It's time for Mac geek gab and listener Tim brings us our quick tip of the week with this really cool one look since math calculations are in the operating system they're now available in text messages in Apple's latest OS's iPad OS iOS Mac OS they're all there it's all there go try it enter your equation and when you type the equal sign you get an option to X out of the result leaving just the equation that you typed or you can hit the spacebar and the result
of the equation will be typed for you. More tips like this plus your questions answered today on the MacGeekGab number 1057 for Monday September 30th 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in tips like that. You send in questions.
We answer the questions. We share the tips. We share cool stuff found. We string it all together into an agenda so that we each have an excellent opportunity to learn at least five new things every single time we get together here on International Podcast Day in durham new hampshire i'm dave hamilton and here in south dakota i'm adam christiansen and coming to you live from pleasanton california it's pilot pete on show 1057, hit and run yep i was
just wondering what our police code was yeah well it's it's one of two it's it's either a hit and run person hit and run accident is what it says i i want to come back to that and uh missing person right i i whenever i see something on the highway that people would call an accident oh look those two cars got into an accident i don't know what anyone's intentions were i'm just driving by how do i know it was an accident versus something
intentional so i call it an incident not an accident it's an incident or a crash well yes yes right it is a crash intention is not not determined that's right intention is is not necessarily obvious yeah. Anyway, we cast no asparagus here, though we cast no asparagus. We do cast giveaways. We this month, if you go to Mac, you get dot com slash giveaway. You will see our giveaway for one focus, which is a fantastic app.
And it lasts one more day. This giveaway, at least from the time that this episode releases. Of course, if you're watching the live stream, you get a few more days noticed. But I don't know why it's showing zero entries. I know that's not true. However, oh, it's because I have no entries on this computer. That's why it's showing me zero entries. Yeah, there's 50. So you got some time. Go enter.
They are giving away five licenses to this OneFocus app, which is a great app for pulling together kind of or pulling aside everything and really helping you focus.
And pull not like it keeps you from using apps that you don't want to be using in those moments it's it's fantastic so uh happy to partner with them for this month's giveaway shall we keep going with tips about the apple os there adam apple os is some hidden some hidden features that you may not have caught in the new operating systems this one's for ios 18 ipad os 18 i'm assuming as well comes from Martin.
Martin says, rather than pressing the side buttons to get to the screen to turn off your iPhone completely, so that's, you know, the slider to turn it off. There's now a new power button in the upper right-hand corner of the control center, which you can use to get to the off screen. So if you pull down control center, I played with this because it's a great tip. Pull it down way up in the upper right-hand corner.
There's a little power button you just press and hold that and it will go to the off screen so you don't have to remember the stupid finger gymnastics of volume up volume down you know whatever to activate the power on off screen i guess that's the reset procedure power on off you can just hold the side button right the power button yeah yeah but at least now it's it's there watch os has this too too. That's, um, yeah.
What a, what a, what a novel concept to give people a software button to do this. I, I, it's, I, I had been to the control center countless times, of course, since I'd been using iOS 18, I've been on the betas for probably a month now, never noticed this. They're not right there in plain sight. So I learned something new. Yeah, absolutely. So that's a good one. Well, and the thing that Adam referred to here is the other Another quick tip, because I had this happen to me once, my phone froze.
I couldn't do anything with it. I actually wound up going to the Apple store. This is years ago now, but he was talking about it. If it freezes, you have to hit the volume up, the volume down, then press and hold the power button, and it will reset. That's how you kind of control or delete your iPhone. And a good tip to know, because you can't get to the control center software when it's frozen on you. I'll say it again for the people in the back. Up, down, power.
I remember UDP because I'm a network nerd. Uh but that you hit up you hit down you hit up you release it you hit down you release it and then you hold the power button i believe is is the uh right yep until you see the white apple logo that's right and then you know you're saved yeah you've been saved you've been saved that's right. Uh doug reminds us to not forget about ios 18's iphone mirroring he says it works wonderfully I use it regularly now.
Last night, my battery was almost dead on my iPhone. I plugged it in about 10 feet away and used iPhone mirroring on my laptop to interact with the phone. I have a couple of messaging programs that do not have Mac or web equivalents, so I can use my keyboard and mouse, whereas I used to have to peck away at the phone keyboard.
Board there are a few things that don't work properly um i think they might have to do with security but in general it works great thank you for that doug i completely forgot that that was a feature in uh in ios 18 and and i haven't played with that yet yeah exactly there's so many things that we hear about and then it's like if it's not didn't you have to be like a developer using x code to get an iphone screen up and try to do all that back in the day and that was only wired up,
like yeah yeah apple were the only ones that that had access to like they would do it for keynotes they're like hey that feature you're demoing there can we have that too you know.
Right yep yep feature you didn't even know you wanted yes or yeah yeah i knew i wanted they didn't know we want they didn't know we wanted yeah that that's the one, And then Taron reminds us that when we talked about all the new tech and why we wanted the new phones and this, that, and the other thing in our keynote sort of debrief episode. He says, I'm surprised that no one called out the spatial or 3D camera feature, which is in all of the iPhones 16.
He says, I want a new iPhone just for this function.
I have a 10-year-old daughter. her she still has four grandparents and i want to get all of them on uh spatial videos and photos asap i did the apple vision pro tour this summer and while i don't have a plan to buy this now looking to the future having a 3d picture of the grandparents would be an amazing thing he says yeah so i totally agree like that totally forgot about that yep have you adam you didn't forget about it though did you no i haven't i haven't actually taken a spatial photo
or video with my new iphone 16 pro yet okay um but i we did talk about and john wrote in this week about how the spatial videos like conversion in apple photos on vision pro is amazing like it is a killer feature of the for sure of the vision pro so bringing that up just quickly we talked about it when we talked about the new iOS features yes a previous episode and then this week I've I found another killer app that I just want to throw out there so I'm kind of circumventing CSF but beat punch
vision beat punch fun and Fitness is a new app for the Vision Pro. And it's like a boxing kind of app to music. So it's a rhythm. It's a rhythm game, I guess. But it's also a fitness app. And it does like fitness tracking. It has rings that look like Apple's health rings, but I haven't figured out if it ties into health yet or not. I can't figure out how that works.
But I mean, it's so good that I I paid, it is free to like, I think, download and try out, but then there's also a subscription that adds additional features, including being able to use your own Apple Music Library for some of the songs and stuff like that. So I wanted to be able to tie it in. I paid, it's $34.99 a year. Wow, okay, all right, that's not terrible. Which isn't too bad. Yeah, no, a year for these additional features. And again, you can use it without paying the subscription.
