It's time for Mac Geek Gab, and we're here at CES. And that's the tip, is we've got so many things from CES, cool stuff found, stories here, all that coming to you today on Mac Geek Gab 1072 for Monday, January 13th, National Sticker Day 2025.
We'll be right back.
Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Cab, the show where normally we answer your questions and share your quick tips and share your cool stuff found. Today, we are going to share our cool stuff found that we have discovered here at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. our sponsors for this episode are all of our CES coverage sponsors, which include Eero, Roborock, CCC Backup from Bombik, Private Internet Access, and the Omni Group. And we will talk about each of them a little bit later in the episode.
But for now, here in Las Vegas, as far as I know, I'm Dave Hamilton.
And here in another part of Las Vegas, almost three feet from Dave, it's Pilot Pete. And what a wonderful evening. I think this has been absolutely fun, a blast, but boy are my dogs barking.
Dude.
Yeah. So here's the other thing. 1072 police code is a knifing. I think that might be less painful than right now.
Yeah.
But we're working on it. We've got a little Stark Elixir trying to help us through the evening that we brought with us from New Hampshire. And this is fantastic. We've got some really cool stuff that we have seen thusly far.
I'm going to jump right out of the gate, Pete, because I can't wait to tell people about this. I'm at the ViewSonic booth, right? You know, we talk about ViewSonic all the time. We have a great relationship with them. They were showing me some of the screens, the battery-powered screen. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you showed me that in October. Okay, yeah, no problem.
I'm talking to my normal contact there, and I see the other person that's at the booth with her sort of nudging and definitely fidgeting and trying to imply something. It's hard to tell what this is.
I want to get in here.
I want to talk. You should be doing something. Why aren't you? And then they pointed out to me the ViewSonic 27-inch 5K Thunderbolt display. And I'm going to get right to the punchline that costs $799. 5K 27-inch Thunderbolt. You can daisy chain two of them together. It supports the full Mac color gamut.
it's like all the things i i can't imagine we aren't quite finished with ces we have one more full day left based on when we're recording this i can't imagine that i'm going to find something else that is any more exciting for our market ecosystem world than that so i just had to come right out of the gate i'm not i wasn't going to make you all wait to find out about
That yeah practically giving it away.
I mean i i don't and it's view sonic i saw it like it exists i touched it i put a video up um i mean i say i put a video up i recorded a video sadie went and actually made it look good and put it up right but uh you can see it like it exists it's a real thing it's shipping later here in Q1 and $800, that's less than what you would pay for the LG 5K display on refurb.
Oh, right.
Because that's usually right about $1,000. It should be about $1,200, $1,300, whatever.
So, yeah, I know.
I'm just...
Yeah.
Yeah, that's fantastic. Can I have one?
Yeah, go. Of course, Pete.
I'm going to do it. i figure.
We'll go back and forth here
Yeah there we go yeah no i meant can i have a oh one of the a few sonic 5k monitor yeah well.
I don't know about that
Yeah yeah oh no banging the mic because i can um so i'm gonna i'm gonna just go in the order that i happen to put them down on on the paper yeah sure not in any other order because uh this is one of the first ones that i saw and they are the form smart swim to swim goggles and I thought well okay you know goggles and sure but you you put them on and in your right eye, It's readable. There's no strain. There's no little tiny, because I'm really disappointed.
Is it like a heads-up display?
It is a heads-up display. And it appears that now it's closer when you're standing in the room and you're wearing the goggles. Sure. And they claim that once you're in the water, the digital readouts that you're looking at appear to be about five feet out in front of you.
Okay.
But I wear prescription glasses. I noticed no blurring or eye strain or having to roll my eyes up. So I've been super disappointed with several of the glasses that I've looked at here so far in the last three days. Some of them you have to close your right eye, hold the tongue out the left side of your head, stick your finger in your ear, and look at a pinhead, and you almost see some letters in there somewhere. That's not the case with these.
The data is right out there in front of you, and it has like nine different parameters that it tracks for you. Pace and heart rate and rate of speed and all that sort of thing. And one of the coolest things is I like to do open water swimming in the summer when I can get into a pond or a lake in New Hampshire. This thing has a compass in it. So what you do is you look at, say, a dock that you want to swim to 200 yards away.
You go, okay, that's bearing 275. And when you're swimming, if you notice that you're heading 280, correct back to 275. So instead of swimming off 30 degrees before you look up and realize, well, I'm not going where I thought I was going. so yeah it was really cool and uh these they're i think there's a sale on them right now but the list prices on them is list price on them is 279 dollars.
I the it's a really low form factor i don't think you're going to hit your shoulder on the little tiny piece of gear that hangs out by your right eye yep and they it the biggest thing that surprised me was the ease of being able to see it and get not no eye strain right right simple no eye strain to look at the data that these goggles are presenting to you which is rare It is.
So I figured we'd have a conversation about this. I wasn't thinking about the swim goggles, but there is a trend here this year about augmented reality glasses.
Yes.
And there's all kinds of different permutations of that, many of which are overreaching and under delivering.
Not ready for primetime.
Correct. And that's fine. I always say our job when we come to CES is to sift through all of that crap and all of the stuff and find those gems, right? So there's a lot of that particular category is just, like you said, not ready for primetime. And that's okay. We expect that. That's how CES is. It's just how it works. I encountered one that feels fairly ready for primetime. And similar to what you're talking about with the swim goggles, it's not trying to do too much.
And it's the Even Reality's G1 smart glasses. You can get them with a prescription. They laser etch a screen onto both lenses. Okay. And then there is a tiny two, tiny projectors in there that project onto the laser etched portion of the glass.
Yeah.
And it's a heads-up display for your life, right? And you can have it do different things. You can configure a dashboard. You can have it give you directions. In fact, there was one point where I was getting driving directions and you get to set where in your field of view, these things appear and how far away they are. Okay. So it's very configurable, very comfortable, very natural feeling.
