691: A Menlo Phase
14 May 2026Apple’s chip-fab options, branding the 20th-anniversary iPhone, Terminal and Xcode preferences, and some very special filenames.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- CapEx vs. OpEx (via Andrew Leahey)
- “Hot lot” (via Anonymous & Matt Jones)
- Ultra/Neo/etc
- Is the “iPhone Ultra” the 20th anniversary iPhone? (via Janne Ojaniemi)
- Did we forget about “Studio”? (via Karan J)
- What’s the ∆ between an iMac Neo and a Studio Display? (via Zoran Nešić)
- Time Machine
- Apple agrees to pay iPhone owners $250M for fumbling AI Siri
- Apple is flirting with Intel and Samsung
- Ask ATP:
- How do we actually move files around our Macs? (via Brandon Whichard)
- Do we use a profile/theme for Terminal windows? (via Chris Harper)
- Do we use any other IDEs? (also via Chris Harper)
- Post-show:
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Chapters
- Goose homework
- Follow-up: CapEx/OpEx
- What’s a hot lot?
- iPhone Ultra: 20th Anniversary?
- Studio and Neo branding
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Time Machine follow-up
- Sponsor: Zapier
- Apple Intelligence class-action
- Apple’s fab options
- Sponsor: Quince
- #askatp: Moving files on Macs
- #askatp: Terminal themes
- #askatp: IDEs other than Xcode?
- Ending theme
- Special filenames in macOS
Goose homework
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to tell you that I’m upset at the two of you. And the reason I’m upset at the two of you is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I am finally getting around to reading Project Hail Mary. And I can’t put it down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so freaking good. No spoilers, please, anyone. But, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, so this was the impetus was that Erin decided that she would like to read the book before we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watched the movie. And then I was like, no, she’s probably got the right answer there. So I started to read the book a little bit behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her, and she’s a much faster reader than I am. Uh, so I am reading it. it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit less than halfway through, I’d say, and it is, this book is a sniper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attack complimentary on my wife, because it is all like biology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and science. I’m not going to get any more specific than that, but she is freaking riveted. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey riveted. And so I’m a little upset at you two that I’m having to spend my time with some of my best friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead of reading my book.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sorry. I will say I did see the movie and without spoiling anything, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought it was excellent. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey really, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally what I’ve heard.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. I saw the movie too. It was rare. Marco and I both went to see a movie in a theater. That’s wild,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that is true. Wow. And I did not. Wow. What a slacker
⏹️ ▶️ John saw in a theater was F1 to give you an idea of how little I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theater these days. Oh, wow. I’m really slacking. Man, I have problems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over at my household. Goodness. Well, that’s right. Uh, the other pre-show I wanted to do is I asked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John to do a little bit of homework and in Marco’s defense, I did not explicitly say to Marco one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way or the other whether or not he was expected to do the same homework, and so he didn’t, which is fine. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Marc, but John… I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can barely do the homework that is assigned to me, let alone homework that is not. By the way, before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we continue, sorry, John and Merlin on the last episode of Reconcilable Differences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did, in the member-exclusive bonus content, did an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco segment on homework.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Mm, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can like I found it incredibly therapeutic and and incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good because homework when I was going through school was just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the largest source of profound emotional damage that I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of what I talk about in therapy today is related to that and so to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this discussion of homework and how Kind of you know the downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of our homework culture and how? Ineffective it can be and how damaging it can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found quite therapeutic and quite interesting so thank you John and Merlin remotely from from talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for talking about that so well and May I join whatever efforts possible to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abolish homework? Yeah?
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going through it with your kids So like you see you can see how it
⏹️ ▶️ John changed and how it has not changed since your experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s not actually it’s not as bad as it was like when we were in school. Like it’s it there’s less of it now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know my my biggest problem was always that like as soon as I was not in school
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just never think about it and or I you know things would be assigned to me in class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the teacher just like saying something once or writing something in the corner of the board and as soon as I’m out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that classroom it’s gone and so if I didn’t see it or write it down I would never know about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know now they can just log into their chromebooks and log into their whatever classroom and see all the assignments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that they need to do. So there is no such thing as like I don’t know what I have to do for homework
⏹️ ▶️ John tonight. Did you find that to be the case? Because I heard that for my kids a lot even though yes you’re right they could have
⏹️ ▶️ John just logged on and checked but I mean it’s just didn’t go away just got less plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah it isn’t a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system but and and there is certainly some fame surprise but it is way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now than it was when we were in school like it’s It’s way more forgiving. And now most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my kids’ teachers, not all, but most of them will accept late made-up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco homework before the end of the quarter. Which that was not, like when I was in school,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you didn’t have it when it was due, zero. That’s it, just a zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like John was saying in that episode, no matter how well I did on the tests or anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the homework was like half of my grade. So I would get 100% on all the tests and get 0% on all the homework for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get Cs. It was rough. Anyway, thanks, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So sorry, Casey, go on with your homework assignment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No, no, not at all, not at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I plus one everything you just said. Homework stank, it still stinks, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wish we didn’t have it. So I asked John to do a little bit of homework, which, again, my memory’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey garbage, and I guess maybe I had sent you this homework as like a, not as homework,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but as a, hey, check this out, ha ha, or maybe somebody else did, I don’t know, but one way or another, I sent you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an audio file that I wanted you to listen to. And perhaps you could describe for us not only what it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, John, but also what you thought of it, which is really what I was after.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I couldn’t find, I’m pretty sure I saw it on Amazon or something, but somebody did link me to the video thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the video thing is the only thing that would have given me the information about who is actually performing it. It’s Goose, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It is, yes. Okay, so it’s Goose doing a Billy Joel cover. And I can see why you sent it to me because I’m a big Billy Joel
