Alright, it's time for MacGeekAb and listener Barry brings us our cool stuff found of the week. And what is that you ask? If you've been doing the internet for a while, you'll know what that is. But if you want to learn details about what those noises are, then Barry sent us this article that visually explains it and tells you what all those weird sounds mean. So if you want to learn what it was like for doing the internet back in BBS day, then check out this article.
We're going to get more cool stuff found like this. Plus your questions answered today on Mackey Cab 977. For Monday, April 17th, twenty twenty three. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Mac Geek Gap, the show where you send in your cool. Music. Stuff found like that. We share it. You send in your quick tips. We sometimes share those, although I don't think we have any in the agenda today because we've got so much cool stuff found.
You also send in your questions and we try to answer those. Sometimes we even have questions of our own. We put it all together into an agenda. The goal being that every single one of us, even those of us hosts here, every one of us, perhaps especially those of us hosts here, learn at least five new things every single week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode include notion.com slash Mac geek gab. That's where you can go to try notion AI for free.
Cool thing. Also, BB Edit from Barebones Software, my favorite way to edit text. It's an app that's always open. We'll talk more in depth about each of those a little bit later here in the show for now here in Balmy, Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in equally balmy Fairfield, Connecticut, this is Jonathan Brant. And here in Lee, New Hampshire, where everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. It's Pilot Pete.
Yeah, we gotta start doing something about the weather, Pete. That's right. By golly. You know what? Maybe we can do that at our Hangout, which is coming up on Sunday, April 23rd at 4 p.m. Eastern time. There's been some discussion in our Discord channel about what to discuss at this Hangout. And I think what we're going to do is share our and collaborate on our various use cases and failures and successes using all the various AI engines that are out there.
Because I think that's a great collaborative conversation to have in a group setting where it's just sort of a Hangout. Show up with your favorite beverage. hang with us for an hour or so. There is the all the details are on the calendar at Mackeycup.com slash calendar. They're also in our discord channel. I'll put a link to that right here in the show notes. We can go to Mackeycup.com slash discord and that'll get you started as well.
So and that's where the password for the zoom meeting will be because I can't put that out, like on social media. We've learned that the hard way. Uh, yeah, we get lots of special friends coming in. He had lots of... My favorite one, and I use the term favorite very loosely here, but like my favorite from a I want to cause problems standpoint is the people that would show up,
Before I had the security settings locked down the right way, obviously, they taught me. So we got caught. We learned we moved on tuition. But what they would do is they would log in and change their name to the name of someone that's currently there And then they would post something massively offensive like, you know, super offensive, Maybe a picture try to share their screen with even worse images or like say something in the chat It was like, you know offensively racist or whatever.
They did a bad bad thing. Yeah, they do a bad thing and then they would quickly change their name. So that part's not cool. But then they would quickly change their name to someone else so that we would then go and ban a legitimate member of the chat because we thought that suddenly somebody that we'd known for a decade kind of went off the deep end and was like, yeah, this is super inappropriate to do here. So we got to boot you. Pete, cut that out. Pete, knock it off.
I didn't want to say anything, Pete. So I respect the thinking behind that. The ingenuity, yeah. I mean, we like to use our powers for good for the most part and not just like script kiddies and doing the thing that I'm sure they didn't come up with. Like someone came up with that. I'm sure whoever was in our chat doing it was just doing it because they read about it somewhere else. Or they heard about it on a podcast. Like.
Like this one, maybe we can share better things. You just gave a bunch of people some bad ideas. I really did. You know, I'm going to jump us back into cool stuff found. Listener Gary had sent in, actually a lot of you have sent this in. The new Steve Jobs book, Make Something Wonderful. It's available as an e-book on Apple Books. You can also download it. It. We'll put links in the show notes for all of it. But what it is, is it's a collection
of Steve things that Steve said or wrote throughout his life. And I think some of this stuff is just absolutely fantastic. And and there's just so many great little just just hearing his words and there's a nice forward by Lorene Powell Jobs, obviously his widow, and just some fantastic stuff. So one of the things that I read in there this morning was how he, when he was in school, he and his friend in school would do things like that, but they actually came up with it.
There was a bike rack of a hundred different bicycles, you know, like it's this elementary school or whatever. The kids would ride their bikes to school. One by one, he and his friend went through and traded bike lock combinations with all the other people that locked their bikes up, right? So it'd be like, hey, if you tell me your combination, I'll tell you mine. And they did, and they were honest about it.
People didn't know that these two guys, Steve and his friend, were collecting everyone's bike lock combinations. And once they had everyone's, they went down and changed locks for everyone's bikes. Because they had all the combinations. And it took people, he said people were there till like 10pm trying to unravel this mess that they had created. The principal then split the two of them into different classes going forward. Man, that reminds me of a famous boot camp story, Dave.
Uh-oh. Is it one that we can share here? Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah. But yeah, so what the DIs would do is they'd go through and they would find... The guys would be in a hurry, right? You'd get out, get out now, go, go, go, get on the street. And they'd go out and they'd leave their wall locker and or their foot locker unlocked. And so the DIs would then go through and find 10 or 12 unlocked padlocks. And they would take them and they would lock them all together.
And then when the troops came back from chow, they'd go, you have two minutes to get your lock undone or we're going to PT you. You know, so they, of course, you know, one guy would get his lock on them. Then they'd PT him for 30 minutes and then they go, okay, you have two minutes to get your lock undone. Then they'd PT them again. So it was a way to PT the guys for, you know, three, four hours. PT? What is this? I'm sorry. Physical training. Pushups, sit ups, squats, bends and thrusts.
Basically run you into the dirt. See, I learned a new thing, right? I now know that PT is a physical training. There you go. There you go. Have you read any of make something wonderful, John? No. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It, I haven't yet either, but it looks really good. Yeah. I woke up super early this morning. I don't know why. And it was like, crap, like, I don't, I just don't want to be awake yet.
Like I'm, you know, it's like, it's just how it was. I woke up at like quarter to seven, which for me is, is, you know, that's still the middle of the night, but, uh, I wonder if it's audio book. That's when I get a lot of my reading done. I mean, the only way you would want to hear this is if Steve was reading it. And unfortunately that's not the case. However, there is that AI engine that people have used to make Steve say things like it.
It's, it's, it's, I don't think it's the engine that I've seen was just taking like sort of samples and, and stitching them together. But, but there are AI engines out there that, that will. Learn the inflections of a voice and then just, you know, push them out. So, yeah, in fact, I was going to say there was, there was one and I don't know, now I don't remember which one it was.
So I'll have to go look for it, but it would learn your own voice so that you could go through with you, with your podcast and go, Oh, the sound screwed up there. So I want to go back and, and, and have it. And you type out what you want it to say and throw it in there and it would put, it right in. You didn't have to say it or rerecord it or anything.
Yeah. It learned your voice. Yeah, Veritone, who does a lot of things, one of which is they're a podcast ad, like a buying agency, but they, you know, they've done tons and tons of things.
