Welcome to Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined by my friend and yours, Mr. Stephen Hackett. Hello, Stephen. Hey, David. How are you? I am fantastic. We get to do another feedback episode of the Mac Power Users. I say this every time, but there's some of my favorite episodes because it lets us free range a bit, you know, and that's always fun. Yeah. And putting this document together, we've both been in here over the last week or so.
This may be the most MPU feedback episode we've ever had. Like, we're talking about laptops and... going paperless and beta software and dictation and email. Like this is just, this is pure MPU today. Yeah. And you know what? We've got a lot of great questions. keep them coming gang it really makes the show better we love hearing from you and your questions opens up a lot of interesting
avenues for discussion on these occasional feedback episodes, so please keep it coming. But before we get started, I want to congratulate you. I just read your post that Stephen Hackett has now been independent for 10 years. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It is wild to consider. In fact, it snuck up on me and I saw the thing on my calendar. I was like, oh gosh, that's hard to believe.
Yeah, I'm extremely thankful. That's the feeling. You can go read my 1,800 words or whatever. But I've just been very fortunate over the last 10 years to get to work on some amazing projects, MPU being the top of the list. It's amazing that I've been self-employed for a decade and no end in sight, and I'm extremely, extremely happy about that. That's the thing, once you're self-employed.
The stress doesn't become, how do I become self-employed? It becomes, how do I stay self-employed? That's right. It is something I notice between people that kind of gravitate towards this. is this fierce call for independence. You read it, and I can see it in between the lines in your post as well. I feel the same way. More than money, I'm interested in being in control of my time.
That really, I think, is an underlying kind of common denominator for folks like this. I also, something you didn't write about in your post, but something I'll never forget was... I don't know if it was Macworld or WWDC or something, but you, me, Jason Snell, and Mike went to lunch at a tea place in San Francisco.
and you were thinking about it and that i felt afterwards like the three of us just like leaned on you way too hard yeah but i remember talking to you about it and this look in your face like Oh boy. I think I might be doing this. Yeah. You remember that lunch? I remember it. Well, I should have put that in there. Uh, yeah, it was WWDC. It would have been 2015. So, you know, relay had been going about a year and.
It went to that tea place around the corner from Moscone. It was back in the San Francisco days still. And yeah, y'all were like, hey, you know, you got to do this. And I had already been. thinking about it and putting some things into place but i came home from that trip and quit my job uh the date on this post july 7th you know july 6th july 7th uh it's not that long after wbdc right and um uh y'all were definitely
influential on me in that decision making. And what I love about that in hindsight is that the four of us still all work together. Right? Really in more ways than we did then. And that's really special to me that not only do I get to do what I love, but I get to do it with people I really, really care about. And that's special. Well, you looked like you had the weight of the world on your shoulders that day, buddy. I did. And I'm glad that it worked out. And congratulations. Thank you.
Today on More Power Users, this was my request. I wanted to do a 3D printer check-in. We talk about these once in a while, but it's been a while, and I am still really enjoying mine. And I have some cool new projects I've been working on. You've got some amazing stuff, too, that filament you link. I can't wait to talk about that. So we'll be talking about 3D printers today and more power users if you'd like to sign up for the ad-free extended version of the show.
You can do that relay.fm slash mpu. Okay. I want to talk to you about these MacBook rumors for a couple of reasons. One's a feedback episode, so we get to go off the beaten path. But you have had this tension. in your computing life the last several months about, like, do you keep your Mac Studio? Do you just go to, like, one big, beefy laptop? Kind of what do you want to do right now? If I...
Have my chronology correct? You have a Mac Studio and you have a MacBook Air? Yeah, nothing has changed. Orders have been placed and canceled. Yes. Oh, yeah, it was the what have you done thing in the show notes a few weeks ago. I still think that's probably a good setup for you. My setup is very similar. I have basically a loaded 14-inch MacBook Pro, but then I also have a MacBook Air.
Four times I don't need to take my whole computer out of my office. But this set of rumors, and basically the reporting is that Apple is looking at putting the A18 Pro from the iPhone. in a new or revamped low-end laptop. Currently, at least in the US, you can get the M1 MacBook Air, which is hard to believe almost five years old now. You can get that machine at Walmart for either $649 or $699. Sometimes it doesn't sell at $649. And that's a great...
In fact, I just had a family member who, they were on a pre-retina MacBook Air. like an old MacBook Air and like literally all they do is like check their email on the web it's fine but it died like it just was dead probably just needed a battery but I was like you know what like this thing is old you're not getting security updates anymore and I sent them
To the Walmart. I was like, get the cheap MacBook Air. It's going to be great for you. They're checking their email on Yahoo. It's the least taxed Mac of all time. It's great. And it's great for a lot of people. It's really affordable. But Apple is maybe looking at replacing that or supplementing it with something with the A18 Pro. And our friend, speaking of Jason, over at Six Colors, man, this is one of those posts, I'm sure you have this too, where...
As soon as I saw this in my RSS reader, I was like, dang it, I should have done it. Like, it's such a good idea. He compared the benchmarks of the A18 Pro with the M1, M2, M3, and M4. And the headline is the A18 Pro is almost 50% faster than the M1 in single core tasks and basically identical in multi-core and graphic tasks.
Incredible. Clearly, it could drive macOS, no problem. But I'd love to know what you think of this. Is this something Apple should be looking at? Something that is an interesting product? Well, I mean, it's a little bit off-brand for them. Like Apple's never made discount Macs, right? Well, not since like the 90s. Yeah. But I feel like this is part of the bounty of Apple Silicon.
apple silicon is really fast m1s are still for sale and useful i was having the exact same thought you were um a couple weeks ago my octogenarian mother-in-law was at the house and the battery is dying on her her macbook air and i looked it up it's a 13 year old macbook air and you can't buy a battery for it you know it's so old and and it frankly i i think it's probably hacked i mean she it's a long story but you know a lot of times older folks get
caught in deals and she told me how she talked to the nice guy at microsoft and he helped her fix her computer and yeah so it's like yeah i uh i was telling my wife you know what christmas or her birthday we're gonna just go get her one of these m1s i'm just gonna buy her one and give it to her she's absolutely worth a computer to me you know she for everything she's done with me including raising my wife
to be who she is and uh but then this rumor came out like oh maybe i should wait and get her this thing when they come out with it so yeah i think there's there's definitely space for this in the world now i think apple um evolving to have more of a discount Mac makes a lot of sense right now in time. And I hope this comes true. Yeah, I think it'd be really interesting for them to continue to serve that market.
