690: Turn Left at the Next Tree
08 May 2026How could Apple make Neo and Ultra versions of more of their products?
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Two thirds of your hosts are sick 🤧
- Follow-up:
- Backblaze & cloud backups
- Carbon Copy Cloner & Backblaze (via Barry Rubenstein)
- Maestral
- Arq’s approach (via Daniel Luz)
- Neo-ing… other things
- Mythos
- What makes this different (via William Moran)
- GPT-5.5 is equivalent?
- cURL security/bug reports
- Severe Linux security issue uncovered using AI
- AI is still ruining everything
- An examination of Apple’s CapEx
- Backblaze & cloud backups
- Ultra all the things
- iPhone Ultra
- MacBook Ultra
- AirPods Ultra
- iPad Ultra
- Apple Watch Ultra 4
- Mac Ultra
- iMac Ultra
- Ask ATP:
- What size drive should one get for Time Machine? (via Pat Murphy)
- Post-show: Marco’s Great Saunter
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Adobe has also forgotten how to make good software
Sponsored by:
- Factor: Healthy eating, made easy.
- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- 🤧
- Backblaze/cloud follow-up
- Arq/cloud follow-up
- Vision Neo? iMac Neo?
- Mythos and AI security news
- Hardware shortages
- Apple’s (lack of) CapEx
- Sponsor: Factor (code atp50off)
- The age of Ultra
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- #askatp: Time Machine disk choice
- Ending theme
- Great Saunter results 🖼️
🤧
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little sick you too. Yeah, you too. Yeah, so what happened was you know last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week as as I’m getting ready to do the great saunter like the day before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, look day before I I wake up You know I’ve been a little bit of a you know congestion for a few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s also you know my car was also turning yellow last week because it’s pollen season And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now at this moment for this particular six-month period I don’t own ostensibly yellow car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it happens sometimes But it can happen to you Marco right, but this is not one of those times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I figured oh, it’s just allergies and then you know every day the congestion gets a little bit worse like oh It’s it’s allergies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the day before the saunter I Get a sore throat now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this point. I was still telling myself Wow, the allergies are really bad right now to be so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. It caused a sore throat throat. I mean, obviously, totally in denial, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was not going to be sick and miss the saunter after training for it for like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, eight or nine months or whatever it’s been. Like, I’m not going to miss it. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willed myself into thinking I was not sick. However, as became pretty clear, you know, a day later,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two days later, I was like, oh yeah, no, this is, I’m definitely sick. This is not allergies. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really just a cold. So, tis the season.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is the season. So it’s funny you say that because I’m sitting here doing some work in the evening time, which is unusual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. But my boss is a jerk, so here we are. So I was doing work in the evening time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I was sitting here and I was like, huh, hmm, I don’t think that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m feeling like just the beginnings of like the zygote of a sore throat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I mean? Like just the, the idious littlest bit of sore throat. And I’m like, oh, yep, that’s probably coming for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe tomorrow, certainly over the the weekend because the kids both had like colds and light sore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throats. Declan in particular is extremely susceptible to strep and as far as we could tell it wasn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah it sounds like I’m coming down with a cold as well. I guess Marco and you and I shouldn’t have been smooching over the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few days that’s really what ruined everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you got it from me through last week’s show, I guess. Larry. suggest
Backblaze/cloud follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, with that in mind, let’s just get started. And let’s start with some follow-up. With regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Backblaze and cloud backups, Barry Rubenstein writes, One of the best backup decisions I recently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made was switching from Time Machine to Carbon Copy Cloner plus Backblaze. It works seamlessly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the background and provides a ton of options to customize. Carbon Copy Cloner backs up all the major cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file providers including Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc. temporarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downloads only new or changed files locally for backup and then quote unquote, evicts those local copies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I back these up to a dedicated volume on my external backup drive and then have Backblaze backup that drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here’s the support document on how it works, which we’ll link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is highlighting a backup strategy that I tend not to think about, but a lot of people find
⏹️ ▶️ John valuable. I’m always like, just back up the whole, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John whole volume, like everything. Don’t pick and choose directories, but a lot of people know, like they have a habit
⏹️ ▶️ John where they’re like, look, the only files I care about are here or in these two locations. And if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the case with you, you can use lots of other solutions that are much more targeted. So in
⏹️ ▶️ John this one, it’s basically like Carbon Copy Cloner, which Carbon Copy Cloner does the whole drive to be clear. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you only care about these specific directories, you could target copy those with Arc or Carbon Copy Cloner or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John to another place. And again, given its claim that it’s going to ask for them to be
⏹️ ▶️ John downloaded from the cloud service, back them up and then evict them, assuming that all that works and is successful,
⏹️ ▶️ John what you end up with is a target drive that just contain the files you want to back up, and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just plain files. They came from cloud files, maybe in the source, but in their destination, they’re just plain files.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you point Backblaze at that drive, and it cloud backs up that drive. And again, all
⏹️ ▶️ John the files are plain files. There’s no cloud anything. And as long as that drive is directly connected to your computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John Backblaze will back it up. So that sounds like a solution that works well for Barry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was thinking more about this whole situation. And I realized when we were first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting into Dropbox and then all the services that kind of followed in its footsteps, it was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cloud storage, it was sync. Like that was functionally what we were doing. We were taking a directory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was on our drives and we were syncing it between our computers. The idea of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cloud only files or like on-demand files didn’t come until I think years into this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product being a thing. And of course that introduces lots of complexity. the file might not be there, you might not be able to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it there, etc. That’s when the whole like file provider, you know, thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started becoming more necessary, that whole API, all the complexity behind that all the problems behind that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Certainly, I can see, like today’s world, having Backblaze try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deal with what is really cloud storage now and not just synced local storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a lot more complicated. I don’t think Backblaze handled it particularly well in in terms of messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or warning or things like that. But I do kind of sympathize with the position they’re in with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the complexity of this. But I do think like what we are asking these tools to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now is no longer just take this folder on my computer and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync it. That is how many of us choose to use it. Like, I have mine set up to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always keep everything downloaded. Like I never want a cloud only file on any of my computers. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also only storing, I don’t know, I think 20 gigs in my Dropbox, like it’s not a huge amount of data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can kind of see why, you know, obviously this is not the common case for a lot of people. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think another solution that might be relevant here is back when I was using that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third party program, Maestro, which is a third party Dropbox open source client.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t tested this, but I bet Maestro would be backed up by Backblaze because I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only supports downloaded files. And it’s just basically like a background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process of running, pulling the Dropbox API for changes and downloading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those files to a directory on your Mac directly where it appears to be. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet there are things like that or like accessing Dropbox through other third party tools that can access it, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want Dropbox to be backed up by Backblaze, maybe third-party tool like that
Arq/cloud follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of Arc, Daniel Luce writes, here’s how Arc handles cloud files along with the default setting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the screenshot is not spectacular, but it appears to read, when a dataless or cloud-only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file is encountered, and then there’s a dropdown, and there are three options, report an error, ignore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or materialize. So Daniel continues, if a file gets evicted after a successful backup and never changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Arc won’t force it to be materialized back, nor will it error out. Materialization or failure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only occurs if Arc does not think it already has a backup of its current contents.
⏹️ ▶️ John We got, Ark is also, uh, claiming to do the same thing as carbon copy cloner, which is like, Hey, we can, we
⏹️ ▶️ John can pull down the file if you want, if we need to back it up. Um, and I think that’s the route that backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably going to end up going down after this whole fiasco. They’re just behind the times with it and communicated
Vision Neo? iMac Neo?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about Neo-ing all the other things. So last week’s overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we talked about, hey, should Apple do more MacBook Neo style products?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John, I presume this is you, wanted to ask us some more questions about
⏹️ ▶️ John We had a bunch of different people suggesting, obviously in the overtime, we talked about a lot of different Neo
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas and decided if the products were Neo-able or not. But as there’s some things we didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John discuss and these were suggested, there’s a couple that were suggested by a lot of people. One is the Vision Pro. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about that, but obviously in the past we have talked about that, albeit not in the context of the Neo, which didn’t exist
⏹️ ▶️ John at the time. And the idea there is basically, I bet a lot of people want a Vision Pro because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s neat and cool, but they can’t pay that much money for it or don’t want to pay that much money for it, just like
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBooks. And the Neo came along, it’s like, hey, you wanted one of those really nice Apple laptops, but you didn’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John pay a lot, now you can get one. Could they do that with the Vision Pro? And I feel like the answer is a resounding no right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just can’t. I mean, they can’t even air the Vision Pro. Like the Neo
⏹️ ▶️ John That was my reply to the toot. The person who tooted this, I replied back to them. They’re still working on trying to air
⏹️ ▶️ John the Vision Pro. They’re trying to make anything that is less expensive. Oh, you made the same joke?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the Vision Pro is so far from accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and mass market pricing. Like, you know, there’s been big markets for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many years for laptops that were $900 to $1,200. That’s why the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been so successful. It didn’t go straight from the $7,000 Mac Pro desktop to nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve had mid-priced laptops as a big healthy category for a long time. The Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is still in the $7,000 Mac Pro territory and with just nothing below
⏹️ ▶️ John and the key thing about the Neo is, you may be saying, well, there’s all sorts of VR Air headsets that’ll cost
⏹️ ▶️ John way less money. But the key thing with the Neo is the magic of providing essentially the experience that
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody wanted. I want a nice Apple laptop, like the ones that I see that cost too much money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I get that experience but pay less money? And with the Vision Pro, you can make a cheaper headset,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it won’t give you the Vision Pro experience. And that’s the magic of the Neo. Not just, hey, you made a cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John product in this category, but you made a cheaper product in this category that the people who buy it feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re getting away with something. Like that they’re getting what they previously couldn’t for less money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, if and when Apple comes out with cheaper, various cheaper glasses type
⏹️ ▶️ John products or whatever, we’ll know if they match the Vision Pro in quality just because, you know, the screens have
⏹️ ▶️ John to become cheaper. It has to be able to do all the things the Vision Pro can do, but you know, way less or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and cost less money and all that other stuff. So I think they’ll get there eventually, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco technological progress
⏹️ ▶️ John on the underlying technology of the Vision Pro in particular has been really slow. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like nobody has Vision Pro quality screens at a massively lower price than Apple. And obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple overprices it a little bit with their very fancy industrial design and all sorts of other stuff and the cameras on the outside. And we, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John see past episodes. We’ve talked at length about how to make a cheaper Vision Pro, but Neo is
⏹️ ▶️ John not just like, oh, instead of a Mac Pro, it’s a MacBook Air, as we just said. It’s like, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John now you’re competing with the lowest price competitors. And there’s just not that many really low price competitors. It
⏹️ ▶️ John would be like competing with those X-Real glasses that are like a few hundred bucks or whatever, but that’s not, that’s like so far
⏹️ ▶️ John from the Vision Pro experience. So yeah, we’re still waiting on tech for that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say though, the difference is even more dire, not to beat a dead horse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that for some reason everybody still thinks is not dead, but I assure you it’s dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Neo was giving people an experience they already wanted at a lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price point. The Vision Pro is giving people an experience that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people are not actually wanting. and also at a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s such a good way of looking at it. I’m so mad
⏹️ ▶️ John at you. I don’t know. I think the whole idea of the Neo is it’s for people who already wanted a nice Apple laptop and a Neo
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro would be for people who already want a Vision Pro. Like I know it’s a much smaller market, but that’s my idea of like Neo-ing
⏹️ ▶️ John a product. It’s not, because it’s not like the Neo suddenly made people who weren’t interested in laptops, interested in laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like you said, they already wanted a nice Apple laptop. They just like, I’m not paying a thousand bucks for a laptop so they got
⏹️ ▶️ John a Windows one. This is for people who are like, I really want a really nice VR headset. Now, granted, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny group of people, but for those people, and they’re just like, oh, I would love a Vision Pro, but for $3,500, forget
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s like, well, what if I told you, you could get something that you will think is just as good as the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John for $800? They would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leap at it. That narrative makes a lot more sense if what we see from people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who do have the Vision Pro is that they’re using it all the time and loving it and getting lots of things done in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s not the narrative we’re seeing. So I think the reality is worse. I just said people who wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I didn’t say people who owned it. Well, I mean, you’re a great example. You have one, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like you’re dying for a cheaper Vision Pro because you just love the Vision Pro so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the Vision Pro has many challenges. Price is a big one, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has many more fundamental challenges that I don’t think have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great chances of being solved.