They demoed, last year they demoed for me an engine, I can't remember the name of it, it begins with an M, that would do, they had some stock voices in it, anyway, the name's on the tip of my tongue, but it had some stock voices in it, but they also for like five grand or something would sample your voice so that you could do it, and they're like, you know, you want to do this for like ad reads that way it's you doing it, but all you gotta do is type out the
Script and then if you've got the same sponsor on for four shows and you're supposed to create a new script for each show, Well, you don't have to go and re-record and do it. You just it flawlessly reads it. It doesn't mispronounce correct There's no editing to do. Yes Right. Yeah, cuz cuz that's how I do. I pre record. It's actually me It's not ferretone's engine, but I pre record all the ads Obviously they're built to sound like they're just in the flow of the show.
And we do in fact play them into the flow of the show. But I pre-record them so that I don't screw them up. And so I don't stumble over all over myself just like I did there. There's not there's no ums and ahs. Now, I when I record them, there's plenty of that in there. I chop that out so that the ad reads are tight. And and it really so it gives me the opportunity to sit and read the talking points, the background information before I do the read.
Doing that live in the middle of a show while we're reading your questions and all that, I don't have 30 to 45 seconds of silence to read the thing and be like, okay, now I know what I want to say and then say it. That would be super awkward trying to do that in the show. So, so anyway, yeah, yeah. It's fascinating tech. So we'll talk about all kinds of stuff like this on our hangout on Sunday the 23rd.
So I think it is the 23rd. I think that's the right date, but it's whatever the Sunday is after the 17th. Uh, so would that be the 23rd? Yeah, it would be. Yeah. 26, 23. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's how I did the same math. Seven to six and seven. Yeah. There you go. Alright, moving on. More cool stuff found. We swear, every one of them is not going to take seven minutes. Ha ha ha. JITouch. J-I-Touch? Something like that.
JamCycler in our Discord said, uh, you recently mentioned SmartScroll, and, uh, that reminded me of JITouch, which adds lots of extra gestures to the trackpad and Magic Mouse. And you get it at GitHub, we'll put a link in the show notes. There is a website for it, but the version on the website for JITouch is older than the current version, which is available on GitHub. So we'll make sure. But he said, he said it's a multi-touch extension, essentially for the, you know, the magic mouse,
magic trackpad. And if your MacBook has a trackpad on it, that's also the same kind of thing. So thanks for sharing that with us. We appreciate it. That's nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pete, you got one, don't you? I do. You know, it's often been said that England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. And the folks at Time Kettle have actually brought that technology to the rest of the world.
So I have, I'm holding up on the video and it's difficult to see, they're about the size of the AirPods Pro case. And they're little earbuds that are translators. They support up to 40 different languages and it comes with an iOS app or an Android app depending on your system. And of course all of our folks are iOS users, we know. But uh... Now there's some, believe it or not, there's some listeners who use earbuds. There are. Yeah. We'll educate them and get their minds right eventually.
I'm sorry, just being pejorative because I can. So anyway, you put these earbuds in and there's several different modes. You can put both of them in and put your phone into the listen mode and I can watch movies in a foreign language or listen to a brief or something along those lines. It's virtually instantaneous. It's maybe a second behind, but it's close enough to actually get it. I watched some like it hot in Spanish the other day just to see how it would do. It did really fantastically.
Really? Like it was fast enough that it wasn't distracting? It was within, yes, it was within a second. I mean, a little distracting, but if you want
to see it, what's going on, it was close enough that it was good. Yeah. The other option that you can do is you can put one bud in your ear and hand one to somebody else and they put it in their ear and then you just tap your ear and then you speak and then stop speaking and then it translates virtually instantaneously into their ear, then they, tap their ear and speak in their native language and it translates back to you.
That's really cool. So you can share that way. And then the other option is that you can wear one or both and then put it in into a speaker mode. So you tap your earbud and speak in English and then whichever language you have set up to go into, it translates it both in writing and then comes out the speaker of your phone in their language so they can hear and read it both. And then you just tap the phone and they speak in their language and it comes back to you in English.
I'm assuming that that's your language. Right, yeah, it comes back to you in English, right. Yeah, yeah. So, and there's, it supports up to 40 different languages. And the cool thing is, it is, you know, you can say, hey, I want Chinese to German. I want Spanish to Italian, whatever. But you download these language packs and put them on your phone. And those are a little extra. But the beautiful thing about that is, is you no longer need internet connectivity.
So you don't have to use your data when traveling in China and Korea and Japan and Europe to get your get your translations done. So how does this compare? Because when I was in Italy most recently, I was using Apple Translate and Google Translate. And they do have like a conversation mode in the app, right? Where you can put the phone down between you and it'll listen and sort of do some version of this. Have you, like, have you spent enough time with either of those things to compare or
contrast it? I used the Google one in the past and I found it to be close, but not quite as efficient. These are really fast. Um, and it, it, it uses some AI engine and I don't know what it is, which AI engine it uses, but it does use an AI engine to, to translate. And I gotta tell you, I mean, I really love these things. They are, uh, they're not cheap. $350.
But, but boy, if you, if you do any amount of international travel, see if I can get it without a reflection there that, uh, Yeah, I mean, it looks like a, it looks, actually, it looks like a smaller version of an AirPods Pro case. It looks, you know, a little, yeah. So perfectly portable. Yeah, yeah, they, they are. And the, and the charge lasts a really long time. I don't have an exact number for you, but the fact is they, you know, they charge well,
they, they go back in the case, they charge back up again. So you've got days and days before you have to recharge. Amazing. And yeah. And if you do any amount of international travel, these things are super handy. And what I just found out in reading about, I haven't tried yet, is they will work as Bluetooth earphones to listen to music and podcasts and that sort of thing as well, which I had not tried with. Yeah, yeah. Purses yet. I assumed that they were just for translation.
Right. But no, you can take them out and use them as your earphones. Huh. Time Kettle's the name of the company, sorry about the tick there. Time Kettle, and these are the WT2 Edge EarPods, I keep calling them AirPods, sorry, the WT2 Edge EarBuds Translators. Okay. Or translator earbuds. Yeah, alright, well we got a link in the show notes, thanks man. Yeah, absolutely love them. So thanks to the folks at Time Kettle for giving me this set to work with. If you want them back, got to find me.
The good news is it doesn't matter what language they talk in, they know you can understand them, Pete. That's right. That's right. So if they want them back, I'll give them back to them, but not gladly. Right. Yeah, there you go. There you go. So these are good, good, good product. So yeah. So I think you had me set up for a second one there too. Yeah, but we'll do that later.
Okay. Because I mentioned in, when I was talking about Ben's, uh, JITouch, I mentioned Smart Scroll and, uh, that was because Ben had seen it mentioned in the Discord chat, but indeed, listener Saurabh mentioned a utility called Smart Scroll that lets you customize a bunch of scrolling behavior. Most notably, it lets you hold down a modifier key while scrolling on your Mac to scroll much faster. He says, this is a game changer for me since I spend a lot of time scrolling through long documents
and long websites. So thank you for that. Of course, there's links to all of the cool stuff stuff found in, uh, in the show notes. So, yeah, thanks. Thanks for that. So Rob, John, you got another one for us with a, what listener, John? Yeah, no, this, uh, sounds cool. So listener John says this afternoon I got a bundle hunt ad. Never heard of bundle hunt. One of the items in the bundle is do your clone for Mac. It is an app that clones and makes bootable an external drive for the Mac.
