoy Ecamm for Zoom.
Get this, you can automatically send Ecamm Live's audio and video output into a Zoom meeting, webinar, or event, and add up to eight Zoom participants as camera sources in your broadcast or recording. Plus, you can automatically create individual participant audio and video recordings and add Zoom chat messages to your broadcast or recording as text overlays.
Get one month free by visiting ecamm.com slash connected and use the code connected. That's one month free of Ecamm Live at Ecamm, E-C-A-M-M. Ecamm. dot com slash connected with the code connected at checkout. Go there now and check it out. Our thanks to EGAM for the support of the show and all of Relay. It is the end of March, and that means WWDC dates are here. Apple Newsroom yesterday announced that WWDC 25.
will be the week of June 9th. So the second full week of June running through the 13th. And it is going to follow the template set kind of in this post-COVID era, right? So the keynote. And a few specific things on campus for a small number of people, but the rest of the conference will be online. There was some talk. I don't think we got to it on the show. It was like one of those things that was like in my notes and just never made it. But a feeling of like.
If Apple was going to return to the in-person conference, like this year may be a really good year for it, like vibe wise, like to kind of bolster the community. They did not take advantage of that, but it's going to be the way it's been. And don't get me wrong, there are lots of positives, I think, to the current... sort of version of wbc the main one being is it's accessible to everyone and the contents out there basically immediately for everybody right they drop a bunch of
videos at a set time each morning. And then if you're a developer, I think they've used Slack in the past for like one-on-ones and you can meet with Apple experts. So, so yeah, June 9th through 13th, we're going to talk in a minute about some of the things we expect to be there, but of course we'll be doing our Ricky's episode on June 4th. So be sure to take off work and preparation for that. Prepare yourselves.
for the rickies but uh the the question for me is what are our plans um are you are you gonna go I don't know. I don't know because like, I would love to go and see people, right? See people like you or John or developers or folks that I know at Apple. Honestly, my main issue right now is the idea of traveling to the United States as a European. Yeah, it's complicated. And the idea of potentially someone at the border.
looking at my social media history and determining we think this guy is not a friend of the US government and potentially something happening to me because of that Like, it doesn't sound great, you know? I totally get it. I don't want to be arrested for doing nothing. My tweets! You know, it goes without saying.
Like, I love traveling to the United States. I love what I've seen in the United States. I have my closest friend, my business partner, they're all in the United States. We run an American company. We pay taxes in America. And yet here we are. It doesn't sound like a great prospect right now to just say blindly, yeah, I'm going to America. Yeah. You know, sight unseen. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.
No, I totally get it. And if you are part of the population that our current government doesn't like. It's genuinely scary. So I totally get that. I've had that conversation with several people that don't feel comfortable coming in right now. For me, I'm already here, and my plan is to go if I have a press invitation, which I had for years. I did not get one last year, which was disappointing.
Um, so I have a refundable hotel room, but no flights. And if a, if a Apple PR smiles upon me, my plan is to be there, but if not, I will cover it from home. And that's, uh, that's the plan. And Mike's busy. Mike's got a baby. He's not going. But that all said, it's kind of dumb to read too much into Apple invite art, but let's do it. I think we should do it. Yes, we are dumb. Yes, okay. We can just say it. So you look at the WWDC 2025 logo, right? There is a colorful element.
Right. And there is a 25, the number two and the number five, with a sort of frosted glass. light appearance going on basically almost looks and it's got a bit of depth it's got a bit of shadows it looks like the light mode equivalent of the vision of SUI. And I'll give you one more, Stephen. I'll give you one more. If you zoom in on the WWDC 2025 logo and you zoom in on the numbers, okay? Those are actually...
Zoom in on the numbers. Those are actually 3D, okay? You see those are actually 3D objects. Yeah, there's like a lip on the left side. Yes, and pay especially close attention to the number two. It reflects the colors of the WWDC logo next to it. Yes, it does. Yeah, and you know what's the other operating system that sort of has windows that reflect and cast off light and shadows?
Wait, not Vista. No, absolutely correct. You got it. It's Windows Vista. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's dumb to try and predict where Apple is going design-wise by looking at a... logo for WWDC but then again but then again but then again why not it's right there it's right there I got a couple things to add I hate how they squished The two W's together. Like it doesn't even look like a letter. It's like three V's. V, V, V, D, C. You know. Let's go.