⏹️ ▶️ John The next one that we didn’t talk about that was suggested by a lot of people was the iMac, which is an interesting case
⏹️ ▶️ John because I mean, we did talk about the Mac mini in overtime and that one
⏹️ ▶️ John makes a lot of sense from a bunch of different angles. But the problem with the iMac is like, once you swap
⏹️ ▶️ John out the SoC for like an A something SoC, it’s really difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to push that price down because the screen is just, just dominates, the dominates the price and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else about it. And you can’t, like the iMac screen is fine, but there’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a appreciably cheaper screen just waiting to be switched to, like what are you gonna do to
⏹️ ▶️ John downgrade the screen? That’s basically the bottom of the barrel already. Again, not saying that it’s bad, but it’s not HDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not high refresh. It’s not, you know, it doesn’t have a lot of pixels. It’s not super bright.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s already a Neo level screen. It’s just pretty big. You could, I guess, make the
⏹️ ▶️ John case out of plastic or something, but honestly, how much money would that save? Could you do a little bit of different stamping instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of machining to take a little bit off? It’s similar to the Mac mini case,
⏹️ ▶️ John except that in the case of the Mac mini, We came at it in the overtime for people who aren’t members. We came at it from two different directions.
⏹️ ▶️ John One is looking at the Apple TV, which is already kind of like a mini Neo, and the other is taking the MacBook Neo and chopping
⏹️ ▶️ John off all the parts until it’s a Mac mini and seeing what you end up price-wise. And I don’t know how much
⏹️ ▶️ John you can chop off of the iMac, especially since I think the current iMac should have an adjustable stand already
⏹️ ▶️ John and it doesn’t. So maybe we put that on and then we take it off again. But anyway, those were two common suggestions for Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and iMac. We’ll see, obviously the Vision Pro, as Marco has
⏹️ ▶️ John stated many times, has other problems. I’m not really waiting for a Neo anytime soon. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac seems kind of unbudgeable, but we may talk about, we will talk about, I think, the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John later in the show from the other angle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So just on the iMac, on a Neo iMac, or iMac Neo, rather, the monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, the screen is an expensive component. It might even be the most expensive component,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though screen tech has gotten really good and it’s not a very particularly high-end or large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panel, I bet even today, like, you know, how much do you think the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen panel actually costs? Now, a 24 inch, like 4K monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is around two to $300 retail. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s a complete monitor with the whole case and everything and ports and everything around it. So like, I don’t think we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about more than probably a $200 part on Apple’s standards. Like, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John most expensive part. I can’t imagine the case costing more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but the iMac starts at $1,300. And so they tend to have, call it a 30 or 40% profit margin.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You figure there’s probably about one to $200 more stuff in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a decent monitor would have. So-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John also do the keyboard and mouse or trackpad, which the Mac Mini doesn’t come with, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fair. But I think you’re looking at, I think they could make an iMac, right now it’s $1,300. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet they could make a comparable one for say, seven or $800. What
⏹️ ▶️ John would you give her to the aluminum on the case and go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plastic? I don’t think they necessarily need to. I mean, look at what they did with the Neo.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the next biggest place to where the money is, has gotta be the case, right? Because there’s just so
⏹️ ▶️ John much more aluminum in the iMac, right? And it does have the stupid stand, even though it’s not technically adjustable, it
⏹️ ▶️ John just tilts, you know, it’s not height adjustable. But I think the aluminum case is number two on the price list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but with the Neo, what they showed is that they could still make an aluminum case. They just had to make it differently.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but there’s so much less aluminum in the Neo than the iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet they could get the iMac down to $700 or $800 as a Neo version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they want it to. Now, that being said, I don’t think the iMac is a high volume enough product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to care that much. And it’s not because of its price. Like I don’t think, like we knew there were, there’s a million,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a billion people wanting to buy a cheaper Apple laptop because everyone wants a laptop for almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. and cheaper Apple laptop is the best of all worlds for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that many people are dying to have an all-in-one desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and saying, you know what, for my all-in-one desktop, I would get the iMac, but it’s just too expensive. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just don’t think that’s that big of a market. I think most people who buy iMacs are doing it for like aesthetic reasons in an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco office, they don’t care. And most people, most consumers who are price sensitive probably aren’t looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a desktop. They’re probably looking at what’s the cheapest laptop I can get, because that can be my only computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, two separate questions is like, could you make a new version of this product
⏹️ ▶️ John and does it make sense to? And I think most people were asking like, is it possible to make one of these? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think just the iMac, like a lesser case of the Vision Pro, it’s like to what end?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you gonna massively increase demand for the iMac by doing this? Probably not. Thank
Mythos and AI security news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about Mythos. William Moran writes, I am very senior in tech at one of the firms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has access to Mythos and Nightwing. What is significant about it compared to previous LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like SONNET 4.6 or OPUS 4.6 is not the ability to find bugs. It is the ability to chain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them together into actual practical compromises. Some of the chains are 10 or more vulnerability
⏹️ ▶️ John And to recap the context on this, Mythos was the LLM that’s so amazing at finding
⏹️ ▶️ John security flaws that Anthropic didn’t want to release it to the general public yet because it would be too dangerous. They just wanted a select
⏹️ ▶️ John set of security researchers to have access to it so they could shore up their software. And of course it probably leaked
⏹️ ▶️ John due to Anthropic’s own security flaws and everyone has access to it. But anyway, that’s one person chiming
⏹️ ▶️ John in on what makes Mythos special.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then with regard to the preview and some new stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from chat GPT, Kyle Orland at Ars Technica writes, new research from the UK’s AI Security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Institute or AISI suggests that OpenAI’s GPT 5.5, which launched publicly last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, reached, quote, a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as Mythos Preview, which the group evaluated last month. On the highest level expert tests, GPT 5.5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passed an average of 71.4%, slightly higher than the 68.6% achieved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Mythos Preview, although this was within the margin of error. GPT 5.5 also matched Mythos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Preview in its progress on an AISI test range set up to simulate a 32-step
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data extraction attack on a corporate network. 5.5 succeeded in three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of 10 attempts on TLO. Compared to two of 10 for Mythos Preview, no previous model ever succeeded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the test even once. The new results for 5.5 suggest that when it comes to cybersecurity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey risk, Mythos Preview was likely not, quote, a breakthrough specific to one model, quote, but rather, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a byproduct of more general improvements in long horizon autonomy, reasoning, and coding,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so William was saying that what makes Mythos special is that it can chain together vulnerabilities. And this test
⏹️ ▶️ John was a 32-step chain that no model had ever passed, but now Mythos passes it, and so
⏹️ ▶️ John does GPT 5.5. So it’s not that Mythos is particularly special, like this review says, it’s just that
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the new state of the art in these models. And guess what? Anthropic’s latest model and OpenAI’s latest
⏹️ ▶️ John model both are way better at this than past models.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Daniel Stenberg, I can read, I swear, Daniel Stenberg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes with regard to curl, I complained and I complained about the high frequency junk submissions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the curl bug bounty that grew really intense during 2025 and early 2026, to the degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we shut it down completely in February 1st of this year. Since March 2026, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nature of the security report submissions have changed. The slop situation is not a problem anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So does that mean that they’re getting better quality AI-based submissions?
⏹️ ▶️ John That is my understanding. Here’s my summary of this blog post, which you can read in full because it’ll be linked in
⏹️ ▶️ John the notes. They’re getting more security and bug reports than ever, driven by AI, but now they’re much higher
⏹️ ▶️ John quality than they were last year. So basically it’s like, they were being overwhelmed by garbage reports.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong. And you’d waste your time looking at it and be like, no, it’s not wrong. These stupid AI reports
⏹️ ▶️ John are coming in. They’re just flagging stuff that’s not actually bugs and it’s wasting all of our time, even if they find some, because they’re overwhelming
⏹️ ▶️ John us with this garbage input. It’s terrible. But, you know, apparently since March of
⏹️ ▶️ John this year, suddenly now they’re getting tons of submissions and the quality is really
⏹️ ▶️ John high. They’re finding legit bugs. And so Daniel was early on, on the curl, curl is a library that
⏹️ ▶️ John does HTTP requests essentially. That’s simplifying it greatly. It is the library. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s what everyone uses. It’s used in tons of software. It’s obviously security flaws there are
⏹️ ▶️ John really pivotal because if you find a security flaw there, it affects so much software. Cause like every
⏹️ ▶️ John software that does HTTP requests probably uses this library. And he’s, you know, finding
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs is valuable to him as the maintainer of this project, but the slop reports were terrible. But now, now they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John finding legit bugs and giving high quality reports. Unfortunately, there’s also more of them, but fortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, they’re finding even more legit bugs. I think the theory is, again, you can read the blog post, I think the theory
⏹️ ▶️ John is that eventually, the, this will sort of die down more because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, there’s not an infinite number of bugs in code, like there’s, there’s some number of bugs per line of code.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you found, not that you’re finding all the bugs, but eventually it’s becomes much harder to find bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’ve found all the quote unquote obvious ones. But we’ll see these, as evidenced by both Mythos
⏹️ ▶️ John and GPT 5.5, these tools continue to rapidly advance. So it may be a while
⏹️ ▶️ John before we feel like we’ve got all the low hanging fruit in all the libraries that we’re using.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kind of tangentially related, Stevie Bonnefield writes at the Verge, nearly every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Linux distribution released since 2017 is currently vulnerable to a security bug called CopyFail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that allows any user to give themselves administrative privileges. The exploit uses a Python script that works across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the vulnerable Linux distributions requiring no per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distro offsets, no version checks, no recompilation, according to Theory, the security firm that uncovered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. CopyFail was identified by Theory’s researchers with assistance from their Xint code AI tool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, I don’t know what Xint is based on, but anyway, people are just pointing these tools at just existing code bases
⏹️ ▶️ John and finding just really embarrassing, really like obvious in hindsight, really
⏹️ ▶️ John dangerous security flaws. Like this is not, this is like nearly every Linux distribution since 2017,
⏹️ ▶️ John no special tools required, just run this Python script and give yourself root. That’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. I mean, obviously you still need to be able to execute code on the thing, it’s not a remote exploit, blah, blah, blah. But stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, you would think, well, surely none of those bugs probably exist. Or if they do exist, they’re probably only one distro or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, whoosh. Yeah, so, you know, people, these tools exist and people are using them and they’re finding problems
⏹️ ▶️ John and then, you know, fingers crossed, Hopefully we’re all fixing them.
Hardware shortages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then with regard to AI ruining everything from a hardware perspective instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of software Joe Rossignol at Mac rumors writes Apple has stopped offering the 256
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gig storage option for the Mac Mini worldwide The Mac Mini now starts at $800 with the m4 chip 16 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of RAM and a half terabyte of storage whereas it previously started at $600 with the m4 chip 16 gigs of RAM both the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 256 gigs of storage Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is my my overcast Mac Mini has continued to appreciate an aftermarket
⏹️ ▶️ John value MacMinis have never gone down in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value Marco I did a quick eBay search earlier today for the the sold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco items for my configuration, which was the former base of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 16 256 regular m4 which I paid an average of around $550 each for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re currently selling in used condition for around 700
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t save this link, but I think it was it a pull it out of tap bots posted some
⏹️ ▶️ John eBay listings for Mac studios with the big RAM configurations that Apple no longer sells
⏹️ ▶️ John and some of them are going for 35 grand Because you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get it you just can’t like supply and demand Hey, do you want a Mac studio with five tell five twelve gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM? They used to exist used to be able to buy them for what we thought was a huge price But now you can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John them at any price. So check out eBay $35,000, it can be yours.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can kind of understand because, like, suppose you’re a business and you need that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something. Suppose, you know, you’re like, you know, maybe a post-production house, you need more workstations or, you know, what, like, the kind of business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually needs high-end computers and like bills out client fees that can pay that kind of price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of those businesses exist. A lot of people need that for their business. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually is potentially worth it for you to get one for $35,000. $1,000 that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you got the alternative is not getting it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, honestly, who would actually buy that? I would imagine it would be some AI company with a huge existing
⏹️ ▶️ John investment. And to them, this is peanuts, and you got to spend that VC money somehow. But yeah, well, I mean, to
⏹️ ▶️ John be fair, I believe these were listings and not completed sales. So I’m not sure what they’re actually going to sell for.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the bottom line is the supply and demand curve on Macs that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer sells, that Apple used to sell with a lot of RAM, is looking rough these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, listings don’t matter, but you gotta scroll down and check that box that says sold items. Not just completed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco items, sold items. And that will tell you the prices they sell for.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do have some saved eBay searches for really weird stuff, like the bent piece of metal that holds the hard drives in my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we were complaining about that all those years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago? For a while I had an eBay search. I still do have it set up, but I set up an eBay search to
⏹️ ▶️ John get that bent piece of metal for less money. And I’ve left it running because I’m like, surely at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ John this stupid bent piece of metal for this obsolete computer, like it’s gonna come down in price. It’s not gonna be $400 anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I can tell you as of like this afternoon, they’re still going for hundreds of dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, there’s probably not that many buyers of that. But I do think though, the situation we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in now with component shortages, there is not a clear end in sight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is gonna be very disruptive. It already has been, but it’s gonna continue to be very disruptive that I think many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products are going to be delayed. Many products are going to be unavailable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Many low-end products are gonna just not be worth making. I think one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of strained NVIDIA’s gaming business is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as the rise of AI started up, first, I know Bitcoin miners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruined GPUs for gamers first, but it became not necessarily that worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for NVIDIA to serve the gaming market that much because they were having all these giant orders for their giant chips for their other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that kind of thing, we’re gonna see that in the entire industry now. Because in the entire industry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire components and hardware business, it’s worth it for them to serve the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very high priced AI customers right now, and the very high priced data center customers right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all of us on the consumer side, we’re gonna get squeezed in a bunch of different unpleasant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways, title. We’re gonna face dynamics we haven’t seen before. Like actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortages of computing equipment mostly haven’t happened in our entire lives.