⏹️ ▶️ John fan, and I’m not a big Goose fan. It covers a
⏹️ ▶️ John tricky because there’s two ways you can go with the cover. One is
⏹️ ▶️ John and a lot of bands do this you want to play it so that the people who like the original song will also like your cover.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the other way is the way you’re familiar with from video game trailers if you’re a youngster which is
⏹️ ▶️ John oh now I’m gonna do a different version of that song so there’s the the sad somber
⏹️ ▶️ John slowed-down version of a pop song or in going the other direction you can do like the dance remix version of a song
⏹️ ▶️ John that wasn’t originally like an electronic dance song, but now your cover of it is. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like those are the two ways you can go. And the middle ground between them, where it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sound like the original, but also is not a fresh take on the song, is rough.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey feel like Goose
⏹️ ▶️ John was in that middle ground
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there. I think that’s fair, yes. Because like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they certainly weren’t playing it like Billy Joel plays it. Like, down to them not even doing the vocal harmonies on
⏹️ ▶️ John like the pre-chorus or whatever. Like that’s a big part of the song and you have a million people on stage, right? Just have somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John do the harmonies, but they didn’t do it. And obviously the arrangement, instrumentation, everything was all, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John different than it is in the original. But also it was not like, here is like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, genre transfer or like a really different version of it where like different instrumentation
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely like, you know, because it was the same instruments like keyboard, guitar, drums, bass, like
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff. It was like, it’s not that far from the Billy Joel original, but it sounded far from it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like, first of all, I didn’t realize this when I was watching the YouTube video because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, you’re just watching on your phone or whatever, but when you sent me the audio link, it showed the duration. I was like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a nine minute and 30 second song. Like, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, well, you know, jam band. So there’s obviously parts of the song where they do
⏹️ ▶️ John the jam band thing, where they go off and start noodling on the instruments for a while. And honestly, those sounded
⏹️ ▶️ John the most like, It was like, oh, finally, the band could just be who they are. And they’re like, oh, yeah, we were doing a cover. And then they go
⏹️ ▶️ John back to it. It’s like, oh, yeah. So not not not my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John cover. I think they should have either done it more like Billy Joel or less like Billy Joel. And the only time that I
⏹️ ▶️ John found it, the only time I found it not off putting was in the middle parts where they just like extended
⏹️ ▶️ John the bridge out to this big noodley jam band segment, because then I could forget they were trying to do a Billy Joel cover. And just here’s here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Goose doing Goose things. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, I feel like I would not expect you to appreciate any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cover of a song that you like made by a different band. Like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John doesn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John Not true at all. I’ve got some covers that I love of songs that I love. Not true.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Luka Bloom’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cover of Bad, incredibly different than the original. Love it. I think I listen to it more than the original now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which Bad? The Michael Jackson song?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So is it more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like you know when when goose or fish cover other songs, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat frequent. They I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily changing the arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the song. Whereas like if you like if you if a band covers a song
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like dramatically slows it down or changes certain rhythms or you know, if like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that would qualify as like a different arrangement,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just do it different playing different notes on the instruments. Like I don’t I don’t know what the word arrangement rains tech from a technical
⏹️ ▶️ John music perspective, but like for example, the, uh, the like guitar and keyboard parts
⏹️ ▶️ John in that goose cover are not the same. They’re not playing the same notes as the guitar and keyboard cards and the
⏹️ ▶️ John original, because I have them original, like in my DNA and I know like, Oh, they should be playing these notes here. And they’re not, they’re playing
⏹️ ▶️ John a piano or they’re playing a keyboard or they’re playing a guitar, but different notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, I didn’t expect you to be overjoyed by this, to be honest, your reaction seems kind of tepid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I consider that a personal victory, But I don’t see this on YouTube. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sent it, if I sent you a video, I am unclear how or where I sent that. And what I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is for the listeners, I’ve put a link to, uh, kind of the setlist repository where this is mentioned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was actually the 8th of May that this was performed. And also, uh, not to be that guy that’s saying, look at my band
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camp, but look at Goose’s band camp, where I think you can at least listen to a preview of it, if not the whole song without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually purchasing it. Uh, and so we’ll put that link in the show notes. I thought it was a good cover. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really disagree with anything you said though. I think covers generally speaking are best when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Relatively by the book, but well, I shouldn’t say they’re best then they’re most palatable when they’re by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey book like you were saying But I think they’re the best when they’re a complete left turn from what you’re used to as you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were saying earlier I think the canonical example for me because I’m me is all along the watchtower,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was a Dylan song I believe and then Hendrix famously covered it which is almost nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the Dylan version and then Dave Matthew’s band covered it many, many, many times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John which is nothing like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hendrix version. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m sure they bettered the Hendrix version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I wouldn’t say bettered. It is a
⏹️ ▶️ John very different take on it. Jimi Hendrix, Dave Matthews, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right up there, right? Oh, right. Oh, right. Piers. Piers and the Rock and World of Rock. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought we were not at an impasse. That’s negative. I thought we were at an understanding. And here you are trying to ruin it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t dislike Dave Matthews, but I’m not gonna let you say Jimi Hendrix along the Watchtower.
