702: Isolate the Evil
27 Jul 2026Safari 27 and web standards, Apple Maps coming to cars (?), and our very different philosophies on packing for a family road trip.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Three old men talk about the Tickety Tocks
- Follow-up:
- Adam Wunn published his email as a blog post
- Sharing files in
Screen Sharing.app(via Ingmar Wittkau) - Video game preservation (via Jason Griffey)
- Supplying power to Marco’s army of Mac minis
- An update on
Passwords.app“doing the hard thing” - More clipboard changes in macOS 27
- Apple is reportedly looking to acquire AI chip companies
- Apple is actually spending money on Broadcom
- Slate Truck price & availability announced
- Apple 🤝 Ford
- Safari on 𝑥OS 27
- Ask ATP:
- How is Overcast transcription going? (via Pete Ottery)
- How does Apple achieve “growth the hard way”? (via Elijah)
- How do you create a second Apple account for doing development without a different phone number? (via James)
- With an aside lamenting the way Apple Stores work
- Post-show: How does John pack?
- Members-only ATP Overtime: New information about the iPhone 18 family
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Short-form us
- Adam’s FileMaker post
- Screen Sharing file transfers
- Libraries and game preservation
- Overcast Mac Minis vs. ATS
- Passwords.app’s agentic changing
- Pasting into a file
- Apple looking for AI chip companies
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Slate Truck pricing, availability
- Apple Maps in Fords
- Safari 27 and web standards
- Sponsor: ATP Membership
- #askatp: Overcast transcripts
- #askatp: Pursuing Android switchers
- #askatp: Second Apple ID for development
- #atptangent: The state of Apple Stores
- #askatp: Second Apple ID for development
- Ending theme
- Packing for the beach 🖼️
Short-form us
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the show is so short, we really can't fit it in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey We're known for being a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really tight schedule and very aggressively edited. No time for flab, just quick hits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The TikTokers love us. Can you imagine us, any of the three of us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the three of us together, trying to do that like quick hit, short form video? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nope, what works on TikTok and YouTube shorts? Like, we'd be so terrible at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I know you're slightly tongue-in-cheek, but also serious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm serious. I think we would be horrendous at it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we would be horrendous if we set out to do that. But I think there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are clips from the show that could be turned in, like given leaving aside the fact that there is no video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I agree. But you could take like a two to three minute, you know, one of you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two making fun of me or vice versa and turn that into a TikTok-friendly, Reels-friendly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clip, leaving aside the fact that we have no video for this show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but even that, like, I feel like people wouldn't get it. It wouldn't be funny when you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you're just breezing through Rafeet and you don't know any of us and you've never heard our show and you've never heard our banter you don't know any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our personalities, I feel like there isn't any like brief little quick hit that you could put in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a clip, even if it was heavily edited, that would be as like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny or interesting to even come close to representing what our audience feels like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you know If we make a, you know, a back reference to a joke that we made 10 years ago or we're you know playing off of something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we think is funny about each other or whatever, like no one's like if you just breeze through and you and you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five seconds of you know me and John making fun of you, Casey, we're just going to be dicks. Like that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's not we're not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco endearing and fun friends. We're just going to be jerks. Not everything is bite-sized.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. And that's true. I bet you, I bet you that somebody listening with talent in a way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that none of the three of us have talent could put together at least a passable, again, leaving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aside the lack of video, could put together a passable like 30 to 90 second clip that would be amusing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and fun and funny. But no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's a good thing that we are also known for constantly bringing in external talent and hiring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jobs out. We're really good at that too.
Adam’s FileMaker post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. We have no time to waste. Let's do some follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And yet Here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are wasting it. Yes, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We spoke last week slash two days ago in our time about a truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible, I think John had counted or had computed 2,500 plus word email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that deserved to be a blog post about FileMaker. And this was by Adam1. And Adam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has posted that email to his brand, Shiny brand spanking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey New Blog. So you can go to the link in the show notes at Adam1, A-D-A-M-W-U-N-N.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can check it out. And so Adam wrote again after the last episode and said, Thank you for your kind words
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in ATP 701 about my FileMaker email. I sent that to you with the intention of helping by giving some background information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on FileMaker for the podcast, but I didn't consider making it a blog post. I have a website with a blog set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, but while I've never used it, it has always been my desire to do so. John was right. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once a professional writer of sorts. I have been a having been a journalist in another era. More recently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my writing skills were seriously reinforced and polished when I went back to college. That was so much work for an old guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since the three of you were so encouraging, I decided to turn on the blog and create the post, as I mentioned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks again. It was fun to help contribute to ATP's discussion on FileMaker. It brought back so many memories. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey geeking out with you guys.
Screen Sharing file transfers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, with regard to Mac-assed Mac apps, Ingmar Witkow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes: Regarding Mac-Assed Mac apps, today I was blown away by how you share files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between two Macs when using the screen sharing app. You just drag them out of or into the screen sharing window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the other Mac, which is something I've known for a long time, but didn't consider as a good example of Mac-assed Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. And it is a great example of that. So, yeah, so let's say like I have a headless Mac Mini here in the office,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and if I wanted to move a file to or from it, I could drag from my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro onto that window, so the desktop from my MacBook Pro onto that window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and drop it, and it will transfer the file. Or I can drag from the Mac Mini's desktop onto my desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it will transfer the file. And it's very slick, and it's a great example of there's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no way this will work. Well, let me try it. Oh my God, it did work. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's a really great example of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, I remember when I discovered that feature many years ago, um, and it was exactly the same thing I was describing. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, this probably should work, so let me try it because I had an expectation. It was like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it seems like this should work. So it's at least worth trying to see if it
⏹️ ▶️ John does. And lo and behold, it did, and it was great. And the second thing I'll add, this is one of my hobby horses that I should
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe formalize at some point because it's just getting worse and worse over the years. But I think screen
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing to another Mac and dragging files from the screen sharing window to your local Mac or from
⏹️ ▶️ John your local Mac into the screen sharing window is actually easier than using file sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Finder because file sharing in the Finder is so bad and so inexplicably
⏹️ ▶️ John slow and so inexplicably terrible. And like with a screen sharing app, says, look how easy it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's just why, why isn't just, they really need to like 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John completely overhaul the UI and apparently the backend for screen sharing between two Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John that are for, for file sharing between two Macs that are literally in the same room feet from each other connected to the same Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ John switch. Like it's just so hard and so slow and so many bugs. Like I filed this
⏹️ ▶️ John bug ages ago where like I can't connect to my wife's computer as her through
⏹️ ▶️ John file sharing without typing her password every single time. There's a checkbox that says, oh, should I remember this
⏹️ ▶️ John in the keychain? Does nothing. Filed the bug. They're like, oh, if you do XY,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don't put the username in, it'll work fine. I'm like, yeah, but I have to put the username in because I don't want to connect as me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they just never responded. That was like three years ago. Anyway, Cool. So maybe I should just use screen
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing because screen sharing opens up real fast. Doesn't make you, you know, if you've connected to it before, it remembers the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just hit connect and then I can see my wife's screen and I can just drag files onto it and often it's actually faster than using
⏹️ ▶️ John file sharing. But yeah, if you think of something that you think should work in a Mac app,
⏹️ ▶️ John try it. It might. Yep.
Libraries and game preservation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, this is a, this next thing we're going to talk about is a pretty long email from Jason Griffey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I asked John to cut it down, and I took a look at cutting it down, and neither of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey succeeded because it's so chock-a-block full of fascinating information.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did cut it down. The first version that you complained about was the cutdown version.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I cut it down further when you requested it. But I appreciate it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I put in, I did put down cut down versions of this and the other item that was too long that will probably be for next episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then I cut it down further because you can always cut it down further.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I appreciate your efforts, but honestly, this is fascinating. So bear with me. I'm going to be reading a lot, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is really, really great. So Jason Griffey writes, I'm sorry, this is within the context is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overtime segment a couple episodes ago about Sony no longer selling PlayStation discs. So Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Griffey writes, I've spent my career in library technology. So when you got into game preservation on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I figured I'd write in with some information about the legal landscape. The first thing to know is that libraries get their own copyright
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exceptions, separate from fair use, which also still applies. It's Title 17, United States Code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Section 108. And the key thing about it is that it's format neutral. A video game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just a work, like anything else. So under Section 108C, a library can legally make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to three replacement copies of a published game in its collection if the copy is damaged, deteriorating,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lost, stolen, or stored in an obsolete format. The catch is that digital copies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made this way can't be made available to the public outside the library's physical premises. There's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also Section 108H, which opens things up further in the last 20 years of a works copyright
⏹️ ▶️ Casey term for anything that isn't being commercially exploited. Again, format neutral. A game qualifies the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a novel does. So far, so good. Here's where it gets more complicated. The DMCA.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Section 1201 makes it illegal to circumvent DRM full stop, even to make a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copy that Section 108 explicitly says you're allowed to make. You have the right to preserve the game, and a separate law
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes it a violation to do the thing you'd need to do to preserve it. This is American law in a nutshell,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn't it? my word. Congress eventually realized this was a problem, so they built
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a pressure valve. Every three years, the copyright office takes petitions, and the librarian of Congress
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grants temporary exemptions to the anti-circumvention rule. This is the one place the law
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stops being format neutral because each exemption is argued and won for a specific category of works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The good news is that libraries, archives, and museums currently have an exemption to break DRM on video games and other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software for preservation. The bad news is the access restriction. Preserved games can only be played on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey premises. In 2024, the Software Preservation Network and the Video Game History Foundation petitioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to allow remote access for researchers, and the Copyright Office said no. So a library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can legally crack, rip, and preserve an out-of-print game, and then a researcher has to fly to the building to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play it. Also, every one of these exemptions expires and has to be rewon every three years. The next round is 2027.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All of the above is exactly why libraries are where this work needs to happen. Every legal privilege I've described belongs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to libraries, archives, and museums specifically. That's not an accident. Libraries are neutral parties
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with no commercial stake in the works they preserve. So nobody has to trust a publisher's promise that a game will stay available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a fan site's ability to survive a cease and desist. Libraries are community resources with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an institutional mandate to preserve things for decades, not until the next corporate reorg. Publishers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey abandon games all the time. Libraries don't abandon collections. The infrastructure, the legal standing, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mission are all already there. What's missing is money. The best way to make sure this preservation actually happens is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to lavishly fund libraries around the country at every level, from your local public branch to the big academic research
⏹️ ▶️ Casey collections. There are dozens of gamer librarians out there dying to be able to build an archive of out-of-print
⏹️ ▶️ Casey games. Let me just quickly add that I am extremely lucky, and I know not everyone is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I've said this before on the show, but I'll say it again. Where I happen to live has exceptional libraries.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you are in a place that even vaguely values libraries, I bet your libraries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are great too. They're wonderful places to work outside the house. They're wonderful places to go to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just have somewhere different. Oftentimes, the internet is surprisingly good because there's not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all that many people all trying to use it at the same time. You should really check out and support your local library. I bet it's better
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, last week's example I gave of like the publishers, you know, people, game publishers are,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the companies that make and own the games uh, have some responsibility
⏹️ ▶️ John and perhaps could be convinced that, you know, the things they made are culturally important. And they have the things.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have the server code that we were talking about, like, oh, even if you have the game, if the servers are up, it doesn't matter. So they have the server code.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have the game code. They have everything. They should, and I gave the example of like, you know, giving Disney giving
⏹️ ▶️ John their important, culturally important movies to the Library of Congress to preserve them because they realize this is an important cultural artifact.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, we Disney will save it somewhere, but it's better to also have the Library of Congress do it. And what I
⏹️ ▶️ John didn't emphasize enough was the companies that own the games have to participate
⏹️ ▶️ John in this because they have to give them. I mean, this is an example of cracking them with whatever, but like for server stuff, it's like
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff doesn't exist out in the world at all. So those companies have to give it to somebody and say, you never
⏹️ ▶️ John had access to the server code. It wasn't on the disk. You can't use it. Only we have it. So they have to give it. But who are they
⏹️ ▶️ John giving it to? In my example, I used the Library of Congress, and the important part of that was library. More important than I had even realized
⏹️ ▶️ John because I didn't know these very specific laws applied only to libraries actually allowing them to crack the DRM.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, libraries, as who is it? Sorry. As Jason
⏹️ ▶️ John points out, not only do they have special laws applied to them, but they are correctly incentivized.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are not trying to make money from this. They have no connection to any specific company. Libraries,
⏹️ ▶️ John as pointed out many, many times on the internet, and it is no less true every time it is pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out. If libraries were proposed today, no one would ever do them because they sound too
⏹️ ▶️ John good. It's like, what? is there going to be a place where anybody can get books for free? It doesn't make any sense. It's completely
⏹️ ▶️ John unsustainable. It's ridiculous. What is this? Communism? Libraries are great. They already exist. Thankfully,
⏹️ ▶️ John they already exist. And if you fund them, they can do amazing things for you and your community. And video game preservation
⏹️ ▶️ John is just one thing. And I hope eventually they get to the point where it's like, you know, don't make people go to the physical building to
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the games that libraries are preserving. They can do like they do with e-books, where they have this, you know, artificial scarcity system where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can check out an e-book from a library. And when you have it checked out, someone else can't check it out. But you should be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that with video games as well and not have to, you know, go to the physical building. But as Casey pointed out,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the answer is support your local library and vote for people who will change these
Overcast Mac Minis vs. ATS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Jason Morley writes: With regard to Marco's overcast servers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you should move most or all of the Mac minis into half the max on A power, half the Max on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey B power. Don't put them on an ATS. And also, you should get a big boy ATS for the network,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey firewall, and critical equipment. Walk around and look at what everyone else is doing and or using and ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the data center neckbeards. You'll have two or three names come up: Eaton, APC, or maybe Triplight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You won't see Cyberpower or other consumer brands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I've gotten a number of messages from people. Jason Worley was the most extensive. This was actually his TLDR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version, but he wrote a longer message also. And what I like about this advice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, and everyone's basically saying the same thing, that like the Mac Minis, having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them all and all the other equipment be on a single ATS was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great because what I did was create a single point of failure. And the whole thing about data center hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is avoid creation of a single point of failure. So what I've decided to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead, I've ordered some Ubiquiti gear, including their wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memory surcharge. Ubiquiti did not, they didn't raise their prices directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instead, their products now, most of them have a memory surcharge added to them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did raise the price, but they're trying to make it appear as though they didn't until you check out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's both clever and evil. Yeah, I don't think it's clever. I think it's just misleading.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like in most states, having those kind of surcharges is illegal. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what I'm going to do is the Ubiquiti gear that is basically single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco points of failure. I placed an order to make it less of a single point of failure. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is one fiber optic connection coming in. That is the WAN connection. Ubiquiti sells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a WAN switch that can split one WAN connection into two routers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of their modern routers support something called shadow backup or something like that, like shadow backup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode, where you can basically have two identical ones and they kind of monitor each other. And if you feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the WAN from the WAN switch into both of those routers and then connect your switches to both of those routers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh they will automatically fail over if one detects a problem. So I've ordered a second dream router
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro um with its memory surcharge, a WAN switch with its memory surcharge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, if the router fails, I will have a second one. I haven't installed them if they haven't come yet. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, all of these recent Ubiquiti things support a second power input,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not through an AC plug. They have this weird custom DC connector on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the left side. And then they sell basically a separate power supply that you can plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that will then power all of those DC connectors for a group of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I've ordered that thing too, like the rack power distribution thing. So what I'm going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do is plug all of them with their regular AC cords directly into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side A or whatever, plug the new DC power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing into side B, and then so that will back up all of their power. So that way I'm bypassing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the need for an ATS for the main Ubiquiti rack gear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also having the shadow mode failover for the router. And then for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the switch, I just got a second smaller switch, and I'm going to plug in half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Minis into one switch and half the Mac Minis into the other switch and plug each switch directly into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each router. I won't have the switches doing active failover quite because the Mac Minis only have one network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface. So that would be difficult unless I got a second network thing for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single one of the 48 Mac Minis. So that's not amazing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then and then I'm going to do what Jason and others suggested here, which is just plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half the Mac Minis into you know side A and plug half into side B and just see how that goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And hopefully then I wouldn't, in that scenario, I wouldn't actually need an ATS for anything. So I canceled my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATS order, which wasn't going to ship for you know eight to ten weeks anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we're going to go from there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good deal. I think that makes sense.
Passwords.app’s agentic changing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have an update on passwords, quote unquote, doing the hard thing. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a couple of posts from our friends at Six Colors. Jason wrote with regard to macOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Golden Gate: the passwords app gets an injection of agentic AI through a new feature that offers to change your compromised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or easy-to-guess passwords for you, navigating various websites and generating new high security passwords automatically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's a clever idea, but the most unfinished of any feature in the beta. It managed to change three of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 39 passwords it attempted. Additionally, Dan, also at Six Colors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes with regard to iOS 27, my experience was uneven with just five of 18 updated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Better average than Jason's. Yeah, this was the feature we talked about a little while ago that when it was first announced, I'm like, surely they're using
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, dot .well-known APIs and other stuff. And if the site doesn't have that OL, but then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John we learned, no, it's going to like start a headless browser and navigate web pages and use that technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about it many episodes ago of like whatever it was, like a scientific paper or patent or something about like the
⏹️ ▶️ John tech Apple was using to read screens and understand like where the fields are and everything in them.