⏹️ ▶️ John The RAM market always has those things where they misestimate demand and RAM suddenly goes up and down. RAM used to fluctuate
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot more than it has recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It did, but it was, you know, oftentimes that was out of, you know, like some awful earthquake would hit Taiwan or something and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that would crush RAM prices for a little while. But like, I don’t think that wasn’t, that wasn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this big of a swing or for this long of a time or this broad of an effect. In this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we are facing industry-wide here is significant shortages of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of components for probably at least 18 months, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wild and pretty unprecedented. So I think that’s going to create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some strange and difficult dynamics that, you know, if we’re not really planning for them, they might catch us by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprise. I think for instance, if you think you’re gonna need a computer this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it right now. Like do not wait, like right now, you can still get, like if you want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Say you want a new Mac. If you want a MacBook Pro, you’re in luck. The MacBook Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just got their M5 update, and you can go today and order any configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of MacBook Pro all the way up to the max 128 gig RAM, the max chips, you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any configuration of MacBook Pro delivered in about two weeks. Nothing else you can get right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. And you know, the Air probably too, but like, you know, no desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s gonna be rough, and I think this is only going to get worse. If you need a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anytime soon, get it now while you still can, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in three or six months, you might be facing delays of three to 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months to get that computer. And it’s also obviously very important for businesses. Businesses are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going through the same calculus of like, well, if we need to get a new laptop or whatever for everybody we hire,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe we should buy a few in advance. Think about how the problems this creates businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. It’s massive. So we are going to have to be very aware of this dynamic as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumers. We are kind of last priority for a lot of these products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there are shortages already, and they’re going to get worse. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so on the silver lining front, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a direct, large financial incentive to eke more power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the computers that we already have might result in other good effect in the industry. Maybe we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have things become a little bit more efficient. Maybe we’ll have people, you know, care more about things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like repairability. We’ll see, you know, those kinds of effects might happen as a result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this, but in the meantime, we’re all gonna be crunched. And I think we need to be prepared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that, which is one of the strangest excuses I’ve ever given anybody to buy a MacBook Pro, but here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are the king of good excuses. This reminds me a lot of when you couldn’t get a car or a new car anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because of the chip shortage. There’s a chip shortage, you fellas, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t get a new car, not easily and not quickly during the height of COVID. And I feel like this is that, but much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse and much more universally applicable. Yeah, totally. Tim Hardwick in Mac Rumors writes, “‘Apple’s considering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dropping “‘the cheapest MacBook Neo configuration “‘as one possible response to the rising cost “‘of building the popular laptop,’ according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Tim Colpan, a former Bloomberg reporter. Shipping estimates on Apple’s website currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sit at two to three weeks across the lineup, falling stronger than expected demand. And the company is said to have instructed suppliers to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increase production capacity to 10 million units, roughly double the original forecast of five to six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, good news for the Neo. It’s selling really well. But this could be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you can see why Apple would really not want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say anything negative or cause any negative press about the MacBook Neo right now because it’s a hit it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a runaway hit like They’re it’s doing great And for the Neo to either have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you know cut its cheaper price option, which is one rumor that I saw blow by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or to to have you know just extended wait times for it Those aren’t great looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know not not Apple’s fault like they they have a hit on their hands you know, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise great news, but I bet Apple would bend over backwards to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco avoid having to say or do anything negative about the Neo right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tim Kulpan adds in his own post, the renewed commitment to meeting demand means Apple must also ask TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a hot lot of A18 Pro chips. The initial production run was at least two years ago. John, what’s a hot lot?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that when they’re stolen?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. He italicized it in his thing too. So maybe it’s a term of art in the industry, or maybe it’s just Tim Culpan
⏹️ ▶️ John being spicy. But yeah, you got to go back to TSMC and say, can we get more of these?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I also agree that one of the worst things that Apple could do to the Neo right now is cut the low end model, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like, that’s the whole point of the product. Don’t do that. But yeah, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John as Margo said, a lot of the situation out there is that like, suppliers are telling
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturers, we don’t have any more of these things to sell you until X number of months in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what are you doing? It’s not like it’s like, oh, how much we’re like, it’s even if you had infinite money, like we, they’re all bought,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s no more. You have to wait for more to be built. And we’ve, the ones we have, we have already sold
⏹️ ▶️ John or the ones that are coming are already been bought and, you know, so that’s, that’s supply and demand makes prices go up. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John great. I think Apple will hold the line on this one because this is definitely the type of thing that Apple can absorb,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not fun for anybody.
Apple’s (lack of) CapEx
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s capital expenditures. Let’s talk Apple Car and what other companies are spending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on AI. So capital expenditure is, or capital expense, is the money an organization spends to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy, maintain, or improve its fixed assets, such as buildings, vehicles, equipment, or land. It is considered a capital expenditure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the asset is newly purchased or when money is used toward extending the useful life of an existing asset, such as repairing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a roof. Capital expenditures contrast with operating expenses, or OPEX, which are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ongoing expenses that are inherent to the operation of the asset. Opex includes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey items like electricity or cleaning. The difference between Opex and CapEx, or capital expenditure, may not be immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious for some expenses. For instance, repaving the parking lot may be thought of as inherent to the operation of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shopping mall. Similarly, the cost of software for a business, either software development or software as a service licensing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might fall into either Opex or CapEx. That is, is it merely business as usual, or is it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something new, an investment with multi-year return? The dividing line for items like these is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the expense is considered cap-ex if the financial benefit of the expenditure extends beyond the current fiscal year.
⏹️ ▶️ John So during my career having a regular jobby job for 25 years, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John or not the work that I was doing, software development, was considered cap-ex or op-ex
⏹️ ▶️ John has changed several times in ways that has affected me at my
⏹️ ▶️ John job because this is just from the Wikipedia page. You say, what is cap-ex and what is op-ex? And as I as I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the Wikipedia page makes clear, it’s not always cut and dry. Like you can argue
⏹️ ▶️ John both ways. And the real answer is like, what do our lawyers slash financial people tell
⏹️ ▶️ John us we either have to do or we should do to optimize whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell it is the CFO optimizes, tax burden or whatever, right? So at various times it has been like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re a software developer, you don’t have to worry, you’re pretty little head about this. This is all taken care of for you. And other times it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John log everything you do because we’ve decided that we’re gonna count all software
⏹️ ▶️ John development of any kind as CapEx and we need to have a catalog of it for tax reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’ve decided this is the way we’re doing it. Sometimes it’s been in between, oh, well, this group does it. When these
⏹️ ▶️ John people write code, it’s CapEx, but when these people write code, it’s OpEx. Again, like the, you know, it’s repaving the parking
⏹️ ▶️ John lot, CapEx or OpEx. It’s like, well, is this just an ongoing expense like electricity or cleaning,
⏹️ ▶️ John or is this like a new thing where like, you know, you’re making the parking lot fancier? Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even know, I’m not interested in what goes into this, but I’m saying that it’s not always cut and dry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if you pave it really poorly and you have to do it every year?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but like the reason this comes up is I think this was a couple of shows back we were talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was probably in the like Tim Cook turnist like turnover episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like what is Apple, you know, what does Apple spend money on and then Tim Cook era, they wasted all this money in the car
⏹️ ▶️ John and one of the points it made was like, yeah, Apple burned a lot of time and money and people and goodwill on the car, But
⏹️ ▶️ John now, nowadays, looking at the current landscape where Apple’s peers in the technology market,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re spending so much money on AI stuff that everything Apple has ever spent
⏹️ ▶️ John on the car in the past decade is dwarfed by what people are doing with AI right
⏹️ ▶️ John now. And that’s all talking about CapEx. And to the people who are financial nerds who are into this,
⏹️ ▶️ John like this blog post we’re about to read here, I think it’s from MG Siegler, or eventually we’ll get to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve been looking at Apple and saying, Hey, Apple, why are all your competitors massively
⏹️ ▶️ John increasing their capex on AI stuff, data sensors, chips, RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John 100 million dollars salaries for fancy AI people or whatever? Whereas when we look at your capex,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s you’re not doing that and you’re out of step with your industry. Are you falling behind? And blah, blah, blah. We often have the
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple falling behind discussion in the realm of like consumer facing. Why does Siri suck?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are Apple’s hardware products being delayed because Siri sucks? How can they not deliver
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff that they announced in WWDC 2024, that type of thing. But then the financial people are
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Apple, why aren’t you doing the things your competitors are doing? And so they’re getting it from both sides here. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I did pull out some info about Apple’s CapEx to put hard numbers to the thing that I just vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ John alluded to in the earlier episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marcus Mendez writes a nine to five Mac as part of its fiscal quarter two of 2026 results,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple reported 11.4 billion in R&D expenses, up 34% from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Q2 2025, making it the highest quarterly figure in the company’s history. So 11 and a half billion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is as high as it’s ever been. Tim Cook says we are clearly investing more, you can see that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the OPEX numbers. And if you click down on those step deeper, you can look at the R&D areas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey separate from SG&A, which is selling general and administrative, you’ll find that R&D is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even accelerating much higher than the company is. So we’re clearly investing and we’re investing in products and services.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is talking about OPEX and SG&A is another one of those terms that comes up in your eyes glaze over about expenses.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll link to the Wikipedia page on that as well. But these are the numbers they’re talking about and they’re saying they’re up 34% from Q2 2025 to 11 billion
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a chart in the nine to five Mac article which shows like 2022 to current and you can see it’s been slowly going up
⏹️ ▶️ John and then 2026 has a bit more of a bump. But then we get to MG Siegler’s post about CAPEX. Right, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In 2021, Apple spent $11.1 billion on CapEx. In 2022, that number fell slightly to $10.7 billion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In 2023, it was back up to $11 billion. By 2024, it was down a bit to $9.4 billion. In 2025, saw a jump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to $12.7 billion. In 2026, with half the fiscal year in the books, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on track to spend $9 to $10 billion on CapEx.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One could imagine a banker in Wall Street conjuring Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. That’s what I love about Apple, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Their big tech peers go crazy on CapEx, but they stay in the same range. The dichotomy is so wild
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it now gets written about every single quarter, but the dichotomy also keeps growing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every single quarter as big tech keeps ramping CapEx and Apple stays the same. This chart, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in his blog post, which is in the show notes, says it all.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this chart shows 2020 through 2026 CapEx of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook. Uh, and Apple is the first blip. They’re dark blue and the little bar chart
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And if you look at the dark blue bump, as TNC just read the text, little dark blue bump
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2020, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, it’s like the same. It doesn’t move much. It goes up and down a little bit, but stays
⏹️ ▶️ John about the same. The other lines in the chart, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, go bonkers starting
⏹️ ▶️ John in like 2024, 2025, and 2026, to the point where the, where is
⏹️ ▶️ John it? The Amazon line is at, what is that? 200 billion?