Just like five years ago. It works perfectly. It cloned my OS and all my apps, data, everything, and is fully bootable in Mac Ventura 13.3. Wow. It will also clone drives, create disk images, and has a disk tool. It is good. Huh. Huh. That's interesting. I mean, I'm guessing that the way they would do it is is, um, you would have to install Ventura Clean and then clone OneDrive over to the data volume of the new install.
Because I mean that's the process by which we can clone a drive these days, right? Because you're not, I don't think there's any way to actually clone the system volume. I think you have to create that fresh from the installer. But again, I mean, a utility that, that lets you do this, like that automates this process for us. That might be something I'll talk in a little while about this, but that might be something that I'm wondering why, why would they do this?
Certainly apples support calls have gone up since they got rid of the ability to make a bootable clone. I don't think so. No, no. I mean, how many people, well, as evidenced, I was going to ask how many people would make bootable clones. Our group here, lots of hands in the air. I get it. Like, same. I absolutely would. But in general, I think it's a thing. Fair enough. Yeah, my wife would never do it. You know, she just turns it on and runs it and wouldn't even back up her computer if
I didn't do it for her. Right. Well, and that's where I was going to go with this is Time Machine is now, it's still in Ventura, but it's buried. It doesn't get its own preference pane anymore, right? It's buried inside of like general or something, which is like, guys, you know, but, but my guess is based on Apple's metrics that. You know, that's, that's how, that's how it's gonna be. Oh, hey, that means I get to tell you about our sponsor, Notion AI.
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Alright, so John you were talking about Cloning our Macs. I wish that I had kept a clone of my Monterey Mac around I've, Made no secret of the audio issues that I have discovered in Ventura on this show because it's usually while recording this show, That they present themselves the the issues that I've seen are. Are twofold, but the main one is that when using an aggregate audio device?
Any time a new audio, I'll call it a connection, but any time a new app opens up a connection to Core Audio to play audio or to get ready to play audio, there is a pause. And the pause, it stops everything. And then the CPU spikes for like, I don't know, anywhere between one and three seconds while core audio sort of like figures itself out again. And then everything's fine.
Obviously that's really bad when you're doing a podcast. It is only seems to only happen when using aggregate audio devices. Aggregates are, it's an Apple function. It's not some third party thing where you can take multiple audio devices, and sort of merge them together, aggregate them together as one. And the reason you need to do this is because Apple's Logic app, like many other audio apps, will only see one input audio device and one output audio device.
So if you have multiple devices that Logic needs to see, then you have to aggregate them. And in fact, that's Apple's instruction. It's like, yeah, don't be, they'll just aggregate them. Well, something changed when I upgraded to Ventura and that symptom started happening. The other symptom is that Logic is less stable and so I have to increase the sample buffer from 128 to 256 to get Logic to be stable, but that doesn't change this issue.
And I've bumped the sample buffer all the way up and it still doesn't change this issue. They're sort of related, but separate. And so last Friday, guys, I did what, This is one of those do as I say, not as I do scenarios. I rolled my Mac back from Ventura to Monterey. And that's what I'm running on right now. So like we're in good shape here, at least so far. I've recorded actually quite a few podcasts since doing this and it's been fine.
But you're not supposed to do that, right? Like it's not going to let you do that. If you point migration assistant at a, a, you know, if you point Monterey's Migration Assistant at a Ventura volume, it'll say, I don't understand that volume. That's too new for me, which is exactly what it should say. I didn't want to go through the trouble of like setting up an entirely new system just to confirm that Monterey was going to solve my problem.
So I tried something and I made a clone of my data volume, right, like with Carbon Copy Cloner from Ventura and tried pointing a Monterey, migration assistant at it and it was like, no. And I was like, yeah, I know. Okay, let's try though. What happens if I tell Monterey to install, onto that volume, right? And no, it wouldn't do that. So then I installed Monterey and then I, oh maybe it, yeah, it failed, but it did install it.
Like it installed Monterey onto the system volume of that Ventura data clone volume, because it didn't have a Ventura system volume because we can't do that unless we use do your clone right but I used Carbon Copy Cloner which doesn't do that. So I had this clone of my Ventura data volume and no accompanying system volume because that's how those clones work and so I created one with the Monterey installer and it started to reboot and I'm like oh I did it I'm
gonna make it work it's gonna be fine. No no it crashed on reboot every time and I tried like safe mode and verbose mode and yada, yada, yada. It was like super not happy for obvious reasons. So I'm like, okay, fine. I'll get a fresh volume. So I grabbed another drive, plugged it in. I did a fresh install and then migration assistant came up and it was like, where do you want to pull data from? And I'm like, well, I want to pull it from my Ventura volume. And it was like, no, you can't do that.
And then I pointed it at this Frankenstein that I had created that failed at booting. And it was like, yes, I can migrate from that because I see a Ventura system over there. It wasn't looking any deeper than that. That was enough to make it happily migrate. The data volume. Hold on, I'm sorry, I've got to break in. I was hoping you would. Yeah, so you said I see a Ventura system. You meant to say I see a Monterey system over there?
It sees a Monterey system, but there is a Ventura data volume, right? So, right? But because Monterey's migration assistant saw the failed installation of another Monterey associated with that data volume, I mean, I had sandwiched these things together, Then that was the only test it needed to do it didn't actually look at the data volume It just looked at the system volume and said Monterey is there. I'm good to go. Gotcha. Okay, cuz you said I see a Ventura system
Thank you for okay. Good. All right Cuz I was following you right until you said that I mean, oh, thank you. No, I Yeah, yeah, so so I let it do it and it was like, okay This is gonna take you know a couple hours or whatever and and the whole time I'm thinking well what's gonna happen, right? It booted up. It was fine. Now, wait, not quite. This is like...
It's not great. It's like there are things that I there were things that I knew would be broken photos I knew would be broken because like that app updates its library with Ventura and I now have a Ventura photos library Monterey's photos ain't gonna read that and it confirmed for me it ain't gonna read that right so I had to create a new photos that's fine I use iCloud photos I don't really need photos on this machine for this purpose anyway so no big deal but I let it create
a new photos library. I also knew music would have the same exact issue for the same reasons. But similarly, I use iCloud Music. So no big deal. Let it create a new music library. It did that.
No problem. Great. I also knew mail was going to be a problem. But mail doesn't have the same sort of, here's an easy way to start over with your existing accounts functionality, like photos and music do because I don't know why because, but they just, it doesn't like, Like they don't expect you to be in this scenario.
Understandably, like I get it. So mail took a little bit of, and when I say a little bit, I mean a couple of days of like jerking around with it, deleting, because I had to delete like the V10 folders in the home mail library. But then there were other things, there's something in home library containers that, like again, this is do as I say, which is don't do this, not as I do. But it was usable and even without mail, photos, music working, I was still able to do a test.
The other thing that still doesn't work and I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to fix it is iCloud Drive will not sync. Like there's something and I just don't know where to look to blow up. That's probably a good thing though, right? Well. You don't want bad data going up there. I mean, it's just iCloud Drive. It's just documents and stuff. Like that would be fine. And I would like settings and stuff to sync around. So like this is a non optimal scenario for the long term that I'm in.