⏹️ ▶️ John uh Presumably they're using this technology to basically do what you would do as a human. Okay, I got to change my password
⏹️ ▶️ John on this site. Okay, I'm going to go to the website. uh First, I have to figure out how to log in. Is it sign in? Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John login? Where is it? Do I have to pick on the little icon head? Like, people are making it so hard to log into sites. And I know ATP.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John is not great in that regard either, but I do try to improve it. Anyway, um then you get logged in. then you go over to under
⏹️ ▶️ John settings, security, change my pass. Like, that's what these agents are doing. The same thing that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would do. And when you have trouble finding it and get frustrated and can't find the page where you change your password,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm sure it's doing the same thing. Now, it's really weird and sketchy because, like, okay, so an agent's going to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John with a headless browser behind the scenes. Like, what if it screws it up somehow? Or what if
⏹️ ▶️ John like it thinks it didn't change the password, but it really did? And now I don't know what the password is. Like, in the end, it's there's probably a forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ John password thing with email and blah, blah, blah. So it's not the end of the world, but I'm still haven't decided whether I'm going to try
⏹️ ▶️ John to use this feature. Obviously, Jason and Dan decided to do it in the beta just so they could write about it, which is great, taking
⏹️ ▶️ John one from the team there. But its success rate doesn't look great so far. I mean, is it really that hard?
⏹️ ▶️ John Three out of 39? Is it really, are those sites really that hard to navigate? Are some of the sites just gone entirely?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there some kind of rule that says, oh, if the site redirects, don't even bother? um So I'm not sure about this feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John but boy, it really is doing it the hard way. Like we're we are going to try to do the thing that sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John science fiction, which is just let the computer wander the website and figure out how to change your password. I'm sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be fine. And we'll do all of them at once. You just, hey, hey, we found, because we all got those messages and everything. You get
⏹️ ▶️ John them in Google's thing. You get them in Chrome. You get them in passwords where it'll be like, you have 7,500
⏹️ ▶️ John passwords that are garbage. And you just look at those and you just feel bad. You're like, well, I've
⏹️ ▶️ John been on the internet since the nineties. So yeah, I probably got a lot of records in my keychain that are really bad
⏹️ ▶️ John for sites that no longer exist or whatever. But what can you do about it? you're going to go through them one by one and change them? No, you're not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, enter Golden Gate, where it's like, you know, you want me to try to change all those? And some people are like, meh,
⏹️ ▶️ John sure, go for it. And if it comes back and it's changed three of them, well, it's three more than you had changed, but we'll see how
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature looks in release. But again, I still haven't decided whether I'm going to click that button and say, sure, go for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Change all those passwords or at least try to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don't think that I would be too keen to try this personally, but I mean, I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Six Colors boys for doing it or trying it. So I don't have to.
Pasting into a file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to the way you paste in macOS 27, friend of the show Steve Troughton-Smith writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can paste things from your clipboard into the file system. Who else has been asking for this one? And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there's a video where you can see that Steve is copying image data from an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app and then using paste item, the paste item context menu or a context menu
⏹️ ▶️ Casey item in Finder to create an image file. And that file name is pasted, you know, date and date at time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera, et cetera. Now, John, you tried to do this as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I'm like, oh, that looks interesting. Let me try it. And this, I think this was back in an earlier beta of Golden
⏹️ ▶️ John Gate, and I just didn't have that context menu item. I would copy an image and then I would right click in the finder and there
⏹️ ▶️ John was no paste item in the context menu. The context menu would appear and it would have the expected
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in it, but no paste item. So maybe I was doing something wrong. Did you have a different experience?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so I don't have macOS 27 on any of my computers because I don't trust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and I am not that keen to try macOS betas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I have a story about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Maybe I'll save it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. But I can tell you, I think I might be misunderstanding what Steve's trying to say because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, not always, but oftentimes I can copy something like an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey image and then paste it on my desktop and it will create an image. So I tried this with a somebody had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sent me an image in messages or perhaps I'd sent an image. I don't recall. But one way or another, I copied an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey image in the messages app in in Mac OS 26. And then I went to my desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I made sure the desktop was active. And then I just hit Command V and then a file appeared.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So again, maybe I'm misunderstanding what Steve's driving.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That's more or
⏹️ ▶️ John less what he was doing, but I do wonder if like messages, when when an app copies something on macOS, and I'm sure on all
⏹️ ▶️ John the platforms, it puts multiple representation representations on the pasteboard. And then when you paste it,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing you're pasting into can decide which one of these representations do I understand and can handle. So maybe messages,
⏹️ ▶️ John because a lot of the stuff in messages, like you also get like the download icon next to it. So it's like I can download this, I can
⏹️ ▶️ John add it to your photos library, I can put it in your downloads folder. You have lots of options. So I do wonder if there's some temp file
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a URL for and that when you paste it, the finder says, oh, I see there's a URL version that's in the pasteboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me get that URL version and just copy it over here with the file name that it has in the temp location. I don't know. I'm just speculating.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing this reminded me of is a thing that's been in Xcode for a while now, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't use it, but I know that it's there. I've used it occasionally, which is if you like copy
⏹️ ▶️ John a class or a struct or you know, whatever, like in text from a source code file
⏹️ ▶️ John in Xcode, and then you put the input focus on the sidebar that like lists all your files and you hit paste,
⏹️ ▶️ John you're like, what does it mean to paste a wad of text into the sidebar that lists all my files?
⏹️ ▶️ John That shouldn't do anything. Well, what it does is it looks at the text that you're pasting and it says, well, that text, it
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like it's declaring a class. So I'm going to make a file called name of that class dot Swift because it was
⏹️ ▶️ John swift code. And in that file, I'm going to put the thing that you just pasted. So it will create a file intelligently
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the text that was, that you pasted into the sidebar, which is neat and convenient. Instead of you having to go to Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John file, new empty source code file, pick Swift, yes, click on the file in the sidebar,
⏹️ ▶️ John put the input into the text area and hit paste. That's what the Finder is doing here. It's like, do you have data
⏹️ ▶️ John that could be in a file, but isn't currently in a file? Go to the Finder and paste. And I think it's
⏹️ ▶️ John using, oh, this just said pasted month, a year or whatever, but I think there might be some context where it like
⏹️ ▶️ John looks at what it is, or maybe just Siri does that, where it looks at the content of it and gives it an intelligent file name,
⏹️ ▶️ John like picture of dog or whatever, because it's a picture of dog. But anyway, this is an interesting twist on copy and paste
⏹️ ▶️ John where I think what you're seeing, Casey, is like it has been spottily supported in various places. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John with the advent of, you know, agentic stuff running locally or in the cloud even,
⏹️ ▶️ John um being more pervasive in all of Apple's OSs, the idea of taking something that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John in a file, just data, raw data, whether it's text, image data, whatever, and pasting it and
⏹️ ▶️ John making a file out of that paste becomes a lot more plausible because I think the making
⏹️ ▶️ John a file called pasted year month day hour minute second is not a great file name and you'll never remember what the
⏹️ ▶️ John heck that is uh kind of like screenshot with year month day hour minute second like you know there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a date on the file already we don't need to put it in the file name but what else what other choice does it have well now we have different choices
⏹️ ▶️ John so this is something i'm keeping an eye on
Apple looking for AI chip companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Apple is reportedly looking to acquire some AI chip companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, reading from Hartley Charlton over at MacRumors, Apple is looking to acquire AI chip companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a part of an effort to reduce its dependence on NVIDIA for demanding AI workloads, according to the information.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple's own AI server chip, internally codenamed Baltra, B-A-L-T-R-A, had been expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ship this year, but has been delayed, according to people said to be familiar with the project.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has historically limited its acquisitions to deals in the hundreds of millions of dollars and avoided large purchases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that approach appears to be shifting. Apple signaled a change in financial strategy during its most recent quarterly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earnings call when CFO Kevin Parekh, is that how you pronounce that? I hope so, told analysts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the company would no longer target net cash neutral status, a policy under which it had kept its cash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reserves roughly in line with its total debt. Apple did not explain the reasoning behind the change, though the added flexibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could free up capital for larger acquisitions.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there's a couple of parts of this. First, Apple's AI server chip with a code name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Presumably that is not any of the previously rumored or previously confirmed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be used ultra chips, because those are, I wouldn't call those server chips. They may be used in
⏹️ ▶️ John servers. Apple uses the M2 Ultras in its servers, but it is not a server chip. This makes me think that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a plan for a chip that they would not ship to customers, but would instead use just in their
⏹️ ▶️ John servers. Unclear from, you know, the story and the code name, but that's something to keep an eye on because I
⏹️ ▶️ John hadn't heard about that before. I'd heard more vague rumors of it. Once you get an actual code name, like, oh, this must have either
⏹️ ▶️ John been a project or someone's idea for a project. So that's interesting. And the second thing is, I think mentioned this
⏹️ ▶️ John on earlier. So looking to acquire AI chip companies. What is an AI chip company? What does that mean? Doesn't Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John make chips? Why do they need, why are they even interested in another company that make chips? Don't they already make great chips that do great AI?
⏹️ ▶️ John They always tell us they do. Well, there is a subsection
⏹️ ▶️ John of chip-making companies, most of them small and newish, uh that are
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to figure out a way to make a chip that is good at doing the one very specific
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that companies need to do right now with AI. And you might be thinking, isn't that what NVIDIA is doing? But they
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly make general purpose you know gpus graphic private They're very general
⏹️ ▶️ John purpose. You can do lots of stuff with NVIDIA GPUs. And granted, they are tailoring them towards the needs of AI, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John are big and complicated. So the small companies are like, we're not going to out NVIDIA NVIDIA. We're not going to make a general
⏹️ ▶️ John purpose GPU that's better than what they're doing with our tiny startup. And they have all the money in the world and decades
⏹️ ▶️ John and decades of experience. But what if there's an idea that they're not thinking of? Let's try some weird stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the ones that comes to mind is the wafer scale chip companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John where normally you take like a big circular silicon wafer and you print a bunch of chips on it and then you cut them up
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get however many chips can fit on the wafer. And they're like, but what if we make the chip the size of the
⏹️ ▶️ John wafer? The wafer is one chip. And so you just print the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire chip on the, and it's it's, it's massive. Obviously, it's made up of little individual units. Like it's, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the repeated units, like just like there are in an Nvidia GPU, just like there are in any kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it's like, just make one chip the size of the wafer. It's like, well, how can that be
⏹️ ▶️ John economically viable? Because every one of those little chips costs so much money because the wafer costs so much money to make it the current process
⏹️ ▶️ John size. But there's at least one company out there doing this and saying, actually, the math works out
⏹️ ▶️ John because even though this thing costs more than, you know, it costs so much money, also it's incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful for this one very specific task because it's so huge. So that's one example
⏹️ ▶️ John of an AI chip company. I don't know if that's a good idea. Maybe it's a terrible idea, but NVIDIA is not currently doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So companies are out there trying things that nobody else is trying in the hopes that their startup hits
⏹️ ▶️ John on something and then, you know, presumably NVIDIA will buy them. But maybe not if Apple buys them first. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple bought PA Semi, which I think was filled with a bunch of like ex-PowerPC people who wanted to make really
⏹️ ▶️ John cool PowerPC chips, but they're either IBM or Motorola, whoever they used to work for, wouldn't do it. So they started their own company
⏹️ ▶️ John and then Apple snatched them up. Fast forward many years, Apple Silicon. So that worked out really well. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they're looking for the AI equivalent of PA Semi, which is some company with really good people and really
⏹️ ▶️ John good ideas that is currently undervalued out there in the world, doing something other people aren't doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and to snatch them up. And presumably they would use it to make their own AI server chips so they could be, as the story
⏹️ ▶️ John says, less dependent on NVIDIA. Again, see the story last episode about apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John they're supposedly still going forward with their own Apple silicon servers, even though they're doing the NVIDIA
⏹️ ▶️ John deal. So the dream of Apple servers is still alive in Apple, just not once they'll sell the customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the record, if anyone at Apple Acquisitions or whatever it's called is listening, you know, we just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just read that Apple has historically limited its acquisitions to deals in the hundreds of millions of dollars. ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is available for a deal in the hundreds of millions of dollars range. And just letting you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are within your price range, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't think we have any innovative AI chip technology, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not yet, John. Not yet. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John cut out the part where it said their biggest deal was Beats for X number of billion and stuff. They have done bigger deals. I think Beats is
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest, but I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think that's right. They've
⏹️ ▶️ John done a couple of pretty big deals, but yeah, they usually mostly buy lots of small companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could even call us a pretty big deal, John. You could. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, with regard to chip deals, there's actually an announced chip deal from Apple itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from their newsroom earlier this month, actually on July 8th. Let me read it. On July 8th, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey announced a new multi-year commitment with Broadcom to design and produce custom silicon components and cutting edge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wireless connectivity technologies for a wide range of Apple products. A new agreement, expected to exceed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $30 billion, will lead to the production of more than 15 billion U.S.-made chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and support hundreds of American jobs. Quote, Apple and Broadcom have a long history together,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this new phase of our partnership further accelerates our commitment to American manufacturing and innovation, said Tim Cook,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple CEO. The cutting-edge components built in Fort Collins are essential to delivering the incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance and connectivity our customers expect. Again, with Hartley Charlton over at Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rumors, Apple is one of Broadcom's largest customers, believed to account for about 20% of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its annual revenue. Apple's been steadily bringing chip design in-house, such as with its own C1 and C1X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cellular modems, but many of Broadcom's wireless connectivity and radio frequency components remain in use. Broadcom's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chips cover custom radio frequency components, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and other networking semiconductors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found throughout Apple's lineup. Apple and Broadcom signed a multi-billion dollar agreement in 2023 covering 5G
⏹️ ▶️ Casey radio frequency components manufactured in the U S.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have two minds about this as well. So on the one hand, you can look at this and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it's more like trying to bring manufacturing back to the United States, supporting a U.S. company, making the Trump
⏹️ ▶️ John administration happy, all of those things. And I'm sure it is all those things. It's been, It's already been like leveraged in that. And that's,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, we cut out parts of this press release where it's like, oh, this is great. We're bringing jobs back to America. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the current U.S. government administration loves it. Apple loves it. It's all making nice. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the other hand, as Mac Rumors points out, isn't Apple kind of making all
⏹️ ▶️ John their own chips these days? Like Broadcom used to make all sorts of stuff for Apple. not Qualcomm made the
⏹️ ▶️ John cell modems and Broadcom make the Wi-Fi stuff, but like Apple has its own Wi-Fi chips and it's making its own Bluetooth chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, aren't they kind of, isn't Apple kind of like, yeah, we are slowly but surely making
⏹️ ▶️ John everything in-house so we don't have to go to Broadcom? So I do wonder if this is like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, oh, it's just like window dressing and, you know, in the meantime, while we're working on our own chips to replace everything Broadcom
⏹️ ▶️ John makes, we'll do this deal and it looks good. Or Apple has drawn some kind of line that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John we'll make the Cell modem chip because we hate Qualcomm. We'll make the Wi-Fi chip. We'll make the H1 and H2.
⏹️ ▶️ John But at a certain point, we get down to dinky little chips that we don't care about. Like maybe, I don't know, Bluetooth or
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that Apple might have a chip that does that. But like maybe there's tiny, you know, the thread radio. Does Apple want
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the thread radio? Maybe they don't. And so I do wonder if they're deciding, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the cook doctrine of own and control the primary technologies, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. And they say, well, is that radio chip a primary technology or is it just a commodity?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if we don't think we're ever going to make that, let's strike a deal for the next X years that Broadcom will
⏹️ ▶️ John sell them to us at a good price because we're 20% of their business. So we'll see. But like over the
⏹️ ▶️ John past several years, has been a steady march of Apple rolling out chips with a letter and a number in front of
⏹️ ▶️ John them and slowly replacing all the silicon in all of its
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple silicon. And so this Broadcom deal kind of feels weird in that context.