VV... Oh, wait, is VVV... That's like an... VVV is an old, like, Roman history thing from... Is there another thing that Caesar... said like veni vidi vinci which means i came i saw i conquer i think so yeah yeah so i came i saw i conquered The developer conference. Is that the message Apple wants to send to the community right now? I'm just asking. Also, we're just going to talk over it, but like my generator is running.
So if you can hear it, that's why we recorded late the other day. There's a guy here working on it. So I'm sorry. I can't do anything about that. The, yeah, the reflection stuff is super interesting. And I wouldn't normally read into it except that we have all these rumors that macOS and iOS is going to have some Vision OS sort of mixed into it.
And I think that's really interesting. And that brings us to the dueling rumors. There are few things I love more than covering Apple than having people who... report rumors disagree with each other it's just so much fun because you get to pick sides and you know see who's gonna win i love it yeah so let me walk you through the the timeline
Months ago, John Pross, remember him? He shaved his eyebrows when he was wrong about something. And I think he was the one who said there were going to be Steve Jobs limited edition vision glasses or something. Sorry, I think you mean Heritage Edition? Yes, I'm sorry. Yes. Yeah. That'll be in the show notes because we've got to be thorough. So Prosser for a while has said that this is going to be in the works and he had some mock-ups early on that honestly I liked the way they looked.
And he then on his podcast had some screenshots or like it looked like it was actually running on a phone, potentially kind of unclear of particularly the messages app. And there's sort of like this round racked around the keyboard. And the buttons have circles around them. So buttons look like buttons again. But honestly, when I saw it, I was like, that's honestly a little disappointing. Like, that's not...
Sort of the big sweeping change that Gurman said was going to be coming. And then Gurman comes out and was like, hey, those designs that are, quote, floating around. are very old builds or based on, like, descriptions someone heard and aren't really what Apple is going to do. And on his Discord, he said, he, referring to Prosser,
either has very old screenshots or hasn't seen the real thing. So, you know, shots fired. But I think you put all this together, like, I mean, I don't think you would lose points in the... and the rickies to say that hey there's gonna be a redesign coming yeah i mean that seems pretty pretty obvious at this point also german didn't exactly say like he didn't say, oh, those screenshots are completely wrong, right?
So, I mean, to me, this looks like a mock-up. And, you know, the video that Prosper did, like he was talking to his co-host, be like, hey, do you want to see a screenshot of iOS 90? Like, that's not a screenshot. I'm willing to bet that it's not like an actual screenshot. You can obviously tell that it's a mock-up. The quick type corrections above the keyboard say front page tech, which is the name of ProSearch channel. So it is a mock-up. It's not a screenshot.
shot. But Gurman is not saying, no, no, this is completely bonkers. This is totally wrong. It's not what it's going to look like. I think the next few months are going to be interesting. I want to see if Apple in 2025, especially when it comes to software, is a company that leaks more than before. Let's... Something that I want to keep an eye on. A company under pressure, like it or not. Do they have more people talking to external folks than in the past? We'll see.
I mean, do you remember back with iOS 7, like the photos icon leaked like right before? Maybe even by German. I'm trying to Google as I talk, but. I think we're going to see more of this before it's, before it's over. Yeah. Excuse me. It was I download blog. So Sonny Dixon had it. Okay. Got it. Huh. So I think we will probably see more of this before the time comes. But I'm excited about it. I mean, there's lots of things to kind of be anxious about right now in the Apple world. But...
assuming they don't blow it on the Mac in particular, like I like the way this looks. I think adding some depth and honestly making buttons look like buttons, like some of that could be really good on the iPhone and iPad in particular. So like, I'm excited. Yeah, yeah, me too. All right, Stephen, I have a couple of topics that are part of sort of me changing as a computer user.
Which is a broader thing that you will hear more and more on this show and on Mac Stories between now and before Mike comes back. This is going to be a thing. All right. And there's going to be multiple things. And today I'm bringing two of them. So the first one is that for the past month or so, I've been using a Mac mini server. This is not mine.