Even with all of that, before I ever tried getting photos happy, mail happy, music happy, any of that, the first thing I did was launch up the podcasting setup and see if the problem still exists. Because if it does, then I know that it's something else, right? Because I literally have the same data volume. So it's the best way to test this, despite being an awful thing to actually try to live with and the problem was instantly gone. Instantly. So I know that the problem is with
Ventura. Now I have had a support ticket open with Apple for about three months, maybe four, and they replied once and were like, hey, do some of these sample tests or whatever so we can see what's going on. This doesn't make any sense. I'm like, sure I did. So I did that and then nothing.
I also while I was doing this on Friday I posted about it and it turns out when you have some friends who are Apple engineers who follow you on social media and you Start saying things like Ventura broke core audio.
They don't actually I was more specific about I said Ventura broke aggregate devices in core audio, They take that to heart and so I started hearing again from Apple support, which is great Like this is good and they told me that a delay of between 0.2 and 0.5 Seconds when a new audio device is added or a new audio connection is opened is normal, I'm like, oh, oh or expected like okay, and then they wanted to know did you what else?
Did you change when you upgraded from Monterey to Ventura because Obviously like it could have been something else. I'm like, that's they're like what version of logic you're using. What's this? It's got to be something else. I'm like no guys. I literally rolled that data volume back to Monterey So nothing is different on one OS it behaves fine on the new OS it's terrible. And so we'll see what they say. But I don't have a lot of hope that this is going to be fixed. That is fascinating that it.
Breaks it like that, you would think that the question, of course, and I don't know the answer to this is why, like what what changes did they make to core audio to make it better that caused this side effect? Right? Because I can't imagine that they they sat down and said, is there a way we can cause a delay? Like I know they wouldn't do that, right? You know, it's got a larger buffer.
It's not, I don't know. It's that it's, and they told me what it's doing, which is exactly what you can see it doing. It's that anytime something changes with, in terms of what's touching the audio system, core audio essentially reboots itself. Is what's happening and you can see it happening. That's why this, that's why the sound stops. That's why the CPU spikes, you know, like you can, that, that makes perfect sense. But why now is it doing that? Whereas previously it was never doing that.
Like what's the, what's the good reason for that? And, and we'll see, we'll see if they have an answer. But, uh, but I, I was proud that I was able to do this. I don't, again, don't recommend it. Yeah. So, you know, if you have any thoughts, feedback at Mac geek up.com. If you want to tell me I'm crazy for doing that feedback at Mac geek up.com. So tell Dave he's crazy at feedback at MattKeycap.com. Did I hear you right? Did you say feedback at MattKeycap.com?
That's what I said. And subject Dave's crazy. Dave's crazy. Yep. You can tell us on our Discord channel at MattKeycap.com slash Discord. Everything's monitored these days. Back to cool stuff found, shall we? Do you guys have any other than telling me I'm crazy? Telling me I'm crazy, do you have any thoughts about this? Because I, you know. I would have done it differently if I was at Apple, but you know. Yeah, well again, no one chooses to act in a way that's irrational.
Like, so the question is, and I may never get an answer to this by the way, but the question is why? Why is this change made? Because it would be, you know, maybe there's a good reason for it, maybe there's a world where I can rethink my audio setup. I mean, I think it would be find a way to stop using aggregate devices, But I don't know that that's gonna be possible. Um, that would be kind of the trick. But I, you know, I don't know. So, uh, I did find some cool stuff found though.
So when we're here doing cool stuff found the, um, the folks at 12 South, have, uh, have long had the Airfly, which is their adapter that you plug built for those scenarios where you want to use your bluetooth headphones with the airplane audio like if there's a screen on the plane that plays movies or whatever you want to use your bluetooth headphones with those the only thing that the airplane has is a line out jack and so the airfly.
Was built to solve that problem you plug it in it broadcasts bluetooth you connect well now they have have the new Airfly SE, which is a little smaller and only $35 now. It's got a volume control with mute on it. Got a little battery life indicator. It'll it's got 20 hours of battery life. So if you're looking for one of these things, 35 bucks, the air, uh, the, Airfly SE from 12 South, we'll put a link in the show notes. It's good stuff. You got one for us, Pete? I do.
So listener John writes in, and he said, because of some of the applications I use, I often switch back and forth between Mac and Windows. Windows makes it easy to right-click anywhere and create a quick text file. Not so with a Mac, unless you have found the, and here's what I upset Dave with, New File Menu app. Be more descriptive. Sorry, Dave, that's the name of it. New File Menu app.
I'm always, I'm always, um, asking these guys when we're building the agenda, like when you put something in the agenda, especially a cool stuff found, like the name is the next thing. Cause that's what y'all, when you look in the thing are used to seeing, and we link to that and there's a convention here. We'd like to be consistent. And so when I saw Pete said, cool stuff, found new file menu app. I'm like frigging awesome Pete, but what's the name of it in? That's right.
Thankfully I didn't say that out loud because you already put the name in. Right. So it is, new File Menu app. Once installed, right-click will allow the creation of many different file types, and you can sort through your favorites to the top of the list. The program was updated 7 months ago and is working with Ventura 13.2.1, which is now 13.3.1. It works for me there. I tried Automator, JavaScript approach, and an AppleScripts approach.
Both required a hotkey sequence to launch instead of a right-click. So for $1.99 on the App Store, I'm staying with the New File Menu app. There is a free version, and I've installed that just to play with it. You can only select one file type, which is a .txt. So anywhere, just right-click, and you can create a new file right here, right now. And I'm going to pull down the... Being a cheap airline pilot, I have to save that $1.99 for something more important, right?
So now I'm going to download the $1.99 version and it looks like it's really handy to be able to create a new file from anywhere. Yeah. Why has it taken 18 years of doing almost 18 years of doing this show for this to come up? Because like, especially when we started, we had a lot of switchers listening, right? People that that were windows folks became got a Mac for one reason or another. And, and like, this was a topic on the show all the time was how do I know how to do this on windows?
How do I do this on the Mac? Help me. And then that's, you know, part of where a lot of you, as our audience members came from. And one of mine was rename. Right. Early on, you could not rename more than one file at a time. And so I created an automator script to do that. And now it's in finder. And now it's in finder. Yeah. I like, but I'm shocked that we've like, as soon as you're mentioning this, I'm like, yes,
I've done this on windows. Why have I never even thought to do it on the Mac and why doesn't, why, why did a third party need to create this? Why didn't Apple do it? That's fascinating. Yeah. Huh. So they can charge it. But like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It is basic functionality. I wonder, man. I Apple, but Apple has moved to this whole app first paradigm, right? Where you don't just start with where you're going to store the file, which is what this does, right?
You start with what am I going to use to create the file? And then, you know, I save it to wherever I want to store it. Yeah. So that's why I'm just wondering, is there any kind of a P list or any, uh, terminal command way to make this work, but... No, because you'd need to literally add it to the contextual menu in the Finder, which can be done programmatically, and that's exactly what they've done. So you need to go into system settings and enable extensions for that.
Once you download the app, but that's, it takes you right to it. You click on it. Hey, yeah, open it for me. And it takes you right to where you need to go. Um, Mark M I believe it's Mark M. Yep. In the discord chat while we're recording here, it says there is one for 99 cents, Pete called right to click app. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes too. Very cool. Cool. Uh, because he says it does, it says a right click that their, their description is right.