I have lots of questions about what this machine would be. Is it just the M1 Air with an A18 Pro slapped in it? Is it a new form factor that lets them keep this price point down? I don't know, but I do think it's an area that they should look at, especially on the notebook side. Because you can get a Mac Mini relatively inexpensively if you don't upgrade anything. And that should be true for a laptop as well.
And when I look at a machine like this, you know, you think about, well, you know, the iPad is in schools a lot, but what's really in schools is Chromebooks and like is a cheap. Mac more interesting to schools or has Apple lost that game? I don't know. But it seems like they should try. And the sort of not so fun part of this is like. You have tariffs, you have everything else. Like if Apple's got to raise prices at some point on the MacBook Air.
You know, does this give them some cover where they still have a less expensive machine? I would be a little surprised if this is if this remains at 649. I think a lot of people, I think including Jason, listening to him on a couple of podcasts over the last couple of weeks, kind of seems to think maybe it's $7.99. You know, it's a couple hundred bucks less than the 13-inch MacBook Air.
But I don't know. But for people who want a Mac, want a laptop for something like these use cases we're talking about. Or even a student, right? Like I would give something like this to my kids for homework and school machines. Right now we have a couple of M1 MacBook Airs floating around that the kids use, you know, for writing papers and that sort of stuff.
if this were available and you know and even less or in the same bucket like i'd totally be on board for it yeah and you know when i said earlier apple doesn't make discount like bargain computers i think maybe what i should have said is Apple doesn't make junky computers. And I think for so much of history, making a computer at that price point was going to be a piece of junk. But now...
The bar has raised so high on display technology and processing with the Apple Silicon. And like now, you know, something below the high bar. is still really useful and good, not junk. And I think that it just makes a lot of sense right now for a bunch of reasons. So I suspect this is true, and I hope it's true. It's just fascinating. In this conversation, obviously, a lot of people have considered the old 12-inch, one-port MacBook from 2015. Yeah, yeah. And...
That machine was really compromised in a lot of ways. Intel didn't really have a chip that could drive it very well. So the performance wasn't great. Of course, it introduced the butterfly keyboard to the world, so it will never be a cursed Mac in my mind, just because of that. But Apple Silicon obviously would...
totally transform something that size, but the reporting here says it's 13 inches, which I think is the right size. I don't think a product like this... should be ultra portable in the sense that the macbook was i think 13 inches is like the standard size for a laptop and a lot of people's minds and for a lot of these sorts of users 12 inches just isn't big enough and so i think
The reporting of a 13-inch screen makes sense. And if they reuse the M1 Air... body right then you've got two usbc ports of course this would not have thunderbolt because a18 pro doesn't support thunderbolt but you would have usb two usbc ports I think that's fine, right? It's been fine on a $699 MacBook Air for a long time now to have two USB-C ports and no MagSafe. So I think that's fine. Like, it would be great if it had two ports and a MagSafe.
But I would take two USB-C ports and be fine with it on a computer like this. Yeah, I don't think you're not going to get any bells and whistles. And to me, an ultralight Mac is a different beast. And it's not a bargain Mac.
people will pay extra for the ultra light a good ultra light mac i'm a little surprised that product doesn't exist in the age of apple silicon because i feel like that was the the final key to unlocking that that form factor yeah i guess apple just decided hey you know we've got macbook airs and macbook pros pretty small and that's good enough but and and honestly you know kind of thinking as a big company having that
affordable mac is more important than the ultralight so i think they're probably making the right one here although i would still like to see them make an ultralight i don't think i'd buy one but i know a lot of people that really love them Speaking of old, WWDC's underscore used to walk around WWDC with a 12-inch MacBook in his coat pocket. Yeah, MacBook Air. It's totally wild. He's always been into the really small ones.
Yeah, that would be cool too. That'd be a different computer though. I think it would be more expensive and it'd have some better parts in it. and whatnot. But for people like my mother-in-law, your friend, and a lot of education buyers, I think there's a lot of people for whom a more affordable MacBook makes perfect sense. I mean, people who don't care about. having the the latest greatest display or fastest processor this episode of the mac power users is brought to you by one password
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Why not have them at your back today? Go to 1password.com slash MPU right now, get 20% off and let them know you heard about it here on the Mac Power Users. We've got a bunch of listener feedback to go through today, and we got a lot of feedback about snoozing. So in iOS 26, you can change the snooze time, and we wonder, why is it nine minutes?
Lots of people send in feedback and all the feedback I feel like is a piece to the puzzle. So some of the feedback, some of the articles we got sent said, well, mechanical clocks like back in the day. including this one article I read about the first clock that ever had snoozing. It was mechanical, and that had limitations, and so it was nine minutes that way.
Other people say nine minutes is an ideal amount of what my family calls forbidden sleep. When you sleep after you get the snooze alarm. I don't know about that, but, you know. historical mechanical limitations kind of you know stick with us right we see that all the time and so i think it's a little bit of column a and a little bit of column b in terms of why it's
Nine minutes, but you will be able to change it in iOS 26 if you want to. Yeah, Thomas wrote in in the forums and he talked to someone with knowledge of human cognition and electrical engineering. Most product designers who have backgrounds in human cognition also know this understanding as well. The best option actually to get up when snoozing is a random snooze duration between four and eight minutes.
longer than eight minutes and dream state can kick in so disrupting that is helpful if you want to get up yeah that's true i think with a nine minute snooze sometimes you you start dreaming again that's not yeah that's not going to help you That's why it's forbidden sleep because it's like the best sleep, you know? Random would be interesting if iOS had, you know, if you could set like a lower and upper parameter and just let iOS pick.
in that timeframe. I don't think we're going to get that, but it would be interesting to see. Have you seen the mechanical devices now? that go off when your alarm sets off that require you to get out of bed to turn it off. Like, there's one that has a little propeller on it. And if you don't turn off the alarm...