I don't own this computer. It's a Mac Mini server hosted at Mac Stadium. Used to be called Mac Mini Colo, now it's Mac Stadium. And I started using this Mac Mini server. It's a Mac Mini with the M4. M4, just plain M4. Just the bass, M4, okay. Yeah, it's a Mac Mini that I set up about a month ago and that I've been using for a variety of tasks.
most of them related to automation, different kinds of automation. And I kind of wanted to talk about some of these. The first one... which I think is obviously going to deserve a proper article on Mac Stories at some point in the near future, is I figured out a way to trigger shortcuts running on my Mac Mini. from android uh so i've been using this android tablet right uh that i mentioned on the show before i mentioned on app stories on npc
It's this sort of iPad mini, but it's an Android. It's made by Lenovo. It's the Lenovo Legion tab. Really, really good small tablet. But obviously, when I do my reading at night or I'm watching some YouTube videos, there's multiple times where... I'm like, I'm reading an article or I'm watching a video. I'm like, I actually want to save this for the newsletter or I want to save it for Mac Stories. And typically...
If I were to do this on my computer or if I were to do this on my iPhone, I would just run shortcuts, right? Because I have shortcuts that save those links or like even just if I have an idea, for example. I have shortcuts that do all this. take a link and do a bunch of things and save it in Obsidian, save it in Todoist. Like I have my shortcuts. I have hundreds of shortcuts, but I have my like 10 shortcuts that I use on a daily basis.
You know, if I'm using Android, it's like, okay, what am I doing now? Am I just, do I need to save them somewhere else? Because obviously there's no shortcuts on Android. But I figured out a system that involves Tasker. So Tasker is an Android application that is often mentioned as like, oh, this is much better and more powerful than shortcuts. Now, let me tell you, Stephen, I don't know if you've ever played around with Tasker.
Shortcuts users have no idea how good they have it until they play around with Tasker. With all due respect to Tasker, but it is the quintessential Android app in terms of user-friendly. and design and just how things are laid out and how you're supposed to set up. commands and workflows it's very confusing it's very powerful mind you it's very very powerful but it's also very confusing and you know regardless i figured out a system to
with just two actions, because I couldn't bring myself to do anything more complex than that in Tasker. It's basically like I'm sending off a web book. Like it's calling a URL. That URL is on a little server app that is running on my Mac Mini. And when the Mac Mini sees that webhook, it fires off a shortcut.
So that's the idea. So I have a system that is always there in the cloud that allows me to trigger shortcuts from Android. But the shortcuts themselves, they're obviously running in the shortcuts app on the Mac Mini. I have other use cases for the Mac Mini. I've been using a variety of large language model tasks on the Mini, mostly in the terminal. I've been using this really, really great command line utility by Simon Willison.
just called LLM. That's the name. It's a command line utility that you can install Bannerly, you can install it with Python, you can install it with Homebrew, and it basically gives you access to all the modern large language models. from the terminal. And I've been using it to run some experiments to transcribe videos as well as app stories episodes automatically.
So I've created a bunch of like commands to transcribe podcast files like mp3s, generate a transcript, and then take the transcript and fix some common errors. and turn that transcript into an SRT file that we can use on YouTube. That's basically part of me sort of trying to figure out... How much can I help John's production workflow when it comes to podcasting and YouTube creation? Just because, you know, I'm sort of the guy.
at Mac Stories in charge of coming up with automations and shortcuts for people, like not just for readers, but like internally for the Mac Stories team. And I figured maybe I can help John with this sort of stuff.
So that's obviously a terminal is not something that you get on an iPad. Right. And it's kind of perfect for the Mac mini because you can just fire off the command and then leave it running. It's not even running in the background. It's running in... las vegas you know it's it's it's running in another country uh yeah so that's in a data center which is just i mean it's cool right like it's
Yeah, yeah. It's cool. So how are you getting to the Mac Mini? Are you like remoting into the GUI to do this terminal stuff or what? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. And I want to recommend Jump Desktop. Jump Desktop is so much better than VNC, in my experience. It doesn't use the VNC protocol. It uses the RDP, Remote Desktop Protocol, which I think is a Microsoft thing. And Jump Desktop, you install a client, like a server on the Mac Mini, and then you use the client on the iPad or any other computer.
And the quality is just so much better. Like the image quality is so much better. The latency is... highly reduced compared to VNC and Jump Desktop in particular as the setting where it automatically uses retina quality and switches the the resolution of the host computer to match whatever display resolution you're using on your client. So if I'm accessing the Mac mini from an iPad, I get full screen iPad retina resolution.