⏹️ ▶️ John Dave Matthews. Matthews and like, no, same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, my point was just that they’re all very, the point I’m trying to bring up is not the relative qualities, but just that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re each very different than the other. That’s all. Anyways, I appreciate you indulging me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. One more cover. That’s the one I was trying to remember. I just looked it up. It’s a DHT. I have no idea who this banana
⏹️ ▶️ John band is. It’s D period, H period, T period. Did a cover of listen to your heart from rock set. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the original rock set song, which is just a garbage pop song from my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey childhood and extremely popular, but garbage you pop. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the the DHT cover is a slowed down moody one that hasn’t been used
⏹️ ▶️ John in a video game trailer. So it’s another cover that like I have many covers that I like. They have to be. They have to be really
Follow-up: CapEx/OpEx
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. Let’s talk about CapEx versus OpEx. This is capital expenditure versus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operative? No, I should have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. Operating. So Andrew Leahy writes, regarding reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for software development being CapEx or OpEx, you’re mostly right that the lawyers in the building were deciding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether what you were doing qualified as one or the other. But the lawyers were themselves reacting to Section 174
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changes. Here’s some more info if you aren’t already asleep. And then Andrew linked to Bloomberg,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we will put in the show notes, from September 26th of 2023. In there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bloomberg writes, the IRS’s September notice 2023-63 clarifies the definition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of software development for purposes of current year expensing, encompassing nearly every aspect of the software development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey process. In doing so, it’s requiring most related expenses be amortized.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did almost fall asleep there. Yeah, the reason I put this in here is because I said it over my career that it has changed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do remember around this time, there was a big change, or everyone’s like, there was always like debate
⏹️ ▶️ John over who’s doing it and maybe companies would change their mind. But when this thing happened, whatever this section 174 change was,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like company-wide, like there’s, you know, there’s a big new decision and we’re doing a hard right turn
⏹️ ▶️ John and pretty much everything is going to be a capital expense for software development. And I’m not sure if it changed
⏹️ ▶️ John again after that, but yeah, the landscape has changed several times causing confusion
⏹️ ▶️ John and delay, as they say.
What’s a hot lot?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right with regard to hot lots with Apple in the 18 pros from TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a couple pieces of feedback the first from anonymous who writes in regular chip manufacturing a wafer goes through several dozen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey manufacturing steps inside a fab different customers wafers and the processing steps are carefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sequenced and scheduled to keep production line at close to 100% utilization a Hot lot is kind of like the fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pass in Disneyland You pay extra in the wafer and the wafers or individual chips get priority
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at each manufacturing step It can give you wafers and chips two to three times faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matt Jones writes, a hot lot, which demands a stiff price premium for its reduced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cycle time. TSMC specifically offers two classes of expedited surface, hot lot and super hot lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the latter being even more expensive and faster. The premium and improvement in cycle time vary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the tightness of the line and the queue demand, including who’s in line since cutting the line can push back
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they renamed the super hot body used to be performance hot lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, that took me a second, but well done, John. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. Yeah. So hot lot. It’s a term of art. There you go. And it’s basically pay money to cut the line
⏹️ ▶️ John and I guess annoy everyone else’s stuff is getting delayed. delayed but you know money can solve a lot of problems I guess.
iPhone Ultra: 20th Anniversary?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, with regard to altering and neowing all the things, Jan Ojaniemi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, maybe iPhone Ultra is the 20th anniversary iPhone? Question mark.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we didn’t talk about that. As you know, I did mention that iPhone Ultra had been rumored as a name
⏹️ ▶️ John for a phone that is more expensive than the current top of the line phones before the folding phone
⏹️ ▶️ John rumors had started. It was just like Apple’s going to make a new phone. It’s going to be more expensive than a Pro Max and maybe it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be bigger. And blah, blah, blah. That was, that was the, I think the original iPhone Ultra rumor.