The propeller flies off into the room and then the alarm starts again and continues to ring until the propeller is put back on top. And then there's another one. These are all on Amazon. There's another one that's an alarm clock that has little wheels on it. And if you wait too long, it rolls off your nightstand and starts rolling around the room and you got to chase it down. I threatened to get one of these for my daughter who was having a lot of trouble waking up when she was in high school.
But she grew out of that. But yeah, there's some really crazy stuff out there. I was actually just talking to somebody about this because I knew we were. coming up on this and it came up in a conversation that you know they keep their they use their phone like their alarm clock like a lot of people do but they they leave it on the other side of the room right that's like the simplest version of what you're talking about
Mine is on my nightstand, so that's for better or for worse. But it's an interesting idea. I don't usually use a snooze. I feel like, I don't know. I'm ready to go when the alarm goes off. I'm ready to get going and doing stuff. Usually, do you have this experience? I always wake up like five minutes before the alarm is set. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I normally do. I don't know why. I guess we'll probably get feedback on that next. But my brain knows about five minutes before my alarm is going to go off, and I wake up usually then. You got that internal clock running. Okay, Unify. That show got a lot of feedback as well. We did a whole show on Stephen's continuing love affair with Ubiquity. And I thought pretty objective coverage. You talked about what it's good and what it's bad for. But we heard back from some folks.
Yeah, we had a couple of listener questions. Mike had asked, I've been thinking about upgrading my home network. Do you think it's overkill for someone who mostly just works from home and streams a lot of video? Yeah, it can be. I think we said that, right? If you're building a stadium, you need this sort of stuff. If you're building a house, you don't necessarily need it.
What started the path for me was I upgraded my internet connection and I wanted it to take just absolute full advantage of what I was getting speed-wise. That led me to this after conversations with some people who bullied me into it. And, but I'm also a nerd, right? And I like nerdy projects and I would never.
recommend this for somebody who is looking to do something like this on a budget or you know like even think about like my bro so my brother's a great example he was on the show a long time ago he works from home he's got a little home office And I just put Eros in his house, like new Eros about a year and a half ago. And it's great for them. Like he doesn't want to tinker with it. You know, he gets great coverage. The way his house is set up running Ethernet.
through it was not really going to be a pleasant experience. Well, it's never pleasant, but it was going to be an extremely unpleasant experience. And so they're just wirelessly mesh and it works great. And if you've got good coverage and good connection speed where your desk is, then.
There's no need to go down this road. But if you want a nerdy project or you want some of those other benefits we talked about, then it's there waiting for you. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of me. I'm like your brother. It's like the Eros are working and I don't really want to mess with it too much.
But I will say, ever since we recorded that show, every time I'm out in public, I see them everywhere. I see them in retail stores. I see them in restaurants. Everywhere I go and I see them, it's like they're teasing me. Hey, why don't you bring me home? Brian wrote in with the question that I wish I had asked you during the episode. I mean, it just cuts to it. What's the biggest real world difference you notice after switching?
For me, it is the absolute even handedness of the Wi-Fi across my house and office. So even on Eros, if I was streaming something. And what was walking from the studio, like through the house, it would inevitably buffer at some point. And era is really good about the handing off between devices, but. I never really got that dialed in and never had good coverage like in the garage, for instance. And because Ubiquiti has different options or different places.
I could put a weatherproof access point in my garage and have great coverage in there, which is really nice when you're working on something or we have our home gym built in the garage. And like my wife is streaming a fitness class or I'm streaming a fitness class. it just working and so that wi-fi coverage for me is the biggest thing and i've i've could have put more euros in but i was starting to get to a point of like there's a lot of these things running around
I don't want to put one in the garage because the garage is enclosed, but it's not heated or cooled. However hot it is outside, it's hotter in the garage. However cold it is outside, it's that cold in the garage. it's covered, but it's not an indoor cooled space. And so the, the, the optionality of what they had was really great. And the second one for me that I really, really appreciate.
is that my handful of cameras, that that footage is stored locally. Now I do have a hole punched through my network so I can get access through the Unify Protect app to my cameras when I'm away. If I'm out running errands and someone is on my front door, you know, my front porch, then I get a, I get notification just like I did with, with ring or with nest cams before that, but not paying a subscription for that.
not having that video streaming to the internet all the time of being stored somewhere else. Like that's, that matters to me. I didn't think it did until I started looking down this road, but it turns out it does. And so those things have all been. really nice. I feel like you touched on something there. If you've got an Eero setup that's like five Eeros, then you're probably a ubiquity candidate.
You know, at that point, if you're going to get that complex with an arrow system, you may want to get more control. My takeaway from that show was I am interested, but I'm interested when these arrows give up. Yeah. You know, when they're too old or.
you know the next time i do an upgrade i'm gonna seriously because there's something that really called out to me was the component nature of it and the way it like i could once you build a system like this you could just update individual components over time and always keep it up to date and usually what i do is i just wait till they get so old they just don't really work well anymore and then i do have a big update and
I don't really want to do that. I think I'd rather to have my wireless like constantly kind of in its best shape. Yeah. Some updates from Ubiquiti since we did that show. Yeah, I talked a little bit about their NAS product and how it was newer and lacked some of the features that you could get other places. And it is still not a Synology, right? It is not. a Linux computer with hard drives in it, like a Synology is. You're not running applications on a Ubiquiti NAS.
But Unified Drive, which is the software it runs, is getting a big update with 3.0. It was announced just about a week ago. And they have really brought some additional features to the management side of it that they didn't have. Things like multiple storage pools. So if you have hard drives of different sizes or you have different sets of data and you have different levels of RAID protection for that data.
say you have one sort of set of drives like what's on there is really mission critical like it's really important nothing happens to it but then you have another one that's less important but speed is more important you could now subdivide your NAS and have different raids with different characteristics running at the same time. This is very common on other systems, and Ubiquiti is catching up there, but it is coming in 3.0.
Better iOS support for accessing files. This was new when we recorded that episode, but it's getting even better in 3.0 where they have an iPhone app. Again, if you allow it, if you enable it, you can access your files from anywhere. It does not integrate with files on iPhone and iPad. And when I was reading about this update coming, that's a very common feature request.