So it's an option. you can opt in to get additional features but basically i mean it puts like virtual. Robot hands on your hands and then they're overlaid with like these colored boxing gloves and it's fully immersive and just super fun like it's great and you're getting some exercise so that's good for me too i figured 34 bucks a year for basically you know that's cheaper than them that's about a one month gym membership a lot of places i think yeah yeah that's that you're right Oh,
that's yeah. You're, you're way ahead of the game. Uh, I mentioned on a previous episodes that my wife has been using her latest gen meta quest for, uh, exercise. And it's amazing. Like it, she, she loses herself in it. It, you know, it's not like I need to exercise for 30 minutes today. It's I, I can, I have to set an alarm so that I stop after 30 minutes.
And one of the apps that she will occasionally use not maybe for exercise like it you do work up a sweat it's called drunken bar fight and it's basically you know the same thing that you're talking about here just in a potentially a different context but yeah yeah what i'll say about this one is um the the like mapping to the hands all the developers people are saying like that that's a problem yeah whatever this developer did they figured it out because it does a great job without actual
controllers yeah so um and even better like the other the other kind of killer app although it wasn't a very long experience is the what if from disney which is a whole marvel you basically become um doctor strange and you do all the kinds of gestures and things like that the hand tracking on that was not nearly as good as what it is on this one so if anybody's looking for a fun thing to check out beat punch fun and fitness on your vision pro All right.
And there will be links in the show notes for all of these things, of course. Uh, last week before we recorded before my new iPhone 16 had arrived and I was lamenting the fact that I was on the 18.1 beta knowing full well that my phone was going to come with some flavor of 18.0 and that was going to likely mean this convoluted thing, blah, blah, blah. I couldn't have been more wrong and I couldn't have been happier to have been wrong as listener John points out.
I also was in the 18.1 beta and just tried to go straight to migrate on my new phone and it worked. It took care of the update and it was really easy. It says, I hope you found that before the pain. Indeed I did. I figured I would try and see what happened. And it asked me, it said, you're in the developer beta. Do you want to keep doing that? Of course, I chose to answer yes. And it was like, great, I'm going to install 18.1 beta 4, which is what it was at the moment. Now we're up to beta 5.
And then it rebooted the phone and said, okay, great. Now just do your migration from phone to phone and good to go. And it's been great ever since. Thank goodness. Thank goodness. I know. How stable of the developer beta has been? Cause I'm on the public beta and I've thought about switching, but super stable. I I've been on the 18.1 betas since they came out because I wanted access to as much of the AI features as I could have.
So normally I don't run the beta past the, you know, the, the 0.0 release, but obviously this one, I, my plan is once we hit 0.1 to stop on the betas, but if point two has more ai feature i'm gonna stay with it that and i am scratching the surface of what i can do with the ai features in this beta and it's game changing it's truly game changing so yeah yeah oh nice okay cool so craig has a quick tip for us yeah for those folks who have the ipad and Magic Keyboards.
He says, I have a new iPad Pro 13-inch M4 with the Magic Keyboard. I love using it this way as it's, as an iPad is supposed to be or intended to be used, and it works great. Until Saturday. The spacebar was driving me nuts. Not spacing, doing strange things on the screen, practically unusable. A little searching, and I found that there was a potential solution.
Go into to settings keyboard full keyboard access commands and look under activate see if your space bar is listed there if so select none and try again mine mine has been behaving exactly as it's supposed to at this point hope this helps someone yeah i have no idea how he would have gotten that turned on but that would have been infuriating i would imagine so if your magic keyboard space bar is misbehaving, check this out. Nice.
Nice. Um, Kirit has... A bit of an idea, and I think we all liked it. He says, I don't want to presume anything about the structure of your show. Please, this is our thing that we all do together here. It's like, sure, we drive the bus because somebody has to drive the bus. But your ideas are arguably more important than ours. So please keep them coming to feedback at MattKeyCab.com.
That's the important place. You heard him. feedback at macgeekgap.com because when we didn't think of it, none of us could believe it. Pete, I wasn't paying attention. Was that feedback at macgeekgap.com? It's what he said. It is. So, Kirit's idea.
Since you already have great segments like Quick Tips QT in the agenda and Cool Stuff Found CSF in the agenda, I was thinking you could introduce another segment called don't get caught dgc if you like the idea uh and he has he had some stories about this but yeah i mean when we share psas or warnings or whatever how have we not thought to call that the don't get caught segment right well that's why you're here with us folks because you're the ones
that come up with the best ideas so the next few things fall into don't get caught all right Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait I have a I have a thing here Here it is, ready? Oh, I did it Dave, no one wants to see your thing I know, but we're going to do it anyway Thanks Pete Don't. Music. Get caught, Don't Get caught, Don't Get caught God get out God get out, All right, now, now we're properly prepared. Amen. Playball! All right. Well, Steve has a way for us to not get caught.
Steve says, I was planning to update my old iPhone SE 2 to iOS 17.7 on Monday. September 16th, but iOS 18 jumped to the head of the line. I tried to get out of iOS 18 update, but was unable to figure out how. So I went ahead and started iOS 18 update. I got to the point of downloading 18, but my phone said I had no space on it. I found out I had about 70% in documents. I didn't know what that was, but it said it was purgeable.
I couldn't find a way to delete it. I went to iMazing to see if this would help, but again, I couldn't figure out how to delete it. Then I thought maybe I could use iMazing to update to 18. With my iPhone connected to my MacBook Pro, I started the update. Again, the update would not complete. Then I said, oh well, I can restore my backup from iMazing. But oh no, my backup was damaged and I could not repair it.
So the only thing left I could think of was to wipe it, install 18, and try and rebuild my phone back to where it was. I spent most of the day installing all the apps that I could remember I had on my phone. I was at my fiancé's house for a couple days. I returned to my house and checked my Mac Mini and found a backup that was about six months old. I restored the phone and it brought back all the apps, many that I had forgot about.
Fun thing, many of the apps that I forgot about didn't have their icon. It was a gray box with a circle and an X, but they worked fine. After a couple days, the icons came back. Sorry my description of my problem was so long, but I thought you should know. Lessons learned. I guess I should check my backups to see that they are good and current. If you have any thought on what I should do next time, please let me know. I'll try to remember them so I don't get caught. So I do get caught again?
I think he said, I think he means don't get caught again. Yeah, I think I would agree with that. Yeah. Really good. That was going to be my advice. What should you do next time? Don't get caught. Don't get caught. Check your backups. Yeah. Check your backups before you upgrade. And one thing he didn't mention in there was iCloud backups, which may have been current and may still be current. Your old phone might still be floating out there in your iCloud backups.