⏹️ ▶️ John As we are approaching the rumored 20th anniversary phone with the waterfall edge
⏹️ ▶️ John screen that goes off, curves on all four sides and you know, all screen and everything is underneath the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s either a tiny hole punch or no hole punch at all. Like anyway, the rumors of that device continue to swirl.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve talked about it in past shows. The question is, assuming they don’t call the folding
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, the iPhone Ultra, would they use that name for the 20th anniversary phone? As
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, I guess, iPhone XX? whatever that phone is, is that an ongoing product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line or is it kind of a one-off special thing? It sounds kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, it almost sounds like a concept car. Like it sounds like a product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple would be really excited about much more than the public would see also the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the iPhone 10 though, you could say the same thing about until they released it and everyone said, oh yeah, this is better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the iPhone 10 was like, okay, this is obviously, the form factor that all iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be, they just needed a few transition years? I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John it was obvious. I don’t think it was obvious to Apple at all. I think they were gonna try
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a thing. They
⏹️ ▶️ John called it the iPhone 10, they hedged their bets, they released it, and they were hoping it would be the future of all iPhones,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what if the public had rejected it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, they can always change their minds, but I disagree that that was ever their plan. I think they knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this would, like all iPhones will be this, but we can’t or shouldn’t make them all this yet. So they had like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition period of a few years. Whereas what we’re hearing about the 20th anniversary iPhone being this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, all screen curved around the edges kind of thing. Like, honestly, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not super excited about that. I think from an ergonomic perspective, it sounds awful. And I think it ignores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality that almost everyone uses cases on their phone. And there’s a reason why all the Android manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried that years ago and currently mostly don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think you’re thinking of the curve as more like the old Android phones. The latest rumors of the curve is that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like barely, like a one or two millimeter little thing. Like it’s not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John like, so you can view it from the side. It’s just like it goes over the top and then curves a tiny little bit. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John get that. Yeah, that’s the latest rumors, right? And the other thing about it is, I’ve always said since the
⏹️ ▶️ John day zero of the iPhone that the obvious evolution of this product is to have the screen cover the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And then they made the phone with a notch. And I said, yeah, they have a notch because they have to, but as soon as they can get
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of the notch, they will. And they didn’t get rid of it. They turned it into dynamic island, but it got smaller. And the dynamic island keeps getting smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I still say, as soon as they can get rid of that dynamic island, they will, but they can’t yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even for the 20th anniversary front, I think they can’t. But I still believe that the natural evolution of the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John is to continue having the screen go edge to edge, top to bottom, unbroken, no notches,
⏹️ ▶️ John no dynamic islands, no hole punch cameras. And maybe they won’t get there by the 20th anniversary front, but when I hear them talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, I’m like, oh, well, they’re gonna put even more screen on it. And I agree with you that the curving around the edge is
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of wild card, because even with the rumors of it being barely curved around the edge,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, okay, but then doesn’t that still make it kind of, you know, slightly more difficult to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with cases, maybe slightly more breakable? What is the advantage of those extra one or two millimeters around the
⏹️ ▶️ John edge? You know, having a zero bezel, as opposed to having a, not only is
⏹️ ▶️ John there no bezel, but the screen continues for a millimeter down the side, I’m not sure if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an advantage, but I do think, just like the iPhone 10, the iPhone, the 20th anniversary
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, the iPhone XX or whatever, or 20 is effectively,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can make this phone now for a premium price. We would like all future phones to be like this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if public rejects it, we’ll change our plans because we know how to make the other kind of phone too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think like for them, you know, going back to the original question, like if they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a name like iPhone Ultra, I would expect them to use that name for a product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple expected the line to continue indefinitely the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John can necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say that about this 20th anniversary product that is rumored.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still sounds kind of like an experiment or a one-off. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so again, I just don’t see them using the term ultra because then that term, suppose this product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t succeed and it’s named ultra, then they either can never use that name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, which is a waste of a pretty pretty good kind of generic name, or they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just call something else, you know, iPhone Ultra in the future that would be totally unrelated. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be kind of a weird marketing thing to deal with as well. I just don’t see that happening. I see this just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sounds like a product that, first of all, may not even launch, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still sounds kind of concept car-y and it doesn’t sound like the rumors are super firm around it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think if they launch it, I think it’s a one-off.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think a 20th anniversary phone, there will be a 20th anniversary phone. and I think they’re gonna make this, the
⏹️ ▶️ John questions about this one have been, can they actually get it to be all screen? And that basically the answer in the past several
⏹️ ▶️ John months has been, it looks like there’s gonna be a hole punch because they just can’t get the camera under the screen because the quality is too crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But oh well, like I think they will ship something even if it has a hole punch camera in
⏹️ ▶️ John it, even if it has a tiny dynamic island, just to get it out the door. And I think they want,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I think they won’t use the Ultra name is because I think their hope is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the top of the line phones will look like this. Now the wild card here is what I said before, which is like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if the idea is that Apple wants to add a new ultra tier to all of its
⏹️ ▶️ John product lines for even more expensive products, if they put this one in the ultra tier,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would mean that like, the year after there’ll be another ultra another ultra and it’s like, Okay, well, then does
⏹️ ▶️ John that delay the trickle down like anything that’s in an ultra? Well, it’s hard to say. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the features you put in an ultra, you can’t keep them there forever, like the MacBook Ultra, assuming again, assuming that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true. Are you gonna keep the OLED in the ultra line forever? 20 years from now,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the MacBook Air not gonna have an OLED? Because sorry, that’s ultra exclusive. I don’t think that’s tenable.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, I just feel like ultra is a placeholder for the more expensive top of the line one, the features do have to trickle down.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in the case of the iPhone Ultra with the little screen edge thing, assuming people don’t hate that, which is an open
⏹️ ▶️ John question, I just feel like that will eventually trickle down to the Pro and Pro Max, and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John trickle down to the no suffix iPhone someday, because if it’s a successful feature like Face ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually it goes down the line. But this is all an open question. Like this is, I think about last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John my main concern about Ultra, or my main question about it is, is this an opportunity to
⏹️ ▶️ John add a new high-end segment and product lines that didn’t previously have one? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John is this a name they just tack on for marketing reasons for one generation and then just nevermind and
⏹️ ▶️ John continue on? And I’m trying to think of what they would call 20. They don’t call it ultra. They
⏹️ ▶️ John could call it XX. I don’t know how they would pronounce it. Iphone 20. I think that would be fine. They
⏹️ ▶️ John could call it Iphone 20. Yeah, they skipped numbers before. Why not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would properly be 19. What if they call it Iphone 9? What?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because there never
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one. Because they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey never made one. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It teleported from
⏹️ ▶️ John the future when they made the Iphone 8 and the Iphone capital letter X for Roman numeral 10.