Maybe they will do that down the road. But for now, it's just an iOS app or iPad app, and you can get to your files. You can also use a browser. The thing that I was most excited about... is more options for cloud backup so i spoke on that episode that i am using arc backup arq it's a great application it's been around a long time I'm using that running on a Mac mini in my house, and it has the NAS mounted in Finder, and then it backs up those files to Backblaze B2.
totally works like it has been really solid it runs every i think saturday night and it's been great but they are adding uh backblaze b2 s3 and dropbox two unified drive. So the NAS can back itself up to one of those targets. Now those are rolling out over the course of the rest of the year. So it's not here yet.
But when they do, my plan is to shut down my ARC, you know, sort of daisy-chained system and just let the NAS back up to Backblaze B2 on its own. And I'm paying a handful of dollars a month for that data. B2 is very similar to Amazon S3, but for my purposes, at least much cheaper. And that way I don't have to make sure the Mac mini is on or, you know, I'm not.
Right now, if for some reason, say I restart that Mac Mini and the volumes don't remount automatically, then the backup doesn't go through, right? Because the volume's not mounted for ARC to see it. All that will be simpler if it's all in the box. And so I'm looking forward to that. And I think that's, I think that was, I think the backup was a big missing piece of their raid solution. And I'm very happy to see that they are.
getting that getting that uh evolved and built out i'm just glad that we have a mac power user is now expert on ubiquity so when that time comes i can just send you a note and say all right steven give me a list of what i need to buy Yeah, and I'll put the forum post in the show notes. Lots of great conversation on the forums, including some stuff that I just didn't have time to get to, like VLANs, where you can have multiple virtual networks running on the same hardware.
That's very common for people to put like their Internet of Things devices on one network and everything else on another. I don't bother with that. Mine's all together and it's been fine. But especially in a business environment, you may want like, well, all the Ethernet ports in public spaces, I don't want them to have access to our server. And so they could be on a VLAN that's... got limited access internally or a lot of people put their security cameras on one vlan
just to separate things out. Didn't get to that, but that's also really easy to do with Unify stuff. Actually, very easy to do. Back in my IT days, doing this stuff on Cisco switches was a nightmare. And with Unify, it's like point and click. It's great. Yeah, that's actually tempting to me because I have a lot of internet of things and a lot of home automation stuff. And I do wonder that all that traffic isn't slowing things down.
All right. Topic near and dear to the Mac power users is paperless. Curtis wrote in. he wrote in and first thing he did is made us feel good he says mac power users remains one of the top apple podcasts well that's our goal every week we want to give you something you can take home
But then he wrote, I was wondering how much you have updated your paperless document workflow over the years. My wife and I find ourselves empty nesters. We bought an RV and as digital worker, I can work from anywhere. We want to try and figure out the digital nomad life.
I'm looking for ways to shed some of our physical world footprint. And one of the big ones is finally going paperless. Well, I did a paperless field guide for you, Curtis. Go check it out. But I'll tell you that it's got even simpler than it was the last time I covered this. My paperless workflow, capture-wise these days, is almost entirely with my iPhone. I have gravitated to Greg Pierce's SimpleScan app. Greg is a friend.
I think he's a great developer, and he makes real simple stuff. Simple Scan is one of those. You just point it at your thing. I've got the Control Center widget on my phone, so I don't even go to the app. I just swipe down, push the button.
and scan and i do it all the time when the mail comes in i just scan stuff right there if i need to send it to somebody i can do it from his app i still have a scan snap in a drawer and since i gave up the practice of law i don't need it as much i don't have as many big documents but you know once in a while like when we get the insurance package you know where they send you like 50 pages of policy stuff and whatnot
I'll break out the ScanSnap and do it in that. My ScanSnap is ancient at this point, but it still works and I hope it keeps working. So I just, you know, when I do need it, I use that. Document management for me these days is all in DevonThink, especially the new one that's given even more AI juice to it. DevonThink is a great place to throw a lot of documents. We've talked about it. They're occasional sponsor.
And I really like the way the app works. And so my system is Capture with my phone, sometimes with a big scanner and managed documents in Dev and Think. How about you, Steven? Mine's also really pretty simple. Using my phone to scan stuff just like you. If it's a bigger job, then I've got just a flatbed scanner that I've had forever. And we'll just sit at my desk.
And scan some stuff. Not as fast as something with an automatic document feeder, but it totally works for me. And then I don't use Dev and Think for my paperless stuff. Dev and Think for me is all my tech history database stuff. Most of what I scan sort of in my paperless system is actually shared with my spouse. And so we have a shared...
I used to be on Dropbox. Now it's on iCloud Drive, actually, because it was the only thing she was using Dropbox for. I was like, why are we paying for a Dropbox account? We can just use iCloud. It's fine. And it's been fine, especially, I think it was Sequoia and iOS 18 where you can...
Tell it to keep a folder downloaded. World of difference. Yeah. I'll scan it. I'll name it with whatever it is. I'll put the date on if the date's important. And then our organization is basically just a bunch of folders and subfolders. It's very. kind of manual but it works um and i am not scanning my utility bill each month i'm not scanning my internet bill each month like this is stuff for taxes or you know stuff for the kids or like
One of our kids went to a week long summer camp and had to scan some stuff. So, you know, we had access to it, that sort of thing. But it's very simple and surprisingly manual. There's lots of great tools for this to automate things like. Hazel can look at the stuff in a PDF and figure out where to put it. Mine is just kind of old school, but it works for me. If I was in Curtis's shoes and living out of an RV...
I think I would really try to do it just with a phone as your capture device and see if that's a problem. But even with Greg's app, I think you can scan up to 20 pages in one go. You just literally turn the page over and you point it at it and it does everything else for you. So yeah, try to do it with just a phone and come up with a simple storage system like Steven. If you're sharing with your wife, you want to make sure she can see it as well.
Let us know how it goes. Yeah. Just very straightforward and simple. Curtis, I'd also love to know just other tech stuff you run into when on the road. That's really interesting. I would imagine some of that's much easier now than it would have been in the past.