For the Mac Mini, obviously the Mac Mini is headless, doesn't have a physical display attached to it. But Jump Desktop sort of takes care of all of that. So that's very nice. I've been using Cursor. to, as the kids say, vibe code, some internal things. I've created, like, I was actually doing some reorganization today. I've created about, like, 10.
sort of personal Obsidian plugins, just for me. I don't think I'm going to share this with people. And I've been creating these plugins, sort of just, you know. chatting with an LLM in cursor making the plugin and then like I've been sending these plugins to uh the one true son fin for like actual human manual review sure uh which is a process like
I don't know, makes me feel better about it. Yeah. But like, you know, it's the sort of thing where actually Matt Bertschler had a great take last night on his blog, like... how it sort of feels empowering to be able to do this like low stakes personal projects with these tools now. It's the sort of thing where like I couldn't hire.
Finn for 10 plugins in the span of a month because Finn has a day job. It does these things on the side. So it was either I'm not going to have these tools or I like to think of these things as like the modern equivalent and the more powerful equivalent of me spending a week copying and pasting random bits of code from Stack Overflow and Reddit.
It's essentially the same thing where these models have been trained on the Stack Overflow and Reddit and GitHub threads, but they do it for you. And so, yeah, I've been doing that. I've been sort of leaving the Mac mini running in the background with cursor. doing the coding. And then I go in and I build the plugin and yeah, I got a bunch of things in Obsidian that are just for me, like very specific Mac stories things. But it's been nice. It's been nice to do that.
And then I kind of wanted to mention the final item, which will lead me later in the other thing that I'm bringing to the show today. This is something that I'm going to share this Friday in Mac Stories Weekly. figured out a way to never worry about the shortcuts permission dialogues again never again so when i was triggering the shortcuts from android
Initially, I was happy, but that happiness lasted for about 30 seconds. Because what I didn't consider is that whenever you call a shortcut remotely... obviously shortcuts get scared and be like ah
do you want shortcuts to allow access to this URL? Do you want shortcuts to allow access to this file? What about this folder? Do you want to enable this shortcut to run another shortcut? It was like... a deluge of dialogues one after the other for imagine for every single url from an individual domain that i was sending from my android browser
to the Mac Mini, I was getting, for one shortcut, five permission dialogues for each URL. It was impossible. It was impossible. I would have to log in, like grab my iPad, open Jump Desktop, allow... five dialogues and then you know the next day i would be sending another web page it was like another five dialogues like this is impossible like it's incredible that shortcuts doesn't have a power user mode we're like
I know what I'm doing. Please never bother me again. But yet here we are. So I figured out a system like this week when I was putting together the next topic that we're going to talk about. I was like, I am done with this. I need to figure out a solution. And so, of course, I turned to good old friend GUI automation, graphical user interface scripting, to have a little bot, a little shortcut that is always running. In fact, it's running every 10 seconds and clicks the button for me. Oh, gosh.
Yes, yes. So I will have the backstory and all the details and the code on Mac Stories Weekly. But yeah, so... all of these permission dialogues no more because i have a little thing that is always running because mac os lets you build these these kinds of things that run every every 10 seconds that clicks the button for me Incredible. Yeah. I mean, it's really dumb that you have to do that, but incredible. Yeah. So you seem happy with this. This is a little toe back in the Mac waters.
I feel rejuvenated in many ways. In many ways. I feel like myself from a decade ago, but with the knowledge of the things I've done. and the experience I've had, and the things I've seen, yeah, I feel lots of potential, lots of potential. We'll see how this evolves over the next few months, but yeah. This episode of Connected is brought to you by Google Gemini. Gemini Live is a feature where you can just talk to it, and it's really wild to have a full-on conversation with this thing.
I was messing around and asked it to give me some ideas for hosting an event. And when it starts giving results, you can just stop it and say, okay, well, what about something low key for a smaller group? And then adjust to that and you can keep going until you get an idea that you want. And I think it's really useful for brainstorming things. It's good when you don't know where to start or if you hit a wall, you can just open Gemini and it helps you get the ball rolling.
But you can use it for all kinds of stuff. If you want to learn something new or have it give you advice or explain Bitcoin in simple terms, which seems impossible, but it can do it. Or you can have it quiz you on something like microbiology. I mean, imagine being a student and you've got a personal tutor on hand. It's hard to explain. You really just need to play around with it, see how it listens, responds, and adapts to your style of conversation. Just try it out. It's free.