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Slate Truck pricing, availability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have finally heard Slate Truck Price and Availability Announcements.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We first discussed this way back in May 2025 in episode 641. Reading for The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verge in Jess Weatherbed, we now, as of June 24th, know the price of Slate Auto's affordable American-made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric truck almost a year after the company warned it wouldn't hit its initial under $20,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey target price. The no-frills pickup starts at $24,950, matching the revised mid-$20,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey price range it promised last year after the Trump administration announced it was putting an end to the $7,500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey federal EV tax credit. Pre-orders for the Slate truck are live now, with production scheduled to begin in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey autumn of 2026. Customers can pay a $300 non-refundable deposit within the next 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days to lock in a delivery date, which is expected to start in late 2026.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this one just dodged price increase corner because it was actually increased back when the
⏹️ ▶️ John tax credit was ended, which was dumb, but it's one of the many dumb things happening in our country. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good on them to come in at just under 25 grand when their original target was 20 grand
⏹️ ▶️ John with the $7,500 EV tax credit. So I wish them luck. We talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John the truck. You can go listen to that episode. It is, first and foremost, a very
⏹️ ▶️ John low-priced electric vehicle. It also happens to be a truck, which is kind of dumb, but Americans love trucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John so give them what they love. There's lots of reviews on YouTube you can check out. It actually is a very clever and interesting vehicle,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I wish them luck. Yeah, it does look pretty cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's for me, but I really, really want it to be a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that would be incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, like a huge number of vehicles sold in America, especially are fleet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trucks. You see like a lot of white Ford F-150s out there. You know why? Those are fleet trucks. Like it's a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very common vehicle need, and people who buy those need them to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap, durable, serviceable, plentiful, and customizable. And that's exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Slate is promising. So it could be really interesting. But getting a new car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company off the ground is very difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we'll see how it goes. Yeah, there's some funny things. I think I posted them to our car channel, and over one
⏹️ ▶️ John of our Slacks, where they show the Slate truck, which, by the way, it looks very, very tiny. It is a very tiny vehicle.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks hilariously small. Not just small compared to today's pickup trucks, but even small compared to like pickup trucks
⏹️ ▶️ John of decades past. It is a small vehicle. And they showed it next to one of those giant $70,000
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, thing the size of a house. And they said, just pointing out the slate has a larger bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they just meant length, maybe not width, but still, the monster, the gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John pickup trucks we have in the U.S. today are essentially for people who really should have a sedan or
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a minivan, but want to have a truck anyway. And so they make this huge vehicle with a four-door
⏹️ ▶️ John cab and these terrible, uncomfortable back seats. And they're like, oh, I guess we have to have a bed. So it still looks like a pickup
⏹️ ▶️ John truck. And they put this tiny little bed on the thing. It's totally useless. It's never going to be used anyway. It's always going to have a cover on it. Don't
⏹️ ▶️ John scratch up my bed. There's no bed liner. It's just like, I don't know. It's very depressing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the slate truck is like utilitarian. It's like the little, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they are, K vehicles from Japan. Tiny little truck, mostly bed,
⏹️ ▶️ John two doors. You know, it is, and the slate, you can turn the bed into like rear seats
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff and like sacrifice that room. But lots of sort of like, it kind of reminds me of Marco's
⏹️ ▶️ John talk last episode about 3D printing, because honestly, this entire car, the interior looks kind of like it's 3D printed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I'm sure people are going to be 3D printing a ton of stuff to augment the interior because like, it doesn't even come with a radio.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there's an extra you can buy where you can mount your iPad. Like it's just so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey customizable
⏹️ ▶️ John on the inside and it's all plastic. And again, you can customize the back and turn it into like an open top thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a Jeep KC where you have just a roll cage and
⏹️ ▶️ John or like, a cap on it. Like, It's very interesting and it comes
⏹️ ▶️ John in one color. It's like the Ford Model T. You can get any color you want as long as it's black. Well, these are
⏹️ ▶️ John gray. Get it slate. But you can wrap them. And so they'll wrap it for you or you can do your own wrapping.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can't wait until I see one of these on the road because I feel like if I see one of these, it's like somebody who really wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John a cool, interesting new thing. And especially if I see it customized, like it's like an art project. It's like a kit car
⏹️ ▶️ John where like this is the starting point. And then if you're the type of person who wants to add personality
⏹️ ▶️ John or custom abilities or 3D print crap and stick it to your dashboard, this is the car for you
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as the company stays in business.
Apple Maps in Fords
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, speaking of car companies and older car companies in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a newsroom announcement. Shoot, it was a day or two ago. I'm sorry I didn't capture the date, but I'll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link in the show notes to the actual newsroom post. And it reads as follows: Apple and Ford today announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford's upcoming Universal Electric Vehicle or UEV platform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through Apple's new Map Kit for Automotive SDK. Let me take an aside. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we know this was a thing? The Map Kit for Automotive
⏹️ ▶️ John think you just read the announcement of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Okay, that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I thought too.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they say new.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, it's fine. I'm not like upset about it. I was just very surprised, and I had assumed I had either forgotten or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey missed something, but I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John Unlike CarPlay Ultra, which was announced but no one ever used, they figured, why don't we wait until someone's actually going
⏹️ ▶️ John to use this before we announce this one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So continuing from the newsroom post, coming to Ford's UEV platform in 2027, this integration will deliver a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle's displays. Leveraging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple's new map kit for automotive SDK, Ford's UEV platform will offer drivers turn-by-turn directions using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey natural language, real-time traffic and incident information, intuitive search featuring detailed place cards, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey routing options to help users easily find the best route to their destination. Additionally, Ford UEV drivers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will benefit from an intelligent EV routing functionality, including battery preconditioning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, let me take a little aside here. All I hear about from people who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are real electric vehicle nerds, and I mean that I think so far complimentary, um, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they can't, there there's reasons that car play can't be a thing. And one of those reasons is it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very important for an electric car to precondition the battery before it's going to get charged. It needs to know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the navigation needs to know when the car needs to be charged, et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So let me repeat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So argue with me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, if you know, but I believe that preconditioning the battery is more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's much more about like heat and like the temperature management of the battery to prepare it for fast charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you don't precondition the battery and you just pull up to a fast charger, you will still fast charge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just might, you know, it might take a few minutes to like warm it up or, you know, whatever it's doing in that preparation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's all. So what you're doing is like, I believe what you're doing if you don't precondition the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just artificially capping your charging speed for the first few minutes. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's not like a huge difference. It's a minor thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that's what Casey's saying people complain about is like, that's why you can't just use CarPlay because it doesn't know about the battery,
⏹️ ▶️ John but my car's built-in system does and it preconditions it. And how big of a difference preconditioning is in terms of your charging speed
⏹️ ▶️ John depends entirely on, well, how fast is the charger even connecting to and what is the weather like and what temperature is the
⏹️ ▶️ John battery. But their point still stands, which is there's an integration with the car system
⏹️ ▶️ John that is smart about the battery. And then CarPlay's out there being dumb, like, oh, I'll route you to a charger,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I won't, I can't do anything about your battery. So you're going to get there. How are you going to get there? Whatever the temperature of your battery
⏹️ ▶️ John is when you get there, oh well. And this is a new technology that Apple has that apparently integrates with at least Ford
⏹️ ▶️ John cars. It says, guess what? Apple software can tell the battery to do the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John the built-in car system does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I will read that last thing one more time, just so we have it fresh in mind. Additionally, Ford
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UEV drivers will benefit from an intelligent EV routing functionality, including battery preconditioning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ford will also use road level information from Apple Maps as part of the development of its next generation Blue Cruise hands-free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey highway driving capability to deliver a more seamless on-ramp to on-ramp to off-ramp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience. I can't help but wonder, does this intuitive search include ads?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hope not. You never
⏹️ ▶️ John know. It'll read the billboards along the road and speak them out to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. And take a cut some way, somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but it's also worth pointing out, like, you know, again, once you have an ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue stream, you're only one soft quarterly projection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from twisting that knob a little bit more. I'm sure they probably have deals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the manufacturers of what they will and won't do in this situation and everything, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much do we want to count on those over time? Like, how much would you assume that would never happen? If it was a company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other than Apple, especially an ad company like Google, if they were doing this, we would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely say, well, yeah, they're probably going to have like ads and maps the way they have ads and maps everywhere else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Apple can, the way we see, the way we know Apple today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the John Tarnas era will change this. I don't think it will. The way we see Apple today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we cannot say for sure that they will not junk up any of their properties
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with ads because they have already been doing that. The App Store is junked up with ads. Maps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is about to be junked up with ads. Apple News has always been junked up with ads. And these are all significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue streams for Apple. We have already seen that they will throw the user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience out the window to juice services revenue. Like try using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of their apps without being an Apple one subscriber and getting everything. You see upsells constantly for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their own stuff, even beyond the ads that I was just talking about that are like just direct ads for other things. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only is Apple definitely an ad company, but they're a bad ad company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store search ads are terrible. I know I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years on App Store search ads. They're horrible, but as a developer, you kind of have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy them. It's a terrible system. They're not good at it, but they win by being the gatekeeper, not by being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. When it comes to stuff like this, if they are creating new properties
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within which they can serve ads, they have not shown that we should trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at all not to. So in a situation like this where we're like, oh, maybe somebody they'll put ads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way we what we know today with our current level of trust in Apple around this particular topic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have to assume that every surface that can have ads in it for Apple eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will until and unless they show us that they have been thinking different about that. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not been the case so far. I
⏹️ ▶️ John see what you did there. Well, uh that same is true of Ford, unfortunately. And GM, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole reason they don't want to let Apple in is like, we want to control the ads and subscriptions and stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I'm not sure Apple is any worse than letting Ford control this because they would sell sponsorships to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm sorry, can we just go back a step? Did you say hundreds of thousands of dollars in Apple ads?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jesus Christ. I'm not going to interrogate you further because I don't think I can handle that conversation much less you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Frankly, I don't think I want to think about it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, let me get back to this newsroom post. So continuing, our new mid-size electric
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vehicle will be priced around $30,000, said Jim Farley, Ford Motor Company CEO. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Map Kit for Automotive SDK also enables automakers to deliver a cohesive navigation experience for drivers that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consistent with the look and feel of their vehicles and provides road-level information to help automakers build hands-free driving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experiences. The SDK follows the same privacy principles that the Apple Maps app provides today. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not collect users' location details and activity on the vehicle's map in a way that can be tied back to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individual user. I'm going to read just the beginning of that again. Apple does not collect users' location details.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's kind of doing a lot of work there, I think, because who knows what Ford is going to be doing, but that's all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, a good for them, good for Ford for saying it'll be around $30,000 because we just said the slate is $25,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so we'll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, there's there's been a long and storied history of people promising $30,000 EVs,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it's historically proven very difficult at that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey price point.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we'll see how they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, no argument. All right, finishing up, in addition to the integration of Apple Maps into Ford's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UEV platform, CarPlay will continue to be available on Ford vehicles, providing drivers with a safe and smart
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to use their iPhone in the car. Let me translate that from corporate speak to real person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, Rivian Tesla and GM, ha ha, go f*** yourselves. So good. I loved it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I think this is very interesting. I'm very much interested to see how this looks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, aesthetically and how it operates. Is it good? Is it not? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really hope that this is a further step in the direction, as much as I snark,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a step in the direction of Rivian and GM and Tesla, hopefully finally getting over themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and adding CarPlay. Because as a wise man once said on CaseyList.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CarPlay is additive. You don't have to use it. If you don't want your users to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, they don't necessarily have to. If your stuff is that good, they won't use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for someone like me that pretty much demands it, that won't buy a car without it, it sure
⏹️ ▶️ John It's also nice to see that Apple Maps, Apple Maps has come a long way since very difficult launch.
⏹️ ▶️ John and these days we don't say, oh, I can't believe Ford's putting Apple Maps in its car. Now it's going to not know where it's going to go.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think Google Maps is better in certain ways, but one place that Apple has really excelled
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past many years is the actual visual appearance of the maps. Not only does it look
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty, but I think it does a good job of like information communication.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is a road? What is not
⏹️ ▶️ John What is a sign? Is a stop coming up? Like That type of information is easier, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to read on Apple's display than on Google's Maps display. And also a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of the native in-car mapping things that I've seen on like rental cars and stuff that we've used. I'm like, oh, this map is
⏹️ ▶️ John not good looking. Like the roads are just thin and don't let me know what they're really doing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that I want to read are too small or in a weird font or, you know, or just like the contrast isn't
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Apple Maps is, I think, does a pretty good job of both being readable
⏹️ ▶️ John and attractive. It's not always a win versus Google ones. You can find on the web and we've talked about them on past shows. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think lots of people saying, I'm going to compare Google Maps to Apple Maps. Not the driving like 3D flying north through thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John really just the 2D looking down like the Maps interface. um And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John Google does things better. But uh i in all those tests, I always feel like Google looks uglier. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there are some areas where Apple excels. It's one of the reasons I use Apple Maps mostly in my car, even though I think Google still
⏹️ ▶️ John has better traffic data and Apple Maps still sometimes takes me on routes. Like when I'm I use it, you know, just
⏹️ ▶️ John when I'm going in the local area, not because I don't know how to get there, but just because I want to know when some stupid construction
⏹️ ▶️ John is closed down a road. I want to know that before I get to it. So I'm like, oh, Apple Maps will tell me that. That's why
⏹️ ▶️ John I have navigation on when I'm driving to places I already know how to get to in my local neighborhood. But it also means that when Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Maps tells me to go a certain way and I know how to get there, I'm like, no one would ever go that way. That's insanity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Maps still does that sometimes. I guess it's probably like technically shorter or faster or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are intangibles that Apple doesn't know about. I think maybe Google uses a little bit more crowdsourcing
⏹️ ▶️ John of like when most people go from A to B, they use this route and the traffic's good. So I recommend that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I'm also kind of like Casey, would love to see how this looks in because they
⏹️ ▶️ John described in one section of like, oh, how it's going to like integrated into the vehicle's experience. Like, is it going to be like themed?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John color change? So it's, you know, looks like the color of the vehicle or matches the Ford branding or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. But yeah, this This seems like a more fruitful path than the CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra thing, which still, low these many years later, has, let's say, extremely limited adoption.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's one way to put it. You're exactly right. I don't know. I just, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so badly to get a different car. And we're not going to turn this into a whole conversation right now, but I think I'm ready
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get rid of my Volkswagen. I love the car. There's nothing wrong with the car as I said here today. But I think I'm ready for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a full electric car, which is very sad for my left leg, but that's neither here nor there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there's just nothing on the market that I think that's it. See, now you know how I feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also about Max.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say, for whatever it's worth, I know that BMW might be a hard sell for you, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the upcoming i3 is potentially very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The SUV or the sedan? I can't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco recall. The sedan.
⏹️ ▶️ John when you walk up to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the Electric 3 series. I think it looks very good in the previews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything so far. We'll see when it comes out. I suspect, Casey, as much as you love the i4,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspect that new i3 is going to be very tempting for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I 100% agree with you. I want to move on because this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental neutral. But I 100% agree with you. I mostly think it looks good with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the front. The front is real bad, but I don't think I'm going to want to pay $80,000, $90,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever they're going to charge for this to get into it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John at the time frame. You can get into
⏹️ ▶️ John like $65,000, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think I want to pay that much either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't think. That's
⏹️ ▶️ John driving a $25,000 car. I'd agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think I'm going to be able to get into the, well, I will not choose to get into this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car until it has fallen in price, is coming off lease, et cetera, et cetera. And that's like.
⏹️ ▶️ John get one after it's gone down or, you know, used one or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. But I don't think I want to drive my eight-year-old car, which is in great shape, only has like 35,000 miles. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't want to drive this eight-year-old car for another three-ish years, four years before I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get this. So I think there's, I need to figure out what to do in the interim. And I just, I can't figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out what that is. And I think the answer may be the I-4, but it's, it's, it's, I'm not sold.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There's nothing that I can look at and point to and say, yes, that's the one. And that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me sad. Anyway, let's move on.