⏹️ ▶️ John In 2026, Facebook is
⏹️ ▶️ John and Microsoft are both about like 180 or so. And Apple is, as we said before,
⏹️ ▶️ John nine or 10. Like they’re just so incredibly out of step. And speaking of the car project,
⏹️ ▶️ John looking on this graph, the car project ended in 2024. That is not visible on
⏹️ ▶️ John this graph. The end of the car project. Now Apple’s no longer wasting billions of dollars on the car. Surely
⏹️ ▶️ John their line will change in an appreciable way. Maybe it does if it was just Apple being shown here,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in the scope, like this was my point, in the scope of what everyone else is spending on AI stuff and CapEx,
⏹️ ▶️ John money that they’re laying out for things that are not just like ongoing expenses, but like we need to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, buy tons of GPUs, build new data centers, like new stuff or whatever, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John rules they’re using to consider at CapEx. Apple is not doing what everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John else is doing. And there’s, you know, we’ve had debates about this from, again, from the product perspective. Are they falling behind
⏹️ ▶️ John for, what reasons are they falling behind or whatever? But on the financial side, this is the other side of it, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple investing versus is Apple smarter than everybody else and everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to waste all this money. And when the bubble pops, they’re all going to be left holding the bag and they’re just burning through cash. And Apple is going to be sitting on
⏹️ ▶️ John the sideline going, we didn’t have to do any of that. We saved our money. We’ll see how this turns out. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the as as MGC says, the dichotomy is clear. Like looking at this graph,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these things is not like the other. and it’s Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We know that over, historically, Apple is pretty stingy with how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and where it spends money. So that could be an effect here. But, and I would say like, combining,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like referring to the car project here as like, oh, it didn’t matter, they blew all that time with the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is the point of why the car, I think was so damaging to the company. It wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about money. Apple has plenty of money and has for a long time. It was about talent drain and opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost. The car pulled a lot of talent from other areas of the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John They hired a lot of people for the car project, though, too. Like it wasn’t it’s not like they they took the Mac OS people and put them on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, like they also hired people. But that was a significant talent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drain. And while some of it probably resulted in some things they could use after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car project was was killed, most of it probably wasn’t. So it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was the bigger opportunity cost. Apple is limited way more by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talent and bandwidth, so to speak, than they are by money. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if you can fault them for not having enough CapEx
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever develop R&D costs, I think it’s not necessarily that, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they wasted money on the car and then, you know, wow, look, AI dwarfs it. Like, no, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more like AI is like a huge deal. Apple is nowhere in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they also separately had a car project that drained a lot of talent and was a big distraction for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my main point is not to say that Apple didn’t waste money in the car project. It’s to say that everyone else is potentially wasting
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more money in or maybe it’s not a waste. Like what I’m trying to say is that, like, again, if this graph
⏹️ ▶️ John was just Apple, you talk about the car project and you talk about the money wasted, the time wasted, the opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John cost, all this other stuff. You know, obviously it wasn’t a successful product, although I still say it was successful and that they
⏹️ ▶️ John thankfully didn’t ship something that they would be embarrassed by or whatever. But like it was misguided,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was mismanaged, it was rebooted too many times. Johnny Ivans insisted it not have a steering wheel. They wanted a dragon, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have one. Like the whole nine yards, right? And it was a waste of money and everything, but Apple is notoriously
⏹️ ▶️ John stingy. So even though over 10 years they spent billions of dollars, still generally dropping the bucket.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what this chart shows is what the rest of Apple’s peers are doing right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And essentially how it either looks like they all know something Apple doesn’t, or it shows that they
⏹️ ▶️ John are panicking and Apple isn’t. We’ll find out which one of those things is true because I don’t think they can both be true, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re spending so much money just astronomical sums. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean they have the money like these are very rich wealthy companies It’s not like they’re bankrupting themselves by spending this money But like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not just outspending Apple by a little bit Like AI is different than any other like if you go back to
⏹️ ▶️ John any other the trend or boom that Apple didn’t follow. Like everyone’s investing in netbooks. These bars were not like this
⏹️ ▶️ John when netbooks were popular, right? Like whatever the thing is, even if you went back and looked at it, like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is always funny when we talk about this number, like in the smartphone revolution, how
⏹️ ▶️ John much money was, you know, Microsoft spending on the
⏹️ ▶️ John mobile devices versus how much money was Apple spending? And the bars would have looked pretty similar. I think like the
⏹️ ▶️ John estimate I always see in those various stories about like how much money did Apple invest before they could ship the first iPhone?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like 150 million or something to get the first iPhone out the door, which at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Ian, you’re taking people off Teams or whatever, but like how much additional money did you have to drop in before you ship the first iPhone?
⏹️ ▶️ John $150 million to get that business started was a really good deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That was $150 million,
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely well spent. And I bet during that same time period, Microsoft probably spent more on mobile
⏹️ ▶️ John than Apple did. They just didn’t, they just made worse choices and didn’t get the
⏹️ ▶️ John same end result. But then like, again, those lines wouldn’t show up on this graph at all, because these are in billions,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? This would be the thickness of the X-axis. I just, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John astronomical how much money is being spent. And by the way, all those hardware shortages, you can see that in these lines too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who’s buying all the hardware so that I can’t get RAM? These bars, this right here, this is where it’s all going.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s why you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get the Mac that you want.
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The age of Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We talked about Macbook Neo-ing all the things, but John, you want to go to a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey direction this week. What are we talking about? Do the pun. Do it, Casey. Do it for me. The age
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ultra on Apple products.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thank you. I worked hard on that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m here to serve, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m making dated references. The kids remember those movies? It was a long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, they’re so good though.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it really, this really is what this is about. We did talk about Neo-ing, but, and And what this topic is specifically.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sticking the word ultra on Apple products, which is different than I mean, we weren’t talking about sticking the word near.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re talking about knewing in terms of we have the MacBook near, which is a real product. And it’s the first one to have that suffix
⏹️ ▶️ John and kind of do each other products. But there are existing Apple products with ultra stuck on the end of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John This the question here is and this is based on a whole bunch of rumors. The rumors are swirling
⏹️ ▶️ John and people love to see a pattern. And Apple’s going to stick the word ultra on the end of a bunch of products,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe products that we’ve already talked about, but suddenly when you stick ultra on all the end of them, is this the age of ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we’re starting with the iPhone ultra and John’s favorite YouTuber max tech shows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off some, I guess they were like aluminum or some sort of metal models that looked very accurate. And if you’re to believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the video, and I have no reason not to, uh, the same leaker that came up with these specs or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey printed or whatever made these metal objects, did it a year ago for the iPhone 17.
⏹️ ▶️ John done this for the past several models. You can get these essentially down to the fractional millimeter accurate models of the iPhone months
⏹️ ▶️ John before they come out. So I have no reason to doubt these, but if you want to see the foldable phone in
⏹️ ▶️ John physical form, this is it. But the reason this is part of this section is, hey, you know the foldable
⏹️ ▶️ John phone we’ve been talking about? One of the names that’s been rumored for it has been iPhone Ultra. It’s a pretty obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John choice. And since the very first time that the foldable phone was rumored years ago. iPhone Ultra was thrown
⏹️ ▶️ John out there along with iPhone Fold, iPhone Duo, whatever. But in the light of this new Apple’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John stick Ultra on all their products, it’s really cementing iPhone Ultra as the favorite name
⏹️ ▶️ John for this particular phone. And it is an interesting start to the Ultra family of products
⏹️ ▶️ John that is rumored here because, I mean, the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason I put a link to the thing with showing the models of it is When I see that little, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum model in the hands of a person and they’re, you know, manipulating it and folding it and using it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks to me like, and I’ve seen other people say this as well, this is kind of the spiritual successor
⏹️ ▶️ John to the iPhone mini. And you’re gonna put ultra on this product? Now, in
⏹️ ▶️ John one respect, ultra will apply because rumors are that it will be ultra expensive because
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, screen’s the most expensive part and this has two screens, one of which is twice as big as you would
⏹️ ▶️ John expect. And it’s obviously expensive and fancy to make the folding screen and you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John make the sides thin and all, you know. It’s gonna, the rumor is it’s gonna be more expensive. If you look at all the folding
⏹️ ▶️ John phones in the industry, they tend to be very expensive models. So Ultra makes sense. But when I look at the actual phone, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, look, it’s a phone for people who miss the iPhone mini because it’s so small. It’s so short
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s, I mean, it’s thick, it’s fat, it’s chunky when you have it folded up. But one of the points that’s made
⏹️ ▶️ John in the video is like, Look how easy I can reach everywhere on the screen with my thumb when it’s folded up. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the fat nano of iPhones. I mean, if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you’re looking that
⏹️ ▶️ John way, or the iPhone mini. So right away, I feel like this is a weird product to be called Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John because when I was in, it was iPhone Ultra was that term was being applied to phones many years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, even before the foldable phone was a rumor. And people were like, Apple’s gonna come out with another phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s even more expensive than the iPhone Pro Max. And they’re gonna call it the iPhone Ultra. And here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the ways that it’s gonna be better. And there was like sort of a combination of the iPhone Air rumors with maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ John nascent iPhone folding phone rumors or whatever. But that made sense to me. It’s like, can you make a
⏹️ ▶️ John high-end phone that’s higher end than the Pro or Pro Max and you call it Ultra and you spend more money for it. But the folding phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John other than the fact that it’s gonna be the most expensive iPhone ever, Ultra seems like a weird choice for the name,
⏹️ ▶️ John but rumor has it that’s what they’re gonna go with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t, I, it doesn’t quite fit the foldable for me if the rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are correct about, you know, the size and everything. I do think that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less a successor to the iPhone mini than you think. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, like I took up that 3D printer monolight that I have that everybody made a couple months back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, I can’t reach the corner at all. I can reach about three quarters of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to, you know, diagonal end to end. So I still have a big sweep up there that I cannot reach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s wide.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have a Mini to compare with?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Also for what it’s worth, Max Tech had said that the initial read on the Ultra was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be much taller than people are saying it is now. I think the model you had matches what he
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know if it, like, the ones that he’s got are the ones that they make when they’re like, when they, like the case manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John use these, like I’m pretty sure they’re accurate. I’m not sure if the 3D print was close, but it might be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so the Mini compared to this model, the Mini is a little bit taller, but a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it depends on the size of your hands and thumbs. Like I don’t know how big the Mac stick guys hands are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t think I have giant hands by any means, but they’re not like tiny Trump hands. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calling this an ultra is a little bit of an odd move because first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is going to be very different than the others. Like it’s not gonna be better in all ways. It’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be worse in a few ways. When you look at previous uses of the name ultra, you know, the M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip ultras and the Apple watch ultra, Those are like, we took what was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good about the thing before and just increased everything as much as we could. Like we gave you everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not what the foldable is doing. The foldable is increasing some things a lot, like the unfolded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen size is gonna be dramatically increased. But then the fold and up screen size is gonna be shrunk and weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And take away a camera, most importantly. Right, they’re gonna probably take away cameras. It’s gonna be questionable on things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like how the battery life situation is gonna work out, what other kind of limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or sidesteps going to have and other features will it have things like magnetic charging who knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will work with cases who knows you know will it will have all the other you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have like the heat management features of the pro-line probably not because I don’t know how it would fit in there there’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of trade-offs you can look at the iPhone air for you know a preview
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of probably what kind of trade-offs were required to get the thickness you know required in there and like I think we’re gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a similar number of trade-offs I think it’s also going to be, you know, it’s gonna be mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some ways sometimes, but one way it’s not gonna be mini is how it feels in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand, because it’s going to be not only wide, but I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also guess heavy. Cause this is a lot of mechanical parts, a lot of mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity. I think it’s gonna be dense and it’s not gonna feel mini at all, although it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel ultra. And thicker, obviously. Yeah, obviously very thick. Yeah, so like, So I think it’s going to be a bit of a sidestep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what Ultra tends to mean in Apple’s usage so far is we gave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you the best and the most of everything. And that’s not what this is. This is kind of a sidestep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t think they’re gonna use that name for this. I think they’re going to use a different name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I agree with you about what Ultra has historically meant, but I don’t agree with you with the logical
⏹️ ▶️ John leap. Therefore, that’s not what Apple’s gonna do because Apple does not care about logic or
⏹️ ▶️ John past patterns. They just name things whatever the hell they want. And we’re like, but wait, that doesn’t make any sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your past two things were like this and now this thing is like this. And Apple just goes, eh? And they shrug and we get it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, these are just rumors. So the iPhone Ultra and Stephen Hackett, when he put his money down on iPhone Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he thinks that he was early. He’s like, I’m putting, this is gonna be called the iPhone Ultra. But he was like, probably a year
⏹️ ▶️ John after the first time that name was connected with the phone. But he’s very convinced apparently. I don’t think he has any inside
⏹️ ▶️ John info, but there you have it, iPhone Ultra, potentially one of the Ultras. And to be fair to the iPhone Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John this has been the leading contender for the name. People have basically been calling it the iPhone Ultra when they didn’t just call it the
⏹️ ▶️ John folding iPhone. Duo has not caught on among the rumors. And iPhone Fold, no one seems to
⏹️ ▶️ John really believe that’s gonna be a thing. So if they don’t call it Ultra, I’m not sure what they’re gonna call it, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John our first Ultra product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. MacBook Ultra, otherwise known as the M6-based OLED MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a touchscreen and dynamic island, And maybe Marco Arment, maybe cellular.