Studio and Neo branding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Karan J. writes, what about Studio? Given that the Mac Studio and Studio Display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are now the top of their respective lines and the new OLED Macs could be the MacBook Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac Studio, et cetera. See also Creator Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Studio is in the mix as a name suffix, but the rumors aren’t about Studio, the rumors are all about Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the watch is not called the Apple Watch Studio. I don’t know. I do feel like Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John is not as good a high-end name, despite the fact that as he says, that like their most expensive monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John is called Studio. Their previous most expensive monitor was Pro Display XDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR seems to be the ultra of the monitor world. The Mac Studio is the current top-end Mac. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to make a Mac Ultra. I don’t know. I just don’t feel like Studio seems
⏹️ ▶️ John to me to not be as high-end as Ultra. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Zoran Neshik writes, regarding an iMac Neo, if you swap out the M series for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an A series SOC. Isn’t that just the studio display? And Karan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually also from earlier adds, a studio display would be an easy iMac Neo with a smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheaper display panel, of course. That’s the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John The studio display is so much more expensive than a regular iMac, let alone an iMac Neo.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, it does already have an A-class SOC, and it costs like, what, three times
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as a regular iMac? So really kind of hard to Neo that particular one. And by
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, the A-series SoC it has in it just like, I forget how much RAM it has, we
⏹️ ▶️ John looked it up, but like it’s on the ragged edge of what you would want in a Mac. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be wild to have an A-series SoC and like a super expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John machined aluminum case from the studio display, even the regular studio display.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that shows how tricky it is. Like it does have an A-series SoC, but the screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John the case and the stand dominate the price and make it more expensive than an iMac.
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Time Machine follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s talk Time Machine. We had a one-off comment from John last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week about how you have a ton of small files in your Time Machine backup, mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Node stuff. And John Wilson writes, John’s comments about Node modules, directories, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on making Time Machine backups hard raised an eyebrow with me. Why on earth did you not or would you not exclude folders
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that? The same goes for the.git directory in a repo.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s pretty easy to exclude things from Time Machine. I’ve got a command line, I used to do it. I think the TMUtil
⏹️ ▶️ John thing will do it. You just add an extended attribute to it. You don’t have to like open the Time Machine settings and drag it into the thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what I found is doing that manually, just, it just doesn’t happen. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I check out too many repos, casually clone too many things, just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I have a bunch of them and they are excluded. If you have like a fixed setup where I’m like, I’m only working on these two projects
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have two node modules directories and they’re excluded, so everything’s fine. Fine, but that’s just not the way I
⏹️ ▶️ John tend to work. Nevermind these days, what all like the coding agents are doing behind the scenes and cloning
⏹️ ▶️ John things to God knows where or whatever, even just my own use before the age of coding models and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. I just found myself making lots of these one-off directories, cloning, get repos, playing
⏹️ ▶️ John around with them, you know, doing NPM install and directories. But like, it was just, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John needed it to be automated and to that end, we get some more feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Andrew Hathaway writes, I use Asimov to prevent node modules directories from being included in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Time Machine backups. This is an open source thing. And it self describes as Asimov scans your file system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for known dependency directories, for example, node modules and excludes them from Time Machine backups.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think you have to write manually, but yeah, an automated system that would just like, it’s tricky because it would have
⏹️ ▶️ John to drink from like the FS events fire hose and like see every time something happens and see if there’s a node
⏹️ ▶️ John modules in there. Like that’s why it’s tricky because these are, especially like.git directories for cloning things
⏹️ ▶️ John and node modules, like it just, to stay on top of it requires
⏹️ ▶️ John discipline. And even if you do try to stay on top of it, if you’re trying to do it like manually, or even if you have a scan running every once
⏹️ ▶️ John in a while, if a time machine backup starts and it notices your node modules directory, and it’s like, now I have to back
⏹️ ▶️ John that up, but then oh, the automated excluding thing goes and excludes it, too late, time machine’s already got its claws into it, and now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John grinding away at 2 million additional files. And then, I wish I could do this in Dropbox too.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s a way, at least not in the non-file provider version of Dropbox. I would love Dropbox to ignore
⏹️ ▶️ John my node modules directories, but I don’t know if there’s a way to tell Dropbox to not sync
⏹️ ▶️ John an individual sub directory other than selective sync, which is telling it, oh, this exists in Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ John but don’t put it here. It’s like, no, that’s not what I want. I want it to be here, but I want you to ignore Dropbox. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not quite sure how to do that. Not that I keep the stuff, node module stuff in Dropbox, but I do have some.git