Safari 27 and web standards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let's talk Safari 27. And there's a post by Jeremy Keith
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at adactio, A-D-A-C-T-I-O dot com. I will put a link in the show notes so you don't have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco about it. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pronounced archive, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that about the what is it,
⏹️ ▶️ John A-R-X-I-V dot org site, and everyone told us it's pronounced archive,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is cute and clever. They have like an explanation involving like Greek letters. Unfortunately, there is a website
⏹️ ▶️ John called archive.org, and it's not that one. And it's
⏹️ ▶️ John it's kind of popular. Yeah, so if everyone's saying, oh, my scientific paper is up at archive.org,
⏹️ ▶️ John Because conceivably, scientific papers could be at either one, because the actual archive.org holds lots of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that may have left the web elsewhere. And anyway, it's silly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I think, speaking of silly, I think your pronunciation of letterboxed is silly. But I think in this case, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to go that route or take a page out of your playbook, and it needs to be rchev.org.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, coming back to the Safari 27. So at adactio.com, Jeremy Keith writes, the upcoming version of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 27 of Safari is looking very good. That's not because it's at the cutting edge of the latest web standards, quite the opposite.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Most of the changes listed for this release are bug fixes. That's what I want to acknowledge and applaud. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I believe it was, found WWDC session 204, What is New in WebKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Safari 27? We will put a link to that in the show notes, where Jen Simmons says, I hear from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web developers that it's challenging when you have to work around a problem in our browser engine. You expect more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We hear you. And we set out to greatly improve the quality of existing web platform features. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put our focus there this year rather than on implementing a whole lot of brand new ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then they show a pie chart saying, like, here's the work that we did. And the large Pac-Man size piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John the pie chart is resolved issues. And then in the Pac-Man's mouth, the majority of the mouth is
⏹️ ▶️ John improved features. And then there's a tiny little sliver that's brand new features. And then a tiny, even tinier
⏹️ ▶️ John sliver that's deprecations. So this was, again, the thrust of this WWDC session about WebKit
⏹️ ▶️ John was not, look at all these new APIs we implemented. It was like, this is a rebuilding year. You're annoyed that we,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, have long-standing bugs that are stopping you from adopting a feature, or there's some feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that we didn't implement all of, or whatever. This year, we're going to concentrate on that work. We're
⏹️ ▶️ John going to fix all our bugs, the top bugs that you complain about. And we're going to find whatever tech that you're
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I would use this, except Safari doesn't have it. And we're going to put that one in. And this whole session is all about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And a lot of people watching the session and applauding because if you're a web developer, it's kind of like being,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's worse than being like an iOS developer. You're like, oh, they added this cool new feature on iOS, whatever, but I can't use it until
⏹️ ▶️ John most of my users like migrate. But iOS users migrate pretty quickly these days. But on
⏹️ ▶️ John the web, you're like, you know, this, the caniuseit.com website. I may have
⏹️ ▶️ John been getting that URL wrong. It's like on the web, it's like, OK, when can I use this feature?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because web browsers have much more diversity than iOS versions and people do not upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John as quickly. And so you're like, and by diversity, I don't mean different browsers. I mean 800 different versions of
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome and so on and so forth. Again, Chrome auto updates itself, so it's not that bad. But you've got Firefox and blah, blah, blah. And
⏹️ ▶️ John back in my day, WebTV 1.0, which could barely read HTML. Um, So when
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple rolls out a feature like this, then you can start your clock. It's like, great. In four years, I'll
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to put this on our website. And it will make my life so much easier, assuming I'm still working at the company at that time. But
⏹️ ▶️ John still, you know, the best time to plant a tree is 25 years ago. The second best time is now. So thumbs up
⏹️ ▶️ John for adding these features.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, agreed. Uh, Then there was a contrarian take from Alex Russell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And uh, Alex says, basically, Safari is so far behind, it doesn't even matter. So this is on infrequently.org.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Alex writes, don't get me wrong, it's great that Apple is focusing on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quality. It remains a persistent issue for Safari. But how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relief should long-suffering web developers expect? The best comparative measures come from the Communal Web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Platform test Project. Comparing the current experimental builds with stable channel releases can illustrate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the scale of change we can expect when the next major version of each browser launches. 90%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the minimum Apple requires across all WPT tests for competitors' engines in the EU and Japan,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it has been forced to allow them, in theory anyway. Safari barely clears the bar, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the source for that is wpt.fyi.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and then they show the WPT test pass rates. And you can see Safari just barely
⏹️ ▶️ John clearing the 90% line. It's hilarious, by the way, that Apple's thing to make, to discourage people from using alternate
⏹️ ▶️ John browsers, this whole browser kit thing they made, like, oh, it's for security, blah, blah, blah. We can't just let you run Chrome because that would be too
⏹️ ▶️ John insecure, which is probably true. But also, it's yet another system like the alternative app stores. It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's so onerous to implement this that nobody wants to do it. Anyway, they threw in there, oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John your browser has to pass this WPT test by at least 90% because we don't want people on our phones using
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy browsers. But then you look at the competitive browsers and Chrome is pushing up against 98%
⏹️ ▶️ John and Firefox is like 96%. So yeah, if there's going to be another browser,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there was someone did actually make an alternate browser for iOS in the EU, it would probably be based on the
⏹️ ▶️ John chromium engine or Firefox. it would easily clear the 90% bar. It's almost like they put a 90%
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, well, you have to at least clear the bar that we cleared.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think this, I don't think Safari is ever going to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browser for people who care about cutting-edge web standards. I mean, it hasn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there was actually a time when it was that competitive. It was a long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there was a span in like, you know, like the mid 2000s, 2010s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there was a span where Safari was very competitive, very standards focused. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a time when Apple was not dominant. So it was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important to Apple, especially early in the Safari project, but also kind of midway through it. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very important to Apple for the Mac to succeed that Safari had to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good. And they they made it really good. Like those early versions of Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were great. And Safari was like a leading like beacon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of awesomeness for web standards for a long time. But that was when Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to basically play catch up with the world. like that. You know, It was mostly when they were still mostly about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac, like before the iPhone, or even in the early days of the iPhone, like they were still mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac and early iPhone company. And so they had to comply with the standards to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competitive. And now Apple is so successful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they are dictating terms to the rest of the world most of the time. As I've mentioned before, Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not know how to negotiate. They just know how to dictate. And with web standards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that means is other people are dictating to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Safari needs to do. That's just not going to play well with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today because Apple doesn't need to listen anymore. Again, there was a time where they needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to listen, so they did, but now they don't. And you can also kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see their point on a lot of these things. A lot of modern web standards, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because something is declared a standard doesn't mean it's a good idea. It also doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean that the people who declared it a standard aren't doing so for reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or for interests that Apple might consider maybe like unfairly biased or invalid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or bad ideas on Apple's point of view. So for instance, if any of these web standards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have implications on device security, battery life, or privacy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple's going to have possibly a different opinion on whether they're a good idea or how much of them they want to implement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than somebody else might have. Also, if any of these web standards try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bring web apps up to levels of functionality that native apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that Apple doesn't think web apps should have, Apple's going to have a problem with that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe you could argue that part of the reason is their App Store monopoly, and that might be part of the reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In many cases, that probably is part of the reason. But also part of the reason might be they don't think it's a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good idea for security or for device privacy. So they're going to have their reasons. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, just because something is declared a standard doesn't mean it's a good idea. And it doesn't mean that Apple agrees that every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard is necessary to implement. I've given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my own opinions on this on podcast quote standards that people try to launch. And I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both sides of the argument. So for Apple, something like this, it's like Safari's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way behind. Well, behind in what? Is it behind in a way that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agrees is the definite, right, inevitable path to go on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably not. Now, that being said, I mean, obviously, Safari can always get better. And I, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody who converted to Chrome earlier this year, I see lots of ways that Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get better. Certainly, though, when I'm using Chrome on my laptop and I see the battery life burning down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm like, oh, geez. But Apple has their reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn't just that like, they're not good at engineering. That's not the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. If Apple does not implement a web standard, some of that is possibly because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't have their foot on the gas. Because that is true. Apple does not have their foot on the gas in most areas, they're not forced to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compete. But a lot of it could be they're actively choosing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the quote-unquote standard that someone dictated at some other company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple thinks, we don't agree that that's actually something that's a good idea for us. Anyway, all that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, if what you're looking for is the most standards compliant browser,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and again, who determines the standards? It's a lot of Google people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the most standards are going to be things that Google people design. And of course, Google's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browser is going to do them because they're the ones who design them. And Apple's going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not be competitive in that game if that's what you're optimizing for. So if what you want is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the web browser that will work on the most websites possible, doing the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features possible, what you want is Chrome. And that's going to be the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably for the foreseeable future. And again, and Safari is a great choice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for different reasons and different priorities, but that's the trade-off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when it comes to web standards, nobody is dictating to Apple anything because Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is on the same W3C committees as Google and the Firefox people that determine these standards.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple is notorious for throwing its weight around to put the kibosh on the standards that it doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John like. So it's not as if these standards fall from the sky and Apple's like, oh, another standard. Oh, great. We have to implement it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, right, but they don't
⏹️ ▶️ John always succeed. Well, they're there in the room and they succeed a surprising amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are powerful, all out of proportion, I think, with their market share, which is the next factor, which is like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome is a problem an increasing problem for Apple as Chrome becomes so massively
⏹️ ▶️ John dominant in market share, where people don't even test their websites in Safari anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they're just relying on these specific features and bugs that are in Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John works in Chrome. I'm done. And even if Safari, in the cases where Safari is doing something correctly, but Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, the Chrome behavior is considered correct because, you know, it's the Internet Explorer effect. There's been some posts about like, oh, Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John is the new Internet Explorer because it sucks and people have to design websites for it. But no, the one with dominant browser market
⏹️ ▶️ John share is always the Internet Explorer because whatever that browser does, that is the default and your website has to
⏹️ ▶️ John work with it. And especially as the market share becomes more and more dominant, whatever Chrome does
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes the standard, setting aside the web standards. And yes, there are web standards that they fight about or what
⏹️ ▶️ John they should implement or whatever. But I think this, you know, the this WWC session about
⏹️ ▶️ John the features implementing is not so much about features that Apple disagrees with that they're somehow changing your mind
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. It's almost entirely about, and that's why this Alex Russell's post is so snarky and
⏹️ ▶️ John upset about this, features that Apple claims to have implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago with much fanfare. Hey, there was a W3C decided on this thing. Apple participated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple said, yes, we agree. This is a great feature. We're totally going to add it to Safari. And they added it to Safari in 2021
⏹️ ▶️ John and declared victory and moved on. But guess what? Safari's implementation was incomplete or buggy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple just never revisited it. Let me know if this sounds familiar. Apple just said, well, we did that
⏹️ ▶️ John already. It's done. And
⏹️ ▶️ John well, Chrome, A, had a better implementation out the door. And B, Chrome has a new version every two days.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when they found these little bugs in their implementation back in 2021, they iterated and iterated and iterated. And by 2023,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Chrome implementation was fast, rock solid, had all the features in the standard. And Apple's hadn't been touched since 2021.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that's where people are like, I can't use this feature. Not because Apple disagrees with it. Apple supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ John implemented it, but oh, this one method, there's a bug in it that just basically makes it unusable. And actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was a minor revision to the standard, you know, a three months later that Apple never picked up. And then you're
⏹️ ▶️ John just sitting there waiting, well, surely this WWC Apple will fix this thing. And it just never happens. And people get frustrated.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so when they say, like, I can't do this because, you know, that test is like Safari has a 90% or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those tests are always like, not only do you have to implement it, you have to actually implement it correctly. And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John also in a way that doesn't like massacre performance in terms of like computational performance or whatever. Like, has it implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John in a sane way? There was a couple of things that have gone like this in the past. I forget the particular technology. It might have been IndexedDB
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, where Apple had a notoriously bad implementation and just never changed it. And people, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there was these warnings among web developers of like, yeah, they say they implement, but don't try to use it. You'll just, you'll lose your data and it'll be terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait until they fix it. And there was some battle about that, about IndexedDB versus a different standard or whatever. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple in this situation, again, they throw their weight around in ways that I don't quite understand how
⏹️ ▶️ John they have this power and some kind of bureaucratic, like however the W3C works, because market share wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should barely have a say in anything. Market share-wise, they should just be out there doing like, like you said, what they had to do
⏹️ ▶️ John back when Safari was being written, which is whatever currently works on the web, we
⏹️ ▶️ John need to make Safari deal with that. Like before Safari 1.0, that was their thing. It's like, we're not
⏹️ ▶️ John dictating to anybody. Just the web is out there and people are using browsers that work with it. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ John at that point, Internet Explorer, maybe Mozilla or whatever. We have to make Safari do whatever they're doing. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John if what they're doing is dumb or stupid or buggy, we have to make it work with that. And then they were like, oh, Safari is going to be a web
⏹️ ▶️ John standards thing. But then it was like, just, well, there's a lot of web standards and they keep coming out with new ones. And even though we fight against the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones we don't like, sometimes things come out. And even if we are in favor of it, it's like, well, but how much money
⏹️ ▶️ John are we going to throw at Safari this year? And as you noted, do any of these features threaten our app store dominance by making
⏹️ ▶️ John it possible to have web-based apps that look like native apps? And Apple is so weird about that because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple did do the thing where you can put apps on the home screen that are actually web apps. No one made them
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. They did that on their own so long ago. It's like, well, so clearly someone at Apple at some point
⏹️ ▶️ John thought, hey, this is a cool thing. You could have a web app. It's a website, but it will show up on your on
⏹️ ▶️ John your home screen, on your phone, like it's an app. It'll launch like an app. It won't look like a web browser.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we will support that. I think they might have supported that even before there was a standard for And then when there
⏹️ ▶️ John was a standard for they supported the standard. And it's like, okay. But on the other hand, Apple's like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the things we argue against at the W3C. Look at the features that we say no to. And you're like, boy, a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of those look like things that would make web apps be able to compete with native apps. So which is it? Is it just two different
⏹️ ▶️ John groups inside Apple, right? I'm sure Jen Simmons wants to support every single web standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John She is a web developer through and through. She wants that. She wishes she had all the money in the world and could
⏹️ ▶️ John support every web standard better than anybody. She wants 100% of all those tests. But Jen Simmons is not the CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John as with all these things, it comes down to like, like we were talking about with like the bug fixes. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John having, you know, LLMs help find bugs is great and everything. But before the prerequisite
⏹️ ▶️ John is someone who determines what resources are going to be spent on what has to say, you are allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John to spend this year mostly doing bug fixes. If without that permission,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you can try to sneak it in under the covers and it makes you more efficient. I could fix 10 bugs in the time I could fit one. But if your
⏹️ ▶️ John bug fix allowance time was 1% of your time, it still doesn't make that big of a dent. So you need permission
⏹️ ▶️ John for management and resource allocation to say, this year we're going to be responsive
⏹️ ▶️ John to our customers, responsive to web developers and find out, like find out from them, because you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John could be insular. What are web developers pissed about? Is it that one feature from 2021 that's been
⏹️ ▶️ John buggy? Like which one is it? Because there's a whole bunch of features that we didn't implement or we have implemented or there are bugs in. but We
⏹️ ▶️ John have to know which ones would have the most impact on customers. And in that respect, I don't think Apple is looking at these
⏹️ ▶️ John WPT test pass rate things because those probably weight all the features equally. What
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wants to know is which are the features that are hurting web developers the most? Which are the features
⏹️ ▶️ John that are making it so that when someone goes to a website in Safari and it doesn't work, which features are causing that
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen? Works fine in Chrome. Why does it work fine in Chrome? Is this Chrome? Which feature does Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John have that we don't have? Or which feature does Chrome implement in a different way than us? Even if we're quote unquote right,
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to go back into Safari 1.0 mode and say, whatever is Chrome, whatever Chrome is doing, we need to do exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John that because otherwise that website won't work right in Safari. It's one of the main reasons I use Chrome and
⏹️ ▶️ John it's one of the main reasons I sometimes encourage my family to use Chrome. Is this website
⏹️ ▶️ John not working right to you? In particular, I always say to do it on government websites, which you would think that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be the opposite where it's like, well, government, don't they have to support all these web browsers? There's probably laws that
⏹️ ▶️ John say they do, but there's laws that say a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably they're testing the website in Chrome. So if you're having any, the jankier the website
⏹️ ▶️ John is and it's not working in Safari, try it in Chrome. Very often it works. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that they have to fight against. So, you know, I feel for the Safari team because I know the people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John working, actually working on Safari and WebKit are 100% aligned on everything that Alex
⏹️ ▶️ John is complaining about, but they don't decide the priorities at Apple. Like it's great that they get to work at Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I'm sure they argue internally all the time. Let us do X, let us do Y, you know, let us do Z.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I don't understand whatever shadowy cabal is that the W3C arguing against the features
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple apparently doesn't want. Again, sometimes for good reasons about privacy and, you know, battery life or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes for clearly nefarious reasons. Who are those people? What are their, are they like literal lobbyists So their only job
⏹️ ▶️ John is to go to the W3C and screw things up for the web? I don't know. Sometimes Someday there'll be a tell-all book,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think there's a lot of people at Apple fighting the good fight. And I'm happy to see this year
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, that the Pac-Man shape thing is resolved issues.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think everybody at Apple had to have that same pie chart for the next five to 10 years and things would be a lot better.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, I'm not the CEO of Apple either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. This this blog post it, I think it made some very good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points, but it was clearly someone who is very angry about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanting to continue to be angry about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. Yeah, I mean, I was angry about IE, IE6, you know, anger was about IE6. You cannot imagine the anger
⏹️ ▶️ John because it would just stop you from doing anything good on the web. And Safari has filled that role in that, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, everybody's using Chrome and all these features are available. And this feature is 10 years old. And Apple was totally
⏹️ ▶️ John in favor of it and touted it when they rolled it out. And it's still broken. And you just, and you know, it's like talking to Apple. It's like a
⏹️ ▶️ John brick wall. It's like, hey, Apple, you like this feature. You implemented it. You told us to go and use
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Here's the WWC sign. It's been broken for five years. What the hell? And you hear nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right. And then finally, with regard to Safari, Apple has released a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Safari MCP server. There is a blog post over at webkit.org where Saren
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yitbarik from Apple writes, in Safari Technology Preview 247,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we're introducing the Safari MCP server, a model context protocol server for web developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Safari MCP server gives your agent the ability to know how your code actually renders in the browser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by connecting it to a Safari browser window. Any MCP-compatible client can connect to the Safari MCP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server. By connecting your agent to a Safari browser window, your agent can emulate what your users experience, giving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it the information it needs to debug more autonomously, like access to the DOM, network requests, screenshots,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and console output. It speeds up your debugging process and lets you stay in the comfort of your terminal, which means fewer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rounds of hopping windows and typing prompts to debug your code. There's a section in the blog post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why we built this. There are many ways to build for the web, both with and without AI. If AI is part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your workflow, we think this tool will help make it even more productive. And if it isn't, that's okay too. If you end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up giving it a try, or if this is your first time using an MCP server, let us know what you think. You can find these individuals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mastodon and Blue Sky. If you run into issues, file a WebKit bug report. Filing issues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really does make a difference. So says everyone at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John And WebKit actually has an open bug tracker, unlike feedback and radar. So that's nice. So at least you can
⏹️ ▶️ John watch your thing not getting picked up. But, you know, and it's
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco open source.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it's open source so you can contribute fixes yourself, but it's a little bit of a challenging code base. So I like that part at
⏹️ ▶️ John the end where it's like, you know, MCP, it's for you know, agents, LLMs, coding agents to use. MCP
⏹️ ▶️ John basically like exposes the functionality of your application in a programmatic way
⏹️ ▶️ John using this standard so that agents can essentially puppeteer your app to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it do something. That's what MCP is for. And they say, you know, why do we add this? We added MCP,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because we think if you use AI, if AI is part of your workflow, we think this tool will help. And if it isn't,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's okay too, because they don't want to be like, look, we're forcing you to use AI. AI is still a difficult topic
⏹️ ▶️ John for a lot of people. And Apple is hedging. They're, you know, unlike the raw, raw, AI is great at everything. Whoever wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John this blog post is like, some people aren't AI. Some people aren't. If you aren't,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. This is not for you. We understand. We still like and support
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Right. Like, so I thought that hedge was interesting. But on the flip side of this, this is really like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you're doing web development with some kind of agent, very often the agent will be like, okay, there's
⏹️ ▶️ John a million libraries for various languages that will essentially make a headless Chrome using the Chromium open source Chromium
⏹️ ▶️ John engine. And, you know, a headless Chrome, I can run on doing web development, which is HTML, CSS,
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript, and a backend. And I can all run all of that headless with this headless Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John thing so that I can actually execute the page where the JavaScript will execute and there'll be a DOM, you know, like essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John automated testing of a real web browser. The next level up from that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, but what if I could control your actual web browser? Not as headless Chrome or a headless Safari, but like literally
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome or Safari. And Chrome, there's like a Claude Chrome plugin that does this and Safari same deal, where you would see a
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari window appearing on your screen. I don't know if they can hide the window. Maybe they can. But anyway, it's puppeteering the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual running Safari. And the reason that's important is because in the absence of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you're just perpetuating the cycle where someone using a coding agent and they're making a website and And the
⏹️ ▶️ John coding agent is dutifully writing tests and checking things out. And it's got unit tests and it's got integration tests and it's got end-to-end
⏹️ ▶️ John tests where it runs the actual browser engine and blah, blah, blah. And you know what that agent's just made for you? A website that works
⏹️ ▶️ John in Chrome. And someone goes to your website for the first time and they go,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, your website didn't work. You're like, what are you meaning? Oh, my test pass is great. I tried all the time. It's wonderful. It's like, well, I'm using Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John because the agents can only iterate on failures that they see during their tests. And if they never
⏹️ ▶️ John test in Safari, I mean, this is the same exact problem that humans had where someone makes a website, they're
⏹️ ▶️ John using Chrome, they're testing in Chrome. Once it works in Chrome, they're done and then you know done with your project, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The same is true of agents. If the agent can't test in Safari, it will never know what's broken in Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so Apple's out there going, please, please, agents and developers, we've made an MCP for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please, at least consider, consider trying, consider telling your agent that we exist. We'll register our MCP
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe, maybe on the off chance, they'll look at that. And, you know, if someone writes in their problem description,
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way, this website should not only work in Chrome, then maybe the agent will be like, oh, I see you have a Safari MCP
⏹️ ▶️ John server. I'll try it in there too. Oh, it breaks in there for this reason and it can fix it. So they're trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to do what they can, but it is an uphill battle given Chrome's market share. I wish I had looked this up, but whatever the market
⏹️ ▶️ John share is for Chrome, it's big. And for Safari, especially on the desktop, it's very, very small. Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John on mobile, doing pretty good because of the iPhone. But even there, Android is still pretty big.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Federico writes with regard to this, I asked Codex about comparing Safari's MCP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to its own Chrome extension and the older Playwright. The verdict, although Chrome has a richer API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Chrome DevTools when it comes to network requests, Codex actually preferred Apple's leaner, more direct approach for letting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an agent drive and debug a browser.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love asking the coding agents their opinion on things. It's like, they don't have an opinion. But yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can ask them to show you the pros and cons and the feature lists and so on and so forth. But all this is
⏹️ ▶️ John showing that Apple is apparently, you know, again, putting in a good effort and trying to do a good job. And it's just a question
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, who will adopt these tools we are laying out before you? We want
⏹️ ▶️ John to participate. We want your website to work in Safari. What can we do to make that happen? They're trying.