I had them on and there were driving directions and it was just like, okay, you know, you're going to turn right on the Locust Street in, you know, two tenths of a mile, whatever. Sure. Okay. Normal stuff. The guy says, look up, like, look at the ceiling or towards, you know, start looking up toward the ceiling. And then I saw a map view.
Oh, wait. Oh, cool.
All right. And it was like, okay, this is cool. Like, great. Okay. So, and you could get, you know, stock prices. You could get various different things, the weather, different pieces of information. Of course, notifications could come into this. So they're $549, certainly cutting edge in terms of what we're doing with these things. But it felt like something functional. The battery would last all day with sort of what they configured, what they called normal usage.
Actually, about a day and a half with normal usage. And they charge in their case. Their case is, you know, like when you put the glasses in the case, it starts charging them up.
And...
So that was, to me, that was one of those things where it was like, okay, you went after a product that could actually be used today as opposed to something that basically is going to be a proof of concept-ish.
Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Oh, very cool. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm going to stay in this category. But yeah, I'm going to stay with this theme. And the first thing I'm going to say, a couple of people have had to punch out, although our numbers are climbing on the people watching.
Don't worry about that, Pete. Not a single person listening is
Ever going to know. Listening are going to hear that. That's right. I was just going to apologize to the folks live. We realized that the internet is kludgy at best and downright cruddy at worst. And Dave's actually going to talk about how it got cruddy last night and how he fixed it.
I will interject with a story here about the hotel Wi-Fi because that's what we're dealing with. We tried tethering to do a live stream to our phones. No. It's like it's kludgy at best, but it's fine.
I almost feel like one of the vendors we went to see who couldn't get their Wi-Fi.
I was every vendor. It really is. It is. Yeah. So I've got, I've got two things to rant about with the wifi. The first is the only booth where like smart home stuff needed to be shown that actually worked with all their wifi. And it was remarkable only because there was no issues. I had already been to enough booths where people were like,
Yeah, well it's,
It's not going to work because the wifi in here sucks. It's like, okay, well you knew you were going to need this. I go to check out the smart home stuff from TP links booth and Pete, it was like you, it was like I was in your house or my house. It just worked. And I was like, okay, so this is a solvable problem on the show floor. And TP-Link, it doesn't surprise me.
Here's why everyone else's Wi-Fi isn't working.
Yeah, well, no. Oh, okay.
So kudos to TP-Link for actually, you know, using the tech that they know how to use and making the Wi-Fi work.
Maybe I should have talked to them.
And maybe all the other vendors should have talked to them and said, hey, we're going to need some Wi-Fi. Can you help us out?
And while we're on the subject of TP-Link, There's lots of things from them that I want to talk about, but the one I will talk about in this episode is not out yet. It will be out this summer, but it exists. You will see a video of it. I held it in my hand. It is the TP-Link BE3600. None of that means anything. Wi-Fi 7 travel router, and it will sell for less than $100.
and it unlike the barrel ax it actually has a user interface that makes it understandable to the average user so that they know it's got seven different modes it can capture wi-fi and relay it it can go ethernet and relay it it can tether to your phone and relay it it can do all the things right like because that's what it does and it'll be they they said less than 100 so i call that $99. If it winds up being 80,
Sure.
It's about the same form factor as the Barrel AX. If you haven't seen the Barrel AX, it's like a fat, stubby iPhone.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's a short, stubby, fat iPhone with some swingable antennas. It is certainly the size that you could just throw in and leave in your travel bag and always have. But the nice part is it's Wi-Fi 7. And I'm While Wi-Fi 7 is faster, the thing I like best about Wi-Fi 7 is it uses all of your bands simultaneously. So unlike Wi-Fi 6E and prior, where your device had to pick, am I using 2.4, am I using 5, am I using 6 gigahertz? With Wi-Fi 7, it uses all of them simultaneously and moves around.
And also, probably not so much with this, but in general Wi-Fi 7, also Ethernet is factored into that. So if you've got Ethernet connected and Wi-Fi 7, it will move your data around and take the best path for your data. So Wi-Fi 7 and a travel router, to me, that's the best because, you know, you're going to be in a saturated wireless area in a hotel and to just have it use what Wi-Fi 7 can do is awesome. So I was very stoked.
Swipe it off the table for tonight's episode. I'm just asking for a friend.
You are not the first person today to suggest that that should happen. And they kind of looked at me sideways. I'm like, well, is this a functional unit? And they're like, maybe.
I'll bring it back.
I'll bring it back. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Oh, too funny. Oh, that's fantastic. Okay.
Yeah.
Well, all right. Well, let me take it back briefly to the glasses. I found a pair of glasses that are almost ready for primetime. How about that? But I bet they will be by the time they come out in March. And they are at Captify.glass.
Very clever name for it.
And Captify.glass. Transcribes live conversation so I think most useful for people who have some amount of hearing loss okay so but it will translate for instance he was trying to speak to me in Mandarin and it eventually came through when crappy Wi-Fi finally let it happen but so needing Wi-Fi connectivity I don't know how that's gonna work if you're out and about in a foreign country he and I said well what about how do i speak to you back in mandarin and he goes
well you can't but it's not there yet yeah and he goes but if understanding is the goal that's where these get the nice thing about these is that fully prescription okay they'll meet any prescription and put it in there, and the display was in fact readable which i was a couple others that were not readable yeah yeah this was readable and it it came up really quickly in english it because we were speaking english to each other it was almost instantaneous yeah and and very good at at
the transcription and there was one other point about it and i forget exactly what it was but you know it's been one of those days yes um they they were not uncomfortable oh that's what it was so for most of the time you couldn't tell that somebody had something different about those glasses but if you look straight on you got a little about half inch by half inch square in the middle of the lens yeah you could see a green reflection okay.