⏹️ ▶️ John is the MacBook Pro we’ve been talking about. They’re like, oh, I remember when it was like and they’re going to have the
⏹️ ▶️ John M6 MacBook Pros of this year, too. That’s the rumor. I would say I think we talked about this last episode, like based on the
⏹️ ▶️ John component shortages, the having the M6 based MacBook Pros come out in calendar
⏹️ ▶️ John year 2026 seems vanishingly likely at this point. So, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John too bad for that. But this this product’s been rumored for a long time. We’re like, oh, you can get the M5 ones if you’re comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John with the OMA design. Again, before the component shortages gave you another reason to, but like, hey, if you just want something that’s tried
⏹️ ▶️ John and true and tested and you know what they’re like, the M5 MacBook Pros are great. You can get one, they’re available right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John The next one is gonna be fancier in so many ways. It’s gonna have the OLED screen, right? It’s gonna be M6 based.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gonna be a new design for the case, which we haven’t had in a long time. Supposedly also thinner. It’s gonna have dynamic island
⏹️ ▶️ John and a touchscreen and maybe cellular, like, wow, I should wait for the M6 based
⏹️ ▶️ John one. But all of those rumors were kind of like, you know, we have the M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Mace MacBook Pro and every once in a while, Apple redesigns its things, the Mac money gets a new case and becomes smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John The the current MacBook Pro design was a redesign of the previous one. Like it just makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the current rumor is, oh, no, they’re not just going to roll out this thing. This
⏹️ ▶️ John M6 OLED base, blah, blah, blah. Touchscreen, Dynamica on MacBook Pro as the successor to the M5
⏹️ ▶️ John ones? No. They’re going to call it the MacBook Ultra, As in,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not the MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro has an M5 you see, and a non-OLED screen, and no
⏹️ ▶️ John touchscreen, and no dynamic island, and no cellular. Ah, but this is a new class of MacBook,
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably for more money. I feel like this is the only consistent theme with Ultra so far, for
⏹️ ▶️ John more money. And we’ll keep selling the MacBook Pro with the M5 in
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I guess, in the old case. But if you want a MacBook Ultra, which is somewhat disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ John to me, because I just assume it’s like, This is the next best greatest MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s no less a MacBook Pro than any of its predecessors. Yes, they occasionally go
⏹️ ▶️ John through these, you know, redesign, revision things, but we don’t change the product line to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, okay, well now, this is a whole different product. No, it’s just the next late, it’s the next evolution in
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Pro. Why do you have to call it Ultra? And when I see the name Ultra rumored for this, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, they either want to or have to charge massively more money for it,
⏹️ ▶️ John or they love the idea of having an even higher priced, higher margin model
⏹️ ▶️ John in the MacBook Pro line. So they can keep selling the MacBook Pro for the people who can’t tolerate
⏹️ ▶️ John how massively we’re gonna gouge them for this new one. And by the way, this new one
⏹️ ▶️ John will be way nicer than the old one in a lot of ways. Newly redesigned thing, much better screen, touch
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, the dynamic I own cellular, like these are all features that just
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t exist before in the line. So I see that if you’re gonna make this split, now’s the time to do it, but it pains me a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit to see them trying, if they, assuming, again, assuming this is even true, trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to split the line in a way that I think is not justified by what I see
⏹️ ▶️ John as simply making the MacBook Pro catch up to modern specs in all regards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I think this, the MacBook Ultra idea makes a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more sense than the iPhone Ultra being the foldable. Like this, to me, it’s like, you wanna give everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most. And again, look at the Apple Watch Ultra for like a precedent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. The Apple Watch Ultra didn’t need to be the thinnest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sleekest Apple Watch model. It was the one that was like, if people want absurd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life, much higher durability, much brighter screen, much more depth rating,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the different things the Ultra gives you, things like the siren and the speaker the extra button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like all this stuff. The ultra was like, we are going to prioritize giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you the most that you could possibly want out of this device. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are that that allows us to make something that is thick and blocky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has expensive metals in it and stuff like that. And that will that will help achieve that goal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this product doesn’t need to be the thin, sleek mass market thing for the more mass market targeted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price. So when you take that attitude and consider how could you make a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro Ultra with that style so you can you can brainstorm things like yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would have the higher end component the OLED screen it you know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has, you know, a higher end tier of chips available. I don’t necessarily.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s the other thing about it. Does that mean the MacBook Pro is never going to get the M6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or will just get it like on a staggered pace like Like right now, the MacBook Air has like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a staggered CPU, you know, from the Pro line. Maybe there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is another subdivision of chip. I don’t know if it’s feasible for the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermal envelope to include like the actual Ultra chip. That
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the only thing I think would justify the Ultra name is if they actually did have an
⏹️ ▶️ John M6 class chip that has unprecedented, like that is just bigger and hotter
⏹️ ▶️ John than has ever been. I don’t think it’s going to be the case because again, the rumor is that the Mac, the rumored MacBook Ultra will
⏹️ ▶️ John be thinner than the existing M5 MacBook Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe they’re achieving that through things like a more expensive metal. Maybe they, maybe it’ll be titanium. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been done before, not recently, but it’s, and not without its problems, but you know, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a different world now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it going to be that fancy metal that we talked about in the earlier episode?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. Like, I don’t know how it would work out cost wise, but certainly like you can imagine, Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a MacBook Pro that has the best possible screen they can ship, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fastest chip they can ship. Maybe it has higher resource limits on RAM and storage also. What if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only available in 16 inch and that gives them a few more options of the configuration options they can offer?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, what if it is titanium? What if it is, you know, better battery life than all the other ones? Because it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit bigger, a little bit heavier, but it’s ultra, it’s allowed to be. There’s a lot of freedom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s offered by the concept of making something, of having an ultra line. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch Ultra, I think has been a big success in a lot of those ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So hopefully there is something to that besides just a higher price.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think if the ultra actually was like the watch where it was actually bigger, thicker and had higher specs in all
⏹️ ▶️ John regards, I would accept it. The thing that burns me up about this though is that I feel like the MacBook Pros are overdue
⏹️ ▶️ John to have OLED. Touchscreen is not a high-end feature. It’s on $300 laptops, right? The dynamic island
⏹️ ▶️ John is not so amazing that you need to have be the high price thing. And I don’t think they’re gonna put a bigger, faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John hotter chip in it. I think it’s just gonna have the same chips. It just kind of annoys me to like, essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John fence off what used to be like, we used to, when the new MacBook Pros came out, they got the
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and the Max version of the, playing the Pro and the Max version of the latest M chips. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just what we accepted. And now it’s like, okay, well now there’s this staggered thing. Only the Ultras get the latest version of the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Max chips. You gotta wait for the other ones that trickle down. And by the way, this is an excuse for us
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep tech from trickling down. Like basically the Apple trickle down thing is we have to have a somewhat, they try to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a somewhat sensible line where the higher end ones have options, lower end ones don’t, which is why the
⏹️ ▶️ John non-Pro phones took so long to get ProMotion because it was just a differentiator for the Pro phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John What this would mean is that don’t hold your breath for the MacBook Air to get an OLED screen. Because that’s like a 2029 product.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget what the rumors were for that, but it’s like, that’s got to trickle all, it’s not even going to go on the MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s only going to be in the Ultra. Pros still don’t get it. Then eventually it has to trickle down to the MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you go, fine, it’s not gonna be exclusive to the Ultra in this third generation of the Ultra product. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Pros will get it. And then you gotta wait another three years for it to say, fine, a MacBook Air can have an OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. And that’s how Apple essentially gets embarrassingly behind on technology that is found in commodity
⏹️ ▶️ John products where the price of OLED screens, one of the few components that is not going through the roof right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I’m sure everything is increasing a little bit because of carry-on effects, but like screen prices do go
⏹️ ▶️ John down. Screen quality does get better, but Apple just holds the line and says, no, OLED is an ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John feature only, and it has to stay that way for years. And that just, that annoys me. So I’m not happy about this
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor, if it turns out to be true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’m happy about it, if I get my cellular MacBook Pro, that’s all I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the other thing. You think like, oh, we want cellular so much, guess what? Your only choice for cellular, which is like, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that you can get on like a base level iPad, right? Your only choice is the three, starting at $3,000
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Ultra or something. that feels gross too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny when I bought my current computer that I’m using to speak to you right now, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an M3 MacBook Pro with M3 Max in it and 64 gigs RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight terabytes of storage, I thought, oh, it’ll last me a year or two, which has been typical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me for the last several years. And now, I think three years in, I’m expecting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m gonna hold onto this until the MacBook Ultra, whatever they call it, is something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than your Mac Pro in terms of expense because it’s going to be a doozy, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if RAM and SSDs are still incredibly expensive. Next on our list, AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ultra, otherwise known as AirPods Pro with cameras to feed visual intelligence to Siri. And there was some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey news about this just earlier today. In fact, Mark Gurman writes, the earbuds, which rely on cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see the space surrounding a user and provide information on advanced testing. The cameras essentially act as eyes for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri digital assistant and aren’t designed to take photos or video. These components, located
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in both the right and left earbuds, allow the device to capture visual information in low resolution. Other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than longer stems to accommodate the cameras, the product will resemble the AirPods Pro 3. The idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to let users ask questions about an item they may be looking at. For instance, they could be facing food ingredients and ask what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they should cook for dinner. The device could give the wearer a reminder based on something the camera sees, or it might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use external visuals to provide more advanced turn-by-turn directions. The AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could cite specific landmark ahead when telling users when they should turn. The new AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t designed to support hand gesture controls. They do have a small LED light in the earbuds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will turn on when visual data is being fed into the cloud. Apple had planned for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earbuds to go on sale as early as the first half of this year, but the launch was postponed after delays to a revamped version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Siri. Everyone take a shot. While the hardware is nearly ready, concerns about the AI elements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could further hold back a launch if Apple isn’t pleased with the quality of the visual intelligence features. Surprise, surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a weird one. They’re applying ultras to the AirPods with cameras in them, which is again, a long rumored product.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you stick ultra on these? Well, it’s surely differentiated from the AirPods Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not just like the next logical revision of the AirPods Pro to stick cameras on them. I don’t think that follows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like we’ve had AirPods Pro, AirPods Pro 2, 2.5, 3. Cameras were
⏹️ ▶️ John not really on anyone’s list of things that everyone else is doing on their earbuds
⏹️ ▶️ John that surely Apple will have to do, but this is apparently their plan. So if they wanna stick ultra on this one, I give them a pass
⏹️ ▶️ John because I mean, they’re not AirPods Pro and sticking a camera on something that didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John previously have one, it sounds pretty ultra. Whether or not this will be a good product or work or ever ship because
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t get their C-React together, we’ll see. But I, you know, I could say, and obviously it’s probably gonna be more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John too because you’re adding cameras to things that didn’t have them and there’s not a lot of stuff on AirPods to begin with.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the addition of a camera is a significant addition to the parts that you need to make
⏹️ ▶️ John an AirPod. but if you’re trying to make a family of products with ultra suffix, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same question I said before, if they don’t call these ultra, what do you call them? Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess, because they already
⏹️ ▶️ John have pro. AirPods camera?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or it could just be, well, it could be AirPods Vision, but it- Remember when they did the iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John photo? They just put stuck photo right in the name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, you could just make a, this is what we were just talking about with regard to the MacBook Pro versus MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro Ultra, but it could just be the new AirPods Pro. You know, they just get more pro-y. Yeah, I mean, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John just make it four, I guess, like they’re up to three and they use the numbers in marketing, right? AirPods Pro 3, right? Yep. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I mean, this is not a product I’m particularly excited about, but we’ll see, maybe it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change my mind. But honestly, I still am not good with the AirPods Pro 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still use my twos the vast majority of the time because I still find the three is uncomfortable. Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John Even with the tips, you went through the whole different tip things?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I went to the comply tips and they’re less uncomfortable, but they’re still uncomfortable really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after a long time. and I still use the two as the vast majority of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Losing the ear lottery sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does. But yeah, I think that, you know, we went through the profication of their product line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years and now everything has a pro. And so if they wanted to go higher than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultra is the word they tend to use. So yeah, I think that’s very likely to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, just to briefly kind of echo what Marco said, I don’t feel like I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cameras in my AirPods. However, this is one of those things where I would be very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unsurprised to see, Oh, Apple came up with something really clever and I must have this in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s not the hardware though on these, it’s like any other AI type thing. It’s like you need the sensors there