Sponsor: ATP Membership
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This podcast was made possible by contributions by listeners like you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. Hey, so we don't have a whole bunch of ads this week, and we thought we'd take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a moment to talk about ATP membership. So, if you are interested in avoiding moments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like this one and all the other ads on the show, then you can go to atp.fm/slash join
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you can be a member. It is just $8 a month or $88 per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, at least in American money. And you get all sorts of perks. You get ATP overtime, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is more ATP. The only way you can get ATP overtime is by being a member. And that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we do some topics that just keep sliding down the show notes or we just don't have time for. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's actually really, really fun. It's about 15-ish minutes there or thereabouts. And it's the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only way to get it is being a member at ATP.fm slash join. You also, like I said, get ad-free versions of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show. You get the bootleg, which is our unedited version of the show that Marco publishes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally minutes after we hang up the phone. So we typically record on Wednesday nights. By
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first thing Thursday morning, if you're an American, you will have an ATP waiting for you often
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one to two days before everyone else gets it. There's also bonus episodes. We are just shy of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 40 bonus episodes. I just counted and I might have missed one. So maybe it is 40.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have the ATP tier lists, which are my personal favorite, where one of these days it will probably become
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the end of the show because we typically nearly murder each other during the process. But they're fun. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also talk about inside stuff with our work and, you know, convince each other to do or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do things. We watch movies. We do all sorts of fun stuff. And you also, if you're an ATP member, get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 15% discount on our time-limited merchandise sales, which there's one every few months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if any or all of this sounds exciting, and it should, go to atp.fm slash join
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and check out the membership options. You can do this by month or by year. You can do it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in dollars, euros, or pounds. So go and check it out. ATP.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you to all of you for making ATP possible.
#askatp: Overcast transcripts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let's do some Ask ATP. And Pete Ottery writes: Marco, can you share how the reception
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of transcription in Overcast is going? I love the story of you setting it up and I applaud the execution, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find myself never looking at it or needing to. Do you feel it was all worthwhile? Before Marco answers this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me throw in my two cents. Oftentimes, I have used transcription for a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things. One is, and this was such a brilliant thing that you added, and I can't remember if I complimented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you publicly, privately, or not at all. And I think the answer is not at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What did I just say? Publicly, privately, or not at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm answering you. You complimented him publicly. I already know what you're going to say.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey About the musical thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, okay. Then Never mind. All right. We'll fix all that in post.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, you got to leave
⏹️ ▶️ John it. in It's wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know. We'll
⏹️ ▶️ John see if I'm wrong about what you're going to compliment him about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I was going to say the music notes on the side. Okay, you were right. Okay, good. I thought I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said something publicly. Let me double down on it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reiterate or whatever the turn of phrase is. I really love the music notes because a lot of times there'll be, you know, musical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beds on something I don't care about. Now, that could be ads, but it could be other things. And going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the end of the music notes is so wonderful. The other thing that surprised me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I really like about transcriptions is a lot of times when I'm getting ready for bed and I'm not like having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a conversation with anyone because I'm brushing my teeth. I'll pop in an AirPod and I use a motorized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey electric, whatever you want to call it, toothbrush. And even with an AirPod in, unless I make it absurdly loud,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's a little difficult for me to tell precisely what people are saying because I listen at like 1.7x or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. However, if I have the transcription running and I'm vaguely looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it as I'm brushing my teeth or what have you, it makes it so much easier for my brain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to put together what the heck people are saying. And so I don't have to blare my AirPods or AirPod.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oftentimes I'm running mono at that point. I don't have to blare it and I can actually follow along with the conversation at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speed in which I want to follow along with it. So for me personally, a triple plus would would use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again. Thank you. 1.7x.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that's actually, I took note of that as well. That's actually faster than I would have guessed. That's a
⏹️ ▶️ John little, that's a little fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It took a long, long time for me to get to that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I will like the, I think the fastest show that I've run is about one point six. but my usual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed for most shows is like one point one or one point two, depending on the show. I just listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcasts. is the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm over here down in the slowness. Werner Vingy, I think. Anyway, I'm a 1X.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing I do at more than 1X is WWDC videos because Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John style makes those people talk so
⏹️ ▶️ John and deliberately that I go 1.25 for all WWDC videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm 1.5 on most of those. So transcription. Transcription. Casey, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you nailed the biggest use cases that I use it for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, skimming a show. So that's like for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever there is part of a show that I'm trying to skip past, usually it's an ad. Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to any big shows, like from big publishers where the ads are all just DAI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you're basically just hearing radio commercials stuck into podcasts. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it isn't even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they're not even host read. They're just like, here's another ad for Ice-T and T-Mobile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God. So I listen to a few shows that do that. And so it's very easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to swipe over to the transcript and scroll to the end using the music notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or my little cut icons or a combination of both. And I can quickly look at the text and say, oh, tap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right there. And boom, I'm right at the segment start of the next segment. I also will occasionally use this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even for shows that I'm not skipping an ad for, that I just kind of want to skip a topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they don't have chapters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or if I'm trying to skip part of a chapter, like, I don't care about baseball. Scroll, scroll, scroll.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John What show could you be talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find that the transcripts are a much easier, faster, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better way to skim past something in a podcast or to find something in a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or if I have a podcast playing and I realize, oh, I zoned out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last couple minutes because maybe I was distracted by something else I don't want to go back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will often use the transcript to skim back too, to see what did I just miss? And it helps me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more easily find the place that I want to go back to or to skim back and see what I did just miss. And maybe I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to go back. So generally speaking, transcripts for me are an assisting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology for skimming through different parts of a podcast, usually skipping past things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't want to hear, but even sometimes going back and seeing what I did just hear. And because that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the role of them for me, they work very well, even though that like from a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from an accuracy point of view, they're still pretty bad. But for what I'm using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the transcript for, the accuracy almost doesn't matter at all because I'm not reading it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a replacement for listening to it. I'm just kind of using it as a visual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cue to skim around in it. And now that I'm accustomed to skimming around in a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way, when I have to skip it by just the audio skipping,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like I'm a caveman. I'm like, what? This is the most primitive, awful tool to skip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around a podcast using seek controls and audio. Now that I'm accustomed to the transcript,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's painful. Like when I'm in the car and I have to skip around because I don't have the transcript in the car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's, oh, that's tough. But that's the use that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find for them is skimming. And from the feedback from people, it's actually, I don't get a lot of feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it, to be honest. But the feedback, the little feedback that I do get is pretty positive. That being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, I think part of why I don't get a lot of feedback is that it is kind of buried in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI. And I don't know, I don't have any firm plans around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this yet, so I don't want to guarantee anything. But at some point, I would like to explore integrating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the transcript better into the now playing UI. Like what I was just saying about how basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seek controls now feel primitive to me, I think there might be something there. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the transcripts should be involved in seeking more directly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the even easier solution there is all these, you know, Instagram reels and TikToks
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, just do the thing where whatever is currently being spoken is shown in little text
⏹️ ▶️ John that goes to… Sometimes they do one word at a time. I'm sure you've all seen them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like the reason you can
⏹️ ▶️ John watch a reel with your phone muted is because they show the transcript one or two words at a time with the current word
⏹️ ▶️ John being bold. And sometimes the transcription is not accurate, but that you can figure out what they're saying. And that just,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's on the now, essentially the quote unquote now playing screen for whatever short form video you're
⏹️ ▶️ John watching. So I can imagine a now playing screen in Overcast that when I hit play, if I were to glance at it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would see the words being spoken flashing two or three words at a time, just constantly underneath thing. And if I
⏹️ ▶️ John were to tap on those words, it would take me to the full transcript. That's, that's just one possibility. But I know what you're
⏹️ ▶️ John saying about seeking in terms of like, can I get a textual, a visual textual search for seeking instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John the essentially modeled after, you know, CD players or whatever, back, forward,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, skip or whatever buttons. That sounds more ambitious to me than the much simpler one of
⏹️ ▶️ John just essentially show me the closed captioning of this podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and the close that's the way I originally envisioned the UI for this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just wanted to put a CC, you know, closed caption button on the main screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you would tap it and it would stick it over the artwork. I didn't end up doing that for no good reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um i don't I don't know why I didn't do that, but that was how I was envisioning this feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for for many years um But I do think that like like those those CD player
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style controls, we haven't rethought those in a long time. And now that we have this technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is way better for skimming through a file, maybe that deserves some rethinking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that's more of a down the road thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Speaking of not down the road, I hope you mentioned using the transcript for skimming
⏹️ ▶️ John and for skipping over stuff and going back to where you left off. But you also mentioned finding
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And every time I go to that screen, I'm like, where's the search box? Where's the search box?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, yeah, you want search box Please.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's just text, Marko. Please let me search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I want to explore with that is, you know, all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search I have in the app so far is basically old style search.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's like, you know, SQLite FTS, you know, full text search it's keyword based you know, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loosely phrase based maybe um I'm curious to explore like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the on device foundation model stuff for ai based search basically of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now we have better search algorithms that can take things much more abstractly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like what episode did John talk about so and so Like, you know, like that, that kind of search.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that's what people actually want out of a search these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John They probably do, but also I just want actual text search within the one
⏹️ ▶️ John transcript I'm currently looking at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so my challenge with that, though, is the accuracy is not very good. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not find what you're looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand. I'm willing to battle through the the words
⏹️ ▶️ John similar. All right. I just I just want a fighting chance.
⏹️ ▶️ John try the three different words that it might be misinterpreted as. I just want to find within the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just, it kills me. It kills me all the time. Cause I'm like, cause then I do what you're doing, which is like, okay, well, the alternative
⏹️ ▶️ John is, how well does my brain work? How fast can I scroll this? Skim, skim, skim, skim.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you're hoping the, like, the, the unconscious part of your brain is going to spot the word Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John in the thing to find the section. And usually it does, but it's like, we have the technology. We can
⏹️ ▶️ John type MAC space PRO and hope that the transcription worked. And you know, for most of the terms I'm looking for, it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn't complain too much about this at 1.0, but as time progresses, I'm like, where's my search box? Where's my search box? All
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff you're talking about is awesome. Great. Good ideas. I agree. It's harder than this. This is just literal, plain
⏹️ ▶️ John text, substring, no regular expression search. Maybe I'm the only one who would use it, but when I want it to be there
⏹️ ▶️ John and I find myself resorting to skimming, I do feel like the caveman you described.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don't you all wish you could lobby for your favorite app
⏹️ ▶️ John directly to the developer? Ah, the privileges of podcasting.