Backups so well that that might be the also don't get caught because I know there are people out there that still don't use iCloud backups yeah man right there's so no and I could be wrong they're kind of incremental right I mean the the when you do a backup yesterday and then you do one again today if yesterday was a full backup it just does the changes I'm pretty sure it does that's right yeah yeah they're pretty quick yeah yeah yeah I think storage is the thing you
know a lot of of people and half a big chunk of this i'm sorry is on apple their storage prices like their memory prices are ridiculous they need yeah they need to have a thing obviously it's a profit center for them so you know it's a it's there's a give and take there but i mean come on yep i i agree.
And what i read this week uh the third of their uh income is going to be services, yeah by the end of the year we knew this we knew this i mean which is brilliant i'm paying them almost 40 bucks a month now for you know the apple one subscription with 2.2 terabytes of storage for the family or whatever i mean i don't even want to tell you how much i'm paying in apple care subscriptions now yeah i just i yeah yeah i i haven't moved to the month-to-month thing on most
of my stuff i i probably will either do it or rue the day that i uh that i chose not to but yes well especially if you're not upgrading your devices as frequently like it was fine when i had a new phone every couple years but if i'm going to be keeping my phone for three to five years you know yep when it has a problem in year four i'm probably going to be happy i have it yeah but is that the time you can't stop and add it later i know maybe yeah and i know i know that's the that's the thing is
it is it we have found in our family hang on hey well my house is on fire let me get some insurance quick so i i had to knock on some wood but we have found in our family that our experiences and use of our and abuse of our iphones and we all have varying levels of that uh.
Has it when i do a regression analysis on it it has been less expensive to pay for the repairs to essentially self-insure than it has been to pay for the insurance and and i do this regression test every you know few years just to make sure really i do it after we've had an issue you know somebody breaks the black back glass or something you know happens and it's like all right what would it have cost us? Yep. Okay. We're still way ahead of the game. Okay. But stay the course.
So I don't know. That's actually a good, don't get caught. And I'm going to take that advice and kind of go back and evaluate now that I am paying, have been paying these subscriptions and look at how much am I paying versus, cause I haven't done a repair in a long time. Your, your point's valid. So another don't get caught. Yep. Yeah, there you go. Right. It fits in the segment. You got one from Paul, Pete.
I do. Paul wrote in and I'm, I just realized I've got a question about this at the end, so there should be some good discussion. But he writes in, Hi, this is a warning for everyone that uses the Mac address in their DHCP server to assign an IP address. After upgrading my M2 Mac Mini to Sequoia, the Mac address was changed from that which it had with Sonoma to something completely new. This also happened on my iPad. Both devices had private Wi-Fi address options set to fixed.
The new Mac addresses meant that the Mac and the iPad did not get the IPs that I had specified and consequently did not follow the IP-based firewall rules I had set in my router, a potentially serious security problem. This led to some initial head scratching, but once I entered the new Mac addresses into my DHCP server, everything was back to normal.
On a separate but perhaps related issue i run two wi-fi networks with distinct ssids one for me and one for my guests on my devices i had auto join set on my network and not set for the get guest network this meant that my devices never connected to the guest network unless i specifically forced them during the os upgrades some of my devices including the mac mini and ipad seemed to forget the auto join and setting and ended up connecting
to the guest network probably because it came first alphabetically these issues were easy to fix but i don't recall having these sorts of, issues with the previous major upgrades i hope these observations help others, and i wrote them back i'm one of those people i i'm very directive with where my devices are so that I know if I needed to hit Debbie's iMac, I know exactly what IP address it's on. I know. And so, yeah, I haven't gone back. I wasn't home when I read this.
So when I get home, I'm going to go back and look and see if any of this has changed, particularly on this computer, which I've upgraded to Cyanar, Sequoia. 15. Mac OS 15, Pete. 15. Mac OS 15. There you go. Bingo. That's the way to do it. numbers numbers from here on out it is um but my question is that i didn't realize i had until we were reading this pre-show i thought a mac address was a hardware base i mean i know you could spoof.
But in that hardware-based thing, isn't that encoded into the- You want to take this, Adam? Yeah. No, it is. Yeah. I mean, is it different? Am I missing something? Well, perhaps. Perhaps. So Apple has this option on Wi-Fi where you can turn on, and this is there on the Mac, it's there on the phones, the iPads, all of the devices. I know where you're going. For each specific Wi-Fi network, you can turn on, and I believe it's on by default or turn off, this option for private Wi-Fi address.
And what that does is it spoofs, to your point, Pete, the MAC address of your device. And you can have it. I believe there's two options. There's fixed and rotating or something. The idea is you don't want people to be able to fingerprint you as you move around.
The the mac address is not identifiable as this is an iphone this is a mac or whatever and it works great like and on public networks who cares right just let the thing do what it wants but for my home network i turn that option off so that my network is getting that actual mac address of the device all the time etc etc etc so there you go so i clicked on the little quarter shape I pulled up my Wi-Fi settings. Yep. And sure enough, private Wi-Fi address, your options are rotating, fixed, or off.
And using a private Wi-Fi address helps reduce tracking of your Mac by Wi-Fi network operators. A rotating private address reduces tracking on this network and across other networks. Yep. I'm trying to remember. I can't find the setting. I know with my devices, when I did my mapping, I used the ID. I forget what it's called, and I don't forget where you set that. So when I set my router up and my mapping, I do it by the name of the thing which is assigned to the physical MAC address.
I don't know if that would help in this case. No, because your router almost certainly is doing DHCP reservations by the MAC address that it sees. So and you could choose, say, on your home network to use a fixed private address. And then as long as it's the same on that network all the time, you'll get the same that your DHCP reservations will work and everything's fine. It's the rotating one.
And it seems like and I can't speak to this personally, but it seems like from what Paul's saying, at least, that whatever algorithm Apple was using to generate the fixed address for any given network changed or got reset. And so he no longer had the same fixed IP, fixed MAC address. And then his DHCP reservations got broken. I had no idea that was there. That's awesome.
While we're here and talking about DHCP reservations, I want to mention something, and we'll go much deeper into this in future episodes, but I have changed my main router on my network here, which is kind of a big deal. Like, I've been using Synology routers as my gateways for a long time. Most recently was on the RT6600AX. uh we don't know i we do know that synology has lots of lots of products in the pipeline for 2025.