Click is the best extension for the finder context menu. It allows you to create new files quickly and easily. You just right click in any finder window to create a new file. Yeah. There you go. So Mark, just save me a buck drinks on me boys. Yeah. Yeah. Right. There you go. All the, all the drinks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Save me a dollar. All right. What's up next, John? We got something from Barry. So if you want to blast from the past. Another blast from the past.
Wasn't it a listener, Barry, who started us with the modem sounds for this episode? And yes, yes. Yeah. Fascinating. Double blast. But basically, Barry tells us about something called a muffin term, which I guess is a terminal emulator. And you can then use it to connect to old school BBSs. And we have an article that tells you how to find out about those. But. Like, wait, how is it connecting, though? I mean, it's not dialing up.
Like where do these BBS's exist? It's gotta be an AI. Uh, I think it's doing uh, Telnet. Okay, but like how do you find these bulletin boards over Telnet? Like do they, I'm assuming they exist. So the article that we're pointing to, Connect to Old School BBS's, um, explains how to find BBS's. Got it! Okay, got it, got it. Okay, so we've got a link in this motion term to connect to them, but got it.
Yeah, fun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you and I, you and I were like, you know, the kingpins in our area with our bps is back in the day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like the you're right. These are kids. These are people like muffin term will let you use telnet. I wonder if muffin term includes telnet in it because unless you have have installed it with homebrew telnet does not exist on. On Ventura or Monterey, I believe it might have gone away even older, you know, longer ago than that.
So. Like, I wonder if when you install muffin term, does it bring along its own sort of bundled telnet thing? Because telnet super insecure in that it is all plain text. Right? So I think that's where it got deprecated from Apple's default Unix core was because of that. But you can reinstall it with with Homebrew if you want. Yeah, no, that's funny because yeah, on at least on this machine, I can run Telnet. You probably installed it with Homebrew.
Probably. Yeah. I mean, I use Telnet all the time, not to connect to Telnet servers because I don't know of any. Although this article has some, so maybe I will. But I use it to test things. Like if I need to see does a web server answer on port 80 or does an SSH server answer on port 22, I'll type in telnet space server IP address space 80.
And then it just connects. Now there's, you know, unless you speak HTTP, you're not gonna do a whole lot, but it is a nice way to see does that server answer on that port? At least that's my old school way of thinking. Does my server answer on that port? Maybe one of you will tell us a better way to do that with macOS's built-in tools. All right. Speaking of keeping things up to date, Mac Updater 3 is now out and it adds a few new
features. One of them I can't imagine ever using, but they tell us people asked for so they put it in. One is zero click scheduled, fully automatic updates of all of your stuff. I don't I don't want to do that on my Mac. I want to know when I'm updating something. Thankfully, Mac Updater will can be configured and I believe by default is configured to save the old versions of things. So if you have an update that fails, you have a simpler path or a path to rolling back.
But the other thing it adds is you can install older versions with little drop down menu in there, which is kind of cool. So if only you could do that with, say, an operating system. If only you could do that with an operating system. They do have an Apple Silicon migration assistant to help people move to new Macs and make sure you're downloading the Apple Silicon versions of your apps. If you've got, you know, Intel versions there, it does some of that. So yeah, it's, it's.
Yeah, so, but Mac updater is like to me an indispensable app. It makes life so much easier because I, the one problem it solves for me, because what I do is I run it occasionally, probably obsessively, you know, I probably run it a couple of times a week, which is more than I need to. But it goes and looks and finds all of the updates for the apps that you have installed. And then you can tell it to go install them. And it does, which is amazing. It's great.
Where that's really handy is when I go to launch an app that I don't launch all that frequently. And I go to launch it because I need to use it. And it says, oh, hey, I'm old. You should update me. And it's like, yeah, but I want to just use you right now. So update later. And a lot of apps don't have the update later functionality right there. So Mac updater keeps me from running into that scenario, which is great.
So yeah, I like it. That's a, that's a key little app. Alright, where are we here? Oh, I'll share one more cool stuff found here, just because of the timing, Earth Day is later this week, and Anchor has their bio-based cables in honor of Earth Day. Well, I mean, really, they're just bio-based cables. You could use them at any time, but they are made with things like corn, like corn plant-based materials, corn, sugar cane, and 40% bio-based materials are used in the outer sheath.
So you can go check those out at Anker. We love the stuff Anker makes. So when I see new stuff from Anker, I'm always kind of eager to see what they've done. They're one of those companies that has yet to do wrong by me in terms of creating a device that's like not both reliable and useful. Big fan of the Anker stuff. Yeah, they've got some good products. They do. Yeah. They know what they're doing over there, which is, which is great. Like, it's nice to have, uh, have some of those.
Um, Duke asked a question in, and this is sort of like a question with a cool stuff found baked right in, in, in discord, Duke silver one 92 said my MacBook pro M one max is discharging really quickly whilst asleep with the lid closed. This has only recently started happening. I saw on a thread about screen time being an issue. So I turned it off and it seemed to sort it. Then a few days later, it started again.
I've used Activity Monitor to check 12-hour power impact, and I did notice that the Stream Deck app seems to use loads of energy, even though the actual hardware isn't connected. I've since quit that and tried, but it continues happening. Any ideas would be appreciated. And this was the moment at which my mind was blown because Saurabh answered and said, a good app to help debug this is called Sleep Aid. Guys, I'd never heard of sleep aid before. This app is awesome.
It's from the folks at OhanaWare. And it it like it's magic. It pays attention to the reasons your Mac fell asleep and then offers suggestions as to how to fix what it would call like periods of extended and insomnia. Right. I mean, it's normal for a Mac to wake up. Intel Macs will wake up once an hour to do their maintenance. Apple Silicon Macs will wake up three times an hour to do their maintenance. Like that part's normal.
But more than that. and it'll tell you the reasons and certainly you can comb through the terminal and console logs to start to intuit this I'm assuming that's what they're doing, but boy howdy, They make it way way way easier, and they display it in this calendar view It's I went immediately went and downloaded it and started running it, And I've got to now put it on my laptop But it's fascinating like I find my my M1 mini in the office
I haven't put it on this computer here yet because you know, this computer has been through enough. I know that things aren't right with it. I am going to have to wipe this and like build a from scratch Monterey. Like if I didn't say that earlier I'm definitely going to do that probably before we record the next episode at some point if I have the time. But certainly for my laptop, having this on there to tell me is it doing stuff that it shouldn't be doing? And if so, what?
And what can I do about it? And they have some very specific suggestions about things that you can turn off and turn on. So yeah, this was the question that turned itself into a cool stuff found thanks to our Discord community. So thanks for that folks. This is, I love learning about new stuff. So I can't believe, did you, did John, did you know, Had you heard about Sleep Aid before? There it is. The patent patent pending. No. Have you have you.
So I do remember the good old days pouring through the console logs to figure out, sleep issues. So it's nice that somebody brought it together. Does that for us? Yeah. Well, like in in in Monterey, we were able to like look for I forget what it's called, like sleep reason or something. You know, you could grep the console log for that and see what it is. It's not sleep reason, but you know, you could look like with PM set or something and it would show you the reasons for sleep.