I know we've got some extended family that they basically are doing what this is like retired Bon RV. They're all over the place. And they bought Starlink. So they have like a high speed internet basically everywhere they go. And that was not easy. you know, five, six, seven, eight years ago. Yeah. I mean, this stuff is a lot easier now. Yeah. But we'll have a link to David's paperless field guide in the show notes. That's a, that's a classic Max Barkey.
piece of content right there man i updated it several years ago um but it needs i think another update i want to re i want to readdress the capture part of it because
the phones have gotten so much better. Like it used to be that when you use your phone to capture a digital document, it was inferior to a scanner because the cameras weren't as good and the software wasn't as good. But now... looking at my scans i can tell the ones i did with my phone versus this the scan snap and the phone ones actually are sharper because the cameras are just so good in the phones at this point yeah
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We did a show on the beta update, and that brought in a lot of feedback. I guess before we get into the feedback, though, let's talk about what's happening with Liquid Glass. We just got beta 3. few days before we recorded this yeah they've really toned it down and it's probably the right call so the first two betas and what apple showed at wbc lots of
refraction and reflection so you had color and text as of bending around these buttons and kind of zooming in and out as the controls passed over them and some of that is still present right you can still use the clear glass and do some other things but in many places it is toned down and in some places i would say it looks
Kind of like the material from iOS 18, just in lozenges instead of bars that go all the way across the screen. So it's made it much more legible in places, which is good. Don't hear what I'm not saying. But also, it's kind of a little disappointing to me. Yeah. Have they gone too far? I don't know. I don't know. I like the new look, and I hope they don't lose it.
We're in the beta process. I could see them fiddling this dial a bit more. It has changed significantly with each beta. I can't imagine they're going to go any further back than they have, but maybe they're just... Trying to dial it in. I don't know. Good post that we're going to put in the show notes from Matt Birchler, I believe. Yeah. Yeah. Both he and Nick here have written about that.
I'm also going to have in the show notes a couple posts from Mastodon of Underscore and I showing the same screen in the same build, beta build of Pedometer++. Beta 2 and Beta 3. So no code has changed, but you can see the difference in the material. And both of these are videos, so you can see them move. And that's really where you notice it.
I mean, you can tell the difference in, I think, in screenshots, but when you see it move, a lot of the kind of more interesting elements of it have been dialed back. And to be clear, we said this on our beta episode of like, look, this is kind of hard to read in places. Actually, really hard to read in places and maybe a bit over the top and they should dial it back.
For good reason. And I think that they are listening to those reasons. And while I think it was probably the right call, I do find myself a little sad because I had really come to like it personally. I know a lot of people don't. A lot of people love it. It's very polarizing. And maybe that's another reason they've dialed it back, honestly, because it's one thing to ship to a bunch of angry nerds with Mastodon accounts. But when you ship this thing to a billion iPhones or whatever.
You got to make sure it works for everybody. And maybe they felt like they had gone too far. Time will tell. This is not done, right? As we record this, we don't even have the public data yet. That's probably coming. shortly after this episode comes out but it is an interesting time and i installed beta 3 and i picked up my phone i was like whoa like this this is this is tangibly different
Yeah, I mean, it's on the verge of going from liquid glass to liquid frost, you know, where it's like a frosted glass that you can kind of see through. It's not glass anymore. Yeah, I don't really know how I feel about it. I guess I think you're right. I think they've got to get something that's going to work for most people. But I kind of like, you know, I like you. I did like the...
the more vivid nature of some of the earlier builds. I could see them dialing back a little bit, but I don't know if they will. I think usually they only go one direction with this stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I was talking to Underscore about it. I kind of wish there was an option to go back to the old one. What if there was a controller that was like... old glass or you know having some settings and accessibility to kind of choose between these things they again they got to choose something that works for the masses but we'll see they made some changes also to ipad os
um that that also kind of give it more of a mac feel that thing on your mac where if you shake the cursor it gets big now you can get that on your ipad super great that is a great feature of mac os they added it years ago And if you have multiple displays, super, super close. Lose your mouse. Yeah. Yeah. But it's really cool. I'm glad they've done it.
And with the iPadOS, when you go in full screen now, it generates a new space so you can go between them, which I think that makes sense. Yeah, I kept running into this. Because in iPadOS 18 and before, just like on the iPhone, you could swipe horizontally on the home indicator and switch between apps. And that was actually gone if an app was full screen.
in 26 and so they've kind of done both now um i'm actually very happy with with where the windowing is in ipad os 26 now and one thing that's really cool i didn't even realize this until listening to upgrade You know, for basically forever, iPhone apps on the iPad were just like stuck in a sea of black pixels. And now they're just in Windows. And so you can have an iPhone app just like next to an iPad app and they...
look the same, work the same. You can't resize them freely. They're sort of stuck in the iPhone sort of, you know, shape, but it's a much better experience there too. The Firewire issue, now you wrote about it recently. I've seen a lot of posts about the death of Firewire. And Steven, why do I care about that? When's the last time you used a FireWire device? What's going on with FireWire that people are upset?
Uh, I don't know. I mean, there's, you know, there's hipsters using iPods, I guess. Uh, a lot of pro audio gear uses Firewire, but like how many of those people are going to update to Tahoe? I don't know. For me, it was just more an interesting thing of like FireWire has been around a long time and why they chose this year to kill it. I don't know. You can go see my post. I dug out an old drive that I used when I was a Mac surface technician. In fact, you can see this drive has like.
partitions for snow leopard and lion and mountain lion on it it's like this thing is old uh but it fired right up to owc's credit it fired right up and threw a bunch of dongles i you know my sequoia machine It shows up the Tahoe machine. It is not. And in fact, in system information, the app system information, there's not a firewire section in Tahoe.
It sees that there's an adapter attached and it sees that it is a firewire adapter, but that's as far as it gets. I don't know why they chose to do this now because. it's not like oh thunderbolt 5 doesn't support it like my macbook pro is thunderbolt 5 it works my macbook air which is thunderbolt 4 it doesn't it's it's a software change it's not that they pulled it out of
you know, the Thunderbolt spec or the chipset or something. This is a software change. I don't know why it's now. Most people don't. It doesn't really matter. It's not going to be a problem, but it's just kind of funny to consider. All right, we've got a bunch of questions following that beta show from Grace. Now that WWDC hype has settled a bit, which features from iOS Mac OS 26 do you actually see yourselves using every day? All right, you want to go first?