That yeah made it obvious there was something going on yeah and that that would have been true with the the um even realities
G1s as well yeah
And yeah so yes looking at someone wearing these you would have an indication that they were getting some data on their glasses. Right. And I'm not convinced that that's a terrible thing right now.
Well, actually I like that in the sense of this is not a... You know, what's going on. Yeah. It's less creepy when you can see that they're doing that. And I'm sorry I don't have a price point.
That's okay. There's a lot of things I'm about to talk about that
Don't have price points.
Yeah. So I'm looking. I'm on their website, Captify.glass, and I'm not seeing that. But it's got a 10-hour battery time. Continuous captioning, four hours.
Nice.
40 minutes to charge it up. But, yeah, no price point yet. Sorry.
Okay.
Fair enough. I will take a moment to thank this company, but I'm going to tell you about their product that I got to see, and it's Roborock. I'm thanking them because they are, as you heard at the beginning of the episode, and as you've been hearing for weeks, they are one of our five coverage sponsors here
For CES 2025.
And I mean it when I say it, and I'm going to say it a lot this episode. We couldn't do this without the support of our sponsors. It costs a lot to do what we're doing and just to be here, to travel here and do all this
And then everything Sadie's doing back in the home office. So a huge thank you to Roborock.
I got to see their Roborock Saros Z70 robot mopping vacuum and it does all of the things that you would expect
It to do.
And more.
And more because it looks like your standard robot vacuum. You know, it's round. It has all the kind of little things on it. And then if it encounters something on the floor, like a cat toy, a dropped sock, something like that, it stops. A robot arm comes out of it with little pinchers, grabs the thing, and here's the best part. You tell it, hey, if you find cat toys, put them in the bin for cat toys. It will drive over and drop them in that bin.
And I got to watch it. I got a video. I put it up. I think it will have been, certainly it'll be up on our YouTube channel by the time this episode's out. But like.
Dave, I got a question. Does this not look like something straight out of the Jetsons?
It's, it is. Yeah, it's totally out of the Jetsons. It's exactly right. Yeah, it's amazing.
Yeah, this little robot comes over, arm comes out, picks it up.
Picks it up, puts it away.
It was like it yes it does it exactly like whatever you are envisioning in your head is correct yeah
There's a little round robot vacuum going over with an arm coming out of it and picking it up and dropping it it's like oh.
I run my i run my robot vacuum on the main floor of the house at 4 a.m every day This will come as no surprise to many of you that there are often times where I am awake and down on the couch in the living room when the vacuum starts. I know. I'm a nerd.
I'm a musician. I stay up late. Son of a bad word. Yep.
And the vacuum starts. And unless it's going to bother me or get in my way or something, I just let it go. And it's fascinating watching the cats react to the vacuum because they are used to it. This happens every day in their lives.
Correct.
So this is totally normal. They just go around. And every now and then they'll kind of stop and look at it, but they're not scared of it. So I'm really, really eager to see how my cats react to a vacuum with an arm that's picking up one of their toys and putting it away somewhere else.
Or if Kitty stays asleep, does it pick it up by the neck and put it in?
Wouldn't it be funny if it picked up the tail, vacuum underneath it, put the tail back down?
Anyway.
Anyway, so that's the Roborock Saros. And again, thanks to
Roborock for making all this happen.
And we'll talk about each of them. I'm going to take a minute and
Talk about each of them here as we go through. It is fantastic
That we're able to come out here and find this cool stuff. And I hope you folks have secured your wallets whilst listening to this episode.
Yeah, I know. These episodes are not cheap.
But there's a lot of these things that aren't quite available yet. And so, you know, it's a payment plan, cool stuff found.
Yeah. Yeah. So here's one that is available, and we saw it at the very first afternoon we got here, and we went up to see them at Uproar, and they... I wasn't entirely sure what it was, even after talking to the Gent, because it was a noisy environment, and I came back and did more research on it, and I was jaw-dropped once I saw some of their B-roll. It's the Nova AI Companion. And I didn't realize it was just a Quest III headset that it was using.
Oh, the MetaQuest.
Yes. Yeah. And it's virtual reality, but the Gent that developed this did so with elderly and dementia patients in mind and it creates companionship it's artificial intelligence but companionship that learns from stories that they tell it a lot learns what mood they were in and if they're telling a story from their childhood that made them happy and they refer back to it at some point this ai software goes oh that made you happy and that sort of thing or
if they want to go on an adventure you know we're in one of the example they use on their website is where would you like to go today well i've never been to ireland i'd love to see ireland and it takes you on a virtual tour in parts of ireland and there were other things that had they had two guys they look like the what they see is a i'm going to bring up a brand but like a nintendo game yeah bicycle race and but they've got the pedals on the in front of them they're I said,
two elderly gentlemen sitting in chairs next to each other, and they're bicycle racing down a dock to break the tape. But this all-encompassing, and it's very engaging to these people. And it brings them closer to family. You can get two headsets, and family can visit with each other. But I was just amazed at the thought that went into this, to bring people who are otherwise, generally speaking, afraid of technology. My mother was 98 and was not very good with technology. This is something that
they put on your head, turn it on, and it works. And you just… Amazing.
Yeah.
A fantastic idea. And so kudos to Rendever, R-E-N-D-E-V-E-R.com is where the software is available. and they have it as a, help me, Dave, was it a purchase, outright purchase or a subscription, correct?
I don't, that part I don't remember,
Pete. Yeah.
I think you could do an outright purchase for an individual if, for instance, you're caring for an elderly parent in your home or if it's a nursing home business type sort of thing, they could do it with a subscription.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
A monthly subscription to pay for, you know.
I think you're conflating that with the virtual pet that we saw.