Our thanks to Google Gemini for their support of the show and all of Relay. All right, Steven. So I recently realized something about me. Okay. I'm 36, going to be 37 this year.
And I've become the sort of person who likes to talk out loud by himself, usually when I'm driving or when I'm doing chores around the house, to sort of like... brainstorm ideas out loud so you're just to paint the picture you're you're driving in the car i'm driving my two dogs in the back okay you know yeah you got some dashboard confessional playing and
No, I have no music playing. Well, you're, you have music playing, but then you have a thought. Yes. Oh, I need to pause. I click pause. Okay. And then you talk. Yeah. What is listening? Like what, what happens next? Okay. Do the dogs remember? Like if you've gotten your dogs part of your task management system, I feel a little weird about that. So it all started.
You know, I did this as an experiment about a month ago, and I used this app on my iPhone called Super Whisper, which is also on the Mac. Obviously, on the Mac, it does a whole more things. Yeah, it's really cool. It's a really cool app. It's got really good dictation. It's using these new AI models for transcription.
Incredible potential for even people with disabilities, for example. It's got the kind of dictation that it doesn't care if you stutter, if you pause, if you lose your train of thought. It keeps listening and transcribes everything. It's incredible. I did this on the iPhone. But then I realized, you know, it's kind of awkward. Like if my phone is in my pocket and I'm driving. I got to get my phone from the pocket or if I'm doing chores around the house and I'm like...
You know, I don't know. I'm doing something. I got to keep my phone in my hand when I'm doing something. It's kind of awkward. So I recently started having this thought that sort of became an obsession. Like, what are the best earbuds for dictation? Very simple question. What are the best earbuds that I can get to get a really good recording of my voice? And by the way, this brainstorming, it could be that I'm thinking out loud about a shortcuts problem.
or I'm just making a list of the things that I got to do tomorrow. Like that sort of thing. Like I'm just talking out loud about work. Okay. And you want the cleanest capture of that. Yes. So the robot has the best thing to work with. Precisely. I wanted the cleanest possible version so that the AI would have a good place to start, right? I tested the AirPods 4. And before I sold them, the AirPods Pro 2. And I realized that they kind of suck for dictation. Like when you record yourself.
And, you know, it shouldn't have been a surprise given how, you know, when you are on a Zoom call, people tell you, are you wearing AirPods? Because like, you can tell. You can tell. You can tell when somebody's wearing AirPods because they don't have great microphones.
right uh they they they sound like they're far away they sound robotic they have all kinds of compression going on they're very bad so You know me, I started this long research phase, which mostly consisted of purchasing earbuds, testing them for two days, and returning them, and starting the process over and over.
So I started testing a bunch. Started with the Google Pixel Buds 2. Okay. These are just as bad as the Apple AirPods. First of all, Google doesn't make a version without the in-ear tips.
Yeah. They're just like, so I was not a fan. I was like, okay, I'll try them. But the microphone quality is not great. Not great. It's, you know, same issues as the AirPods 4 and the AirPods Pro 2. compressed robotic cuts off some words yeah like they were not to be trusted with like here by the way we're talking for like recordings of say, 5 to 15 minutes, all right? So long sessions of me just talking by myself. So next up...
watch some videos, start on watching some... Can you believe it, Stephen, that there are people on YouTube that do tier lists of earbuds when it comes to call quality? That's a thing. That's perfect. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. I saw the Samsung... Galaxy Buds 3 Pro. These are the AirPods clones that are oddly more angular. They have an angular stem to them. They also have in-ear tips. And they are not that much better than the AirPods. The mic is not great. And set aside the fact that...
they're kind of weird to squeeze because of that angular design that they have. Yeah. But like the microphone is not good. Now, I have found an absolute winner. when it comes to the, hands down, the best Bluetooth earbuds for voice calls and local recordings. And this is a name that maybe will surprise you. The Huawei... FreeBuds Pro 4. Yeah. I did not see this coming. For recordings and for calls are incredible. And that's because they have...
bone conduction microphones. I don't know what Huawei did here to make this sound so good, but believe me, they are, when it comes to recording yourself or jumping on a Zoom call or whatever, Just they sound so good. It's wild. So if you're looking for Bluetooth earbuds that are good for calls and good for recordings, that's right now my recommendation. The Huawei FreeBuds Pro 4.