Way more than 2024 that's what they've told me i don't know what those are so i can't spec i i can't i can't guess as to whether one of those is a router or not i'm hoping one is and i'm hoping that that router has more than just one 2.5 gig ethernet port because with all the fiber connections that are out there that are doing faster than gigabit ethernet or you know faster than gigabit you need more than one you need to be able to get gigabit ethernet into your gateway router and
then out of it or multi-gigabit in and out and the synology router uh the best one they have only has one 2.5 gig ethernet port the rest are all one gig ethernet ports and with that i started thinking maybe it's time to start messing with other routers and experimenting with other nerdy routers so that we have a suitable replacement to recommend so i am experimenting with the unify uh cloud gateway max uh and it's it's running great it's it the user interface is of course,
different from the Synology, equally as easy and confusing. It's all the same. You're running a nerdy router. You kind of expect to have some nerdy things in there. All the features that I was running in the past are there, including inbound VPN. But I just wanted to kind of pave the way for future conversations. I've only been running this for a few days, two days here now. All has been good. All has been great. I was able to VPN right in that work. Yeah, that all worked.
Yeah, it's all it's all good. So I'm just sharing that and then we'll we'll talk more about it. And dare I ask what the price point is on it? Yeah, it's it's relatively inexpensive. The Unify Cloud Gateway Max is one ninety nine. And I'm assuming that comes and all of the ethernet ports on it are 2.5 gig ethernet ports. And, um, yeah, it's, it works great. It looks like the old, uh, Apple airport. Yeah. It's, it's, it's that size.
It's very small. Yeah. It's got four land ports and one wind port. It has no wifi in it. I am using this with my eros. Yes. I do also have, um, a, a U seven pro, which is their, um, wifi seven access point, which for 189 bucks is way less. You, you know, you get a couple of these for way less than you'd be paying for, um, the Eero Wi-Fi 7s or any of that. So anyway. Yep. Yep. Even the U7 Pro Max is only $279. So yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot.
But right now I'm basically using it with my Eero setup. Yeah. I was just going to add my Orbi Wi-Fi 6 system was way more expensive than all that. Yeah. And the Wi-Fi 7 stuff just, you know, make your eyes bleed when you look at the prices. So you have all. Hey, speaking of things that make your eyes bleed. I don't know about that transition, Dave, but I read something about.
A travel, an electronics travel restriction in Mexico now, so if you are traveling to Mexico and I believe this is somewhat new, I don't know for certain when this was instituted. But when entering Mexico, they have as as does every country, they have restrictions on what you can bring in before it starts counting as like goods that you are bringing in for sale and therefore must pay an import duty on that.
That right so the thing that uh you still can bring four fishing poles everything's good there a pair of binoculars two cameras you can bring three cell phones per person all is good there one problem is that you can bring one portable computer laptop tablet or similar computing device eg an ipad one so you can't bring a laptop and an ipad you can bring one or the other. Yep. Otherwise they will charge you a 19%, you know, import duty on the value
of one of those devices. Guess which one they're going to pick. So yeah, not the lesser of the two. That's correct. So ever fly to Mexico, Pete, we do, we do. And, and we have to write all that to all Korea, China, all these countries. We go, we have to, I have a watch, I have an iPad, I have a laptop.
They expect you to write it all down. really yeah interesting and now doc wood as crew i've never been sure tapped for any of that sure but yeah they yeah yeah and just remember uh constitution doesn't apply over there you don't have any fourth amendment fifth amendment rules so no no no you're not in the united states anymore.
You're right in kansas anymore yeah yeah nowhere near so i'll put a link in the show notes it's um yeah so the page that i plan to check in january before i go to mexico in february now it's disconcerting they don't check everyone on the way in lots of people had said oh i do this it's no problem well yeah right it's no problem until you get caught maybe i should have included this in the don't get caught oh this is the don't get caught we are we're still here don't get
caught in mexico don't get too many too many computers and ipads that's right yeah it's not a problem until it is yep yep so yeah but what if somebody in one of the comments on facebook when i which is where i learned about this initially uh but i did confirm it on the on the mexico uh mexican consulate website or something but um one people one person said do they make electronic fishing poles and so i my i replied yes mine looks like an ipad because i can bring
four fishing poles in so So, you know, there you go. All right, shall we move on? Yeah, yeah. So buckle up because you guys today, I guess gave me all the novels, but Kirit has one for us and he says, "'Hello, I've got a story to share about "'that may save you from a little pitfall, "'literally and figuratively. So, I just got my shiny new iPhone 16 Pro Max, and while I was setting it up, I had a problem that I'd like to share.
Apple has made transferring data to your new iPhone a breeze these days, mostly. There's just one tiny catch that you should know about, and here's the scoop. As a habit, I always back up my old iPhone to my Mac on the morning of the big switch. And I do an encrypted backup, because let's face it, who wants to re-enter all those passwords? Not me. Anyway, once you get your new phone, before you can restore from your trusty backup and finder, you have to go through a series of setup steps.
Entering your Wi-Fi password, iCloud credentials, Face ID, passcode, you know the drill. Now, if you're like me, you'll fly through these steps because you're eager to get to the good part, restoring from the backup. But here's where things get tricky. One of those steps asks, do you want to turn on stolen device protection? Naturally, you think, well, of course, I don't want my iPhone stolen. So you click yes without thinking much about it. Ah, but here's the trap.
When you finally get to the step where you want to restore from backup, it asks you to turn off Find My, which is conveniently turned on by default. The problem? It's grayed out and you can't turn it off. Why? Because, my friends, you have to first turn off stolen device protection. Which, fun fact, won't it won't let you do that for another 60 minutes.
Now, while this is a brilliant security feature, if your device actually gets stolen, it's incredibly frustrating when you are just trying to set up your new phone. So there I was sitting around for a solid hour twiddling my thumbs and avoiding any more pits, waiting for that timer to run out.
Moral of the story, when setting up your new phone, maybe hold off on turning on stolen device protection until after you've restored from your backup you can always enable it later minus the 60 minute wait yeah uh you did an excellent job reading that novel thank you adam you entertained the heck out of me um i've not turned this on have either of you turned this on on your phones i have and then i turned it off, You didn't turn it right off though, did you? Had to wait.
No, that's right. That's right. It just, because it, it, it was one of those things that just would never recognize that I was home and it was, you know, a couple months. This is where I live. This is where the phone stays most of the time. And there's no way to force it. Hey, this is home. This is where I live. It seems to me, you ought to be able to designate that upfront to start. I, I, you don't get to pick that. If there's a way to do it, I'm not aware of what it is. If somebody knows,
feedback at mackeycab.com. You heard him. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Huh. Weird. All right. Well, you know, that's, yeah, I haven't turned it on because I've heard all, like, I know that it, I know what it's set to do. Obviously, it's a good thing in general, but it's not.
If you can't if you can't designate certain addresses like i i do know better than my phone about where i live yep yeah one last thing on kirit's thing i i and maybe he can answer us i'm curious if some of that was written by uh ai because it was very entertaining it was well written what so made reading it more entertaining you're a professional actor adam don't don't sell Tell yourself if any of that was AI written though, but I'm just curious if, yeah.