⏹️ ▶️ John directories in there. Anyway, it’s tricky. And the number of things that create a bunch of small files very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John and change them rapidly and remove them when I’m done as increasing
⏹️ ▶️ John over time, not decreasing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to Time Machine on spinning disks, Ben Madison writes, I used a spinning disk for Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until fairly recently. I was backing up a MacBook Pro, which I needed to unplug and take to meetings fairly regularly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If the backup happened to be running at the wrong moment, it took forever for the backup to end and the drive to eject. And I was frequently late
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to meetings as a result. I assumed this was just the nature of Time Machine until I got an SSD and was thrilled to discover that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I no longer needed to budget extra time for disconnecting my laptop. This is a reasonable complaint,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but why wouldn’t you just like plug it in overnight or something rather than having it plugged in all the time?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you gotta remember to do it or do the thing where you tape it to the back of your laptop lid, right? You get
⏹️ ▶️ John a 2.5 inch spinning disc that’s bus powered and you just tape it to your laptop. With portable
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, it is tricky because, you know, Time Machine, even with SSDs, Time Machine takes its sweet time
⏹️ ▶️ John when you say cancel this backup. You know, you could just yank the machine and unmount it and you think, oh, it’ll handle it, it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John but given how frequently Time Machine corrupts itself under ideal circumstances, I wouldn’t want to test that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Carlos Pereira writes, when using Time Machine to backup my MacBook Air’s 512 gig SSD to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a two terabyte spinning disks, backups were taking more than 12 hours. And at some point, something got corrupted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and backups just vanished from the external drive. Backing up my MacBook Pro’s one terabyte SSD to a four terabyte external
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD takes 10 minutes with no issues. Additionally, David Falkema writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since Mac OS 26 Tahoe, surprise, My Time Machine drive that’s the same size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as my source volume has failed to complete a backup twice in a single month. I now have a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive that’s twice the size of my source volume and I have needed to reformat it and start a new Time Machine backup five or six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times since last fall. My current oldest backup is April 28th and again Time Machine is misbehaving.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s doing a backup right now and progress is at 30% with 250 gigs copied so far. I fear the result will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again that the entire backup drive fills up with all previous backups except the last one from last Friday will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey removed to free up space and still the new backup cannot be completed. Again, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to reformat the drive and start over. How can this even happen with a 2x drive? I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t see a lot of people experiencing this exact issue, but it’s driving me batty. I’m not sure what triggers it. And then update,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to nuke my drive again and start over. No space left on device. I have not personally seen this, but I mean, that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen it and the basic issue is that Apple’s maintenance of time
⏹️ ▶️ John machine has been mediocre at best. It’s the type of feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that when it was introduced it was amazing and they it’s not like they haven’t updated it if you look in the underpinnings
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve changed it a lot over the years to try to improve it but it just has never
⏹️ ▶️ John really like to give an example um visibility
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is a complaint we have about a lot of Apple stuff, but like visibility into what is going on. Right. And
⏹️ ▶️ John many people are you’ll see online. They’re saying, Hey, a time machine backup completed. I sat
⏹️ ▶️ John down on my computer. I, I wrote an email and then I noticed time machine had started
⏹️ ▶️ John again because an hour and past I’d read it. I’d written spent an hour writing an email and browsing the web. And then I see a time machine
⏹️ ▶️ John started again and it’s taking forever. What happened on my Mac in that
⏹️ ▶️ John last hour that’s taking so long to to back up. From your perspective as a user, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John I sent one email and I browsed the web. What, you know, how many files is it backing up? What is it
⏹️ ▶️ John doing? Why is it taking so long? That’s the type of thing where more visibility into
⏹️ ▶️ John the system would be beneficial. So you could see Time Machine’s taking a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s backing up seven million new files in this particular directory. You know, like what is it doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is it taking a long time? What is it backing up? Maybe I should exclude that directory because I don’t care about those files. Maybe that’s a cache directory that somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John Time Machine isn’t backing up. And the second part of setting aside visibility is for simple
⏹️ ▶️ John tasks, especially with SSDs and so on, shouldn’t it be getting faster over time to do an incremental
⏹️ ▶️ John backup of the same amount of data? Shouldn’t it be getting more reliable over time? Shouldn’t it be, you know, shouldn’t we be polishing
⏹️ ▶️ John this so that it is efficient, faster, better? Like, and they have added, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John more efficient things where it will use the APMS snapshots and tries to use the features of the file system to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, has different strategies for figuring out what has changed since the last time, which is the tricky bit here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m not saying it hasn’t improved, but it hasn’t improved enough. It doesn’t have any better