Correct. I am. Yep. Nevermind. Yeah.
I think, I think it's just an app.
Believe my last. Yes. It is an app that you buy.
But it might be a subscription app like that. That is entirely possible.
That I don't recall.
Yeah. Yeah.
But it was fantastic to see and, and a lot of thought went into this.
Amazing. Yeah.
Cool stuff. That Meta Quest 3, currently that is the VR headset to get. Lisa has one. She uses it almost every day for working out and she plays games. Lucas has one.
Mostly he keeps it at his apartment,
And they will often play games together. They play golf together and things like that. Yeah, it's cool.
Let me ask a question about that because I don't have one. Do they still require a Windows computer or a Mac computer?
No, no, they're standalone. It's a standalone headset.
Standalone headset?
Yeah, it can be used with a computer.
But yeah, it's standalone.
To play other games. Yeah, because I actually sat in a chair tonight. I'll go to that later. But it was a very immersive experience.
Yeah. Oh, it's super. It's crazy. And I mean,
Is it as, is the tech as pristine as the Vision Pro? No. It's also, you know, 500 bucks instead of 3,500. And there's way more apps available for it because there's an ecosystem. There's a community of users. They've sold, you know, millions of them as opposed to,
You know, 150,000 or whatever Apple sold.
So it's, which is fine.
Yeah. I'm going to take a minute and talk about another one of our coverage sponsors because again without them we couldn't do this and that's the Omni
Group they make
Software that makes our lives more productive.
They have the Omni productivity suite, which is OmniFocus, OmniPlan, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner. OmniFocus lets you capture tasks effortlessly no matter where you are. OmniPlan lets you create detailed project timelines with Gantt charts. OmniGraffle, perfect for diagramming, design. You can create professional-grade diagrams, wireframes, flowcharts, and then OmniOutliner, which helps you organize, brainstorm, structure your thoughts, collapsible outlines.
And where it gets even better is these apps work together, right? So you can use OmniOutliner to brainstorm ideas, then turn them into actionable tasks in OmniFocus, map out a project visually in OmniGraffle and integrate it into your timeline and OmniPlan. And OmniFocus 4.5 now includes app intense support, which sets the stage for all the new integrations with Apple intelligence in 2025.
So it's cool stuff.
You get, you got to check it out. OmniGroup.com.
And as I keep saying, our thanks to OmniGroup and all our CES coverage sponsors, because without them, this,
This episode and all the stuff we've been bringing you all,
We couldn't possibly have existed.
I am going to jump to one of my favorite gadgets that I saw this week, Pete, and that is the brisket Zellos 450, which is a smart smoker grill.
Did you get one? Are we coming over this weekend?
Not yet, but I will test one of these because it's amazing what this thing does. it takes the guesswork out of smoking meats and or smoking anything really but uh yeah it's 400 399 for this this model what i know 399 cost
More than that for a non-smart.
I'm aware i i know i I know. It's crazy. Yeah. And, um, yep. It's, uh, what you do and, and it's got like an AI built into it.
So you have an app on your phone, your iPad, you know,
Whatever, and you can just go in and pick one of their recipes or you can say, Hey, uh, you know, I want to smoke a prime rib, but I've got somebody in the house with a pepper allergy. So tell me what I need to get.
It'll tell you okay you get the prime rib
Uh you here's all the ingredients you need here's how you're going to prepare the prime rib right and and here's when you do these things and get it all ready and then you heat the grill to this and do all the things And it's like, okay, when you're ready, click send to grill. And it sends the instructions to the grill. It runs on pellets so it can start itself. It can turn itself off.
It can put itself into keep warm mode. If you happen to still be like at, you know, your kid's soccer game when the cooking finishes, it's all controllable from your phone. It, it, it, I, my, the way I interpreted it,
These are my words, not theirs.
That with your ge oven this i'm sorry to or any other oven for that matter right.
Oh dude it's it it's it's the idiot's way it's idiot proof right that and they kind of laughed
When i said it i'm like
Those are my words not yours it's fine i get you're not going to call your customers idiots but um
At least you didn't say it was pilot proof you.
Know but
Yeah yeah it's
Very cool oh and the ai you can use um you can take a picture of something either raw meat or cooked meat you can take one picture or up to 10 pictures and it will like dissect it for you including if you're at the grocery store right you take a picture of something you're like oh this brisket looks amazing what else do i need to get while i'm here bingo
Oh you gosh.
I know awesome yep yep Oh, that's the brisket, B-R-I-S-K, space, I-T. So the brisket, Zellos 450. So 399 bucks. I know.
It's, it's. Oh, man.
Their word is, their term is that it demystifies smoking meats, which it does.
I mean, and my word is, it's idiot proof. Right. So.
So now you know what to get me for Christmas Day.
Absolutely.
I know. It's really cool.
That's fantastic. Yep. That's as good a price as the $799 Vision.
Yeah. Yeah, I know. The 5K. The 5K display. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Wow. I know. All right. Mm-hmm.
So here's one we saw just tonight. Okay. And I hate to bring up another brand name, but people will understand as soon as I say it. Sure. you know it's like Kleenex and Crescent wrench and all that maybe FedEx you know it's a verb yes so, But Breathe Right breathing strips, they're like Band-Aids, and they glue to your nose.
And they pull it out.
I've always seen them, and I thought, yeah.
I use those if I have a cold or something.
I have not. I've never used one.
It makes a huge difference. In terms of being able to sleep at night if you have a cold, my son used to use those Breathe Right strips when he played hockey when he was having allergies. Made a huge difference.