With Ventura, there's way too many things that intentionally wake our max up for like very brief periods of time that that's a fool's errand, unless you can apply the right filters to it, which of course is exactly what these folks are doing here. So yeah, it's good. Yeah, and just, and so for the listeners, just a heads up. So Dave did put the link in the show notes and it's at ohanaware.com. You're not gonna find it in the app store, it appears.
Unless you want a relaxation, you know. I can't imagine, that's a fair point. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's ohanaware.com. It's in the show notes to get that exactly. But if you put in sleep aid in the app store, you're gonna wind up with relaxation programs and such. Right, sleep aid for yourself, not for helping your Mac. Not for your computational device. Right, right.
Listener Joe, and there's again a thread in Discord about this, which is worth reading if what I'm about to tell you interests you. But he said, for anyone that travels, specifically those who use Mac OS and iOS, he says, for years, I traveled all over the world managing to carve out a day on a weekend or so to see new places and explore.
He says, my biggest problem was how to keep up with all the potential places of interest that I had researched without having to tote around a tour book or having to create an elaborate text file to log all of my interests and then sort them. Looking in Mac and iOS app stores didn't seem to have a general solution to this either. I even thought about trying to create my own app for this, but that's a lot of work.
For an upcoming trip, he says, I decided to try a different set of parameters in my Google searching and came across the almost ideal solution, Google Maps. Most folks, he says, I think are like me and either use Google Maps or Apple Maps to search and route to a location, but there's no concept of dropping multiple pins unless unless they are dedicated to a specific route. But it turns out that Google Maps has the solution.
And it's awesome. He says, he says, Google Maps allows one to create custom maps, which can be used for specific trips, places, et cetera. From the main Google Maps webpage, you select the plus or the dot, dot, dot menu or something and select saved. And from there you click maps and create a map at the bottom. This opens a new webpage where you can name your map and you can have layers. So you can have a layer per city and have all the interest points for that area in that layer.
He says, for me, I used layer to capture from which resource I had gotten my interest points. Oh, fascinating. So I'll leave this out there, but if the idea of solving that problem and capturing places that you wanna visit and then having them sort of contextually present themselves because they're gonna present themselves when you are in that locale, they're on that map, that's a great thing.
Pete, have you, like you travel more than the rest of us. Yeah, no, I'm gonna go back and play with this and see how well it works on the phone. Yeah. And or the iPad and that's what that's. Yeah, he says he uses the Mac or the iPad to create them, but then you can see them all in the Google Maps app on your phone. So. Perfect. That's a great idea because yeah, no, just.
Yep. I'm blown away, but I never thought about it. Yeah, I was gonna ask, have you solved, Like how have you, how, if at all, have you solved this problem over the years? Yeah, I just, I use a lot of Yelp and that sort of thing. Oh, hey, where's a good place to eat?
You know, okay, give me the map to it, that sort of thing. Because you're limited to within a couple miles of the hotel, generally speaking, unless you're gonna grab an Uber or a bus service or something, but no, this sounds brilliant. And I bet integrates really well with the local mass transit systems. Right, right, right. Oh yeah, because it's Google Maps. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Alright, John, what's next here? Now, maybe some real questions. Ugh. Yeah, let's go to Larry.
And Larry says, I have a very large Eero network and I'm attaching a screenshot of my network. Thank you. Basically, I have an old house with brick chimneys and plaster walls and all these Eero's, have given me what I want, which is Wi-Fi everywhere. And it's quite seamless. I've been very happy and none of this has been a problem. Lately, I've had a problem with an M1 Mac Mini that is attached to one of the Eero Pros. It attaches fine, but it doesn't show that it can access the internet.
Now, next to the Mac Mini is a HomePod Mini that is attached to the very same Eero Pro, and while the Mini shows no internet access, the HomePod Mini is merely playing music for me. The Mac Mini is on 13.3.1, and all the Wi-Fi settings are defaults to the best of my knowledge. None of this makes any sense. One device can't access the internet, and the other does. And they are on the same Aero network and same desk within inches of each other.
I have tried rebooting both the Mac and the Aero to no good effect. Is the Aero defective? Any thoughts? Huh. Interesting. I mean, the only thought I have with problems like this, Dave, is... Is turn it off and on again. So with the Eero, what you can do, I mean, the only thing I could think of, Dave, and I don't think I've ever had to do this, but I have the first generation Eero's. But if in the Eero app, you go to home, then the Eero name advanced, there's a restart.
I mean that's a good place to start. I think there's nothing wrong with that. To me, assuming that doesn't work, and of course it may well work, but assuming it doesn't, I would, my thinking would jump to, okay, what is it about that Mac? And if the Mac says that it's connecting to the Wi-Fi network, I think we should believe it for now. And we should look in the Eero app and see what does Eero think?
Does Eero see that Mac connected? And I know you've got a lot of devices and you're going to have to scroll around and find it, but what does it say about it? Is it perhaps somehow blocked, right? Because there, or what IP address is it assigning it? Is there something like, is somehow that IP address being shared with another device and so your Mac can't talk?
Maybe try setting your Mac manually, either with a DHCP reservation or just literally on your Mac to not use DHCP and connect to a different, you know, use a different IP address that can get super convoluted if for the same reason, and like you start getting things with the same IP address crashing into each other, that's bad. But like that would be, I would look at why, you know, what is the Mac's IP address? And one thing to test, I'm just jumping all over the place here,
but is turn the Mac off, right? Disconnect it or just disconnect it from Wi-Fi. So the Mac doesn't think it's connected. Then go to another computer and ping the IP address of that Mac, right? And C, does it answer? Right, because if it does, that tells you something. Because something's answering, who and why would be an interesting exercise for the listener. And there are some good network scanners out there to tell you. Fair. Right. What's at that IP address. Right, yeah.
At least gives you a MAC address, and then you can reverse lookup, hey, who made this MAC address? What's the yeah, who does this belong? What vendor does this belong to? I don't know that like that's where my brain goes to troubleshoot this stuff is that kind of thing. I don't know like. No, I'm with you. Looking at the devices in the Aero app can be helpful, because yeah, as you pointed out, you can block. Right. IT addresses and maybe you inadvertently did this at one point.
So yeah, looking at the status of the devices in the Eero app. And Pete, I like your suggestion too. I like Thing for scanning a network when I can't find things. So it's very good. Thing is very good at mapping things and showing you the status of them. So that would be another suggestion. And I think you can download the thing. You don't need like the hardware to do the network scanning. You can just download it, download the app and yeah, check it out. I love the Thing app.
I use it when I'm at like a new club where I'm playing music. And most clubs these days use digital mixers, which let you remote control. Like I get to control what what monitor mix is sent to my in-ear monitors. And but a lot of times the engineer won't know the IP address of the board off the top of their head. And it's it's always a negotiation with the engineer. It's like, hey, you know, I walk in.
I try to be helpful first. I tell him things like, hey, here's the thing I know about our band that that would be helpful for you to know as you're setting up. Then I stay out of their way while I'm like setting up my drums. And then it's like, oh, hey, what mixer do you use? OK, cool. And we buddy buddy up. Then it's like, hey, can I use my iPad to control my ears? Oh, sure. Fine. Great. Do you have the app? The answer is always yes, because I've always I put all the apps on my iPad.