⏹️ ▶️ John to provide input, but it lives or dies entirely based on these much
⏹️ ▶️ John smarter thing living either on your phone or in the cloud or both. That does something with those. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John as this, this rumor says, the cameras aren’t going to be like good camera. I mean, it’s an AirPod. What do you think you can fit in there?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not gonna be, it’s gonna be a low resolution camera from which you, the user, will probably never
⏹️ ▶️ John see any output. You will never see what these cameras are seeing. It’s probably some just garbage thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s input to what you hope is some kind of smart thing that can say like, now, now we can see what’s around
⏹️ ▶️ John you and maybe we can do useful stuff with it. Like I said, directions, turn left at the next tree or whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re walking around, like if the thing at the other end of this is smart and useful,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the cameras that are doing it, it’s the smart and useful thing. And it’s just like, just, it just needs access to some cameras and these are already in your
⏹️ ▶️ John ears and they have a pretty good view, depending on your haircut.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there are challenges here, but like, as the end of this says, there are concerns about the
⏹️ ▶️ John AI elements that could further hold back a launch if Apple isn’t pleased with the quality of visual intelligence features. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently they haven’t been pleased with any of the AI features, because they haven’t shipped them. And they continue not to be
⏹️ ▶️ John pleased. And so I’m not optimistic, Casey, that Apple is gonna bring you around on these, or
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even that optimistic they’re gonna ship anytime soon, because so many things have been delayed. And especially
⏹️ ▶️ John for something like this, where it’s like the only purpose of these cameras is to feed some smart thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s gonna do stuff with them. It’s not gonna take pictures. It’s not gonna take video. You’re not gonna see the output of these pictures according
⏹️ ▶️ John to this rumor. Its whole purpose is to hook up to that smart thing. If the smart thing’s not smart
⏹️ ▶️ John enough, don’t ship this product, wait. And it sounds like from this rumor, like the people who did the hardware and I was twiddling their thumbs, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we delivered the hardware on the schedule that you said you wanted it. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just sitting there waiting for the software people to get their act together for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. All right, next on our list, iPad Ultra, otherwise known as the 20 inch foldable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OLED iPad, which has been reportedly shelved.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we talked about this on several shows ago. The rumors about people didn’t know whether it was gonna be Mac or, whether it was gonna run Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS or iPad OS or whatever. And then there was a rumor a while ago that I think we also reported on. Oh yeah, they’ve decided
⏹️ ▶️ John not to do this one. Basically this is like, imagine a foldable phone, but massive and
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably running iPad OS. It’s like an iPad that I, you know, you can fold out of the screen is really big.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I guess you could make it in like an L shape and it could have an onscreen keyboard to be kind of like a laptop. Like it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John this rumor was always just going all over the place. But yeah, the rumor is that they’ve decided
⏹️ ▶️ John for now not to do this one, but had they done it, it might’ve been called iPad Ultra. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is another one where I think the Ultra name fits cause it’s like massively expensive iPad that’s way bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John that can bend in half, which is the thing iPads can’t do. That one
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey definitely- Well, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can, Marco did it once. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a butt in the household that did it, but it was not Marco’s butt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s correct. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, Apple Watch Ultra 4. What do we think about this, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s already got the name Ultra, and this rumor is the worst, because they’re like, maybe there’s an iWatch, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John there will be an Apple Watch Ultra 4, like they’re up to three, they’re gonna make another one. Probably not gonna be redesigned,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like maybe, the rumors are so bad about, Like maybe it will have newer updated health sensors.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it will have a redesign case. Maybe it’ll have touch ID on the side button. And maybe it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have a new S12 SoC. But none of these, none of these maybes about the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the fact that there will be an Apple Watch Ultra 4, I would put money on. But the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody can come up with anything that they’re willing to say, yeah, it’ll probably have this feature. And it’s just like, what could they do
⏹️ ▶️ John for an Apple? They could do all these things, but it doesn’t seem like any of them are even rumored. It just seems like people are guessing based
⏹️ ▶️ John on like, Well, if they do make one with the four, it probably has to have this stuff. So this is only in here as a courtesy
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s already got the name Ultra. And it is, as far as I know, the only product, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John the chip, but that’s not a product, like it’s an ingredient in a product. Apple Watch Ultra was out there with the Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John name, out ahead of everybody else, being all Ultra. And they keep making them and they’ve been getting
⏹️ ▶️ John better a little tiny bit, but nothing dramatic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultra, right? The Apple Watch Ultra? No, so I double checked the M1 Ultra came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I meant the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John product. The chip is not a product, it’s an ingredient.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they were both the same year. They’re both 2022, I believe. But yeah, the M1 Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beat the Apple Watch Ultra by like six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was thinking product, product, not chip, but that is a fair point nevertheless. John is still in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bargaining phase with regard to his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Mac Pro. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John bargaining, I’m just saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Ultra, question mark? and John himself has put an upside down smiley in our internal
⏹️ ▶️ John Because honestly, you know, what kind of Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John would you put a name on? Now we’ve been talking about the MacBook Pro Ultra, right? But like, what about
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac, which means desktop Mac, because the laptop ones are called MacBooks of various kinds.
⏹️ ▶️ John What would a Mac Ultra be? Yeah, I think we know the answer to that question. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does not want to make it, but I’m just saying Apple, If you’re gonna put Ultra in all your products,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope someone in some pitch meeting says, hey, what if we made a Mac Ultra and then someone wearing
⏹️ ▶️ John one of my shirts just glares at them. Said his name was Stampy.
⏹️ ▶️ John You loved him. That’s a Simpsons reference, Casey. Nope, I actually got that one. Mac Ultra,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can rename it someday. The case for a true Mac Ultra successor, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Ultra, just gonna leave that out there. Let’s move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. I mean, I think there is room for a Mac Ultra, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s ever going to be the form that you want it to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, like I said, I’m not married to the form. As I’ve made the pitch in the past several episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John more transistors, bigger, hotter, more heat dissipation in exchange for more computation. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of flexibility within that framework,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. Yeah, I think if such a thing were to exist, it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another tier of the Mac Studio. In the similar way that like when we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the iMac Pro, it was, you know, externally, it looked like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 27-inch Retina iMac, even though internally it was very different and, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, had much higher-end components, totally different cooling, et cetera. But it was like a pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco form of a product line they already had. I think if they’re ever gonna do a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultra, It would it would be basically a pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pro edition like a higher higher end Edition of the Mac studio or something looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very similar to the next year, but they’d call it the Mac Ultra They wouldn’t call it the Mac studio right and it probably wouldn’t call it the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that name is now tarnished forever Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it seems like they’re moving towards ultra as their high-end name and leaving kind of pro is the middle kind of what they did with the
⏹️ ▶️ John actually with like the Super cores and the medium cores and stuff like that But by all means,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have quibbles about which particular products they put into these slots, but if they want to change their naming and make Ultra the new top, Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John the new middle, and then I guess a four level one, which is like Neo, Air, Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra, and then somewhere in there is the non-suffix ones, somewhere in between.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I’m fine with them going through that, but yeah, whatever they make, if they were to make a Mac, the whole idea is a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that can do more than the current highest end Mac because it has more transistors, uses more power, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a desktop Mac, right? It’s plugged into the wall. You don’t have to worry about battery life on a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re only using 300 watts now. Take some of those excess watts and turn them into computation,
⏹️ ▶️ John because hey, we have this, you know, there’s plenty of things people want to use computation for, even
⏹️ ▶️ John more so now than there has ever been. Please use that, please. You know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can fit it in the same Mac Studio case and call it the Mac Ultra with using the special metal or some fancy heat
⏹️ ▶️ John sink, fine. But if you have to make a bigger case, a taller Mac Studio, whatever, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John tied to the form factor. Again, the trash can was not, you know, if they had been able to scale that, it would have been great. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the idea of a chimney thing. There’s lots of directions you can go, but like Mac Ultra, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of like me being like in a morning period, I feel like there is a, I don’t know, a latent period or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s necessarily going to be a multi-year gap before Apple even looks in the direction
⏹️ ▶️ John of anything resembling a Mac Ultra, simply because they just finally
⏹️ ▶️ John got the, you know, the will to can what was everyone was knew was a dead product, the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you gotta wait many, many years for them to revisit this, if they ever revisit it. It’s not even clear that
⏹️ ▶️ John they ever revisit it. But I do think the odds of them revisiting this in many years
⏹️ ▶️ John is increased if they actually do this rumored sort of ultra, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, what’s essentially a marketing rollout of like, hey, we’re defining a new tier of product that was pioneered
⏹️ ▶️ John by the Apple Watch Ultra, which is our existing products with Ultra on the end, which
⏹️ ▶️ John are more expensive, fancier, better, more blah, blah, blah things. If they do that, it’s inevitable that in five
⏹️ ▶️ John years, someone is gonna go up to the whiteboard and write Mac Ultra question mark with an upside down smiley face. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta happen, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m Mac Ultra. I am not in the market for this, but I love this idea. reading from Macworld.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roman Loyola writes, of all the desktop Macs, the iMac is the most likely candidate for an ultra version. Would it be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fastest, most powerful Mac available? No, but Apple isn’t necessarily defining ultra that way. Ultra applies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the product in a particular line that goes above and beyond a typical feature set in some way, like an iPhone that folds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a MacBook with an OLED touchscreen. An iMac Ultra could have a 6K 32-inch display and a Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Max chip to set it apart from the standard model. I don’t think they would sell any of these, and I still think they would do it, that they should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it because it would be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if it’s not time to look at the Mac Ultra because it’s too soon, I think it’s about time
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at the iMac. It’s been a long time since the iMac Pro. And, you know, again, Roman putting his stake in the ground
⏹️ ▶️ John of what he thinks Ultra should mean. And I would caution again, that just because your definition makes sense doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean Apple will do it. In fact, it may be the opposite. The more sense it makes, less likely Apple is to do it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a valid definition of Ultra based on history and logic to say, we’re not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the whatever Ultra is not the best whatever Apple sells. It’s just the best whatever within that line. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the iMac Ultra would be a bigger, more powerful iMac that has a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John screen and a faster CPU and dissipates more heat and blah, blah, blah, blah. We’ve already done this. It was called the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, it was great. It was incredible. Yeah, and Apple decided a long time ago now,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not interested in pursuing that. But I feel like the time, enough time has passed for them to at least consider,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, this Ultra thing is going great. If it turns out that essentially we’re able to drive wealthy
⏹️ ▶️ John people up market and get more money from them. Like some of this boils down to from a product’s perspective is like, yes, we’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John cooler, better products. And I’m not setting that aside because I like those products. But also as you go
⏹️ ▶️ John higher end, it’s nice that you get nicer margins too, you know? Like you get much lower volume, but you do
⏹️ ▶️ John get higher margins. So like that’s the play here. Like for all their product lines, they want to have a good spread.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t, you know, they want to go down low with the NEOs and make sure they’re selling as much volume as they possibly can.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ll also go up high to some degree to try to get, to see how much money there is to extract from the market,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They’ve always done that. So, again, I don’t see, because desktop Macs are
⏹️ ▶️ John so unpopular, relatively speaking, this doesn’t seem likely. I know there
⏹️ ▶️ John are people who would love this product, but I don’t know if there’s enough of them for them to develop it, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John since the only product in the iMac line currently is the iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is extremely unfriendly to ultra-ing in its current form, which is so thin you can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John put an ethernet port on it, right? So I, you know, it, unlike, because the iMac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John had the advantage that you could take the existing case and make it a darker color and stick better internals
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, and it was done. You can’t do that with the current iMac case. They would have to make a new case and then that
⏹️ ▶️ John basically kills the project. So like, no, it’s, you know, or a 32 inch screen, it’s like, you’ve just killed the project. Cause like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not making a separate case, separate bigger case with better cooling just for this product that no one’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John buy, that’s not even gonna be the fastest Mac cause the Mac Studio will still be faster. So, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John Rome, but I don’t think this is gonna happen, but I think it is about time for Apple to consider this before
⏹️ ▶️ John deciding that they don’t want to do it.