So I always thought my nose holes were plenty big. and i know i had a friend who uh their their daughter played university level basketball okay and for years two years was told you know you're slacking you're not working hard enough turned out she'd broken her nose when she was like i don't know four or five years old and had all kinds of damage in the back so she wound up having to have surgery and once she had the surgery she
could breathe again and she could keep up with her teammates yes so i'm like okay so oxygen through the nose is a thing yes but so for the first time tonight this gent came up to us as we were walking walking by he kind of flagged us down i'm like hey come over here look at this.
Yeah well it's his job
Okay yeah absolutely and he was good at it i will give him that he was very good at it and he gave had us put on the intake breathing strips he.
Called them the ferrari of Ferrari this category of product yes and
What happens is he has little applicators that put a little metal thing on each side of your nose with a sticker with a little sticker it sticks on almost that's almost like a band-aid but it's it's nowhere near as obvious as the other brand nowhere.
Near as uncomfortable as the other
Things okay oh good yeah but then there's a metal arch that he puts on, and they magnetically attach and open your nasal passages. And, oh, my God, I've never felt anything like that in my life. I mean, immediately I'm like, I could go running without opening my mouth.
Yes, absolutely.
Olympic approved yeah yeah I was shocked at how good the airflow immediately became as soon as I tried these on and I've never tried them before in in any brand and I thought it was a gimmick it was silly but you know someone's making a buck passing this crap off to the public.
No no it's
Oh my gosh they really work yeah I can see where I'm going to use these there's no doubt in my mind he gave us a free sample to take home that'll last 30 days and i can tell you i'm going to be a customer yeah.
And it's simple
So there you go breathing strips yeah.
Cool uh i will stay with the uh sleep the things that can help you sleep category and jump to the for me buds which
I got to see and
Actually even check out this morning. So these are earbuds in our pre CES episode. We talked about the ones that I
Use from anchor that I
Got last year that work and do some things that can help you sleep. These take it to a whole other level. So these similarly, actually they're the most comfortable sleep earbuds I've ever tried.
And they actually had couches in their thing.
So I laid down and checked it out so I can sleep on my side with these.
No problem.
Did you fall asleep, Dave?
I did not. Okay. $119 is the price,
And I think actually you can get them for $109.
And these have, just similar to what the Apple Watch has, a pulse monitor inside your ear, right? So it tracks your heart rate, which then lets it track your heart rate variability, which is very important for having a good night's sleep. If your heart rate just remains up the whole time, that's bad. so it tracks all your stuff and then while it's doing that They call it an AI feature. It's pattern matching.
Fine.
That's the term we use in the app. That's the
Companion to this
Tells you what kind of music you should listen to.
And it will even pick music for you. You could pick music yourself,
But it will match music to your heartbeat. And it's not just music. One ear has sounds.
The other one has binaural beats and it can actually help you
Get to sleep, stay asleep. It does all the data analysis. it will detect snoring uh so i i these things i i have not yet tested them while sleeping but i am eager to do so
So i actually went to the booth shortly after you okay i knew you had gone there but i went there anyway because i committed to them that i was going to go got it put them in my ear and here's the cool thing about it uh i'm going to share some information that probably a lot of you don't want to know, but I sleep on my side.
Same.
So, yeah. And let me tell you, those, you can sleep on your side with those two. They fit in there perfectly nicely. And I just now went to the website as you were talking about them, and I am sad that I didn't get one of the last three on Kickstarter at the lowest price. But right now on Kickstarter, they're still 30% off at $139.
Okay.
With $280 or $90 left. So by the time you hear this, there may still be some there. I'm buying some because they're also a regular Bluetooth headset.
Yes, yes, right. You can also just use them.
Correct.
With active noise canceling and everything else.
Yep, all the things.
Is it active noise canceling or just passive?
I asked him and he said yes. It's active. Oh, okay. Well, that's my recollection. All right.
I believe you.
But even if they're not, they're tight in-ear earbuds, but they're flat. you can lay on your side and.
It's not gonna bother you
Yeah but it plays white noise and as I recall the app was in an app yeah it was an app that comes with it and it has, Sleep for eight hours, power nap, and then concentration or focus and one other mode. So it plays alpha waves and delta waves and theta waves all based on what you're trying to do.
And reacting to your heart rate too.
Yes. Yes. Yeah.
So this Jen has put some thought into it.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
The designer. He was a fun guy to talk to.
He was.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. I'm going to do it again. And I want to tell you about Carbon Copy Cloner,
Aka CCC Backup, another one of our CES coverage sponsors
And a huge thank you.
You know that I use CCC Backup on all of my Macs to do all kinds of different things. I certainly do backups with it, cloning my data
Volume and making sure I have an up-to-date copy of that all the time.
But I also use it as scheduled tasks. uh i copy my photos library
From my mac to my
Uh network storage device
And i use
Ccc backup to do
That and it's
Just copying a specific folder keeping it in sync it
Happens it does you know it does it
The smart way they've got it is the best way to navigate snapshots on your mac and you can even create snapshots you can do task grouping now well which means you can chain tasks together. So if I want it to back up like I do, my photos, and then also my music library, there's no reason to have those tasks running simultaneously because they're going from the same place to the same place. So I just have it when one finishes, next one goes.
It's fantastic. If you aren't yet using CCC backup, check it out at bombbic.com.
That's B-O-M-B-I-C-H. Mike's business card says, sounds like the pen, not like the dog.
Bombic.com, and thanks so much to Mike and Sarah and the team over there for supporting us yet again with our coverage.
Oh, boy. Is my tongue bleeding, Dave?
I'm sorry, I won't do that.
Okay, very cool.
All right.
What's next?
I think it's my turn.
Actually.
It sounds like it.
You know what? I was going to do one thing, but i'm going to stay because we talked about uh headphone we'll keep the categories together shall we shall we shall we shall so i'm going to talk about the commuter headphones they're mag safe commuter.
With a k
K-o-m-u-t-r okay.
So it's one of those cool names yeah all right
But they're MagSafe, so they attach to the back of your phone.