But then having to ask them what's the IP address of the mixer, it stops them in their tracks if they don't know it because they have to go all the way back to the mixer and like scroll through three pages and look it up and all that stuff. And so I will ask them, do you know the IP address of the mixer? And if they say no, you know, I'll kind of be like, okay, don't worry about it. And that's when I launched the Fing app, because I've connected to the wifi.
They have to give me the password for that. There's no way around it. But once I've connected, I can scan. And I mean, there's usually, you know, one other device on the wifi or two, their iPad and the mixer. So easy way to find it. There you go. Yeah, I like the Fing app. It is good. It is good. Uh, Phil, no, Jay Brinner is next up and asks the question. I have an external drive on a Ventura Mac Mini and the drive is shared. The drive shows normally on the Mac Mini.
When connecting to it as a share from a different computer, it shows normal drive name and normal drive name too. And it will allow me to connect to either. So, this is one of those weird ones. I'm curious if it's happening on all computers or just one. Usually when this happens, it's because on the Mac that is connecting to it. When you mount a drive, I think it's important to understand how this works.
With Unix, which the Mac OS is, when you mount another drive, it attaches that to a folder, a blank, empty folder that then that new resource is attached to, right? And you can actually attach it to anywhere you want. This goes back to the old Unix days where you would want a separate drive for swap. And so you would mount that at slash swap or slash temp or something like that. And so the... When macOS mounts a drive, it doesn't want to ask you where you want to put it.
And so it puts it at slash volumes, with a capital V, slash the name of the drive. Unless the name of the drive already has a folder there. And if it does, then it is slash volume slash the name of the drive two. And if there's already a two there, then it's slash volume slash the name of the drive three. You get my point. This is why this happens even when you're just connecting an external drive to your,
To your mac right because like that's that's how it works. So, Like that's where I would look first is to make sure First on the max that it's connecting that are connecting to it, I would look in the volumes folder and see are these there I would eject the drive disconnect from the drive, And then go into the volumes folder and clear out Check the folders to make sure they're not empty because it's possible something saved something there that thought it was saving over to the other drive,
but because the drive wasn't connected, it saved it locally on your hard drive. That could be the issue. So check that out. But then go look at it even on the Mac that's sharing it, I would think. Like, it seems weird that it would advertise it, right, John, as a thing. Like, I don't know. Right. Yeah. Thoughts? Mr. Braun? Maybe John's muted. Oh, he's back. Woo! Now, I've been having a similar issue. I'm looking on my phone right now.
Yep. And I see, so I got iPhone 12 mini, entertainment room, entertainment room, and then iPad 4. Oh. And it's like, why did that happen? So the name of your iPad on the network has been incrementally or numerically increased. Yeah, and that usually will happen when a device goes to register itself and sees there's a device on the network already with that name. So there was already an iPad mini and so it was like iPad mini 2 and then something else said there's already iPad mini 2.
And so, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, interesting. Usually you can, like, in order to change for you, John, for your scenario to change that back, you would go to the iPad mini and go into like settings general and about or something in there. And that's where you would change that name. So just for anybody who's seen that. Yeah, that's what I've done in the past. Now, whatever my Macs have done the same thing, it's like, oh, well, let me go and change your name. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
All right, we got we got time for for one more. You want to take us to fill John? Since that's what's next. I know I tried to jump there earlier, but you know. All right, hold on. Let me get Philip. All right. Well, I'm going to rant about something then because, years ago, I used to be able to in the car while driving and I have vivid memories of this as does Lisa. We drove one time from LA to Tahoe and LA is basically sea level and Tahoe is a, you know,
like 6,000 feet or something. And I remember driving in the car up that highway that drives in California that drives through like the land where the sun bakes you, uh, and noticing that, you know, our ears were popping and all of that good stuff. And I remember driving along and being like, Hey, I wonder if Siri can tell me my elevation. And so I asked her what's my elevation. And she told me. And so we did this every few minutes, maybe every 10 minutes for, for quite
some time, just, you know, out of curiosity, like, where are we? What's our elevation. And, uh, I've tried doing that recently and it does not work anymore. It says, I can't show you that information while you are driving. And it's like, I, that's great. I don't want you to show it to me. I want you to tell me like, use your words, use your words, Siri. That's it. There's the title of the show. I knew we were going to get there. Use your words, Siri. Like, why does it not, like what, why, why?
You know, if Apple put half the energy into the S lady that they do into their magic behind the camera. Oh yeah. then the Google Assistant and the A-Lady would all be. In the smoke behind us. Well, I mean, they're all going to be smoke or adapted in a, within a year because of, of AI, right? Like, but, but, but Siri's definitely the worst in terms of like getting her to share information audibly. Yeah. She wants to share it.
I know I'm driving. I know. I asked you using my words. Yeah. I asked using words like, and this is one of the things that I really like about the A lady is now there's a visual component like there's a lady devices with screens and there have been for years, but it start was as an Audio only device it had a microphone actually had a set of microphones on it course and a speaker,
That's it. So it was forced to answer audibly not vitably. This is this needs to be a word, Why is vitably not a word?
We have audio we have video anyway, I don't know like like yeah what but Siri's gonna need to get they're all gonna need to get way better real fast and I think that the tech is there for that to happen So I'm really curious to see what comes out at WWDC and like in terms of what Apple's doing with Siri in the next Thing so maybe someday again Siri will be able to tell me using her words,
My current elevation. It's all I want actually I use I use when I need to do that there's an app on my watch. Yeah. I think it's called elevation. Yeah. But like, I just want it to tell me, I don't like, this is, it's a, it's a very concrete piece of information. It doesn't need to interpret anything. I can launch the compass app on my phone and see it. I just like, I know Siri can know it because she used to be able to know it.
It's on the watch. It's called altitude. It might only be for the ultra for us. Ultra folks. Yeah. Mr. What is called altitude. Yeah. And then there's GPS tracks, which is on the phone. And that'll also tell you your. Yeah, but like the compass app on the phone will tell you. So like the phone knows it natively. Are you ready to tell us about Phil's question, John? Yes. Okay. So here we go.
Phil says lately on my MacBook Pro with a gigs of Ram whenever I play a YouTube video and Safari the fans kick on and sound like they're running at max speed. I've been there. From my iStat toolbar, the CPU seems to be running at 180 degrees. Okay, that sounds about right. I have replaced the battery once already on this machine and I'm fascinated by the idea of an Apple Silicon machine.
I work at a nonprofit, they've given me to use a 2019 15 inch MacBook Pro, which is nice for the bigger screen, but the battery life still sucks I hate the touch toolbar. I have seen videos lately, especially from Luke Miani and Everyday Dad, okay, about the value now with the bass 14-inch Pro from either third-party reseller or Apple-certified refurb.
I realize it will be overkill for what I use it for, but I'm also considering how long I keep machines in rotation, such as mine and my wife is running a 2012 MacBook Pro with internal DVD drive. Wow. I also like the idea of a bit bigger screen real estate versus getting a new era 13 inch MacBook Pro. Also, if something is announced at WWDC in turn of chips or new models, do you think that there will be a price drop on the refurb store of the M1 Pro 14 inch?