⏹️ ▶️ John visibility than it did before. And these type of bugs where you’re like, I don’t understand what’s going on. I have a time machine drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s huge. It tells me there’s not enough space. It deletes everything else or it gets stuck on a file and I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John file it’s stuck on. Like you’ll find so much stuff in web searches of like use LSOF,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, to figure out what files are open and figure out whether you see this with MDLS with the spotlight and the next thing as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John just everyone trying to diagnose, look at the logs, look at these lines. If this happens,
⏹️ ▶️ John do this, erase your disk and format it in this way, do this thing, it shouldn’t be this fraught. The whole point
⏹️ ▶️ John of Time Machine, the promise of it is that it’s for backup for people who don’t know how to deal with backups, it’s just simple, plug in a drive, you wanna back
⏹️ ▶️ John up to it, okay, I’ll take care of everything for you. But instead it becomes this babysitting nightmare where, and again, this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John on spinning disks, this is not lots of small files, this is just regular use of Time Machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would file this under another aspect of macOS that has been allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John to, I don’t know if it’s been allowed to deteriorate, but it certainly hasn’t improved. You know, you would think
⏹️ ▶️ John features that exist for many, many years that are used frequently wouldn’t just get the bare minimum of maintenance and slowly accumulate
⏹️ ▶️ John new bugs. Instead, they would be, you know, knocking down every one of the bugs and getting better and better. Like I would want to see every
⏹️ ▶️ John few years of WWDC say, oh, and the new version of Mac OS, we made Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ John better. It backs up 20% faster and we did this and we did that. And like, they just don’t say that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even the improvements they do make, they don’t tout. And it’s like frustrating to me because time machine is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of my favorite uh, features of Mac OS ever added and watching it, watching it not thrive
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Apple Intelligence class-action
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Emma Roth at The Verge writes, Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that accused it of misleading customers about the availability of its Apple intelligence features. The proposed settlement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would apply to people in the US who purchased all models of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between June 10th, 2024 and March 29th, 2025. People who submit qualifying claims can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey receive $25 for each eligible device, which may increase decrease up to $95 per device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey depending on claim volume and other factors, according to Clarkson Law Firm, the legal team behind the class action
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lawsuit. Apple denied any wrongdoing. Here’s Apple’s full statement. Since the launch of Apple Intelligence,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve introduced dozens of features across many languages that are integrated across Apple’s platforms, relevant to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what users do every day, and built with privacy protections at every step. These include visual intelligence,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live translation, writing tools, Genmoji, cleanup, and many, many more. Apple has reached a settlement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to resolve claims related to the availability of two additional features. We resolve this matter to stay focused on what we do best,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delivering the most innovative products and services to our users.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love the legal system where they can claim no wrongdoing, but it’s like, but you didn’t ship those things in the ad, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re going to claim no wrongdoing for this thing that was obviously the case. And also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is we’re going to pay $250 million. Right. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John the no wrongdoing and paying. Sometimes you do just make a lawsuit go away. But even in their own statement,
⏹️ ▶️ John they basically said, well, we did a bunch of other stuff, right? It’s kind of vaguely related and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re resolving this thing with you know claims related to the availability of two additional features like
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah Those are the ones you didn’t ship. That’s what they’re suing you about but I put ads on TV about those
⏹️ ▶️ John things and People would see the ads on TV and say I’m gonna get a new iPhone because it’s gonna have those things
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know You literally today. They’re not shipping. They’re still not shipping So I feel like this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a slam-dunk case and for them to say we admit no wrongdoing But we obviously I mean they advertise
⏹️ ▶️ John things that they didn’t ship So yeah, and I bought, I have a 16 pro, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I will be getting my 25 to $95 for that. And I’m excited about that. Did you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you actually signed up for it yet? They don’t have, they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John opened it up. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think there’s a way to sign up for it yet. Okay, that’s what I thought. But I’m assuming they’ll send me an email or, you know, we’ll cover it in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but I always sign up for these things. I always take the money from, usually it’s, you get a piddling amount, but hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes it’s like a multiple devices in the family. So, you know, both my kids get 30 bucks. I get 30 bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sure. I’ll take the money, but I just, This is this is probably the least
⏹️ ▶️ John bad ending Apple could have hoped for, that they they were allowed to settle and admit no wrongdoing and
⏹️ ▶️ John pay to what to them is like, you know, pocket change, nothing in exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John for probably one of the biggest screw ups in the past couple of decades, biggest public scripts in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of decades, which is a WWDC 2024 showing a bunch of features and then putting ads on TV with
⏹️ ▶️ John a famous star from the Last of Us slash Game of Thrones advertising those features.