Yeah, so on the Mac in particular, I really like what they're doing with Control Center. They brought a lot of stuff over from the iPhone and iPad where you can customize that. I love, absolutely love that on the phone in particular. That's been really fun to play with.
And on the iPad, I mean, it's obvious it's the multi-window stuff. I'm not a huge iPad user. This is not really going to change that, I don't think. But it does mean a lot of the tasks I do where I'm kind of jumping between things, it does make them easier. And I think that's fantastic. I'm with you on both of those. I would also add that I just really like kind of the modern look of the Mac operating system.
with liquid frost or liquid glass, depending on how you look at it. But I kind of like the upgrades. I think I'm going to really enjoy it when I get it on my main machine. That's today, right? today's the day i'm supposed to install it nope it's not don't do it okay uh from joe vision os looks great on paper but is there anything that would make either of you consider picking up an apple vision program
Joe, I picked up my Apple Vision Pro yesterday. I use it all the time. This one's for you, Steven. You're not a big Vision OS user. Is anything in the new system making you want to use it more? No. I wish, but no. My struggles with the Vision Pro and Vision OS are pretty fundamental that at a computer level, it's like an iPad that's weirder to use. It's great for media.
Like, it is fantastic for media. But past that, I just struggle to find a place for it to fit. You know, I mean, the biggest use case for me for productivity stuff remains to be writing. and just sitting in my chair back at Yosemite with an Apple note screen. I wish there were more, more writing apps, you know, taking advantage of vision OS. But.
But Apple Notes is good enough. And I really like that. It just puts me in a different place to write. And I like that. So more contextual computing, guys. That's the key. I forgot to write the name down. Whoever wrote this in, I'm sorry.
But they said, I installed the iOS 26 beta, and the live activities keep crashing. Are these betas more unstable than usual this year, or am I just unlucky? I think you're unlucky, whoever you are, because I haven't really had that experience. Things have generally been working fine for me. uh yeah i don't actually i don't think i've used that feature at least very much um i would actually say the beta 2 and beta 3 have been relatively good for me in terms of
uh, what works and what doesn't. Um, you know, I mean, my work phone has been on 26 from the beginning and it's basically fine. Again, I wouldn't put on a production machine. Like I know there's big issues with logic and Tahoe right now. That some friends of ours are struggling with, but it is, it is a beta and something that works in one build may be broken in the next one. That's actually not super uncommon.
That's kind of what you're signing up for. And if that doesn't work for you on the device you're looking at, stay away for now. One bit of good news is I put my Apple Watch on this morning at 6 a.m. It is now 1023. And I have 95% battery. That's pretty good. Yeah. With Beta 2, it would have been down to like 50%, like 10, 30. Yeah. So something got fixed.
My test watch is still on beta two. And yeah, the battery life was really rough. But no, that's good. That's good. And, you know, it may get worse again. Again, these things are fluid. not just in terms of user interface, in terms of features, in terms of stability, just kind of rolling the dice a little bit every time you hit update on a beta. But that is the deal. That's the trade-off of getting to see it early.
From Brian, Mac OS 26 seems to be all about subtle polish instead of big features. Do you think that's a good move or is Apple playing it too safe? um we talked about that during the episode i don't think they should be working on the paint job and the engine in the same year and this year is a lot about paint job but that's fine because the um
The thing that the engine work they need is artificial intelligence, and that's on a separate track. So I kind of feel like this was the right move this year. What do you think, Stephen? Yeah, I agree with you. I really like the way you said that on that episode. And honestly, the Mac is a mature platform. What I want from the Mac is...
it to get the same features in the cross-platform applications that its iPhone and iPad cousins get, right? So if something comes to notes or reminders or messages or Safari. I want it on all the platforms at once. And Apple is killing it in that game. Like it used to be, I mean, we've, we talked about this in the past where like, Oh, there's this really great feature and reminders, but it's just on the iPhone and iPad and the Mac.
may get it next year or may never get it. They've got that stuff in lockstep across the platforms. So that's what I want. I want the Mac to be like at the grownup table with the other OSs. at Thanksgiving dinner. It's a weird analogy. But when big features come that are Mac specific, I want them to be done well. And in a year where we're getting a OS redesign.
I'm okay with big features maybe not being around. While I'm not in love with the way Mac OS 26 looks, I don't have any problems with it philosophically, if you will. Yeah. Kathy says, now that widgets are persistent on more platforms, how are you actually using them? Do they still feel like clutter? Boy, Kathy, what's all the hate here? Yeah. Clutter?
I don't know, I like widgets. I feel like there's a couple things Apple's been doing underlying technologically. Widgets, Apple Intense, there's some underlying universal tech that goes across all their platforms. And I think we're now starting to see the payoff of all of that. You mentioned earlier how you can have multiple control centers on the Mac.
and have third-party widgets installed on them. I just feel like all this stuff is just kind of becoming everywhere, and I really like it. I think it was a vision, and it's taken a while to implement, but we're... As users are all starting to see the payoff of this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I got, I love widgets. They're not clutter at all. Uh, but I work on which is the guy who works on which is with, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um,
But I do, I do use them. I use them all over my iPhone and iPad. I'm not a Mac desktop widget user. I actually don't like them there. I wrote this thing a couple of years ago, like they should bring it back dashboard. Still kind of believe that. But I love that widgets are extending everywhere. And in Vision OS 26, they got a lot better. Actually, really compelling stuff in Vision OS 26.
with widgets widgets are also really cool in carplay apple took the standby system so if you have your phone you put it on mac safe charger you turn it horizontally you get those big kind of chunky widgets you can like see across the room which is a great feature uh That's what drives the CarPlay widgets. And it's really cool to have them in CarPlay. You can build your stacks and have useful stuff there.