So he can let us know. Oh yeah. Yeah. Fair. Yeah. Maybe, I mean, maybe here it's just a good writer. Like it is possible we are, you know, Oh, of course. I don't mean to, I don't mean to disparage his writing talents at all, but in this day and age, you have to start to wonder like it's fair. It is. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Kira, let us know. It just, we're, it will, we will not share any of your secrets.
It's at least none of the ones that we haven't already shared and we appreciate your tips we appreciate everybody's tips it's awesome and that segment was kirit's uh idea so there you go i love it. I want to take a minute and tell you about a podcast that we're doing a swap with. It's called Grumpy Old Geeks. And this isn't just another podcast with two old white guys talking about tech news, security and entertainment and more. No, no.
That's because occasionally there are three of them. That's right. And they've been podcasting for over a decade with more than 650 episodes. Brian and Jason have over 50 years of combined experience at Internet Industry Pros, for whatever that's worth. They've seen the information superhighway go from the dream of a shining star Trekkie in future to a William Gibson dystopian nightmare of legless virtual avatars in a cloud of BS and vaporware.
They promised us a future of flying cars, but all we got was self-driving cars that are always 20 years away, corporate mass surveillance and NFTs. There are many swears and feels, mostly grumpy, but host Brian, Jason, and sometimes Dave. Well, not this Dave, at least not as far as I know. Maybe there's Dave the avatar, the AI avatar. I don't know. Maybe. But sometimes Dave discuss what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.
Tune in every Saturday for a heaping helping of the real deal on our technological future and more. Or go to GOG.show or search for Grumpy Old Geeks on your podcast platform of choice. And thanks to the guys over there for doing this swap with us. We always love these podcast swaps when we're able to do them with folks. Especially with a show that's a perfect fit like that. People need more three old white guys talking about tech. It's like,
I think, I'm not kidding about this. I like it. It's good. What's, oh, it's also good and even better. I'll say even better. Is, are all of you who support us with our premium program at macgeekup.com slash premium. It is very much appreciated. It is not mandatory, but it is very much appreciated and is a huge part of what allows us to do what we do. In the last couple of weeks, the following people have submitted and I want to thank them.
In the $25 range, we've had Craig from Costa Mesa, Thomas from Garden Grove, William from Getzville, Graham from Glebe, Domenico from Holbrook, Andrew from Honolulu, Michael from Omaha, Bryn from Sun City, Mike from Tempe, michael from woodbine and fernando from parts unknown we had a 20 contribution from deke and a 15 15 contribution from bob in lapeche and then 10 contributions from james and amity harbor bill uh in parts unknown jeff from chesterton chesterton
i said that right barry from just Plains and elsewhere. Kevin from Edison, Paul from Lawrenceville, Joseph from Marietta, Corey from Lothian, Santiago from Palm City, Stephen from Plainfield, Jonathan from Plainsboro, Michael from Robbins. Can you tell that I alphabetized this by the city in which they live? Brian from Southbury, Frank from Tunbridge, Frank also from Voorhees. It's different Franks. To different places. John from wake forest, Timothy from West Windsor.
Thanks to all of you and everyone who is in our premium program. We, uh, we love you, uh, more than we're probably able to communicate. So thanks so much. And if you want to learn more about that, as I said, Mackie kept.com slash premium. Uh, let's get to some questions. Shall we? We've been excited about getting there and we did it. We went through like 15 things, and we still have time left? Hitting it. Hitting it. Woo! Hit and run. Hit and run. 10.57.
All right, Adam, you want to bring us into Bruce here? Yes. Okay. Another slight novel, but we'll get there. Yeah. Folks. Oh, he didn't call us gentlemen. Folks. I'd like to react to the discussion. I'd like to react to the discussion at the end of MGD 1055 and the discussion of how often one changes their password. Bottom line up front, and maybe this is all we need to read.
It's widely understood that changing passwords, except in the case where there's evidence of compromise, is detrimental to security. The U.S. National Institutes of Standards and Technology recognized this and changed their recommendations in 2017 with the publication of Revision 3 to the NIST 800-63 Digital Identity Guidelines and specifically Part B of that. Basically what they discovered was that actually forcing a password change was detrimental to security, so that's old, old hat.
You should not be forcing people to change their passwords. Yeah. Right? Was there a question here, or was this a don't get caught thing? Well, no, I think, the question I had was like, I immediately was like, well, how could it be detrimental to change, to force changing your password?
And so I dug into this a little bit and realized the problem is a couple things, but the main one is that it forces people to get more complacent about how secure they make those passwords, because you're constantly having to remember them. And I know that I am guilty of this because my company still requires me to change my Outlook password every 90 days, or my.
Windows password basically my uh what do they call the thing on windows that you log in with like, liking on the names or something like this no the centralized like login system that drives all of windows networking microsoft live or something whatever it is okay yeah whatever that, it's the centralized password login system for corporate networks and you everything in windows connects to it i can't remember anyway um but they force they forced me to change my password every 90 days.
So my password is now just these variants of something that I can remember. Now I use, I use a long enough phrase, but basically what happens now is it, yeah, active directory. That's what it's called. Um, and, uh, so I just use my long passphrase and change the number on the end until I get to the point where, cause they will only let you, they won't let you reuse it also for a certain number of days. So I just keep adding a number until then I go back.
Right. Which is really bad sure like you know and so i know that's part of part of this issue in the same thing they also say that you shouldn't be enforcing other than password length you shouldn't be enforcing any kind of um you have to have a number you have to have an uppercase you have to have a you shouldn't have to do any of those rules either you want to allow all of those things but so it keeps yeah so it keeps it wide enough you're actually limiting the number
of possible passwords if you require yeah so what they do say is you should have a minimum of eight but really they say 16 is what it should be but they're not forcing that in this sort of rule but they recommend 16 they say at the very least it needs to be eight and you should allow up up to at least I think they say 60 I'd have to go back and look because that's another one that infuriates me is like I've had banks and credit card companies that
limit me to 20 like overall length and I'm like that's ridiculous you're forcing me to have a less secure password by doing that so yeah huh and then.