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#askatp: Time Machine disk choice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some ASCII ATP and Pat Murphy writes, I got a new laptop, an M5 Pro, 4TB SSD. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually start a new Time Machine backup with a new machine. Do you have an opinion on how big of a Time Machine drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get? I used to get a Time Machine drive 2X or 4X, the size of the drive it is backing up, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey current costs are making me pause. The price of a 4TB external SSD microcenter is about $1,100 for the love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of God. Wow. Just three years ago, that drive was 200 bucks. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would generally say get at least as big, if not 2x, the size of your drive. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this case, I would do one of two things. I would either get a four terabyte drive and no bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD, that is, or just get a spinning disk. It’s fine. For a time machine, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not really that fine. I wouldn’t recommend that. But here’s been my philosophy for time machine backup drives. It’s always been my philosophy,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just served me well for multiple reasons, one of which is sad. Get a
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine drive that’s the same size as the driver backing up. And I know you’re thinking, that’s not gonna work. What about
⏹️ ▶️ John like, cause there’s overhead for the backups themselves and everything and I wanna have multiple versions, multiple backups, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just one backup, yada yada. But here’s the thing. First of all, you shouldn’t actually be filling
⏹️ ▶️ John the drive you’re backing up to like the brim. It should have less, your four terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John drive should have less than four terabytes in it. Like not, you know, a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John amount less. because Mac OS flips out when there’s no free disk space. Okay, bad things happen. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John not fill it as much as you possibly can, which means that you’re not backing up four terabytes of data.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, Time Machine doesn’t back up every file that’s on that drive, it skips over stuff. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the read-only system volume and crap like that. I forget what it skips over these days. I don’t know if it’s doing the whole system volume or not, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not getting everything. So my point is that your four terabyte backup drive
⏹️ ▶️ John should handily hold a complete backup of the data that’s actually on
⏹️ ▶️ John your four terabyte disk that you’re backing up, plus a couple days,
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks, months of churn, depending on how often you change files. And also my practice
⏹️ ▶️ John has been to get the biggest drive that I can afford as my main drive, which means that I can probably barely
⏹️ ▶️ John afford to get a drive the same size. The reason you don’t get 2X or 4X the size,
⏹️ ▶️ John say, wouldn’t that be great? I could have years and years of backups because I’ve got my first backup and then just all these iterative diffs
⏹️ ▶️ John for the subsequent backups. I could have huge history back up history. The reason you don’t do a 2X or 4X
⏹️ ▶️ John is because time machine will corrupt itself long before you were able to fill a 4X the
⏹️ ▶️ John size drive thing. Because time machine is reliable for spans of a year
⏹️ ▶️ John or two, but eventually it will say, oh no, your time machine backup, like it’s corrupt
⏹️ ▶️ John in some way. There’s no real error. Your only recourse is to erase the drive and start over.
⏹️ ▶️ John That happens to me every few years. So I think before you’re able to fill,
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly a 4X size drive of the one you’re backing up, Time Machine will be corrupted. As for spinning
⏹️ ▶️ John disks, these days, especially with APFS on the spinning disk, it’s just too slow. It like,
⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside the noise and everything, it’s just, it’s brutally slow because APFS is not
⏹️ ▶️ John optimized for spinning disks in any way whatsoever. And Time Machine does lots of little
⏹️ ▶️ John IOs and it’s just, I do not recommend it. I know it’s cheaper to get the storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Use that storage to hold your massive video files. Backing up 50
⏹️ ▶️ John gig Blu-ray rips that are in single MKV files, great for spinning disks. Backing up
⏹️ ▶️ John the tiny little files that make up a time machine backup of your active main system drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good use of this. So my recommendation, get one drive that’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John size as the one you’re backing up or maybe a little bit bigger. Getting something even 2X as big is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John too aspirational with respect to the historic reliability of Time Machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would also say definitely get the one that is the matching size. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I’ve operated my time machine disks for over a decade, and it’s been totally fine. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a problem with it. And as for spinning disk versus SSD.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Man, those prices hurt. I don’t I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t feel for the choice you have to make on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John time and buy the SSD when it was 200 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like John is right that spinning disks are really slow by today’s standards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, Time Machine is one place where as long as you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tolerate the noise potential of where it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a place where I would say it doesn’t matter that much for the speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. But it does though, because you think it doesn’t matter because you’re like, I don’t care how long the backup takes. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting on it or anything. Here’s the problem. It will take so long that if you tell it like it’s scheduled
⏹️ ▶️ John like backup every hour forget about that A single backup is going to take many hours and you will get to the
⏹️ ▶️ John point where a single backup takes more than 12 Or 24 hours. So now you’re not getting good backups
⏹️ ▶️ John because oh I modified that file an hour ago Let me get it from time machine. Sorry It’s still running the backup
⏹️ ▶️ John that it started at noon yesterday because this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and I know this because I use come on
⏹️ ▶️ John I I’m telling you I used to have spinning disks inside, directly attached inside my
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro that I was using as my Time Machine volumes. That’s how I know this is the case. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John bad with APFS and Time Machine on spinning disks. Like that bad, where I’m backing
⏹️ ▶️ John up a four terabyte SSD to like whatever it was, an eight terabyte spinning disk. It was just brutally
⏹️ ▶️ John slow, such that first of all, it was never not doing a Time Machine backup, which was bad, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, and it’s not like it’s swapping my main drive with IO because it’s so stupid slow, but it’s just, it’s always doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the interval of my backups, like how many different versions of this file that I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John working on for the past two days, can I get another backup? Massively spaced out because it just took so darn
⏹️ ▶️ John long. It is close to the worst case scenario for spinning disk. Like I said, spinning disks are great, use them to
⏹️ ▶️ John store giant media files. Don’t use them for Time Machine, if you can possibly help it. Now it could also
⏹️ ▶️ John be that I am stressing these drives more. Again, I will say the two
⏹️ ▶️ John underscore separated words that everybody knows, node underscore modules.
⏹️ ▶️ John How many files can you create? How quickly and how quickly can they churn and change over the course of doing development over a
⏹️ ▶️ John week of work? Node underscore modules directory will really abuse
⏹️ ▶️ John your time machine backups. It’s easy to end up creating and modifying and
⏹️ ▶️ John deleting literally millions of files on a daily basis. That will brutalize your time machine
⏹️ ▶️ John drive. If you limit yourself to excluding certain drives, folders or whatever, maybe you can help. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’m still saying to like, I know the cost feels bad, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. Try it for yourself. Again, maybe I’m a pathological case, but I had many years experience in this 2019 Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John backing up to time machine and a spinning disk, and I do not recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s just because it’s a piece of crap Intel computer. That’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ John was a fast internal bus. It was fast, a good fast drive. 7,200 RPM, high quality,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s just spinning disks plus tiny files plus APFS equals sadness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this episode, factor and delete me. And thanks to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week we’re gonna be talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adobe’s, let’s say they have recently forgotten to make good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software UIs especially. So we’re gonna be talking about that. And overtime, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can join the list at atp.fm slash join. Thank you everybody, and we’ll talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Accidental Check podcasts
Great Saunter results
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you are in the office in your home. Did you walk into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the office, or did you get, did you roll in your wheelchair into the office?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco sauntered in. –Mmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco –So, uh, I’ve mentioned in, uh, past shows that I was training to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very long walk called The Great Saunter. Uh, this is a once a year walk organized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the group called Shorewalkers, um, around the perimeter of Manhattan. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one day, you walk about 32 to 33 miles miles around the perimeter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all you know from like seven in the morning until you know seven to nine ish p.m.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on how quickly you walk it. This is I’ve never done any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like extreme if you could call that extreme athletic event
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before any really any athletic event longer than a 5k run I’ve never done you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything bigger than that. This was you know a pretty big effort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me and the group I was with. And I’m really proud of all of us for doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here’s the recap. So first of all, if we can go on a brief aside, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a minute, bikes and pedestrians should never share the same paths.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know this is going to annoy all the bikists out there. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just… They’re going to be so mad at us. I know, but I think I have an angle that they will appreciate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cars can’t coexist with bikes gracefully because of the inherent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differences in their size, their speed, their physical needs. Well, neither
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can pedestrians. Now, it’s not as bad as it is with cars because drivers of cars often kill cyclists,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think it’s super common for cyclists to kill pedestrians. I’m sure it has happened, but it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not very common, whereas I know that cars pose a much greater danger to cyclists. So I know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not comparing the level of danger. But between cyclists and pedestrians,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these two modes of transportation do not share the same path well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been training for this walk for about, you know, seven or eight months, something like that. I have had cyclists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scream at me, threaten me, come within inches of hitting me at very high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speeds, intentionally at least once, all while I was in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either a shared lane or on the pedestrian side of a split
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lane. So my view of cyclists having now done a lot of long walks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on shared paths is now I think similar to the view that cyclists have of car drivers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not every cyclist is a problem just like not every car driver is a problem cyclist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s enough bad cyclists that they pose a menace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pedestrians when they’re in shared paths. They are entitled, reckless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and inconsiderate of pedestrians and they have no concern for pedestrian safety or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that we tend to have the right of way. Again, this is not all cyclists, but there’s enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are like that, that it’s a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Interestingly, when you posted your first Instagram picture about this and it showed the big like crowd of
⏹️ ▶️ John people walking and then to the right there were like two cyclists, I think I commented to my wife, I’m like, boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet these cyclists love this day of the year when their bike path is invaded by a gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John crowd of people walking along
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but it’s not because there’s a dividing line. But look, I want bikes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of my walking paths just as much as they want me out of their bike lanes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s oftentimes a shared path, especially in a city like New York bikes and pedestrians
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do not coexist. Well on an eight or ten foot wide path and it is best for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone’s safety and happiness for motor vehicles bikes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pedestrians to each have dedicated spaces that are not shared with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco others and sorry to all the good cyclists out there but the bad ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you are a menace to pedestrians again not to the not to the same degree of life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threatening the cars are to you but definitely physically threatening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a point where I hate to say it because I I never cared about cyclists before, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really don’t like them now. And I have very good reason not to. And that’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bad ones. I know that. But it is best for all of us to have our own spaces. I am advocating for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bikes, cars, and pedestrians to all have separate spaces wherever possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. That’s an amazing future, because currently, cars have a place.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes, pedestrians have a place. And that’s basically the state of
⏹️ ▶️ John the US. Every once in a while, pedestrians and bikes have a shared space, which is what you’re currently complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about. But the utopia of cars, pedestrians, and bicycles
⏹️ ▶️ John have each having their own separate place, boy, what a fantasy. Not in this country, in most places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s tough in this country. But other countries have done it. It is possible to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it’s totally possible. It’s just we have consistently done everything we possibly can to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening. So anyway, consider this advocacy for everyone to have their own lanes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. All right. So going into this a few weeks back, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did two walks in consecutive weekends that were each about 22 miles. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first one was in Manhattan and it was on pavement and it was fine. And afterwards, I felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tired, but everything physically was fine. The second one was upstate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was faster paced. In the middle of that walk, I got like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant pain in my left rear end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it progressed as the walk went on into significant problems with my left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ankle. And this was a few weeks before the Great Saunter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was this on pavement to upstate?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it was on a gravel path. So it was like a packed gravel, a beautiful, it’s the Ashokan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rail Trail, it’s a beautiful path.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’ve been to Ashokan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’s and and that path is like 20 feet wide so it being shared with bikes is fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s also just not that many people or bikes on it just it’s a very wide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly sparsely populated path it’s a it’s a great path but I took it it was on gravel and took it too fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that combination really inflamed my my left side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially the for the following couple of weeks my left ankle So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went to physical therapist and got some advice and got some stretches and stuff like that but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it basically boiled down to is for me to get through the Great Saunter I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take extra care for my ankles especially the left one and so what I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on everyone’s advice and a couple of tests I had these little like heel cups that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put in the shoe that are like little squishy wedges so that it cushions the heel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is it slopes the foot more forward as a result which I knew going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it this is going to make it more likely that the front of my toes might hit the front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the front of my shoes and get blisters. But blisters heal a lot faster than tendons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I thought and based on every you know everyone agreed like all the physical therapists and the doctor everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agreed like okay yeah this is this is what you need to do to get through it. Anyway, going into it, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ankle was hurting but I made it through. The ankle never got past medium hurting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but boy did I get blisters and that really made the last 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miles very challenging. I’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the better news in a few minutes. This has happier news but I did have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hard time getting through the last 10 miles. It was just the hardest like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mental pain endurance activity I’ve ever had to do because it was literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 10 miles of every step hurting very painfully because of significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blisters. So I got through it and there were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few nice things along the way that I wanted to mention. First of all the day before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I made a Saunter map app Well, rather, I should say, Cloud Code made a Sontr map app based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on about four prompts that I gave it. The great Sontr published
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an online map and a GPX file. And you could use the web app. But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, I would like to have this as a native iPhone app for lots of reasons. I think I could make it work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit better. And also, it’d be able to do things like estimate my finish time. Because we were targeting, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we want to finish by about 9 p.m. Got to keep a certain pace throughout the day or manage the breaks, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wanted to know things like, am I on track to meet that time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And where is the next bathrooms and refreshments? Like, how far? Like, are we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three miles from the next bathroom? Like, maybe that will affect the choices I make, you know, things like that. So I just had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pointed Cloud Code at the web page that hosted their public map. And I said, you know, basically, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make an iPhone app that has this map in it, that puts my location on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco map wherever I am, estimates the distance to the end and how long that will take at the given pace. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a drop down to pick the pace and show the points of interest as little descriptions that pop up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell me where the next bathroom and next refreshment stops are. It just did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I refined it over the course of like three or four prompts over maybe a half hour. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never looked at the code. I never edited the code. I submitted it to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store. And this was the afternoon before the event.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m like, alright, a first time submission of an app, of a vibe coded app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that requires location access. What are the odds this is going to get approved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the next 18 hours?