So I think Apple's doing a great job with it, and I hope they continue to push that forward. And what's nice about them is if you don't like widgets or you just want a clean... desktop on the Mac, or you just want to, uh, icons, you know, on your iPhone or iPad, at least on the iPhone and iPad today view is still there. So you can, you can just have a bunch of widgets there.
off to the side as well but um but i love them i got them on every home screen of all my devices yeah every year when we're in betas i try out stage manager again and uh try to make it work i mean there's a good case to be made for stage manager on the Mac. But one of the things I do like about it is I have it set so when I am not showing a stage manager setup that it shows my Mac widgets and I find I'm looking at them more now.
having them show up that way. And that's kind of nice. But yeah, I'm with you. Kathy, give widgets a chance. They're okay. They're just fine. Dictation. David wrote in, I'm a big believer in Sparky's suggestion of Whisper Memo on my phone, integrating with drafts. What would you recommend for a simple app to do something similar on the Mac, launch the app, dictate, and then it shows up in drafts?
A few options. You can run Whisper Memos on your Mac. He has not limited it. So you can just install the iPhone app on your Mac and do it just like you do on your iPhone. So that's one way to do it. Another thing you could do is voice memos, Apple's a little voice recorder app. The transcription of that is way better than most people realize, and it's entirely private.
You can do that. You would have to manually copy it out. There's not a way. There wasn't a way to write a shortcut script to automatically export the text and put it somewhere else. But it's still not too hard to do that. And if you want to keep it private.
um that's a way to do it um also i would consider that workflow because if you're on the mac you don't really need that workflow you can just open drafts and dictate directly into it then you don't need to have it you'd be abstracted like that um drafts has dictation built in you can open drafts push a button start talking greg does a great job it you know that works just fine um the developer of whisper memos has a mac app now called whisper type
that is just like, you know, kind of using the same technology as WhisperMemos, but it just types whatever you're saying, wherever the cursor is. So that does it. And if you want to go up to up a level, super whisper is much fancier and kind of fiddlier. But we've talked about that app on the show before. Yeah. Lots of great options. I feel like dictation.
has really benefited from the, the boon and these AI tools and, uh, and neural networks like the hardware and Apple doing it locally, uh, as much as they do. I think it's all really great. Um, and I wouldn't sleep on voice memos. I mean, it. Do you remember when voice memos came out, the UI was like a microphone? It was super weird. Wasn't it a reel-to-reel deck? That was podcasts. That was podcasts. But voice memos is great. It's free. It's from Apple.
You can trim in there. They have playback speed options. You can actually have skip silence. Like they have like the overcast thing in there. Yeah. You can, in a recent update. like have more than one layer at a time. We're like for dictation doesn't matter, but it is cool. And it's on the iPhone, iPad and the Apple watch. And it all just syncs with iCloud.
It's great. I don't, you do a ton of dictation, but when I do, if I'm just like recording something for later, I will just use voice memos and you know, then it's on my Mac waiting for me when I get back. Yeah. The other secret. Benefit of voice memos is it's a first-party app, which means it gets a priority in terms of running in the background. And sometimes some of these other third-party apps get dropped on mobile devices.
You don't really know why, but I suspect it's because Apple's aggressively managing RAM. Yeah. Whereas voice memos, that never happens because it's Apple's app and it's got a secret hall pass to always run. Okay. A little bit on email. Yeah. Yeah. That's my fault because of all the superhuman talk. That's right. We're going to get to them.
Naomi asks or wrote, I've tried things like MailButler, SaneBox, and even Hay, but they all have trade-offs. Is there such thing as the perfect email setup? After long, hard thought, Naomi. The answer is no. That's right. Email is kind of rough, and we all have to just choose our poison when it comes to an email app. Yeah, I think that's unfortunately true.
The benefit of that, though, is that there are a lot of trade-offs in these different things. And a lot of these things you can mix and match. Like I use SaneBox plus Gmail plus Mimestream, right? And for me, those combination of tools... That's the best thing that I have found. And MimeStream, if you're listening, put me on your iOS beta, please. I know it exists. Yeah. You know, it's something like, like, hey.
Really opinionated. We spoke about that last time you went wandering through the email wilderness really has some interesting ideas about how you manage things and how email even gets to you. For me, it was. the opposite of what I wanted when I tried it. But for some people, it may really click. And that is kind of the upside of this category is that because email has been around for so long and it's so well understood, people have begun to experiment.
on the layer above it. And that is really interesting. But sometimes it takes some time to find what works for you. Yeah. Scott wrote one to me. I tried superhuman, but bounced off it. How do you justify the cost when there are so many free or built-in email apps out there? Why not just use Google Cloud rules? And that's a great question. You know, when you're talking about trade-offs, I think a huge trade-off with Superhuman is $30 a month.
Yeah. Which is a lot of money for an email application. But email is a huge part of what I do. And it has historically been a point of friction for me. And I always have to clarify, I like... writing emails especially to listeners and humans but i also get approached by a lot of other people who are just trying to get me to put their their ceo on a podcast or you know all the various email
shenanigans that come my way and superhuman actually gives me time to respond to humans and effectively get rid of the rest. And for those reasons, we did a whole show, and I'm not going to go through it all. But I'm still using it and liking it, and it stuck for me. And email is no longer as much of a friction point in my life as a result.
related bernice said is uh david still using same box with superhuman no i mean superhuman kind of they do a lot of the same thing same box and superhuman superhuman to me goes a little bit further on some problems i have but for a lot of people sane box is better but you know you just got to look at them and know which one you want but you um you don't need both yeah i think that's uh i think that's that's true
Indeed, I think if you used both, it would probably cause problems. Probably. Yeah. Got conflicting email systems. And since we did that show, Superhuman got bought by Grammarly. Yeah, this is fascinating to me. Superhuman being bots in a way doesn't surprise me.
Is Grammarly buying them is what surprises me. And what I thought, and I was not alone in this, it was like, you know, Grammarly's whole thing is like, Basically text and grammar checking and writing suggestions in your browser or on your computer through an app or a plugin or whatever.
And I use it. I run big stuff through Grammarly. Don't always take its suggestions, but it's really good at catching the wrong there, you know, the there, there, there problem. Yeah. I, when I saw this, I was like, I wonder if. Grammarly looked at the world around them and thought, oh gosh, is our product becoming a feature? What I mean by that is when Grammarly started, it was kind of the only thing like it and the best at it.