I kind of love how these things look in the black and gold. Yeah, that's what I have. That's what I have. Yeah, they're cool looking. There is. If you go to the Huawei page, the link is in the show notes, and you scroll down to the controls to look through the images, it looks like a Vision OS button. Yeah. I see it everywhere now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these are good. These are good. And they actually give you both silicon and memory foam tips. So they're pretty good. There is both in our document and in my story. A giant, however. Okay. I ran into two more issues. The first one I already mentioned, the Huawei had in-ear tips, which I'm not a huge fan of. especially because like they bother me if i'm wearing them for like more than 30 minutes my problem was that if i'm when i'm driving my car
and either I'm using CarPlay or I'm using Android Auto for reasons that will be clear as part of the teaching changing as a computer user down the road. In either case, if I'm using the... voice recorder on Android or Super Whisper on my iPhone, both CarPlay and Android Auto, when I'm in the car, at that point, they completely ignore the fact that I'm wearing earbuds. They just default.
to the car's microphone which defeats the whole purpose of this which defeats the whole purpose of this right i was so happy i was like yes now i finally have earbuds that record me with very good quality and then i got in my car and I started driving and I listened to my recording later. I was like, oh no, this recorded the car's microphone, which was okay. It was actually better than AirPods.
but it was still defeating the purpose of what I wanted to have. There's no way that I know of in either CarPlay or Android Auto to say for this particular app. ignore the microphone of the car. Yeah. Just use the... There's no setting to do that. Correct. So, yeah. I was back to square one. Gotta do more research. Been doing more research.
eventually we got to a few days ago. Okay. So mind you, this has been going on for like two to three weeks. Yeah. You're just, you're opening their bud. You're taking them back. You're trying them out. Yeah. Yeah. So we got to late last week. I was about to give up on this idea. And then I landed on another Chinese company, the Xiaomi website. So Xiaomi, turns out, they've been making earbuds.
They're called the Xiaomi Buds, of course. And specifically, with the Buds 5, apparently they've been making five of them. So this is the fifth model. There are both Buds 5 and Buds 5 Pro. Of course. Both of them support what I think is a genius feature that I am convinced More companies, including Apple, will copy at some point. And it's so obvious. I wonder why didn't I think of searching for this before. These earbuds allow you to triple click.
the stem of the earbud, to start a local voice recording that is stored inside the earbud itself. The audio recording... for up to 90 minutes per earbud. So for a total of three hours of local voice recordings are stored inside the earbud. You can either choose to record with one earbud at a time, with both. You can actually even just open the case and press a button and record by talking to the earbud's case. All right?
Later, yeah, later, when you're done, you open the Xiaomi Earbuds app, which is available both on iOS and on Android. You can see the list of recordings that are stored. in the earbuds and you can transfer them to your phone and at that point you have an m4a file that you can do whatever you want with it and There's an asterisk there, but I'll get to it in a second. And I'll leave you with a bit of a teaser for next time. But it gets better. So the Buds 5 Pro. Xiaomi.
as so far released in Europe, a Bluetooth only version. But they have also announced a Wi-Fi version. And you may wonder, wait, what? Wi-Fi earbuds? That's starting to become a thing, apparently. You get much greater bandwidth, right?
and much greater power consumption. But yes, so this is a thing called, it's a Qualcomm thing. This actually was announced three years ago, and it's only sort of becoming a... like a thing now it's called snapdragon sound and it's like sort of like what apple has been doing with airpods when you use the airpods with apple products it's not like plain vanilla bluetooth it's like actually better than bluetooth these are using wi-fi
So far, you can only use it with Xiaomi phones. You can only take advantage of the Buds 5 Pro model with Wi-Fi, which costs more than the Bluetooth model. Only if you have a Xiaomi Ultra... 15 Ultra, I think it's called. So, yeah, it's very much proprietary to the Xiaomi ecosystem. But, and this is where I got so happy, the Buds 5 are... the equivalent of the AirPods 4 in that they don't have in-ear tips. They have pretty much the same design of my beloved AirPods 4.