#askatp: Pursuing Android switchers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's move on to our second question. Elijah writes, A year ago, John posited that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could, under new leadership, pursue, quote, growth the hard way. With the Neo, Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indeed pursuing Mac growth, but John's Apple turnaround article or post focused on growing the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP 689 now acknowledged, quote, they've been trying to Neo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone like crazy, but it's hard to Neo. Alternatively, in ATP number 641,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we asked Apple to consider, quote, why did that person choose a Samsung Galaxy? Do they have a different feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set? So Elijah says, what strategy sees Apple winning over Android users? A privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen, a DEX style desktop mode, replaceable batteries? The current feature set, crash detection,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey satellite connectivity, Find My, et cetera, doesn't seem to be doing the trick, nor did the pre-neo $430
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone SE. What do you think, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Tech nerds who are listening to this episode and tech nerds in general who are interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in iOS versus Android or are always like, the feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that I love about Android is what iOS would need to add to win me over there. And the feature is always some nerdy,
⏹️ ▶️ John customizable thing that most Android users don't use. And so even though that's what they want,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, oh, some you know replaceable batteries or some feature like the privacy screen that's obscure or better configurability
⏹️ ▶️ John or the ability to customize this one thing that I care about. Those are advantages of Android.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it's why people who want that stick with Android. But it would be, I would not recommend Apple pursue
⏹️ ▶️ John that strategy to get Android people over because you all you would get is that tiny, tiny, tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John percentage of Android users who love that stuff. And honestly, you're never going to satisfy them because
⏹️ ▶️ John they want they always want more. Like they're the Android power users, right? But Android is
⏹️ ▶️ John huge and people, you know, half the world buys Android phones and it's not because of all those things that nerds
⏹️ ▶️ John care about. So really, I feel like is essentially they have to Neo it. They have to do what they did with the Neo, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, what's the barrier to entry? Number one, has got to be price. Make a, a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that is cheaper, but feels expensive. And Apple's been trying. And whatever, for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John reason, all their various SE phones and, you know, from from the five C on Apple has been trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, here's an iPhone. It feels like an iPhone. It looks like an iPhone. It's got the cachet of an iPhone. You're
⏹️ ▶️ John going to love it as much. Everyone who loves an iPhone loves it. But it's so much cheaper that
⏹️ ▶️ John it suddenly enters a price range that Apple wasn't really competing in before. Now, setting aside the price increases
⏹️ ▶️ John with the RAM and storage, Apocalypse and all the other stuff, the Neo really was their
⏹️ ▶️ John first revisiting of the strategy of, you know, maybe we could sell more Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John if we figured out what people who aren't buying Macs are complaining about. And the number one complaint
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm sure was Macs are too expensive. And they did it somehow, amazingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John without making a Mac that is crappy because the Neo is not crappy. That's proved hard on the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. The phone, I just, you know, I think the margins are actually probably higher on the phone, but for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John reason, they haven't figured out the right formula. Maybe they're afraid on the phone of like cannibalizing
⏹️ ▶️ John because they they make a really good one, they'll cannibalize the other phone sales. Because unlike the Mac where like people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John buying the more expensive Macs, like they might not be well served by a Neo. If you need
⏹️ ▶️ John a MacBook Pro, the Neo is probably not going to get you to Switch. Oh, it's so much cheaper. Yeah, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John it's it's significantly less powerful. And maybe, who knows? Maybe the Neo is cutting into their, the sales of
⏹️ ▶️ John what were previously the lowest price things like the MacBook Air and stuff. But we'll see what Apple has to say
⏹️ ▶️ John about that, which is probably nothing. And we probably won't be able to intuit from their sales. But still, that is a danger.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in the phone in particular, they just all look like little rectangles, right? That like Even more so on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, the RAM and storage and multiple CPUs and local AI, like
⏹️ ▶️ John there's just not a lot of room for variation in a device that's this small with, with the battery constraint
⏹️ ▶️ John to be what it is, whereas laptops at least can get bigger and thicker and desktops can go above that. So uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing they should continue
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Uh, But I think the, uh, the strategy is to do like literally what they did with the Neo
⏹️ ▶️ John and not do the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every Android nerd listening to ATP wishes they would do. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not saying that it's bad that Android people like that. I'm saying Apple will never satisfy them. And if they want
⏹️ ▶️ John a hundred percent of those customers, they would shift market share by like 1%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, if you look at why most Android
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users chose Android, it's almost always about price, especially as you, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, if you leave like the super rich countries like the US and you go other places, like it's even more about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the price. Um, But that's a huge part of it. Like there, there is no significant nerd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power user market that's choosing Android for for its nerd powers or features like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For Apple, that's not significant enough to be worth addressing at all. Those of you out there who are in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market and who are yelling right now, I don't say that there aren't any of you, but that's not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make a dent in Apple's numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even the form factor argument, which is always like, oh, but Android has this so much more variety. You can get them big and small and
⏹️ ▶️ John foldable and this and that. And it's like, if only Apple offered more variety. But like, I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ John secondary. Like you said, Marco, someone's going in. They're like, I don't want to pay a lot for this phone. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John now when I've decided this is my price range, oh, there's a big one and a small one and a folding one. that's nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if there wasn't a big one and a small one and a folding one, they wouldn't say, oh, now I'm going to look at Apple for twice the price. No, they would still, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John take whatever they could get. So it is nice that there's more variety. But first of all, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has been doing a great job of increasing the variety in the iPhone line recently. And they're going to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it again with a foldable one soon. So watch out for that. And maybe the 20th anniversary one. Like, not that they're, you know, one company
⏹️ ▶️ John is never going to give you all the diversity of the Android space. But for a long time, there was
⏹️ ▶️ John one iPhone and then there was a couple of them. They were all very similar, just different sizes. And they really have blossomed lately
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Air and even the Mini and the foldable one. And you know, like I think they're doing a pretty good job
⏹️ ▶️ John and they could extend that a little bit as long as they're making sure that they like, you know, when they didn't have a
⏹️ ▶️ John big phone, that was a problem. But I think they're covering a lot of those bases. But I do think the massive variety
⏹️ ▶️ John in Android only becomes a decision point after someone has already chosen Android because that's within their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even then, like when you look at what most people, like what most Android users are using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like, you know, a mid-sized phone, just like Apple's phones. Like it isn't the form factor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is that is making people choose it. It's almost always price. How would Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly address that, the low price market? And they I think they are addressing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it down to the level they are willing to address it. but Or
⏹️ ▶️ John able, because cameras are expensive, you know, like the screens are expensive. It's tough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Like when people talk about Android having, you know, worldwide, whatever it is, like 75% market, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the worldwide market share is, that's not a bunch of people using flagship, Samsung, and Google phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's a whole bunch of people using some very inexpensive phones with very inexpensive components
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are nowhere near the cutting edge of what the high-end stuff and pretty much every iPhone is offering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's a market that I don't think Apple wants to address because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compromises it would take to address it from Apple's point of view would be so vast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't think they're in it. I think Apple is very happy taking the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco percentage of profit in the cell phone industry that they do. Now, that was very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the Mac. The reason the MacBook Neo made so much sense in the Do is that Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share of the PC laptop market was way lower than their current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share of the smartphone market. And I think they must have seen that as something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, from Apple's point of view, the Neo is not very compromised. They really did a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they really kind of nailed like, what can we make for a significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower price than our other stuff that we can still feel proud of? And you look at the Neo, like, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. I don't think Apple could make anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be a Neo version of the iPhone that would be like half the price of iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, but still using new components. The Neo, the MacBook Neo, they really had that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opportunity because it was a totally different market. They had totally different trade-offs they could make that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save a huge amount of costs without making what they view as a crappy product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think to go back to the question of like, you know, how do you entice Android users?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John stole one of my answers, which was different form factors. You know, do you want a foldable phone? Well, you can't have a foldable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone, not yet anyway. The only other thing I can think of, which I will be the first to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, is extremely esoteric and nerdy, and I get that and I acknowledge it. But I was trying to think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about like, what would I, what did I covet in the past that Android could do that iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn't? And the only thing I could think of is that it is possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least last I heard, it is possible to have like a TSR in DOS speak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could have an app that has a component that still runs, even if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app isn't running. And iPhones and iOS has actually gotten much better about this over time. There's very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few use cases that I can think of that you can't make work with iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software today, with iOS software today, or apps today. But that's the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that I always thought, man, that would be cool. Now, the question you should ask me is, well, why would that be cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey? And I've got no good answer, but that's the only software trick that I can think of that I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android phones could do that iPhones can't. And I don't even know why that would be useful, but I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it would be useful. But that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are some amazing, fun capabilities that Android phones have that people love a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot that Apple is just not going to do. Like, you know, some of the ways that Google's integrating some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their AI features and everything, like the ways things like widgets work, like there are just some fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differences that people, that many people do just prefer on Android, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you're heavily into the Google ecosystem. Like there's a lot of good reasons for that. But Apple's never going to make those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of changes because that's just not what iOS is. It isn't how iOS works. It isn't Apple's style. It isn't iOS's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style. So they're never going to win over those people. But again, like those people, I don't think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has a chance of winning them over no matter what Apple does because that's that's not what those people are looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for. So instead, if Apple were to focus on growing the iPhone market significantly, it would basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entirely need to be about price. And again, we as talked about, I don't think i don't think they have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more room they could go down and and still have it be something that Apple wants to sell.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we can get to that. It's just because phones are still kind of cutting edge. like We're still in the phase where like everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John can essentially make their phones a little bit better every year, even if it's only just like slightly better screen technology, slightly better camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly better, uh
⏹️ ▶️ John uh battery life or whatever. um and And the CPU, obviously, and GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. So they're they're still like still like getting better like I think everyone, whatever the economic
⏹️ ▶️ John turn is like this, the phones haven't completely satisfied the market because everyone has complaints
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, my phone died. I wish everyone would love their their phone to be a little bit lighter, for the battery to last a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit longer, for the screen to be a little bit brighter, and for it never to be slow. we're not quite there yet. Whereas with laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially before the dawn of local AI, which most people are still at this point not really using,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does web browsing. You can run a spreadsheet. You can watch a movie on it. Everything is fine. And even the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life has gotten pretty amazing. So laptops are closer to satisfying. And as laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John approach that kind of like, well, we're starting to be able to satisfy most people's needs, it
⏹️ ▶️ John created this section of the curve where it's like, well, you can make a laptop with a phone chip
⏹️ ▶️ John and most people will find it extremely satisfactory. We might get there with phones with advances
⏹️ ▶️ John in technology and solid state batteries and so on and so forth. Or eventually the flagship phones are so good that you see this
⏹️ ▶️ John little section underneath. It's like, you know, we can make a phone for half the price that most people
⏹️ ▶️ John would find entirely satisfactory. We're just not there tech wise with phones because they are so miniaturized
⏹️ ▶️ John and so demanding and they're on the cell network and we use them all day. Like they they are
⏹️ ▶️ John not quite yet completely fulfilling all of our needs. We're still advancing on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's just a younger product, right? We couldn't make these kind of phones at all not too long ago, whereas the laptop has been around
⏹️ ▶️ John much longer. So watch for that. This is not a thing that is unchangeable forever. Maybe sometime
⏹️ ▶️ John in our lifetime, technology will exist to make a phone that is satisfying
⏹️ ▶️ John in the way that the Neo is satisfying for significantly less money. And when that happens,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably five years later, Apple will do it.
#askatp: Second Apple ID for development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All righty. and then finally for AskATP, In the past, you have mentioned that it is recommended that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey create a separate Apple account for doing development. My question is: how does one go about doing this? When I go to sign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up for a new account, I'm required to provide an email address and phone number. My phone is already linked to my existing Apple account,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it is not valid. I asked at the Apple Store and they didn't know. I hit up the Apple Support app, and it says it's Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey policy for every Apple account to be linked to a phone number for, quote, security and recoverability, quote. How does one go about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually creating a separate account apart from inventing a time machine to go back in time before you were required an associated phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number? I don't have any good answer for this. I genuinely am not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, let's revisit the premise here, which is creating a separate Apple account for doing development
⏹️ ▶️ John there. I think a lot of the reasons the particular people of our age and our circles do
⏹️ ▶️ John this is because we had the time machine, which is called Being Old, and we had Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John IDs a long time ago. A lot of us had Apple IDs that were not email addresses.
⏹️ ▶️ John My original Apple ID was not an email address. It was just a username with no at sign in it whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, Apple made us change all those to email addresses. But because we had that from way back in the
⏹️ ▶️ John day, later when the Apple ID system was becoming more advanced, you could create an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID with your phone number because you had whatever, your cell phone number, and your old Apple ID that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John didn't even have a phone number, maybe had your home phone number or something was like, it was just still there. So now you had two
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple IDs. And a lot of us in that situation with two Apple IDs made the decision that
⏹️ ▶️ John we're going to do development on one and the other one will be like our home thing or whatever. So then we, then it's kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, back solving and say, well, since I had two of them, I decided to use one for that or whatever. But setting that aside,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason someone might still want to do this today, in my opinion, and maybe you two have different opinions,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the account for your apps is so fraught
⏹️ ▶️ John because you never know what the heck Apple's going to do related to the App Store that you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John want to isolate the evil to, and I know Apple did all this stuff behind the scenes now to say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you think that's a separate app ID, but we know you're the same person using both of them. So this is not foolproof, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ John just one extra layer of defense where someday they wake up and decide your app
⏹️ ▶️ John is banned. And in fact, it's banned so hard that your whole Apple ID is banned. Then that won't
⏹️ ▶️ John destroy all your iTunes, the movies you bought on iTunes or whatever. like that Separating your personal from your business
⏹️ ▶️ John in general is a good practice. uh And that's why I still recommend to people that I say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not going to lie to you, it's going to be a hassle. Juggling two Apple IDs is a hassle, especially since Apple still does not
⏹️ ▶️ John let you log in with a passkey with the second Apple ID that you're not going to join your Mac. Please, somebody fix that. um it's
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be a hassle, but it having that separation is nice because I would never want
⏹️ ▶️ John like my family photo library, everything I've ever bought from Apple, all of my various
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud sync notes and stuff, my family plan, blah, blah, blah, that we're in a family, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Personal Apple ID. And then my apps, developer Apple ID. the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing the developer Apple ID does is log into App Store Connect and, you know, register for WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John and do all that stuff. Is that separation really saving me? Apple knows that I have both of these accounts. If
⏹️ ▶️ John they banned it and wanted to ban it so hard, they would probably ban my other one too. But I'm hoping that it provides a little bit of compartmentalization.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that's why I do it. That's my opinion on why a second Apple ID might be useful before we get into how you make one.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you guys think of that? Do you have two Apple IDs? Do you think it's a good idea?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there's a huge other reason to do it, which is if you have a company entity to
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that's right. Yes, Marco, come in with this one for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So if you are developing apps under your own personal name,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that's fine. But it's very commonplace in the U.S. at least. I don't know how other countries work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in the U.S., it's very commonplace for people to do their side businesses or main businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some kind of corporate entity, an LLC, an S corporation, an LLC being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taxed as an S corporation, like what, you know, something like that. This is how I've always done my businesses. They've always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been in LLCs. This makes a lot of things a lot easier. But if you have a company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you are developing the apps under and you want to be taxed through that LLC or whatever it is, you're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to need a company account, a company Apple ID, and a company developer account.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you ever intend to make any money from it, obviously talk to an accountant or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But having an LLC in the US is not that hard, not that expensive, and not that difficult for tax
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. So that's generally what many people do and what I recommend. But anyway, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that case, you can't use your personal Apple ID. You have to have a second Apple ID for the LLC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. That's why you would do it. As to what the people at the Apple Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple Support app said, they don't know. They're delightful. They mean well. They can't answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions like this. Like, this is not within their expertise.
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of esoteric, although before you go on, there's one point that I thought you were going to make that you didn't, which is, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what? If you ever want to sell one of your apps, Well… lot easier when it's confined
⏹️ ▶️ John to its own Apple ID with the whole, like, you've done this more than, you know, I've never done this at all, but I've heard you
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about it. Like, I think that makes that easier as well, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's a little bit outdated. Apple has over the years developed methods to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to transfer ownership of an app to a different developer account. When they first did it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a bunch of restrictions. Like if it had ever used iCloud, it couldn't do it. I believe that none of those restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still true. I believe…
⏹️ ▶️ John Not even the bundle one. If it's ever been used in a bundle, you can't do it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't know about that one. But over the years, they have made it more possible to move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps to a different developer account. That being said, you are right. It is easier to just buy the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account. But I think in most cases, most lawyers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you're buying a business, most lawyers don't buy the business entity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They buy the assets of the business entity. So like if I wanted to sell Overcast, no one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to come by and say, I'm going to buy Overcast Radio LLC from you. They're going to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm going to set up a new LLC and we're going to agree to transfer Overcast assets to that new LLC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the Apple ID an asset, though?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but the Apple ID is for that business entity.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but you can change what Apple ID is. Like I had a personal, I had a non-business Apple ID that I converted to a
⏹️ ▶️ John business Apple ID. Presumably I could convert it back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn't guarantee that. What I have heard is that the process of changing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the business entity or even the name of the business entity on an Apple ID is incredibly difficult to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple to actually do.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I went through it. It is difficult, but it is possible to do. it. maybe it only goes in one direction. I don't know
⏹️ ▶️ John because I only went from not business entity to business entity on my developer account. And that was incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John painful and dumb and took a really long time, but it did happen eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, I think the idea of like having it be separate so that people can buy your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app more easily, first of all, I think is a little optimistic for most people. But also, like, I think many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco acquisitions, if that does happen, many acquisitions don't work that way anyway because they'll want to make their own new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you hand off the Instapaper Apple ID or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I don't remember how we did that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn't buy the LLC. They set up their own new company and we transferred everything over. I don't remember what we did for the developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account, to be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you might have given them the Apple ID because I think that could have been before transfers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it probably was. And I don't think Instapaper used iCloud for anything. Um, so I might've been able
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe iCloud didn't exist then I don't remember back then. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John you were getting to for, for like, how do you register another one? I came into this problem as well. I think I
⏹️ ▶️ John complained about it on the show when I was like, I want to make an Apple ID for testing purposes. I know you can make sandbox
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple IDs a lot easier, but I like, I wanted to make a real Apple ID. It wasn't for like app testing purposes. I think this was me trying to like do Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10 testing or something. And I wanted to have other Apple IDs that I could do stuff with. And
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while, again, I think I complained about it on the show. I just literally could not create an Apple ID. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it just, I couldn't do it. I was getting errors or like it asked me for stuff that I didn't want. The phone number thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, they want a phone number for you. Like one of the answers in the old days was like, oh, get a Google voice number, but I don't think they're handing
⏹️ ▶️ John them out anymore. And I think Apple rejects Google voice numbers, like the basically like synthetic voice over IP voice
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers and things. Like Apple's requirements for what it takes to open an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John We call them an Apple ID. Sorry, they're called Apple accounts now. Apple's, you know, what does it take to open a new Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John account? And will it actually work on whatever system you're trying to do it on? Those answers change all the time. And to
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco's point, asking somebody, quote, at Apple about it, whether it is customer support or an AI
⏹️ ▶️ John chatbot or a person in a retail store, I wouldn't trust
⏹️ ▶️ John anything they say because it's not a part of the business they interact with frequently. Like they're just like, you know, oh, you're
⏹️ ▶️ John a new Mac user. You're going to set up your very first Apple. Sure, that'll work because you've got all the information available and you're just a person.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although, again, I couldn't even do it under that scenario back in the day. But if you're trying to open multiples,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I don't know. Get a burner phone, use your landline if you still have one. I think that's how I ended
⏹️ ▶️ John up doing things is I have landline number and a cell phone number. Like it's difficult, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. And if you do it the other order that I did it, don't do it the way I did it, which is come in
⏹️ ▶️ John with an Apple ID that is ancient and is not even an email address. And then just add a regular, quote unquote, regular Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John at me.com or no, itools.com or whatever the hell it was. And now I have two. Yay. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John start by creating a business entity thing. And if you create a business entity, I can tell you, if you're going to sell things to the app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John we all have to have a phone number associated with our business that is not our other number. Because if you want to sell in the EU, they demand
⏹️ ▶️ John a you know a phone number and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you probably don't want your
⏹️ ▶️ John home phone number posted on the app store in the EU. So it's kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like this whole sort of big windup of like, make an LLC, get a mailing
⏹️ ▶️ John address for the LLC that's not your home address, get a telephone number for the LLC that's not your home telephone
⏹️ ▶️ John number. And then once you've gathered all that and done all that stuff, then you should probably be able to sail through
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple account creation process because you're creating a business account from day one with business info.
⏹️ ▶️ John You've got your Duns number. You've got all your address and your phone number and you got everything ready to go.
⏹️ ▶️ John I've never actually done that, but I imagined it's got to be easier than what I ended up doing, which was having a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John old personal Apple ID and watching it evolve over the years until I eventually converted it into an LLC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And there's also like, if you want to have a phone number that you can use for your business, you don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to have like a whole separate cell phone plan. Like you could You could have like a cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VoIP plan, or you maybe you could get like some kind of like, you know, one of those like very low use emergency only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cell phone things.
⏹️ ▶️ John My phone number cost me nine dollars a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like you can do stuff like that. You know, you can get like, you know, PO boxes at a UPS store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't think Apple will let you do a PO box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, okay. Well, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I'm sure like
⏹️ ▶️ John when they were doing the EU thing, whatever it was, where everyone had to get an address, I think you're not allowed to use a PO box. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you do have to, like, again, there are companies that will do this for you if you pay them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Many times, though, like if you form an LLC through an accountant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um many times the accountant will let you use their office address as the LLC process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John address. Be careful
⏹️ ▶️ John with that, though. If they move or retire, it screws with stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco True. Yeah. But anyway, so there's, you have options, but that's that's generally like the way to do it. um
#atptangent: The state of Apple Stores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as for, I did want to very quickly go on a totally different tangent. Us? Us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love the Ternus era of Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reconsider the flow of the stores. The experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a modern Apple store is so crappy in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many ways. Because the stores are built with the structure and assumption
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a time that has long passed. That like, this will be a place that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will explore our products and talk to a genius and it'll be so nice. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stores basically are DMVs that look nicer now.