But now like you can copy and paste an article into chat GPT or Claude and it can do basically the same types of things. Not as well laid out in my opinion, maybe not as good, but close enough. And I wonder if Grammarly saw that and said, hey, it's time that we expand. I mean, there's this sentence in their press release. This acquisition accelerates Grammarly's evolution into a, quote, AI productivity platform for apps and agents.
positioning email as a critical communication surface in the company's vision of an agentic future. That makes sense to me from their perspective. Yeah, and I got an email as a subscriber from the superhuman CEO. I mean, not to me, but to all the subscribers. And he was saying that they have this AI-first productivity suite vision.
out the out there you know it's like not only do they want superhuman to manage your email but your tasks and your calendar as well yeah they're already some calendar integration stuff in superhuman And they look at this investment as a way to accelerate their timeline. And then I would guess pull the Grammarly has a lot of good information about writing tips.
And the thing Grammarly does, it's the best at, in my opinion. I still pay for Grammarly. Yeah. Even though Apple makes kind of a similar thing with Apple Intelligence that's built in and secure and private. But I can see there being a nice share of technology and information between Grammarly and Superhuman and them kind of combining together to do more. To be honest, I don't know how interested I am in AI-based.
task management yeah um or your calendar planning i generally feel like that's a part where the human needs to do it but um i understand that that's something people think they want and these guys are going to try and build it Now they've got enough money between them to do that. So let's see what they do. Yeah. Superhuman says they're being acquired to build the future of work. It's like, boy, that's a big sentence, my friends. Yeah.
You said something on the interview with Ken last week of like, AI and task management's aligned for you. At this point, you don't want those things to mix. But maybe they get it right. I don't know. Yeah. But what I will say is that I continue to get emails from superhuman saying, hey, we added this new little feature.
And it's like, they just really continue to really drill in on email friction and finding ways to remove it. And that's what I'm paying for. To answer the question from Scott earlier, why am I paying 30 bucks? I want... Somebody obsessively figuring out a way to make this easier for me. And if they start getting so into task management and calendars that they're not continuing to do that with email.
then, you know, I'll be keeping an eye on them. You know, that's all. Because the problem that they have been hired to solve for me is email. And I want to continue to see that happen. All right. Stuff we're playing with. Steven, what are you playing with these days? Yeah. So mine's kind of a short list this time, but one that I've really enjoyed is that I've just been pulling my big camera out more.
Okay. I've got a Sony a seven, three, a seven, something, I think three, uh, several lenses for it. And. I used it a lot for work when I was doing more YouTube stuff and that sort of thing. But I found myself pulling it out at more family events and just sort of around and have really been... enjoying it and you know the iphone cameras are incredible but i am extremely interested in the slim iphone rumors for next year which
reporting says only has one camera and that would be a limitation compared to my pro that has three uh so that's also been i think i think that's kind of been one of the reasons i hadn't even thought about that until i Kind of put this in the show notes today, but the iPhone camera is good, but real cameras with real glass are still way better. And I've just, I've enjoyed kind of getting back into that process after really not being in it in a long time.
And so, yeah, you know, I'm just that dad with a big camera in his bag all the time again. Yeah, that's cool. But what has changed a lot since you last did it was the software stack. You know, in terms of photo editing, there's a lot more options than just Adobe. Although I think, aren't you a big Adobe user? I am. Yes, I'm shooting in RAW.
I'm editing them and, you know, Adobe's raw, uh, environment. And then I'll, I'll save out to the photos, but there, there are lots of things out there that, um, You know, if I, if I was going to really like do this, do this, I'd may look at some other options, but I know what I'm doing in the Adobe tools. They're good. I already pay for it. Cause like I am right. And I'm in like Adobe sweet spot where I need.
a couple of apps that they don't sell in a bundle. So like I pay for the whole thing each month, like 60 bucks a month or something for creative cloud. So I'm already paying for it. It's already on my machine. I'm already good at it. So I do most of my editing in those Adobe tools. I was looking at that denoise filter or AI algorithm they run now in Photoshop. That is truly impressive. Like you take a shot and it's noisy and then it's not. I mean, it's like.
There's so many great things you can do with photos now. So you feed it some images from your big glass, and now you can take advantage of some of that AI stuff to make them even better. I bet you're going to get some great pictures. Yeah. I bought something this month. I've been looking at putting a shelf on top of my computer desk.
I don't really need one. I mean, I had 3D printed some stands and whatnot, but I also kind of like the idea of a shelf and it gives me a little bit more way to get stuff off the desk. And I was going to make one in the shop. I had a piece of walnut set aside for it. And then Ugmonk twice a year does like a huge sale. And they had theirs, Ugmonk Gather Shelf on sale. And the advantage of it is it's thinner than a piece of wood. It's very thin and it's steel. So it's a magnets work on it.
And that kind of got me curious because I do like to print and embed magnets and wood stuff. And I thought, well, having a steel shelf would give me some possibilities I wouldn't have otherwise. And it wasn't that much money. So I went ahead and bought it. And I really like it. I'm glad I did now. So it's a very thin, black, powder-coated steel shelf with four simple legs underneath.
And it allowed me to kind of reset up my desk. And I'm still in the honeymoon phase with it, but I really like it. I put a picture with Steven. We can put it, we can share it in the notes if you want to check it out. I've got my stream decks. I've got my recording equipment, everything on my desk in nice, tidy fashion. Yeah, I'll put that in the show notes for you. It looks great. I mean, I've definitely eyeballed this thing in the past.
I have tried other shelves. It's been a long time, maybe even in like my, like my iMac pro days. Like you, I've got, I've got audio gear, right? I've got, I only have one stream deck. I don't have. Is this three stream decks in this picture? Yeah, three stream decks, yes. So stuff is just kind of spread out, but it looks great. I'm glad you're happy with it.
this one ships with a little sub shelf that you can attach to it for a laptop so like for you you would slide your laptop in it and it's i don't have that installed on this Because I don't need it. But I put that aside in case someday I decide to switch and do the Steven method. But yeah, I'm really happy with this thing. And it's nice. Three stream decks is a lot of stream decks. It's a lot of buttons, man. It's a lot of buttons.
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