They support noise cancellation, basic noise cancellation, even without the tips. And they can record audio locally. I've been testing this this week, Stephen. And it's incredible. So I will say this. The recording quality that I get from the Buds 5 is not as good as the quality that I get from the Huawei earbuds. But I can get in my car, start driving. My phone is paired with the car system. I can triple click the left earbud in my ear.
to start recording independently from my phone. And later when I'm done, I can triple click again. The recording is saved inside the earbud. And when I'm home, I can import the file and do things with it. This is finally the dream realized. The Buds 5 compared to the Buds 5 Pro, from what I've read online, don't have the same microphone system.
I think my understanding is that it's slightly worse, even just from the fact that the Buds 5... has microphones that can cancel up to like they have wind noise resistance up to 12 meters per second whereas the buds 5 pro have wind noise resistance up to 15 meters per second. Is that how wind noise reduction is measured? I've never come across that. So I would imagine that...
It's basically measuring the strength of the wind. That's what it looks like. Right? To mitigate wind noise at 15 meters per second, approximately 33 miles an hour. Okay, that's pretty strong wind. Yeah. You couldn't, I mean, if you were, you couldn't drive with your windows down. I don't think like on the highway, but if you're just walking around and it's breezy, it should sound perfect. Yeah. Yeah. So.
I tested this this week. I think out of curiosity, I will place an order for the Buds 5 Pro, even though they do have the in-ear tips that I dislike. I just want to test for myself. how big of a difference they have in terms of microphones. You've gone this far. You might as well keep going. Exactly. So now, I was at this fork in the road. Either I... could only record with excellent quality on the Huawei earbuds, but that would have meant no earbuds in the car because it wouldn't work.
Or get worse quality with the Buds 5 by Xiaomi, but you're able to record in the car because they are completely independent from your phone. I decided to go with the second one, obviously, because I love the idea of recording something with the earbud itself. I think that's such a clever idea that I just want everybody to steal.
Like, I would love to do this with AirPods at some point. But, and this is where I will leave you today, Stephen, with a bit of a teaser. The files that I was getting from...
the Xiaomi earbuds app, they had a whole bunch of noise. They were not as clear as the audio recordings from the Huawei earbuds. Okay. And they were saved to... M4A with the ADTS codec which is a weird codec that for example I have a bunch of shortcuts that deal with transcribing mp4 audio files and they were just giving me an error because they said this file format is not supported so again
Did more research and I found another task for the Mac Mini. I created a system. So now follow me here because we're going to talk about this in the future. This is just a teaser. I created a system. where i import the audio file from the earbuds and there's only one thing i need to do take this file share it with the share sheet and save it in a folder of my google drive that's all i need to do on the mac mini there's a hazel automation that runs first and it runs two
FFmpeg commands. There it is. One, to convert the audio. And two, get ready. It runs a neural network to apply a filter. to the audio to clean it up. So it cleans up the audio recorded from the Xiaomi earbuds. Then, and we'll get into the details of this workflow maybe in a future episode, then... It fires off a shortcut. The shortcut uses AI to analyze my audio, creates a transcript, creates a summary, comes up with a title for the file.
And identifies if in the conversation that I had with myself, I mentioned things that are supposed to be like actionable tasks. Like if I say things like I have to or I need to like. It understands if there are items that are actually tasks that I need to do. It takes everything and creates a note in Obsidian that has the title, the embedded transcript. the summary, the actionable items, and an audio player to listen back to that voice recording. And it just happens. It all just works.
Basically, I just save a file in Google Drive. And I don't know, two minutes later, I open my dashboard in Obsidian and everything is right there. Wow. Yeah. So yeah, that's part of me changing as a person. Yeah. I'm still trying to wrap my head around all that. So you're in the car in Rome, hit a button, you talk. Yes. I talk. Yes. You say some things. You've got, uh, you get the file transferred and then it gets pulled to a Mac mini in Las Vegas, which cleans up the audio.
transcribes the audio, and you get it all back in your Obsidian Vault on your phone in Rome. That's right. That's right. Within two minutes. Within two minutes. It's converting the audio, denoising the audio. passing the audio to a transcription app on the Mac Mini. The text from the transcription app is passed to Claude. I have a very complex Claude prompt that I created.
so that it comes up with a title, with a summary, and with actionable items identified from my conversation, and everything is put together in an Obsidian template. saved into my obsidian vault as a markdown file and in my dashboard note in obsidian i have a i have a data view query that shows me all the voice recordings that I recently saved that still have open tasks for me to look into. Yeah. True mad lad status.