My company we have two-factor authentication with a third-party provider and we still have to change our passwords every exactly it's driving me nuts yeah i probably shouldn't admit here in front of god and everybody that i you can't use your previous four passwords so i changed my password five times that's that's actually really smart i mean that is a good tip. Skip back to the original. I do. Change it, change it, change it, change it, change it. All right,
now I can go back to the one that I actually want. You got a rotation. Yeah. Yeah. But that's another example of why this is bad to force this. If you have just a good initial secure password, you should not have to change it unless it's been compromised, right? That's the exception to this. So I want to be very clear about that. It's fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Only force a password change when you have evidence of a compromise
with that password. But the rules also go on to state that you really shouldn't be using single passwords in this day and age. You should have two-factor. You should have other mechanisms that are better security than just a single password. You know, if you're building a system, it shouldn't just be a mid-price password. Pass keys are a-coming. And to their credit, they did change from 8 minimum to 12 minimum at work. With, I don't know if there's a maximum or not. I don't think there is.
I mean, there probably is. At some point, at some point, War and Peace is too many characters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It should be sufficiently long, and it definitely shouldn't be restricted to 20, which is a common one I see, and I don't know why anybody would limit it to 20. Yeah. So, anyway. There you go. Yeah, interesting. I love these discussions. Yeah. Right. Um... Oh, yeah. I don't know. All right. Are we ready to move on to Deke? Is that where we're going there? Okay, great.
Deke has, I need to find it. So I'm going to vamp here. I see it now. I found it. Hello, Dave, Adam, and Pete. I've been a listener since coming over with Adam, whose Mac cast show I listened to for many years. Same Deke. He says, I really enjoy the info and discussion from the three of you. Amazing. We love that. We aim to please. We really do. My question today, Deet continues, is about using a dedicated iPad in a common area of the house to access home automation apps.
I have these apps on my phone, which is great for me, but my family members are not as interested. They would use, but, he says, they would use an iPad sitting on a counter in the kitchen. I'd like to configure an iPad to access five or so home automation apps that control the lights, the blinds, the door locks, the thermostats, appliances, and cameras.
Cameras bonus if it can also access music and podcasts to play through my home pod minis but of course i don't want the ipad to access my email my messages my files my calendars my alerts nor anything else personal i am aware of ipad kiosk mode but my reading suggests that this is to provide access to a single app not a group of apps and since my devices are not all home kit i can't just leave it on one app.
I also considered adding an extra Apple ID, but that doesn't seem to me like the right solution. Can you or your listeners suggest a good approach to meeting my goals? And I think I'm throwing this one to you, Pete, to begin the discussion. Yeah. So I think all of us had answers on this. That was pretty cool. The first thing I came up up with was since you're the parent, as it were, of your device is the parent device in this.
Account, set up screen time and block access to apps like mail, messages, files, calendars, and any other personal information that you want to block. And to do that, you go into settings and screen time and limit the apps there. And then let's see what else I wrote. If you share an Apple ID with the iPad, ensure that the notifications like messages, mail, personal data are not visible by disabling notifications for those apps under settings and notifications.
Which is why I actually have a separate ID for my work iPad, because I don't want my personal messages going to my company iPad. So I just, I set up a separate Apple account, But he needs to be on the same account so it has his home address. Is the way I understand. That's the way I'm reading it. That's why I came up with that approach to it. Yeah. He needs that Apple ID. Now it's called an Apple account, not an Apple ID. He needs that Apple account to run his home. Yeah.
Really? It's not Apple ID anymore? I think it's Bo. I think it's ubiquitous now. Oh, you're right. It's Apple account. I think they're trying to move it to call it Apple account. Yeah. Wait. Oh, no. Here we have it. What is the difference between an Apple ID and an Apple account? It's exactly what you're saying. With the releases of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15, and watchOS 11, Apple ID is renamed to Apple Account for a consistent signing experience. Okay. Great. Thanks.
Good to know. Another quick tip. Yep. But they probably still won't let you merge accounts if you have two. No. Not without knowing somebody. Is there a button? Yeah. I've never been able to get it done. You know it's doable.
Doable it's got to be doable yeah my my thought on this was to just i don't know why he doesn't want to use a separate apple id as part of his family unless he's already at six and which and he can't add one but if i were going to do this i would add that because an apple id can log into home uh you can share your home with other apple ids you can for the third party apps you can just Just log in with those accounts. That's fine. And then you can have music that's specific to that Apple ID.
Like it feels like that would be the solution if he has a slot, but, but he said he didn't want to do that. So I, I, I'm not sure why, but. Okay. That's why it didn't occur to me. What do you think? Yeah. I didn't read that. So I was like, I know the answer and I typed it before finishing reading. So I think Pete's answer is probably if you don't want to do the separate Apple ID thing. So I'm accepting that caveat up front. So I'm going to be clear about that. So stipulated.
Yeah. I think screen time is the right thing. And I was like, when this came up, I was like really curious about this because I was like, I think you could do this with screen time. It turns out it's kind of actually tricky to do, but I think you can achieve exactly this. There's just some details in terms of like what Pete was describing that I think are important to point out.
So when you go into settings, screen time, what you're going to want to do is go into the restrictions, content and privacy restrictions, turn those on. And then there's a bunch of them, including like access to install apps, delete apps, purchase apps. You're going to want to disallow that probably on this iPad so people can't put other apps like because he wanted just a set of apps. So you'd want to set up the iPad as new, install the just the apps that you want on that iPad.
Or in terms of the third party apps, I'm talking about the HomeKit apps, then disable being able to download or install any new apps. And then also under allowed apps and features, this is the core iOS apps, you can turn off things like mail, Safari, FaceTime, a lot of the built in apps, access to the stores and podcasts and news, that's all built in apps. And then I think that would basically cover it. You would also want to go in and disallow access to contacts, calendars, reminders.
And I think that would then stop any of that from being accessible. The only thing there that I wonder about is if you had automations that needed data from calendars, contacts or reminders, I don't know what would happen there. So you'd probably have to play around with those settings a little bit. But I mean, you can turn basically disallow everything and lock that whole iPad down.
Now the last thing you want to make sure you do is in the screen time settings, scroll all the way to the bottom and make sure share access share across devices is turned off so that these settings only apply to that iPad and don't screw up everything else on all your other devices. So that's probably a very important setting to check maybe even first before you start setting all these things up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't bury the lead.
But I think that would effectively lock that device down. Like you wouldn't be able to install new apps on it. You wouldn't be able to access mail contacts, calendars. You would only have access to the apps that were installed on there. And then, and then you set a passcode on, on the screen time settings so that only you could change those settings, right? That would effectively lock that iPad down I think in the way that they're looking for. I agree. Yeah, I like this solution. I feel like.
Does anybody out there do this? Because this is one of those things where you want it to be locked down. You want your data to not be your private, the data that you deem private. You want not to be accessible to other people, but it is accessible to someone who knows how to get into that iPad. Right. And so where is the hole?