⏹️ ▶️ John DMV, you've got a number and you know where you are in line. That's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the Apple store functionally is the DMV now, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still seemingly in denial about that. And so they don't work as well as DMVs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. They don't work as well as the deli counter. Right. right. um and and yeah sorry for non-us people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's the Department of Motor Vehicles. It's the the offices here that you go to get your driver's license and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's RMV in the in Massachusetts, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, whatever it is. Yeah. So like Apple stores have tons of people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are fighting for appointments to get their broken phones fixed. Like that is the basic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most common thing people are there for is like, my phone broke or died. I need a new one or I need you to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or whatever. And you tell me it's going to be extraordinarily expensive and I didn't buy the iCloud storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn't buy the Apple Care and you're going to tell me how horrible that is and it's going to suck. Most people in the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store are sitting around looking sad about their broken phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting in queues that are not apparent to them that I think have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty high like forgetting rate. Like you get forgotten. Because everyone's just identified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the color of the shirt they're wearing. Another person comes in with a blue shirt and forget it. Right. Or it's like, oh, go go over there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to Sam. Who the heck is Sam? And oh, it's that person in blue shirt? Yeah, all seven of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, and and you go and it's like, and people, all the blue shirts are like standing around hovering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appearing to be doing nothing. And there's like two of them who are working their butts off. And it's like, it's a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really weird setup and system. And it's, it just seems like it is based in fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco denial about what they actually need to be today. Just in terms of sheer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume, like they need a lot more stores. They need a lot more capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for appointments. And genius appointments are also never served on time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they're always late. So you if you have an appointment at 12 30 you go at 12 30 you're gonna be there till 2. The whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system is straining under load. It seems like Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not maybe aware or acknowledging that. And the experience as a customer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I now dread having to go to the Apple store for something, unless I'm just buying something and picking it up real quick. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I have a service need, I dread going there. Not because the people are bad, because they're not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The people are very nice. And I've always had good experiences with like, once I actually get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person, it's always very pleasant and they're very good. But they don't have the capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they need. And the way they organize their traffic and manage their traffic is also terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the customer point of view. So I don't know how much they have to change here to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this significantly better, but what they have now has not scaled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well at all to its current level. And I and I hope, I hope at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this new era of leadership at Apple, I hope they think of addressing that somehow. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't know what that looks like. It could just be you need to order, you know, open a lot more stores. Um, But I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some basics like a cue that people can actually see and kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know where they are and know and and you know be able to figure it out more easily, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think would be a pretty big help.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we've been complaining about the lack of lines at Apple stores for so long now it's hard to believe it's going to change. But i want
#askatp: Second Apple ID for development
⏹️ ▶️ John To rewind quite slightly before that tangent, just to hear from Casey, do you have two Apple IDs or one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I have one that is my personal stuff, and I don't, I might've used that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one for fast text. It was so darn long ago, I think I did, but everything else is under a different Apple ID that's held by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my LLC, just like you described. I don't think it has an associated phone number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I think I made it long enough ago, like you were saying, that it didn't need one. But I echo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you two were saying, that it, if you were looking to make money from your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, and even if you're just looking to release your app, but especially if you're looking to make money, I can't recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough getting a completely separate Apple ID. Treat that as its own entity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Never the two shall meet, just like you would, at least in the United States, with like a business checking account versus a personal checking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account. You want very clear lines between the two just to make sure everything is clear as day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Definitely, if you're going to have an LLC in the US, give it its own bank account. It makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything so much easier because then it's like, what is business expense? Everything that was charged to this account. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's very, very simple. Very easy. Thanks to our sponsor this episode, Squarespace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP.fm slash join. One of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Overtime, we're going to be talking about some new rumors about the iPhone 18 family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming up. Didn't make it in the full show, so we're going to talk about it in overtime. You can join to listen, at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's KC-Liss, M-A-R-C-O,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann A-R-M, E-N-T, Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann U-S-A-S-I-RACUSA. It's accidental, accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann They didn't mean to accidental, accidental. Check
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long.
Packing for the beach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, you are sometime in the future going to be going to the beach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your annual beach trip. And I was curious because I was ribbing you earlier about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it shouldn't take you long to pack because you have so little space to pack into insofar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as your cars are tiny. And I was curious. Have you seen the trunk of an accord? It's not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tiny. Have you seen the back of Aaron's car?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Everything is small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compared to a bus. Right. Well, and then we put a Thule on top. Anyway, so when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go on a trip, John, and this does not necessarily mean the beach. So I was curious, like, when you pack for a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trip, say you're going to the Midwest to visit family, what do you pack? How do you pack? What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is your approach? And then I'm especially interested to hear what is your approach for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beach? And I think that the difference between you and I, I'm going to wager, is that we tend to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring a ton. And a great example of this, I think we've talked about this in the past, is that we bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our own beach chairs to the beach. And my understanding is you typically stay in the same house every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year and you know that they have beach chairs there. And so you don't bring beach chairs. And that, that in and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of itself is a ton of space. But I think there's a lot more to it than that. So when you go on a trip,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are you bringing? Are you bringing a Ubiquiti travel router, John? Are you bringing a Sonos Roam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I tend to do? What are you bringing when you go on a trip and especially a beach trip?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the additional context I will add comparing my packing to Casey's was I believe at
⏹️ ▶️ John one point Casey posted a picture of the back of his cavernous Volvo SUV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I just shared that with you privately. I don't think I posted it publicly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the stuff that was in there that we were looking at, beach chairs doesn't even begin
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco describe the category
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that was in the back of this car that I would never take on a trip with me. I don't remember
⏹️ ▶️ John the specifics. If you want to enumerate some of the things that our jaws were dropping about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, gosh. I'm trying to remember. I'm also trying to find the photo. Cause what we do is.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I, here's one of the things that I remember. I think you had like essentially uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John soda or whatever. Not just like one two liter bottle of soda or something, but like a case of
⏹️ ▶️ John soda from like Costco, like from like
⏹️ ▶️ John Yup. We're going to pack that and bring on the trip. Beach chairs, food. like, And we would look at this and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Casey, wherever you're going on vacation, you can buy soda. They have it there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there already. You can get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You do not need to, like, think about like the bulk and weight and potential danger
⏹️ ▶️ John of a case of soda as a choice to put in the back of your car to go on a trip. It's like on
⏹️ ▶️ John every axis of choosing things to pack in your car, it is like bad, wrong, no, don't
⏹️ ▶️ John do this, absolutely not. And he's got it in there. Just so much stuff. Now, look, you got a big
⏹️ ▶️ John car? Hey, you know, and you've got it, you've got a roof rack on top of the cavernous car and you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'll send you a picture of that in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you do you, because obviously you bought the giant car. At least you're using the giant car,
⏹️ ▶️ John even more so using the giant car. Because is your car three row? I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is, yes. All right. So you got, but you're putting down the third row when you go, I'm assuming. That's right, yes. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, it's huge and you've got the roof rack, which you could probably barely reach because the car is so big. You do you.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I'm not an SUV person. don't have one. I've never owned one. I just do sedans. The accord
⏹️ ▶️ John sedan is a quote-unquote full-size sedan and the trunk is big, but it's a sedan. The trunk is only
⏹️ ▶️ John big compared to the small to midsize SUVs that people think have a lot of room in them. But actually, when
⏹️ ▶️ John you open up the trunk, the back, the headrests are like two inches from the window glass because
⏹️ ▶️ John the entirety of that car has been taken up with space for the passengers and they have the little truncated
⏹️ ▶️ John back. And they're like, I've got a big SUV. I got a lot of storage space. Like, no, you don't. My accord's trunk is bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, when I pack, this is a thing that I'm sure Marco is
⏹️ ▶️ John already starting to realize, in case he will realize soon if he hasn't already. If you have children,
⏹️ ▶️ John as they get older, the amount of stuff you have to pack decreases. Yes. You would think it
⏹️ ▶️ John would increase. Like, oh, they're getting bigger. Aren't their clothes bigger? All these big teenage boy jeans are taking up all this room. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John babies, their crap takes up so much room. And then toddlers, it shrinks a little bit because you don't need so much stuff for
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And it shrinks and it shrinks. So now that both of my children are essentially adults, although sometimes I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about that, and sometimes they do as well, they actually have less stuff. But still,
⏹️ ▶️ John we've had these accords, which actually have grown a little bit over the life of the kids. We've gone on trips in
⏹️ ▶️ John civics, back when we just had a civic, where we eventually got accords. We'd go on family trips and we would find a way to wedge
⏹️ ▶️ John all that crap in there. And also when we just had one kid, it was easier than packing for two kids. And anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it all worked out. We always fit everything in. No roof racks, no nothing. It just all goes in the trunk. But what that means
⏹️ ▶️ John is no beach chairs. One beach chair would make it so we can't pack. One. Like, cause that's
⏹️ ▶️ John not, cause it's just, it is a poor choice for packing. It is not dense. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, incompressible in various dimensions that are bad for packing in the trunk of a sedan.
⏹️ ▶️ John So no beach chairs. We do bring a beach umbrella. Um, And just because they don't have
⏹️ ▶️ John them where we are, we always bring them and they're sticks and they can mostly fit in. So it's not too bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let me stop you right there. Just very, very briefly. I'm genuinely curious about this. So if you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go to a different beach house, which I know you would not do by choice, but like let's say the owners of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this beach house decide they're not going to rent it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John We've been to different beach houses over the years. It's not always been the same one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So how do you know if you need to bring a chair? I'm genuinely asking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when you rent a beach house, usually they'll tell you like whatever amenities they have. Like sometimes they have bicycles you can use
⏹️ ▶️ John and they'll say if they have beach chairs or whatever. And so yeah, like we just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what you're walking into. And if they don't say anything one way or the other, guess what? You can buy beach chairs when you're there.
⏹️ ▶️ John often you can just leave them at the house. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey come back the next year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too, uh I was going to say cheap, but let's go with frugal to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John that's, this is the ultimate cheapness because it's like, well, think of the other thing, Casey. I don't know if you've run into this. If you really, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you rent a house, especially a beach house, but any kind of house, I would imagine. And this is like, we were doing this days before Airbnb
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. um When you go there, if it's like a house house and you plan on cooking in the kitchen,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we do, because again, see, like we're not going to go out to restaurants all the time. It's like a kind of trying to keep it as low
⏹️ ▶️ John budget as possible family vacation. You know, every single pot and pan in that place is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be garbage. You know, every knife is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so dull that
⏹️ ▶️ John you could not cut anything with it. It's just like a safety knife for a child. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John what do we end up doing? We go to the store, we buy a cheap pancake pan, a cheap
⏹️ ▶️ John knife from the supermarket that is a thousand times sharper than any other knife in the house. And we put it in
⏹️ ▶️ John a particular drawer and we just leave it there. And guess what? When we come back next year, it's still there and it's still better than
⏹️ ▶️ John all the other knives. And if it's not, go buy another $12 knife from the supermarket. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they have things there. So yeah, we will, you know, what are you going to do if there was no
⏹️ ▶️ John beach chairs? We would go to the store and buy a beach. Like we're going to beach places. They sell beach chairs, right? But we've
⏹️ ▶️ John never had to do that. We've had to had to buy utensils and pans sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John We've never had to buy beach chairs. Umbrellas just don't seem to be applied. So we bring ours with us. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff we have fits into the trunk of our car for four people for a week's vacation at the beach.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does involve a beach umbrella and sometimes an inflatable air mattress if we're really trying to, you know, pack
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of kids into houses. Although these days, as the kids all become adults, no one wants to sleep on air mattresses. So we bring them
⏹️ ▶️ John less. It's just clothes, you know, the stuff you want to bring with you, toiletries.
⏹️ ▶️ John My family apparently finds every pillow in the entire universe unsatisfactory,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don't bring a pillow because I don't have room for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, to be clear, Casey, these pictures you just sent include such items as a watermelon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You're hauling you're hauling a watermelon. Fans? Like, you you know, you can go to a grocery store when you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. But now you can't get this watermelon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you can't get a Costco watermelon, which is like one-third the cost of the one at the grocery store.
⏹️ ▶️ John i see I see cans of Pringles. I see a roll of paper towels. I see multiple fans. I
⏹️ ▶️ John see a LaCroix, a case of LaCroix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A huge case of bottled water bottles. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? So So the thing I'm understanding better, and we've had a little bit of this conversation in years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past, I'm understanding better that I'm not saying I'm right. Let me just make it plain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right now. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not saying I'm right. But the approach that Aaron and I take is that the only thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we buy or things that we buy when we get there are things that are particularly challenging to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transport. So typically we'll go to the beach. No, hear me out. Watermelons?
⏹️ ▶️ John It's so perfect so easy to transport.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, well, it is easy to transport. It's just there. But like milk and OJ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and eggs and things like that, that we're not going to bring from home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But you would Basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything else we bring.
⏹️ ▶️ John if you Just wait until you find a refrigerated compartment. You're like, we're bringing the milk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We would if we had a refrigerated compartment. And truth be told, we do bring a cooler with some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things in it, but I will always go to the store and get like milk, OJ, eggs, you know, some of those sorts of things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yogurts, whatever. But basically everything else we bring. You know, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever like beach drinks that we have, bottled water, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 100% understand. You're exactly right. We could buy that at the beach, but it's like eight times the cost of what it is at
⏹️ ▶️ John Costco. Child-sized shovels complete with solid wooden handles. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rolls of toilet paper and paper towels and another fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because you want the noise from the fan
⏹️ ▶️ John fan for each person. Yeah, but the pillow thing with my family, we have a four-person family and three of the people in
⏹️ ▶️ John that four person family insist on bringing their own pillows. Sometimes they want to bring two pillows.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so it's a bit excessive.
⏹️ ▶️ John the good thing about the pillows, well, the good thing used to be about the pillows is like, look, they're the last thing that goes in. And guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what? You can squish them into pretty much any spot because they're
⏹️ ▶️ John But then but then some of them got on the memory foam pillow kick and those are much more dense and it's harder to get those into the spots where
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to wedge them. But anyway, I tolerate the pillow thing, especially since worst case, you can say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you really want the pillow? That's on your lap for the whole drive because there's no other place for it. And it's not so bad to have a pillow
⏹️ ▶️ John on your lap, but it does make you hotter. And I can't convince them not to bring I don't bring any pillows. I just use whatever pillows they have there
⏹️ ▶️ John and somehow I survive, but they all have to bring their pillows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am extremely picky about pillows. I think we've also talked about this in the past. I tend to sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my arm under the pillow. So, you know, it's like mattress, arm, pillow, head. And because of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like a just paper thin pillow. It's absurd how thin I would prefer my pillows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be. But you know what? For that week, I just steal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, enjoy your rotator
⏹️ ▶️ John cuff problem later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I'm sure you're right. I have no doubt.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have those beds that I always see those like fake Instagram ads for where it has like a place to tuck your arm. You ever
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey those? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do notice that you're apparently only bringing two chairs. That will change too, because eventually your kids will be like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John why do mom and dad get chairs and we don't?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. We do have four chairs. I don't think they were pictured. You're right. But we do eventually end up with four chairs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in here. You can bring a whole living room set.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? The thought technology we had for this year was they were selling at Costco. Costco is our jam.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They were selling at Costco these Instacrate things, not a sponsor or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like that. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you can fold these to almost nothing when you're not using them, and then they become a fairly stable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crate when you do need them. So like I put all of my technology into one of those crates. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brought, although we always bring and almost never use, the Switch to the base,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four Pro controllers. We have an Apple TV, which we do use all the time. Um, We have, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else do I have in there? A power strip.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there a Sonos setup hiding in there?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There are two Sonos's.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John There's Sonos Move,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is big, and a Sonos Roam, which is small.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Cause again,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, uh, like, uh, Casey being the the guy from Ponyo has got to spritz the water in front of him. He needs music wherever
⏹️ ▶️ John he goes. Otherwise, he dries out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We're going to have to do that for Remember Special. Otherwise, I'm never going to watch that movie. But um, anyways, we, we bring like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paper plates. And the reason we bring paper towels is because we get them cheap at home. And it just kills me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to spend 5x what I would have spent at home to get all these things we could just as easily bring because we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't have a little baby car. And I'm saying that actually not to insult you. I genuinely mean that because, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said earlier, because we have the space, as with attics, as with homes, we fill up the space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because why not? And then in the Thule, which is the roof racky thing, I'm probably pronouncing it incorrectly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have like the the all the beach stuff, one of the fans, one of the rolls of paper towels,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera, et cetera. So I was just curious. So it sounds to me like, and I'm not snarking at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the exception of the beach umbrella and the pillows, basically the only thing you're bringing is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clothes and very little else. Is that fair to say?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, so tech-wise, just to touch on that, I don't have a travel router. I don't do
⏹️ ▶️ John all that crap, although the house we're at doesn't have great internet, but it's gotten better over the years. But
⏹️ ▶️ John been bringing the Apple TV for many years. Whatever my lowest ranked demoted
⏹️ ▶️ John I bring it because I take lots of pictures and I want to show them, you know, even just
⏹️ ▶️ John to just use it to airplay to the TV, to show the pictures I've
⏹️ ▶️ John on the world's crappiest TV with terrible contrast where none of my colors look right. Every year I go there and hoping this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the year they'll have got a new, their TV is so old. It pains me so much. I do always make sure the motion smoothing
⏹️ ▶️ John is turned back off, but like this TV is so old and terrible. This, please let this be the year that they fix their TV. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's why it doesn't have airplay built in, which a lot of the modern ones do. And also when the kids were little, it's, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John pick up, you can put their shows on that. Even for the adults, sometimes if there's some series like, oh, you got to watch this
⏹️ ▶️ John new show, Stranger Things. I've never heard of it. Oh, good. Apple TV is here. I can go to my Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John and I'll show it to you. You can watch the first episode, get you addicted. So when you go back home, you watch, you know, that type of thing. That's the
⏹️ ▶️ John only real tech we bring. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, Casey would like strap a 65-inch TV to the roof of his car to bring
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. Why not? He's got the roof. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I 100% would if I could.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Didn't you say, John, one I think it was like last year, the year before, didn't you say that you were like on the precipice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of buying a new TV for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John place, if I remember i just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it would be so cheap and it would just be so much. but It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, just do it. Just, they're so cheap. You can buy a $300 Walmart TV would be better than this thing. Please, just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's terrible. um Occasionally other people bring stuff like my brother has brought his Quest
⏹️ ▶️ John headset, which is the only reason I got to try that. So the whole family tried that out. This is before the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, there's not a lot of technology going. It's mostly just everybody and their stuff. But of course, every individual person in our family
⏹️ ▶️ John has, because we're all adults now, their iPhone, their iPad, their laptop, all their chargers and their cables.