That is the sort of thing you can expect from me as a nerd who's rediscovering macOS and assistive AI tools in 2025. I am like... Yeah, I feel like I have superpowers now. And this was a fun, long process that obviously will... eventually make for i think a really fascinating guide on mac stories in the near future yeah computers man they do cool stuff
They do cool things and yeah. But just as a final thing, it's maybe silly, but I really like this thing where I talk to myself because I discovered that... And when I talk about a problem out loud, I don't know what it is, but there's a part of my brain that sort of connects more dots. And maybe it's because I've conditioned my brain over the past 12 years of podcasting to have conversations out loud and to follow up on something else that...
like you or Mike said, for example, or John said, you know? And so talking out loud sort of maybe tricks my brain into entering that mode where like, like yesterday I was in my car, I was thinking about a shortcut and I was like... contradicting myself out loud but like I was like but what if I tried this other approach instead yeah which is the sort of thing that if I'm just thinking you know like a normal person silently in my brain I probably wouldn't do it but it's the talking
that tricks my weird human brain into doing it. So yeah, talk by yourself. It's useful. How is that to read, right? If you're going like the back and forth, like, is it... coherent when you get it into obsidian like four days later you finally look at it you're like oh yeah this this makes sense i don't know let's look This recording outlines two main projects, finalizing an article about automating shortcuts permission prompts and setting up a voice recording workflow. The speakers...
The speaker details technical components of both systems, including AppleScript automation, dictation apps, and file management considerations. Action items. One, finalize column about automating shortcuts permission prompts. Verify if the automation works. If the schedule is reduced to 10 seconds, currently it's 15 seconds. Three, install deep learning models for audio filtering on the Mac mini server.
Four, install Hazel and import rules on Mac mini server. Five, ensure shortcuts has access to create files in the Obsidian. Yeah, I think it makes sense. Okay. You know? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And plus, if I want to, there's an audio player in Obsidian if you want to listen back, or there's a link to read the full transcript. But this is the sort of thing where...
I think large language models are great at, which is take a huge chunk of text and make sense of it, you know, summarize it, you know, find actionable items. It's a sort of like boring task that an LLM is... good for. And because it's my text and my data, I feel much more comfortable about doing this. And I think it's a pretty good use case to combine...
sort of multiple forms of media and multiple forms of automation. There's like, there's an audio file and then there's some text, there's ASL, there's shortcuts, you know, it's a sort of thing that... It's very much up my alley and sort of this new flavor of combining AI and shortcuts in this new type of automation that... I feel it's like sort of my path as a shortcuts user has taken me to this place and I really want to take advantage of it.
for both me and maybe it's going to be useful for readers and it's going to be useful for you or for Mike or for John, you know, for internal tools, like that sort of stuff. Yeah. And it's... You're using some Apple tech, but you're also using a lot of tech that's not. Apple tech. That's on the web. Yeah, that's either open source or on the web, like FFMPEG. It's like open source and, you know, these AI APIs are web-based. It's a whole combination of different technologies.
But very much at the center of it all right now, there's macOS and Shortcuts and Hazel. Those are like the main protagonists. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. Yeah. The most Federico thing you've built in a while. It is a very Federico thing. I cannot wait to share this one. But in the meantime, this week I will share how I automated those permission prompts. Perfect.
Cool. Well, I think that does it. Thank you to our sponsors, Ecamm and Google Gemini for making the show possible this week. If you want to find more of us, you can find Federico's work over at MacStories.net. And of course, go check out that App Stories episode we mentioned earlier. I write at 512pixels.net and host Mac Power Users. This coming Sunday, we have an interview with David Pierce from The Verge. Nice. Really a cool episode. I think people will enjoy that.
If you're a member, thank you so much for your direct support. If you're not and you want longer ad-free versions of the show each and every week, you can get signed up at GetConnectedPro.co. There's a link in the show notes. This week, you and I, we spoke about Apple and NVIDIA, both historically and then maybe the future because Apple went out and spent a billion dollars on NVIDIA hardware. Yeah.
Wild. You can also leave feedback or follow up at connectedfeedback.com. There's also a link there. And of course, all the show notes are in your podcast player. Until next week, Federico, say goodbye. arrivederci bye y'all