Sure.
Much easier not to lose track of than, say, a major brand that might come in a white case.
Yep.
I don't recall the pricing off the top of my head, but it was significantly a good price.
Okay.
Active noise canceling. Dare I mention the Apple brand? I just did.
they look very much like the apple brand except they are uh all black they uh they do have chi charging okay uh usb-c charging but they attach to the back of your phone and the case is a half inch thick actually it's 0.47 to get nitty down in the nitty on yeah yeah and they sound lovely they have a deep bass the trebles were clear and crisp and i i really i want a pair great i want a pair so yeah the commuter headphones uh and let's see active noise canceling yep.
Also cool so
Just in case we haven't talked about enough headphones yet Well, I'm trying to find things that have a differentiating factor.
Okay.
And the, I'm sure I'm going to mispronounce
The company name,
Litmi, L-Y-T-M-I, Cozy Fit 2 Pro, are open ear headphones. We talked about some of these. I told you there were more coming. And these we found here at the show. They're open ear headphones. which means that no part of the headphone goes into your ear canal. So to level set this, we've got the AirPods Pro, which go into your ear canal and seal.
So they also have active noise canceling,
But they have passive noise canceling by sealing your ear canal. Then there are the AirPods Not Pro that hang in your ear, but they go into your ear canal. They just don't seal. So they are semi, right. And then there is this category, which is the open ear headphones, which means they go onto your ear and float a little speaker somewhere that it aims down your ear canal, but does not block it whatsoever. So you are fully aware and fully exposed to all ambient sounds.
And here's where these Cozy Fit 2 Pros get interesting.
Are they the first, Dave?
I don't know.
They're the first I've found.
They're the second. They claim to be the second, though. Okay. Remember that? I asked her, why are you the second? Because there's someone else that did this.
No, no, not somebody else. They have the Lit Me Cozy Fit, and these are the Cozy Fit 2s.
They claim to be the second ones that do active noise.
No, I think there was a language barrier there.
Oh.
I thought it was on the sign. I could be wrong. I thought it was on the sign that said, we're the second active noise canceling. Yeah, anyway, all right. They're the first that I found. Let me get out of the way and talk about, you talked more about this.
And they have active noise canceling.
And it's about, they say it's 15 dB.
I'm not sure that I would agree with that.
I would say it's somewhere in the like 9 to 10 dB range, maybe half of what they were saying. but either way there is a noticeable reduction in ambient sound pete you said it best when you put them on here in the hotel room with the fan going on you feel it more than you hear it yes now i don't know they were having trouble the the set that they had for a demo in their booth we couldn't make them work but they gave us sets to bring back and those work fine so
It must have
Just been maybe
It was the battery was dead who knows or
Maybe a little interference in the hall.
With everybody there shouldn't have been bluetooth or wi-fi it wasn't there was no bluetooth involved
In this this is all
Local on the device so
Yeah no no
They were just
There was something wrong
Which is fine uh But here in the room, it might be different in a very sort of cacophonous environment. It might be more perceivable. But even here in the room, it was like, oh, wait. Yeah, look at that. The fan is quieter. It's really interesting. And I don't know exactly how they're doing it. My guess is that they are creating a complimentary wave and sending that down your ear,
Which would be the only way to do that.
So, yeah. The opposite sine wave.
The opposite, yeah, the opposite audio wave. Yeah.
So, yeah, that's the Lit Me Cozy Fit 2 Pros.
Hey, Dave, we haven't talked about enough earphones yet.
Yeah, you got one more?
I do. Okay. And here's the thing. We talked about this, and you said at one point, hey, look, I'm going to talk about some Soundcore stuff that I like.
I said I was going to talk about some open-ear headphones that I like, and i wasn't going to talk about the ones i don't like
That i don't like and and you didn't talk about these or and but we're not sure if these are the ones you tried or not these are the sound core aero fit two okay and and the cool thing about these is they are like you described the previous headphones they fit over your ear and they they have four adjustable positions actually they're a little you can feel the little detent click click click click click so if you're small you you raise them up if you're if you're a larger ear you lower
the clicks down to the so it's four settable positions and it does aim the sound down your ear hole now these are not active noise canceling but the beauty is they are not in your ear so you're fully aware of everything that's going on around you and i listened to them and i went huh i think these sound pretty good. Yep. Hence, I made you listen to them and go, uh did you not talk about these because you didn't like them and you tried them and said oh no.
Yeah i can't
Remember if these were exactly the ones that i tried
But when i tried yours and maybe i didn't have the the setting right oh maybe the clickable setting right
I mean if
That's the idea they i will say this about these over these open ear um earbuds for
Lack of a better
You have to have the speaker in exactly the right spot yeah because otherwise it's not going to aim down your ear it's not like you're putting it in your ear where you know it's in the right spot if you don't float it into the right spot or if it doesn't float into the right spot because of the difference between your ear and the design of this thing
Then yeah you got nothing so yeah
So there's a little detent in each point.
Amazing it just yeah yeah and uh no one's going
To see the video that you think
You're you're showing well
No there's 67 people watching us right now dave they can't.
See it either well that's
True because our hotel wi-fi is on so uh sorry folks that was a tease you may see me.
Holding no we'll put links to all this in the show notes yeah and
You go sign up at
Macgeekab.com to get the show notes delivered to your email box so
Yes so excited to try the pair of these so thank you to soundcore for by anchor yeah and oh by the way i anchor doesn't make bad stuff.
No, we've had, they are
Known for making
Good things.
Private Internet Access is another one of our CES coverage sponsors.
And as I keep saying all episode, there is not much here that
We would be able to
Do without all of our sponsors.
Let me ask you this. When you're online, Pete, do you really know who's watching? And if your answer is probably no one, think again.
Absolutely no one's watching.
Okay, sure.