⏹️ ▶️ John all, you know, That's just like your personal technology stuff. That's But that's in their stuff. Every person has a personal
⏹️ ▶️ John bag. So every kid has their personal backpack, which used to be a cute little kid backpack, but now is a gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John one. You know, so that's And since I'm driving the car, I don't have my backpack with me and my backpack goes
⏹️ ▶️ John in between the two kids in the seats because
⏹️ ▶️ John can't put it at my feet like they do. But yeah, it's mostly just you know, clothes and
⏹️ ▶️ John sunscreen and you know, hairbrushes and toiletries and all that other stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we do bring towels with us, even though the houses offer towels. We like to have our own and we do bring like a beach blanket. But here's
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing, looking at the back of your packing your giant cavernous car and your roof rack and everything, the tip I
⏹️ ▶️ John will give, if you do not have a gigantic car like this, because I'm looking at what you're putting in your back here,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would never choose the things, the containers that you have put your belongings in to go,
⏹️ ▶️ John including the Instacart thing. And I'll tell you, if you're out there and you do not have a giant box-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John cargo place in your huge SUV, soft containers, no carry-on
⏹️ ▶️ John luggage, no away. I love away luggage. I have a bunch of it. They were sponsored to the show way back in the day, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I honestly like their stuff. No luggage. Nothing rectilinear. Nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John hard and rectangular because the way you get the most out of the cargo space in a thing that is not essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John a cargo van is squishy stuff. Duffel
⏹️ ▶️ John Squishy things. And yes, the packing cubes, use the packing cubes, but then put the packing cubes into duffel
⏹️ ▶️ John bags because you'd be surprised how how much you can squish a duffel bag and another duffel bag next
⏹️ ▶️ John to it and get things in and then the pillows that all the kids want wedged on top in that weird uneven space
⏹️ ▶️ John in the top of the trunk of a sedan where there's like, oh, nothing will fit there. Pillows will fit
⏹️ ▶️ John And at the very end, you put the hats on top because the hats you don't want to squish. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ John pro tip, when you're going on the ferry, the bag that has your lunch in it, it's got to be easily
⏹️ ▶️ John accessible at the very, very edge of the trunk. So you can just open that trunk, yank out the bag, and go up and test it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you yank out the lunch bag for the ferry and every other thing in the trunk expands to fill that
⏹️ ▶️ John space immediately, you failed. Reset. You need
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann to have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann that you can take the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing out and put it back in when you're done. Yeah, my trunk is
⏹️ ▶️ John packed. I always do pack it because, like Casey said, you fill the space that you have. And I've developed strategies over
⏹️ ▶️ John the years. We'll see how we go this year. We might have a couple of challenges because
⏹️ ▶️ John people want to bring more stuff. But, you know, I'm always fighting back against that. It's like, we don't need that much
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. We just need what we know we're going to use when we're there. And if we find out we don't have something,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can always go buy it. And the place we're going is not like a beach town or like a tourist
⏹️ ▶️ John trap type of thing. It's actually one of the less tourist trappy areas on the east end of Long
⏹️ ▶️ John Island, if there can be said to be such a thing. So it's not like going to Bermuda or something where
⏹️ ▶️ John everything costs astronomical prices. We can just go to a plain old stop and shop and it's just the same
⏹️ ▶️ John prices in the stop and shop everywhere and it's fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that's the thing. Like, like, what do you like? How much are you buying such that a grocery store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn't be fine, like price-wise? Like I know Costco is cheaper, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco U.S. grocery stores are pretty inexpensive still.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if you're in a tourist trapped-y town, I mean, you live in one market, like your grocery stores are not cheap because
⏹️ ▶️ John guess what? You're trapped on this little island and you're going to pay our prices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that's because you can't drive to one here. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think like vacation towns where it's like, hey, everyone who's in this town is on vacation
⏹️ ▶️ John here, the little local market is going to be expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, but it's again, like when you have a car and regular road, you can just drive 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes to the nearest regular grocery store.
⏹️ ▶️ John think it might be more than 15. How close is the closest regular grocery store to you when you go on these trips?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Usually 10 to 15 minutes. It's not that burdensome.
⏹️ ▶️ John then you have no excuse then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. No, no, no. I don't.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think ultimately, like, you know, you mentioned a couple of times, like you fill the space you have. Like, I've now owned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of different sized vehicles, you know, from the BMW 3 Series, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the smallest, to the Rivian, which is the largest. I have found when I take my large trips, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially like, you know, going upstate for Christmas or whatever, like when I take my large trips, I fill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them up no matter how big or small they are. When I've had a smaller vehicle, we fill it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the gills and we somehow fit it all in. When I have a big vehicle that I think this will be so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much easier at Christmas, Christmas comes, I fill it to the gills and I'm like, I can't believe I filled this giant new vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And I've been thinking about this recently as I am thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whenever this lease is up for my IX, I'm planning on going with a smaller vehicle next time. And one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the thoughts I've had has been like, can I go down to a smaller vehicle? Like, is that going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make family trips difficult or whatever? And and I just have to keep reminding myself, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, it'll be fine. I've had smaller vehicles. It was fine. I'll bring less stuff because I'll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to bring less stuff and it will be fine. And I think here, like, as much as we make fun of you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, like you are filling the space you have. uh And if you ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to have less space or chose to have less space, you would fill that too. And it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I think having a roof box is ridiculous to add to
⏹️ ▶️ John this. You couldn't bring a case of bottled water. Did we get the count on that? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John when we say case of bottled water, I'm not sure we're giving you the right idea. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
⏹️ ▶️ John eight times maybe 40 bottles of water in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, we used most of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, I'm sure you do.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we're going to say a Costco Kirkland bottled water, 40 bottles. Pack it in the trunk. And there's soda.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see the Diet Cokes hanging out on the left side of that, just leaning over there?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Shoved in there. And another
⏹️ ▶️ John Coke wedged over the watermelon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has to keep the watermelon from rolling. No, that was something different over the watermelon. I forget what that was. But
⏹️ ▶️ John any fizzy drink that could possibly leak and or explode, sure, throw it in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I mean, these beaches are direct shot for us. One of them is like through the Cape Charles is like three hours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other one we go to is like five or six hours. There's no turns along the way? What I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John mean by that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it's not like we're leaving the car for hours on end on a ferry or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. Well, I don't trust any carbonated sugary drink
⏹️ ▶️ John in the trunk of a car. But, you know, so far it's worked out for you. So far. And I do think,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, you'll always fill the space. I would have real difficulty filling Casey's car without the roof rack because I just don't think
⏹️ ▶️ John we have that much stuff that we want to bring to the beach. Like I said, the beach specific stuff is like sunscreen, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is small. I'm bringing Marco's Japanese sunscreen this time to try it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And uh, some, you know, a beach blanket, a towel, a towels, umbrella.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, You know, that's just, there's not, there's not much stuff. Like we're not bringing a volleyball court. I got a
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey would probably pack that like So I think, honestly, if we went on a regular beach vacation with your car, Casey, we would have
⏹️ ▶️ John real trouble filling it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's fair. Do you, what is your, or let me rephrase, you said an umbrella is your shade of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choice at the beach. Does Long Island, has Long Island gotten into the shibumi thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you familiar with this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not recognize the name, brand, but I can tell you the variety of things that people have had on beaches
⏹️ ▶️ John to give them shelter from the sun and wind is very high. There's lots
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of different
⏹️ ▶️ John things that exist, including some things that other people in my extended family bring with them. I've never been into them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I know they exist. Various balloony, windbreakery, hut type
⏹️ ▶️ John things. What is a shibumi?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a shibumi, the idea is let the wind work for you, not against you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what it is, it's basically a giant piece of like, um, what's the material that like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a parachute or like or something like that would be made out of?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. And uh, what it is, is it's you put like a tent style
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like collapsible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the front of it and then it connects to a bag or the carrying case becomes a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bag that you fill with sand and you put that in the front. And so you aim it into the wind such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it's trying to blow away from the bag of sand that's in front of it. But the combination of the bag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sand and all the wind gives you a pretty giant shade that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sit under. And what's really great about it is this thing when it's collapsed is very small and weighs nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is, this was, I'd seen these for years at Cape Charles and I always thought like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this seems like it's got to be a gimmick. And then I would see more of them and more of them and more of them. And then when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we went to Sunset Beach last year with our friends here in town, they got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. And so I finally got to like try it out and put it up and take it down with them. And I was like, oh my God, this is the best thing I've
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever seen. And they're not cheap. And I'm sure there's knockoffs that maybe are just as good. But Shibumi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are incredible if you're a beach person. We'll put a link in the show notes. These things, for my money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is incredible. And I cannot imagine going to the beach without it now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's funny. I would expect to have seen a lot of these because we can see the beach from like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upstairs here. And so, and one of the great fun things to watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is like sitting at breakfast with coffee in the morning on the deck, looking out and seeing all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dads setting up these ridiculous contraptions like for the morning, like trying to stake out a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spot, you know, eight in the morning on the beach. And you see, you see all the dads setting up their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. You know, the lifeguards are out digging up their stuff. And then like, there's like four or five dads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking like they are living for this moment all year long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann they get to play with all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their gear and setting stuff up and staking out the great spot. And so I see a pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco variety of shade contraptions. I have not seen these.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm very surprised. They started in. I'm not surprised because the reason I was giving these a thumbs down is
⏹️ ▶️ John I just don't think Long Island beaches have the consistent wind to make these viable.
⏹️ ▶️ John it fluctuates too much directionally. Like even if it's steady at speed is steady,
⏹️ ▶️ John the direction fluctuation is enough to make this troublesome. I've seen these on the beach. I've seen people
⏹️ ▶️ John have them and I've seen the failure case, which is like, well, you want it to always be sort of stable and rippling in that
⏹️ ▶️ John position. But like, first of all, stable and rippling in the position directed to the wind like a weather vane
⏹️ ▶️ John would be, assuming the wind doesn't change direction, which I think it does frequently and assuming it is steady,
⏹️ ▶️ John also sometimes means the shade is in a weird place. So then you start doing the thing where everyone does a skutching as
⏹️ ▶️ John the sun changes through the day. because if you're spending the whole day at the beach, you're skutching and you're following the shade around. Whereas if you do one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the other systems, including umbrellas, you can adjust the umbrella and you don't have to move your seats. So that is handy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the second is the flappy thing. Like if the wind dies or changes direction or it goes in
⏹️ ▶️ John a weird direction or a gull comes down and starts attacking you and stuff, it's just, I just don't feel this is well supported
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. The technology of very light material and then a bag that it comes in that you fill with sand is well worn. And there's
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of sort of various little tent cave hut things that are like
⏹️ ▶️ John this that are a little bit more reliable. I think this has the wow factor, but i i wouldn't I wouldn't put
⏹️ ▶️ John my stake on this for a long island beaches specifically. Maybe it works better in things with steadier wind
⏹️ ▶️ John and constant wind direction for people who are not going to be on the beach all day long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, what what we see the most of here is whatever like Tommy Bahama
⏹️ ▶️ Marco umbrella Costco is selling this year. Like that that's number one like number one most common.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can always tell like, oh yeah, that's, you can see like there's like one or two old ones that's, oh, that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last year's design. But for the most part, the vast majority of people have whatever Costco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco umbrella is this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I, think if you've seen the picture? Maybe I posted on my Instagram of like, it might have actually even been Fire Island
⏹️ ▶️ John Beach of just like the beach from the distance. And it just looks like a bunch of umbrellas live there. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John walk across the tops of the umbrellas, especially when you're back in a distance and all the umbrellas are like foreshortened into a single
⏹️ ▶️ John line. And it's just so colorful and pretty. And yeah, like you said, like whatever the colors were the years they bought them.
⏹️ ▶️ John know if people buying them like immediately that year because we are beach umbrellas we've been using for decades now. So sometimes you
⏹️ ▶️ John get some really old designs in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they just don't last very long is the problem. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still going strong. I guess they don't make them like they used to. Well, that's definitely true. But yeah, so you see a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of Tommy Bahama Costco umbrellas. And then every day there is usually like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three of those giant tent things that somebody has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes the or the ones that are like triangles where it's like like you have like two up front and then they just kind of just slants down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the, like down to the sand.
⏹️ ▶️ John like a lean to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco looking thing. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there's a lot of those. And those are the ones that that the 8am dads are usually trying to set up is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that like it's way too big. Like our beach isn't that big here. And people bring these tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things and not realizing like, all right, you know, in, in two hours, the tide is going to be under that
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, hopefully the umbrella line makes it so they can't set up anything that close to it. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me, to go back just a half step, you had said what happens if there is no wind. Let me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey introduce you to the incredible thought technology or really just technology technology that is the Shibumi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wind Assist TM, which is two smaller bags
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clips on them. And you fill the smaller bags with sand and clip them to the other end of the Shibumi.
⏹️ ▶️ John So other families' kids can trip over that line and yell at you and take down your thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's right. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because really, like anything that has a line going out to either a stake or a sandbag extending that far
⏹️ ▶️ John from the place that you staked out on a crowded beach on a weekend on Long Island, the kids are going to trip over that and it's going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. I just, I'm not a Shibumi fan. I'm not convinced. I'll see if they become more prevalent.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in my experience, I've seen a couple of them and I thought they were novel, but I don't see a lot of them. So I'm like, oh, that
⏹️ ▶️ John must have died. But, you know, maybe their marketing is going to bring them back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Especially if you look at like the amount of surface like area that you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking up versus the amount of shade that is created. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made for very large beaches that are not very crowded. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we're way too crowded here on our small beach here. So like here, an umbrella is about as large as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people want to be. Because if you're setting up this kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if you get there in the morning and can stake this out, people will hate you. You're taking up too much space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You're taking up tons of room to create a very small square of shade,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, um for you know two people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that you can only walk into most easily through the one big aperture defined by the arc. Because if you try
⏹️ ▶️ John to walk into it from the sides, you're ducking down and it's messing up and it doesn't really want you to walk into it from the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's just it's just not a great idea. Not a fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I think that's because you are on crippled beaches that that are too small.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mean the best beaches in the world? Those beaches?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, wow. Of course, John. Of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I've forgotten that there's nowhere that counts in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire world except Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think the best beaches in the world are Long Island's beaches? You know, I haven't been to all the beaches in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I have been to Bermuda, which everyone bragged about. And I said, you know what? I'd prefer to be on Long Island Beach. Bermuda
⏹️ ▶️ John beaches are nice, but the water is too warm. The sand is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John The water is too warm. I said it. It feels like a bathtub.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get in an argument with you, so I'm just going to plow forward. But I will say…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that… Look, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love Long Island. I love Long Island beaches. I love Fire Island even more, but to call these the
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely do. I totally believe it. They are my favorite beaches in the whole world. I think they're some of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey best beaches. But that's different.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also think they're some of the best beaches. Marco is not really a beach person, as we have established.
⏹️ ▶️ John He lives near the beach, but he's not so much a fan of being on the beach and swimming in the water. Yeah, but because our
⏹️ ▶️ John beach isn't actually that great to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swim in, if I'm honest. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are. Like when you go to the Caribbean, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they are really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John understand. I understand. Maybe Hawaii would convince me. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco haven't been to Hawaii. Hawaii was also really nice. They could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compete. Very nice beaches in Hawaii.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Have you been to
⏹️ ▶️ John No. You should. They have very nice beaches, but I prefer Long Island beaches. And I actually think the Long Island beaches are
⏹️ ▶️ John better. On what metrics? I have to know. Besides the water being colder.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they're more pretty. I think they're more fun to be at. I think they're more fun to sit on the sand all day
⏹️ ▶️ John and go in the water and come back out and have a nice lunch and play like because the Bermuda
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco beach is the one. The water
⏹️ ▶️ John is not refreshing. When you're hot and you want to go in the water to cool off and the water is 85 degrees, it sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? And the beach sand being so fine and pink is
⏹️ ▶️ John but it's not as good to play beach volleyball on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One day, one day before you die, which hopefully is not for a long time, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear you acknowledge that cars other than Hondas exist and are good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And Ferris and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And Porsches. I like them too. I also like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like a lot of cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The cars are
⏹️ ▶️ John not a problem. And honestly, one of the things, like I didn't think about this when I moved here, but Cape Cod beaches
⏹️ ▶️ John actually are the closest I found to Long Island beaches in terms of me liking the
⏹️ ▶️ John aspects of them. The Cape Cod beaches, I think, are not as nice, but they're really close because it is similar. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can't with you, John. Oh, my God. All right. Everyone wants their beaches with the palm trees, but not me.