Have we plugged all of the holes right and and which one is left unplugged that would cause a problem down the road like that's that that's my only concern about this which is why i like the idea of a second account because then it's like that the hole is fully plugged that's that's my and i i can't think of what that hole is i think you've plugged all of them but that's the problem is the unknown unknowns right right yep yeah i mean the second account i think is much easier,
potentially yeah but again you're still going to want to lock down like installing other apps if your intent is like you're still going to have to go some like to say add the screen time protections and at least not let somebody go and install you know another app that they want to install it if your true intent is i want this to be a kiosk like device that can't get messed with Yeah. Yeah. Can you do, you can't do multi apps, iPad kiosk mode.
Yeah, that's, it's. You can't. Yeah. And the other thing about this that's important to point out is the app settings, the app restriction settings for screen time are only a select set of apps. I don't know why that is. It's not, you can't just go in and disable third-party apps. So you have to pre-set up the apps and then disable the ability to install any more apps on the device so it's a it's a weird there are some mdm solutions that oh sure will let you do multi-app kiosk mode.
Right because it like i'm planning hex node will do it and in tune irl will do it so there's there's got to be multi-app kiosk mode solutions like there is a way to do it so could you use apple configurator to create a profile that did effectively limited your use to to to one of you know a series of apps and then that way it is in kiosk like mode locked down with a profile i don't know you could do that well we're finding some things there was a discussion in our discord it's not coming to
me what the topic was right away there was something about i'll find it where you had to do it with an mdm you could not do it with um a profile with apple configurator it It is, yeah, this only works now. I just got to find out what it is. I mean, because corporations do do this all the time, right? You have a sales staff and it's like you get these apps and that's it. You know, on your iPad because you're on the floor and you're just selling stuff or whatever.
It's the every 30-day pop-up that we talked about. You can disable it with an MDM, but not with a profile that you create with Apple Configurator. You have to do it with an MDM. So it's possible that this multi-app mode is the same way. I don't know, but that one, it's pretty explicit. It says it only works if the profile is delivered via MDM.
No manually installing this key so yeah weird it's weird yeah yeah i'm not sure why that would be the case but anyway uh we still have a little bit more time i we have some some great questions here so i want to um ask erica's question of you adam uh good morning gentlemen oh boy we're in trouble now there's a gentleman here uh the other morning on a wednesday morning i was able to send a text message to my husband at a later time in the morning using the send later feature in uh.
Presumably ios 18 but i think it's in the other operating systems too how is it then that i wasn't able to do it on sunday is it only for apple phones or can i send to any type phone is there a catch what am i missing thank you says erica and as always i love the show yep and i struggled with this too, because I had not tried this feature. And I was like, how do I do this? So, you know, of course, I head to Google and find the Apple support article.
And it says it should work with anything because basically the way the feature works is it works through iCloud, it sends an encrypted message to Apple servers. Which is stored there until it's sent and then removed from the server. So if you're using iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, watchOS 11, or Vision OS 2, you should have this feature. What I couldn't figure out, it was like how to activate it. I was like, where is this thing?
So when you're in messages, you just hit the little plus, you have to apply send later first, and then it gives you a little thing in your message box that lets you set up the send later options. And then you type your message and then you send it. Got it. All right. Okay. Oh, wait, you, you set it up before you send your message?
Correct. You have to say, I intend to send. yeah you have to click the little plus button next to your message dialog box and then you'll see the option for send later also location but yeah wait i was able to type the message first and then click the the plus button oh okay so you can add it at any time yeah yeah yeah yeah okay but it's i had expected it to be like i was doing the whole tap and hold thing same like yeah i'm looking for something to pop
up like in the message box and it's not there you have to access it like at like you would an app yeah yeah oh that's that's a clunky ux okay thank you for going through that so i would i would not have i mean i would have stumbled on of it eventually i'm sure but uh yeah great sweet uh larry has a question larry says uh Uh, so wait a minute, I'm entrusting all of my valuable data to SSD drives, but, and he's, he's talking about this product called lifespan for Micromat,
which tells you how much lifespan is left on your SSD, right? It says, but now Micromat's telling me that they, these drives have a lifespan. I know, I know a good backup strategy is, uh, to have redundant copies. And I do. But Larry continues and says, I was hoping that my trusty SSD would last forever. It doesn't seem like there are a lot of moving parts. Should I buy into this fear and get this product? Anybody want to take this? I'm happy to take it, but you want to take it, Adam?
Well, I hate to burst this bubble, but guess what? All media has lifespan. Yep. Record albums did. Cassette tapes did.
Cds do if you damage them enough cds might be a little more permanent but they will rot too eventually like they're it's plastic they're not lasting forever the surfaces and stuff so i mean the reality is everything is going to die eventually but um ssds you know they have a certain number of write cycles and depending upon how they're used and you know the lifespan's gonna And so that's what this tool is meant to tell you.
Chances are you're going to move your data and replace that SSD long before it reaches its lifespan. I mean, most people are. You're going to get a new computer. You're going to upgrade. You're going to... So, yeah. I mean, if you're... I've talked about this with archival storage, right? If you think that you're going to take that drive out and sit it on a shelf for 200 years and be able to come back and get the data back off of it, you've got multiple problems.
One, the data could probably just rot. Two, you're probably not going to have at that time the right kind of interface to plug it into. I have SCSI drives that I'm sure are sitting in a box somewhere. I can't connect them probably to anything today. Maybe I could cobble something together and get them connected, but good luck getting the data. And even if the data was good... It's one of these problems that yes, they will wear out.
Is it going to be a problem for you? Probably not. You're probably going to have some other problem, like you can't actually connect the drive anymore, and you didn't move the data. So it's important with archival backups. If you want to keep stuff digitally for forever, you have to keep moving it. You have to put it in multiple locations. You have to do the work to save it. Yeah. Which, interestingly enough, I got an email yesterday, and I was like, oh, yeah. Yeah.
Steve Gibson has a product called Spinrite. Ah, but it's not a spinning drive, you say. You're right, it's not. And I haven't figured out yet how to do this with a Mac. That being said, I used Spinrite back when I was a Windows geek, but he's updated to 6.1. And he said, Spinrite restores SSD performance.
The biggest surprise in developing this, he said, was discovering that even solid state mass storage could benefit from Spinrite's rewriting of its media due to, quote, redisturb, quote, unquote, SSD and flash storage slow down when they are only read and never written, which affects most operating system files. People say that their SSD-based laptops no longer perform as well as they once did. Now we know why.
During the three and a half years of work on 6.1, I discovered that Spinrite could restore the SSD to original factory performance what okay now i know i upgrade the operating system on my mac once a year so maybe that's enough so that it's writing yeah you know but that's that's why and i'm like if someone has an answer great but otherwise i'm just sort of you know pondering here why would.