Using an unprotected internet connection is like wearing a neon sign, Pete, that says, Hack me, I dare you. But private internet access, or PIA VPN, has your back, right? PIA VPN is your digital bodyguard encrypting your data and letting you choose from servers in 91, count them, 91 countries in all 50 states. You want to stream region-based, locked content or snag cheaper flights by pretending you're in Antarctica?
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You didn't hear that from me, though.
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And again, that's PIAVPN.com slash MGG to get 83% off four free months. You're going to love it. And thanks again to PIA for keeping us secure and supporting all the coverage that we're bringing you this week from ces 2025 yeah stuff oh show what's next
Pete well uh i just want to make a quick comment that there was a navy seal who got out of uh look he retired and his name's jack carr and he wrote a book called the terminal list and they made it into an amazon series and boy it's fascinating fun the the the amazon series was good it was enough different from the book so if you've read the book the series is still going to be entertaining and he wrote five other books and it's fascinating and in one of the books he
talks about quantum computing and capabilities i was wondering.
Where this came
From yep along with.
Everyone else quantum
Hamsters yeah of course they were but i'm i'm gonna circle the uh dot or close the circle Yeah, circle the drain, and down we go, folks. And you're coming with me.
I'm pretty sure that's going to be the title of the episode.
Circle the drain.
Circling the Wi-Fi drain at CES 2025.
Amen. That's a fair title. Anyway, long and short of it, he said in his commentary, I believe it was after his fourth book, might have been before his fourth book in the prologue, knowing what I know of governmental ability to monitor your internet traffic. I don't ever want to send an email again.
So just PA VPN folks. There you go. Got to have it.
What's next the other thing that we saw and i think this may have been the very first thing that we saw was battery tender at battery tender.com they have a couple three well they have many options this one that's coming out in march i believe he said it was is a battery tender so it's essentially a trickle charger you plug it into an ac outlet and keep your lawn mower power battery alive over the winter or your boat battery over the winter, those sorts of things.
Okay. So it'll do a trickle charge.
Got it.
A battery maintainer tender. Excuse me. And the other thing that it will do is provide, in the event you need it, 1,000 cold cranking amps to jumpstart your car.
Oh, yeah. Okay. So for a dead battery.
Yeah. it's a battery tender or for a dead battery a jump starter and it has of course led lights because when you're and.
It's it's portable like i mean you can keep this in your
Car dave i don't know how portable it is it weighs almost a pound okay.
Got it all
Right well i'll have to
Ask someone to put it in my car
Shopping smaller than a loaf of bread yep weighs almost a pound and yeah but a thousand cold cranking amps oh my goodness that's that's enough to start your Ford F-150, your Chevy Tahoe. Yeah, yeah. You know, it'll crank your engine over.
Yeah, for sure.
And then the other one was similar in size it was a battery jump starter and a uh inflator what's the word i'm looking for compressor your compressor okay so it provides 800 cold cranking amps it's not a battery tender it won't leave a trickle charge sure battery but it will inflate your tires and you digitally set hey i want 35 psi you connect it to the the tire and you turn it on and you let it fill up.
That that is one of i every year i
I pick a gadget to get for
Family members for
Christmas and a
Digital battery powered portable tire car tire or bicycle tire inflator is was the gift i did
This year for everybody
It is game changing because i literally can just like put it on my tire set the number push the button and once it starts i just i can walk away because i know it's gonna stop it's not gonna over inflate the thing i can come back okay
It's done all right go to the next tire do this thing so
This thing this 800 the uh the one that has the combination that last year's gift was the jump starter
For the car there you go so this combines the two of them
It's a hundred that one's 139 bucks and is available now the other thing that with which has the trickle charge and the jump start but not the tire inflator is 119 and that will be available later in
Q1 here right and and both are pilot proof you can't put the jump starter.
No it's it's smart enough if you put it backwards it tells you to switch the leads yes
As you've got it on the wrong ones yeah no yeah don't we're not going to provide juice until you have it on the proper terminal fair yeah yep.
You mentioned anchor pete so i am going to do the same they have well there's several things i
Mean there's more than several
The one i want to tell you about is the anchor power bank 25k 165 watts yeah so this thing is it's nuts uh it it is it has One of their nerdy displays on the front of it,
Which we love. Anchor's, you know, nerdy
Displays that tell us what is being,
Like how much
Is being drained out of each port. It has a retractable USB-C cable in it. And then it's got a little lanyard that fits around your wrist, which, oh, by the way, is another cable. Yeah. Yeah, that was cool.
It's very, yeah, I was shocked when she showed me that. I was like, wait,
Slow down. What did you just do? How does that cable show up here?
It looks like a little cloth strap.
It just looks like a little wrist strap.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's got three. It's got the built-in eight-inch cable, which is the wrist strap. The retractable cable is 27 inches. It's got three USB-C ports on top of the two cables and one USB-A port. It is available now. It is TSA approved, and it's $99.
Nice. Yeah. So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it, Pete.
All right.
You know what other story I'm going to tell,
Though? I'm going to tell the story about Eero. Oh, I'm sure you're going to tell that story about me.
Well, you also use Eero.
This story is about both of us because we
Both use Eero as the Wi-Fi
In our homes,
And I test a lot of different things, as you know,
And I'm happy to do that.
And then when I'm done testing, I go back to my Eero setup every single time. It is possible. why that i will test something and it could just stay but it doesn't
Why do you go back to.
Your because it just works it's smart it's reliable they've got easy setup seamless coverage my family never asks me questions about the wi-fi when we're on the euro setup that is key because that lets me come here and know that good chance they're not going to have any issues with wi-fi while I'm Not home. They now have the Eero Outdoor 7, which provides outdoor coverage. It has an Ethernet jack in it, or it can get the signal over Wi-Fi. It will support power over Ethernet.