⏹️ ▶️ John need it to be approved, right? You can just put it on your phone, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could put it on my phone, but like, you know, Tiff wanted it on hers. And I’m like, alright, well I could plug your phone in and add it to my developer account.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me see, it would be a lot easier, especially if anybody else asks if they can have it. It’d be a lot easier if I could just get it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app store. So let me try. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I submitted it, and later that day, it was approved. First
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try, I had to make a privacy policy. I had to answer all the questions about whether it’s designed for kids
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how much data it collects. None, no, you know, like all the, like the answer was very simple. It was, this collects no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data. This doesn’t have anything in it. far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I know. Fair. But it was remarkable. It was… And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app worked great the entire day. And I’m happy… And I emailed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the song tour organizers just to say, Hey, I put this up in case you want to tell anybody, feel free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want me to take it down, I’ll take it down. No problem. Whatever you want. And they were very happy. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was too late to actually tell anybody about it. However, somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app got nine installations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which for a one day event that no one knew about the app and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only existing like, you know, like 12 hours before the event started. That’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty happy. I mean, you’re walking along with them. You got nothing but time on your hands. You just chat them up, say, Hey, I’m using this
⏹️ ▶️ John app. You should try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how I got one of the installations. Yeah, they can install while they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fine. As long as
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t wander into the bike lane.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. So anyway, so that was a fun like five coding story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s an app that like, you know, the day before, I’m like on the train, on the way there, this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never going to be worth me taking time to spend, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three or four days making this app, especially, and there were some parts of it, like, you know, the source is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a GPX file, which is basically a series of points on the map and lines between them. And it’s like, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want you to tell me where I am along that map, but like, what if I’m not on one of the lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or what if I’m between two points? There’s a certain amount of math you have to do to figure out like, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is the point on the route closest to where the person is actually standing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I know I could look up how to do that math. We’re not talking about like really difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calculus here. Like that’s, you know, we’re talking about like trigonometry and stuff. It’s not that complicated, but I didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. And if I was making this map myself, I would have had, I would have spent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three days on it at least. And so it would never have, not only would it not have gotten done on time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s also something I shouldn’t have spent three days doing. You know, it just wouldn’t have been a good use of my time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I didn’t have to. I just submitted it and, you know, Claude wrote it. I tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of things. It took me longer to make screenshots than it did to make the app. I
⏹️ ▶️ John icon. I didn’t ask you this before and I’m kind of afraid of the answer, but who made the icon?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I made the icon. It’s rough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I was afraid that was the answer because it looks not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The icon is two SF symbols spaced
⏹️ ▶️ John Claude to make it next time, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the icons bad. But again, like I’m like, that icon took me like a half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour. And I’m like, this is not a good use of my time. I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John say, you didn’t want to spend time on it, but you spent more time putting two SF symbols on a opaque background
⏹️ ▶️ John and some arrangement. Just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man, it’s yeah, it’s a rough icon. And even but even like, you know, stuff like the screenshots,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, of course, and iTunes can, I hardly ever do screenshots. I know there’s tools to automate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, fast lane or whatever. I’m sure there’s a million things, but I don’t use those things for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my own BS. But I hate doing screenshots because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inevitably, whatever device or simulator I take the screenshots on, I go to upload them to iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Connect, these are not the right resolution. And it gives, these have to be this, this, this, this, or this resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, it doesn’t tell you in iTunes Connect, well, what devices are those?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was in a rush. So you know what I did? I took a screenshot of that error message and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I pasted it into Gemini and I said, what devices are these? And it told me, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what you wanna do is use the iPhone 13 Pro simulator or whatever it was. I’m like, perfect. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saved me some time. I didn’t- I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say, why do you need to know what device it is? But it’s because you were actually taking screenshots on the device in the simulator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I’m taking screenshots using the simulator. I’m taking screenshots because with the simulator, I was able to simulate my location.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I was using the simulator to take screenshots, then iTunes Connect or App Store Connect is like, no, these are the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution for the, you know, the 6.5 inch screen size or whatever. Well, what does, what device
⏹️ ▶️ John is that? As far as I can tell though, in App Store Connect, they’re not asking you to upload screenshots,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re asking you to upload images. I think you can upload basically, I see a lot of variety in
⏹️ ▶️ John like what people upload. Oh, that’s true. Like they, but you can do just a picture of a smiley face and the text that says, please
⏹️ ▶️ John give me money. Like they don’t, like whatever, as long as it’s the right resolution, I think it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is true, and that’s why people will do things like zoom out and show the frames of the device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make big marketing messages that span across the screenshot grid. And it’s this whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I got all that stuff done. It was great. I think it was a really fun experiment for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me of, if I literally don’t have time to look at the code or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so not worth doing, could I make an app that is minimally useful and functional?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the answer is, for a simple test like this, yes. Obviously, it’s not gonna work for all app types, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very pleased that it worked for this one. And it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It was very helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while we were actually on the saunter. It worked perfectly. I was very happy to have it, and it helped eight other people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or at least eight other people tried it. I don’t know if it helped them, but they at least downloaded it. Another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun thing to mention, at the beginning, so I had mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this show months ago, that was a couple of years ago. One of the reasons that I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the Great Saunter and one of the things that drove us choosing to do it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we lost our dog, Hops, last summer, I wanted to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honor him by having a big walk. I was the dog walker, we took a lot of walks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together. I walked thousands of miles with Hops. And so kind of honoring him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by doing this giant walk. At the beginning of the Saunter, like their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hats and stuff like that and maps and everything, like where everyone gathers at the beginning. A fan of the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just came up to me and said, hey man, let’s do it for hops. And a little fist bump. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought that was the most kind, awesome, touching thing. And to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there, I’m sorry I didn’t ask your name, I didn’t say, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was kind of just so blown away by it. Also, it was seven in the morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was about to embark on this ridiculous thing, so my mind was quite elsewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that really meant a lot to me. And so thank you for doing that. That was really awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the people I was with, I told them about it, and they were also like, wow, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really cool. So you should have put a picture of Hopps into the app. He could have even been the app icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, that would have taken a lot longer, especially a liquid glass version. Adapting your dog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to liquid glass is not that easy. Anyway, so thank you to that fan. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really cool. Sorry, I was weird. I was very, very blown away and a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tired and distracted. Finally, for the technology side of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the watches, the stats, it was 33.7 miles total for our walk. It took
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost exactly 14 hours, 74,000 steps for the day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Pedometer Plus Plus on the Apple Watch Ultra worked fantastically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The battery life at the end on an Ultra 3 in low power mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was still 33%. So that was still, that wasn’t his expedition mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the watch in just regular low power mode. So what that means is that the always on screen was turned off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically. Like that’s what low power mode does mainly on the Apple Watch. So always on screen was off, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPS was full blast. The heart rate was full blast, like all of that. And I never paused the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workout the whole day. So it was running the entire 14 hour span. And at the end it was 33%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s pretty great. The Suunto watch that I have also did great. I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ended the day with somewhere in the 40s. I didn’t quite remember the number, but it was somewhere in the 40% range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Both watches did great. And all the tech prep I did was worth it. It was all fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, like Tiff was trying to install a pedometer on her watch, but she didn’t actually start until like that morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trying to get an Apple Watch to install new software when it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on wifi is challenging to say the least. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was difficult to have all that tech work for other people who hadn’t like done it already. But because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had done all these practice walks, I wasn’t really trying anything for the first time on this walk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It all made it very smooth running for me. So I can strongly recommend Pedometer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus Plus for these amazing long hikes or even short walks. It’s still great for that. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also very happy with the Suunto. The Race S is the one I have again. It’s kind of their smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, but even it had ultra-level battery life, even a little bit better than ultra-level battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it was overall a success. We made it. I did it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m proud. It hurt like crazy at the end. It was really hard, but we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got through it. I’m very happy about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would you do it again?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so. If it was always going to be like that at the end,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. But I know from doing the 22 mile good training walk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had zero blisters during that one and it was fine. So I know that I can walk 22
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miles on a pavement with these shoes, these socks, these pants. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way that it works that ended up working way better better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I had with the heel wedge modifications. So I think if I can just keep my ankle in good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough shape during training, I can avoid that. I can avoid needing those heel wedges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then have a much better outcome with the shoes. So I think it is possible to do this better. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next year, I am certainly interested in trying. I don’t know. I mean, the only downside with training
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something like this is that walking is just really slow. It takes a very long time. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to walk 22 miles in a day that’s gonna be most of what you do that day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a very time-consuming Training process you’re basically it’s like you know every Sunday. You’re taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a giant walk somewhere so It is it is a big commitment to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco train for now. You can also just kind of Yolo it and not train at all I don’t recommend that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not something I would suggest but People do it you can yellow it if you’re a young
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person. It’s the magic of being young Yeah, if you’re young and if you don’t mind things like maybe losing toenails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterwards, go ahead But I I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that path that the training
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the training method Tends to have significantly better outcomes, but it does take longer. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do get that. Did you sit at all during the day? Oh, yeah, we took breaks Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if you if you walk it straight at our pace, which our average pace was a rant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when we were moving Was like, you know 21 minutes per mile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ish so you know if you don’t stop you can do it like I don’t know an hour and a half faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something But but we you know we stopped to like you know 10 minutes here and there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even simple things like you know there are certain Spans where there are not that many bathrooms, and so when you finally get to one. There’s a big line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like there was one where we had to wait in a bathroom line for 15 minutes, so that was like well This is our break. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know but but you know there’s like a lunch break in the middle They do a nice job. They have like snacks and stuff like along the route,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s really cool But yeah, there is some stopping, but it’s not, you’re stopping for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five or 10 minutes at a time. You’re not stopping for long spans.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And roughly how many people completed this, just from what you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There were 3,500 registrants and about 2,200 finished. So it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about a 62% finish rate. So that’s pretty good, I think. For
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey ridiculously long,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s pretty good. I
⏹️ ▶️ John put a link in the chat room to the Barclay Marathons Wikipedia page. There’s the documentary, an older
⏹️ ▶️ John documentary about that, that I think you can find on YouTube and there’s a bunch of newer videos on YouTube about the newer iterations
⏹️ ▶️ John of that race. Uh, maybe Marco will have a newfound appreciation for it. If he ever checks it out, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John based on his upstate walking experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And to be clear, like there’s a whole world of extreme athletic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco events. Uh, I am not considering doing any of them. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really have any interest in doing you know marathons, ultra marathons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ironman things like most of that stuff. The reason why I was interested in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because I really like walking. I hate running. Like I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it but I hate it. Every minute of a run I can’t wait for it to be over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Biking is fine until you have to go up a hill. Then I hate it. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s parts of most exercises that even if I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco train myself into the requirements to do them, I just don’t like them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Walking, I really like. So that’s one of the reasons this appealed to me so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the others, I just, I don’t care enough about the exercise to actually train for them enough to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good news, you can walk the Barclay Marathons. Check out the documentary. I’ll put the link to that in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ John room as well if you haven’t seen it. It’s enjoyable to watch, even if you’re just sitting on your couch. But yeah, running is not required.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. I mean, it also, this looks like a trail thing. I also should clarify, like, I really like walking on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pavement. It’s really nice. I’m not a big hiker. Like, I know hiking is just walking, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but up things and in the woods, but I like walking on flat pavement a lot better than that. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Barkley Marathons is not for you to be clear, Marco, but you should watch the documentary. It is eye-opening. It