Something that's written to a cell on the ssd be slower to read from three months from now or or 12 months however many months but a period of time from now than it is today that he's calling it read disturb it's it's somehow it's disturbing it or degrading it or whatever so so grabbing it and rewriting it is prevent is it's, it's essentially going, okay, now it's new data. It's. Yeah, I believe him. I believe Steve. I'm curious as to why. That's all.
It's not a lack of trust. And then how to get Spinrite 6.1 to work on a Mac, it doesn't. It needs its own bootable DOS system to work. Spinrite, as far as I know, has never run on a Mac. It just doesn't need a Windows machine. You do. And then the other problem is once you've got it running there, How do you connect your internal flash drive of your Mac to make it work? That's a problem to be solved. It can be done.
Can it? You'd have to do the target mode thing. Yeah, target disk mode. Yeah, you're right. But he's coming out with seven, spin rate seven at some point in the future. Of course, it only took 10 years, I think, to get 6.1. 6 to 6.1. Yeah, when he said he was going to start working on it. Well, that's when he started working on Squirrel, which is similar to Passkey. Yeah. Right. So, I mean, again, my thing on all of this is, okay, how much degradation are we talking about and over how long?
Because again like right i'm probably getting a new laptop before this really becomes a problem for me you know what i'm saying like right oh are we creating mental problems where it's just like again i'm not i don't need the highest throughput performance of course yeah like at a at a at a base level i get this but how many people are obsessing over you know their read write speeds to that degree no not me i i really don't care honestly.
I'm pointing for those now for those listening i'm pointing at, i've had a point in my life where i do i do not care like i don't run, you know uh benchmarks on my ssds the minute i get them and i know people do and they're like i've gotten emails from people they're like i don't understand because it's rated for this and it's not getting this. I have never double-checked on my things. I don't, My computer works. It runs the things I need to do. It's plenty fast.
Like I'm not worrying about it on a day-to-day basis. All right. So guys, I, Adam, I know you've been reading long things in this episode. I just have one more for you. It's a paper published at the association for computing machinery. I'm not going to have you read this, but it is about mitigating the negative impacts of read disturb in SSDs. And it starts by saying, read, disturb, read, disturb.
So those are two words just for anybody that was wondering how it was spelled like I was is a circuit level noise in solid state drives, which may corrupt existing data in SSD blocks and then cause high read error rate and therefore longer read latency. The approach of read refresh is commonly used to avoid read disturb errors by periodically migrating the hot read data to other free blocks, but it places considerable negative impacts on IO responsiveness while it's doing it.
Okay all right so you can that that's just some light reading for you folks uh if you're having trouble getting to sleep at night so yeah this feels like like a fix for the ssd industry like why wouldn't you just make your ssds kind of do this on some sort of garbage collection system yes yeah optimize your hard drive like remember the old spinning well well i mean even with ssds Like there's trim, which is the operating system telling the SSD,
you've got time now go and do some of your garbage collection. So maybe there's trim version two or something that, that, you know, does this read? We have to remember SSDs are relatively new. I mean, this show has been in existence for 20 years, right? Or almost 20 years. I know, Adam, not quite yet. Your show was in existence for 20 years. This one hasn't hit that number yet. No, you hit 19 or you hit 20. 19. Okay, 19. Right. So that's right. Okay. But we're in our 20th year.
And SSDs were one of the first sort of major technological shifts that happened during this show's lifespan. Like when I first got my first SSD and replaced the internal drive in my laptop. I mean, it was like I had discovered fire, as we all did when we when we went through that.
I mean, it wasn't me. Like it wasn't just me, but you know, they are that, which means that this is a technology certainly that has been in existence for a long time, but in terms of mass commercial use, basically a decade. And so we don't really know about the longevity of these things. Certainly I've seen SSDs die, especially the first gen of them. Those. They do die. And when they die, it is unceremonious death for the SSD. Like there's no getting it back. It's, it just goes offline.
It doesn't even show up as a drive anymore. Right. So, you know, you definitely want to have backups of your SSDs. And we learned that early, early on. It's not like you get, well, it's starting to have problems. So you better get your data. Nope. Nope. This is a binary thing, folks. The switch is off. The switch is now off. Yeah. Good luck. You can, you can bake it in the oven, but it's not going to make a difference.
So, but we don't know, like we just, cause we don't have enough collective mass market experience with these things. We're starting to get to that point. So, you know, to go back to Larry's sort of initial question that he didn't quite ask, but he sort of did. Do you need an app like lifespan for Micromat? I mean, do you need it? No, it falls into that the more you know category, right? If you know your SSD is at 60%, man, that's probably way past time to replace it.
You know, if it's 70% or below, I mean, they probably have some guidance in the app too, but my gut says, oh yeah, like it should be 70s, 80s, 90s, and then you're fine. And the prices have come down so much. That's the beauty of it. You used to go remember you know oh 100 gigabyte ssd drive was hundreds of dollars if not thousands back when it yeah now it still is if you're buying it from apple.
Yeah they're pricing on boom maybe drop wait a minute adam you just answered the question because earlier we were saying why is apple's cloud storage so expensive it's because they're buying their own ssds from themselves that's it yeah we should send tim a link to amazon maybe he can you know get a deal yeah talk about snakes eating their own tail huh oh boy two two hundred dollars for thirty dollars worth of ssd yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly,
All right, well, we have succeeded in burning up our time, which I knew. And yours. We would. You're welcome, folks. Oh, man. For a while, it felt like time was proceeding very slowly in this episode, and then suddenly we got into this discussion. It was like, boom, there we are. We are now finished. Thanks to all of you for sending in everything, for listening. We say it all the time, but this show is a community, and I would say it is a community like no other.
And I am every day so grateful to be a part of this. So thank you all, every one of you. Yeah, it's amazing. Make sure to check out our monthly giveaway at macgeekup.com. That URL is always good once the month changes and the giveaway changes to the new one, macgeekup.com. There you go. Points to the new one. Brings you there. I can't tell you yet what it's going to be for October, but you can find out before I will. Well, wait. I think I already know. It's just a secret. You know. Fun.
Thanks to Cashfly for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. Check out Pete's other shows. So there I was, if you like. Check out my other shows, Gig Gab and Business Brain, if you like. Send us a review. Oh, I meant to read the reviews. We've got two reviews from Canada this week, which is great. We would love some reviews from other countries. So if you're in Canada, you folks are up. Keep it going. And if you're in another country like the U.S.
Or Turkey or Afghanistan or, you know, Australia or Germany, send us a review. You could be the one. We'll read them on the show. We'll read them next episode. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. So much fun. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Music.