So if you can
Run a PoE cable to it, you can just run one cable, and you're done. Of course, it's weatherproof, rain, snow, doesn't matter. And it's Wi-Fi 7. So, he upper, don't get caught without it. Eero.com. And thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. What happened?
You started playing the music. The band's here. The band. Get out of here, band. You guys go back down the hall. Take the elevator down to the casino. How did I start the music?
How did that happen?
I don't know.
That's really.
Where is that?
Oh, I don't know how that's happening right now.
I don't have that window open. So that's cool.
Well, there's that. Yeah, if the window had been open, we might have.
No, no, no. No, I mean the window on the computer that would have that song. Like, I don't know how that could be happening right now.
Someone's trying to tell us something. That was really weird.
It's not playing anymore. I mean, I just grabbed it. This is why I travel with a portable mixer control surface so
That I can,
You know, kill things when they make noise.
Exactly.
It's really strange. Well, I'm going to leave that one, that fader down for now. Thank you, Iro, for all of the support.
And thanks to all of our coverage sponsors, we couldn't do this without you.
And because it just works. Think of all the money you'll save on divorce attorneys.
Yeah. Well, there's that. There's that.
What else you got, Pete? You got another one or two?
I actually have a quick circle back comment on the commuter earbuds that I talked about. They're going to be due out summer 2025. I don't think I mentioned that when we were chatting about those. Thank you. So they aren't due out until this summer.
So how did that music this is really like I yeah I keep our the music that we play that music what you heard is a song called Kootenai by a band called Go Figure which is the band that I played in in college You may, if you've never been part of the live stream,
You probably have never heard that song before,
But you have heard at least one song by Go Figure, and that is a song called The Answer,
Which is the theme song for this show and always has been.
But I keep them in a note,
In Apple Notes, just the audio files, and I play them from there. So I have no idea how that started playing when
I had a different
Note open. So yeah, whatever.
Gremlins, circling the Wi-Fi drain here at CES, Pete. What's next?
That's what we're doing. Well, actually, I saw these today at the Creative Suite. Okay. And they are the Pebble Nova. They have the Pebble speakers, but these are the Pebble Nova speakers. So they're new. Nova meaning new or doesn't go, depending on which language you're speaking.
Well, that's true. It would have to be two words for doesn't go.
Nova. Nova, yes. Nova.
Yeah. Brilliant GM when you did that. Yep. in Latin countries in the 70s, or the 60s, I guess. Anyway, so for a pair of the Nova speakers, it's $279. Right up front, the price point, these are about the size of a grapefruit. And the surprise that I felt when I heard these is similar to the surprise I felt. I'm about to date myself, and no, I don't mean in a good way. In the early 80s, Radio Shack, Tandy Corporation had a speaker that was called the Minimus 7.
It was a 7-inch speaker in a steel case, and they sounded like big speakers that were 3 feet tall. Almost. Almost. They were close. These Pebble Novas sound bigger than that. Wow. 100-watt speakers.
Yeah. That's a lot of power to
Drive through a tiny little. Yeah, speakers that are the size of a grapefruit.
I'm telling you. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And oh my goodness. I'm buying a pair. Plain and simple. These things are, they're able to, well, they've got another piece of gear that they're running Atmos through and all.
That sort of
Thing.
Got it, yep.
So they can fill an entire room with surround sound, stuff coming from behind you. And I swear to God, I had to look around twice and go, okay, no one's standing back there with speakers? Come on.
What's the price point on these?
$279.99. So $280.
For the pair?
For the pair.
Wow.
Yeah. And these are.
Wow.
Yeah. These, and they're in the shape of a ball. That's why I said the size of a grapefruit. They sit on a little stand and they point up at a 45 degree angle. You could, I suppose you can mount them on the wall and point them in or what have you. But the –, I cannot describe my utter shock at how amazing these speakers sounded.
It's pretty good.
Yeah. It was like looking at those tiny speakers 40 years ago and going, oh, wait a minute. Where are the big speakers? They're not there. This is the same thing. These are big sounding speakers.
Cool.
I am going to,
It's time. It's time to bring the band in intentionally.
Those guys again?
I know, I know,
I know. It's how it's going to be. And they left.
They did leave because things were... There's yet another gremlin in the machine here,
Pete.
But it's okay.
They must be circling the drain with the rest of us.
Yeah, that's right.
There's one other thing that we were going to talk about, but I want to wait until we have Adam with us to tell him about all the stuff that ShiftCam does. Because I've seen ShiftCam's products before. Or I never understood them until we really kind of met with them and understood their ecosystem.
Put our fingers on them. Yeah, put our fingers.
Well, I'd had my fingers on them before. It was more about sitting down and having an opportunity to really understand what these products do
And how they work together.
So we'll talk about that. But it's great accessories for your iPhone,
Especially if you're into photography.
Well, and I'll tease it like this. remember we asked him how'd you design it and what did you come up with and he told us this was not the first iteration the.
Second iteration 35
Iterations on the one product alone to perfect it and boy have they perfected it that's your tease.
We'll talk about that
Next week I promise
Thank you for hanging out with us thank you to all of our CES coverage sponsors
Of course what we mentioned during the episode
Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to
You.
Oh, man. You got anything to tell
Them while the
Final little song runs out here?
Apologies to all you poor people who tried to watch us on live stream.
Yeah, I don't think there are any left, Pete.
Were they smart enough to leave?
I think so. I think so.
No, it's not true. There's still people watching.
There's still almost 70 people watching.
Thanks for suffering through.
Well, hopefully the audio's good.
Yeah.
Yep.
I think it is.
And all of you people sitting there, you got caught watching this. The rest of you, don't get caught. Made on a back.
We did it, Pete.
We can go to sleep now.
No one saw me. You can't prove a thing.
Later.