My current retina still works, but getting along the tooth. I can update it to the latest and greatest. Battery life is getting bad again, and I feel that even though the M1 is the first gen of, Apple Silicon, it will be supported longer than any Intel models. I'd like to hear your thoughts. I've been pondering the same thing, Dave, honestly. So I have the MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019. Yep. And the battery life, even after repair, still stinks. Yep. Yep. It's only like two hours. So I feel for you.
And also my machine, the fans do spin up for video tasks. So I mean, my thought is I would get a refurb. Yeah. And I've been looking at them. Okay. But haven't, haven't made the leap yet. I'm pulled the trigger, so to speak. Yes. Yeah. I did see one the other day. I think it was, it was ridiculously overpowered for what I need. I think it was a refurb more power. Yeah, gotta have more power. No, I think it had, um... So it was an M1. Um, I think it had 16 gigs of RAM, or no, maybe 3.
Wait, wait, wait, start from the top. An M1, what kind of computer? MacBook Air? MacBook Pro. What size screen? Uh, I think it was the 14? Okay, I don't think you can get a 14 with an M1, though. Like, I think, like, I would, I would, uh, but no, is that right? Can you get a four? Yeah. You should be able to sure. The MacBook pro 14 inches M two pro or M two max. Right. Oh, maybe you're talking about the, yeah, the 14 inch ones are if you want the 13 inch. Oh no. You can. Yeah.
Yeah, no, you're right. You can get a 14 inch MacBook Pro on the refurb store with an M1. I'm just I'm looking here on the store now. Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. And Phil actually got back to me and said, I ordered the refurb and M1 Pro 14 inch. And it'll be here today. Got it. There you go. That's it. For those wondering if they should make the jump or not, all I can say is the battery life alone is astounding. Am I right, Dave? Oh, it changes everything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Power management. It'll go all day. Yeah. Unless you're doing something really intense. Yeah, unless you got something wrong, in which case you run Sleep Aid and it'll help you figure it out. Like, yeah. But no, seriously, like, it's great. I would, if I, I mean, I'm looking here on the store, especially in the refurbs, I would very much lean towards the M2-based machines. I was looking on Geekbench the other day and the M2 chip is significantly faster than the M1 Pro.
So if you're gonna bother to do it, I would, like that's where I lean is the M2 chip. It's amazing because the M1 smokes the Intel chip, leaves it in the dust like there's no tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, going from Intel, you're probably not gonna notice a difference between the M1 Pro and the M2, but there is a difference. And if you keep your machines for a while, which I know you do. I would lean towards the M2, but with the MacBook Pro, you're forced to go M2 Pro or M2 Max.
You can't just get like a straight up M2 like you can in the air. So- We're going to see an M3 in June. I think they're saying the M3 is like fall. Um, I believe they would announce it at WWDC though. Right. In June. Um, maybe, maybe, maybe it's hard to say, man, like, cause they don't need to prepare developers for that necessarily. Like with, when Apple Silicon was first announced, yes, they needed to sort of. Prep all of us, including developers for, Hey, well, guess what?
Everything just changed, you know, or is about to it, like moving iterations of a of a processor, there's certain developers that would be able to tweak for it and Apple would reach out to them privately. Generally speaking, I mean, I can't say what Apple is doing. I can only look at what Apple has done. But that would be my guess is we won't see the announcement until it's out, until you can order it or it's pre-order or whatever.
So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I would say, take a look at Geekbench, and do some comparisons because you might find that you wanna go with the M2. It's browser.geekbench.com. Let me look. So like the, I was looking at the multi-core scores because that's an easier way to test. But like, you know, you can do... The M2 Max, let's look at single cores, it's fine. Yeah, the M2 Max comes in at the top, no great surprise. The M2 Pro right below that.
And then the M2, right? And then the M1 Max is maybe 15% slower than that, and that's the max. So, you know, the M1 Pro is down another 10% from there. So I'll put this link, the Mac benchmarks link from Geekbench in the show notes so that you can all make your decisions. But yeah, I was looking at a potentially a Mac mini for the studio here. But, but if I don't want to run Ventura, then that might, I don't know. Can I buy a Mac mini and roll?
Like I know it used to be able to run Monterey, but if I buy one today, will it be able to run Monterey? Monterey, like there's been some weirdness with that at times. I don't know. So I got to figure that out. I mean, I can always just like, you know, send it back if it doesn't mean is such an underrated machine, I think. Oh, especially the upgraded one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, for me, I, there's no reason to get a max studio.
Uh, except, except for the bragging rights. Other than that, exactly. Yes, that's fair. That's fair. Yeah, the bragging rights for sure. But otherwise not like the, you know, it's got the M2 chip. It's like, so I don't know. I like, that would be my thought was would be, you know, M1 is what? Three-year-old technology now? Yeah. Right? I mean, two and a half. Michael Herman makes a comment, he says, if it wasn't Apple killing support for the Intel, my six-core Mac mini was fast enough for me.
I just got my Mac mini Pro at 16 gigs of RAM, and I guarantee that thing is smoking it. That's why, look, I bought my MacBook Pro 13-inch with the M1 because I had the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro with the Intel processor, and my nephew came in came in with his little MacBook Air and the M1 and he smoked me and I went, oh man, I can't. Yeah, I mean the difference, you're right. I'm sure your machine is, your Intel machine, I mean I've got an Intel machine in front of me here.
It's powerful enough where it really makes the differences in the portable machines and battery life. There's a reason there was no Intel-based iPhone or iPad. had, right? Like it just wouldn't have worked. And, and so now that we have that tech available to us for our, our laptops, like to me, that's the big difference is the power consumption. And, and that of course makes a difference in terms of the fans and all of that.
But, but the battery life is, is sort of the, the, you know, the leader there. And now it runs everything natively across all machines. Right. No more translational. Right. Right. As long as you're running native stuff. Hey, speaking of, Parallels now runs Windows 11. Uh, and it turns out that was Apple's decision to go that route as opposed to the bootcamp route. So go figure. Thanks for hanging out with us folks. Always fun. Good stuffs.
Good stuffs. Cool stuffs. Good questions. We've got another hangout coming up in two weeks. You mentioned it earlier. No hangout coming up on Sunday. Because this show comes out on the 17th Pete. That's correct, yep. Yep, yep, yep. So yeah, come hang out with us on Sunday. Thank you for the reminder. Thanks for listening. Thanks for providing all the bandwidth. Folks at Cashfly, we appreciate that. Make sure to check out all the other podcasts that we do.
I do two others. I do one called Business Brain for Entrepreneurs, Gig Gab for Working Musicians. Pete does one called So There I Was for Aviation Enthusiasts and People Interested in Simply, good stories. Make sure to check out our sponsors, macgeek.com slash sponsors. The ones we mentioned in the episode, of course, notion. I want to make sure I get that thing right. Notion.com slash mac geek cab. I knew there was something special about it.
And BB edit from bare bones. Dave, you stole my shirt. I did steal your shirt. I'm the laundry thief, man. I've got a bunch of socks that you might need to. Oh, that's where they went. What's it say on my shirt again? Don't get caught. Music.