⏹️ ▶️ John and then to just literally never ship them up till the day we’re recording this. Presumably in all the 27
⏹️ ▶️ John OS’s, the features they advertise or something similar like them will ship, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John still haven’t done it. And if we had back in WWDC 2024, if I had said, hey, we’re gonna be recording
⏹️ ▶️ John right before WWDC 2026, and none of those features in the ad will have shipped, that
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a pretty grim, pessimistic view, but that’s the reality we’re in right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Although to be honest, would you have been surprised to hear that at the time? Like, I don’t know that I necessarily,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because even at the time, it seemed pretty ambitious and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty like concept-y, and we had not yet seen AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do pretty much any of those things with any level of reliability. Normally, look, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a big target on its back because they’re big and famous and rich. And so they get all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of things levied at them, people attempting to sue them or shake them down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most of them are BS and most of them are undeserved. This particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I think it’s not BS and is exactly what Apple deserved for what it actually did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still to this day, am surprised that they were so brazen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and careless with the way that they advertised those features, both the WBC and then in the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commercials. Like that was incredibly negligent and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reckless of them to do that. So they deserve what happened here. This one is a hundred percent on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in hindsight, like it really does. I mean, I’m sure that story would tell it someday, but it really does seem like
⏹️ ▶️ John is given that two years who whole years have passed. They were
⏹️ ▶️ John just like there’s no way that they would have aired an average. I mean what
⏹️ ▶️ John they showed WC fine because that’s like a developer community. Maybe you show whatever but like even that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, I don’t think that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it’s not it’s not fine, but but at least it’s not like here’s the thing. They show stuff in WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John and sometimes things don’t ship or change before shipping because it’s the nature of a thing. You’re seeing a pre-release product, you’re a developer,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you get it. But once you put things on television for the public to see, that shows me that
⏹️ ▶️ John they really thought that they would eventually get to these things. Like, I mean, the only other
⏹️ ▶️ John worst case thing I can think of is like the the white iPhone, which they also advertise on television. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe they really thought, oh, we’re having trouble with the white one. The iPhone, white iPhone 4, we’re having trouble with the white one. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’ll get it out eventually. And they did get it out eventually, but it was, I forget what it was, Gruber was just posting about it again. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was like 18 months or something. Something
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so the usual Apple thing is like, okay, even if it’s not ready, we all
⏹️ ▶️ John believe that it will be ready in a reasonable timeframe. We’re like, oh yeah, sure, no, it’ll totally be ready. Like we’re having difficulty,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll get it out the door. It’s like, okay, fine, then we’re gonna run the ads. Because I think if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John actually internally believed that they weren’t gonna have these features for two years, they would not have aired the ad. What
⏹️ ▶️ John they thought was, we don’t have them now, but everyone says that we’ll probably get them eventually. So
⏹️ ▶️ John chip the ad, it’s important to strike while the iron’s hot. The pro the, the features will come a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit later than we wanted, but it’s fine. But they, they, they, what it comes down to is they
⏹️ ▶️ John did not realize yet that they were not going to be able to do this. Not that
⏹️ ▶️ John year, not the next year. Like they, and they’re just mistaken about what they’re, you know, and I hope there
⏹️ ▶️ John was a big, uh, I mean, obviously it was, there’s big shakeup, a leadership changes, all sorts of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, And now they got a new CEO. So hopefully the company will not make that mistake. And it’s basically not knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself, like, be honest with yourself. Are we going to ship this or are we not? And internally,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a culture where you’re essentially all lying to yourselves about what you’re going to do. And like, I think that has served
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple well for years. They’ve always said, you know, we’ll set these aggressive targets. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John tell the team to do the impossible. And even if they’re a little bit late, they’ll eventually do it. But as I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I complained about at the time, it’s like this one is different and that there is nothing they can really do to make this happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that turned out to be the case. Like it’s not like it’s just a simple matter of finding the bugs and fixing them or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it’s of a different nature. And it was especially of a different nature, because as it turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ John there, you know, their LLM’s that they were working on internally weren’t even up to the their competitor standards. And as Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John just said, even their competitors weren’t doing this at the time. So to believe that they were going to do something that no one
⏹️ ▶️ John else had ever done, even though their internal technology to do that was worse than everybody else’s and that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to ship it in a timeframe that justified airing the ad just shows a complete breakdown
⏹️ ▶️ John of accurate self-assessment in a very public way. We’ve seen, we’ve complained
⏹️ ▶️ John about their inaccurate self-assessment in terms of developer sentiment or all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of other things, but this was like the most public display of self-delusion. It’s corporate
⏹️ ▶️ John self-delusion that Apple has experienced in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I generally, I think it was Marco that said this a minute ago. I generally think the class action lawsuits are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of silly, but it, like John said, you might as well sign up for them. I think I’ve told the story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey briefly on the show before, but long after I got rid of my BMW, there was a water pump related
⏹️ ▶️ Casey class action lawsuit where if you could prove that you paid for a repair to your water pump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your N55, then you could get, I think it was like a thousand bucks from BMW.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And because I’m me and I keep copious notes on these sorts of things, I was able to produce the receipt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from several years prior when I paid Richmond BMW a thousand plus dollars in order to replace my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey water pump. And I got a check from DMW for a thousand bucks. It was incredible. Um, but I, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that with regard to the advertising, I do think it’s like you were saying that they thought they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to ship. They really did like, yes, it was a bit of who of hubris, almost a hubris, a bit of hubris to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, to, to think that, oh, we’ll definitely ship this. No question. And then not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t think it was ill-intentioned. I really do think and get the vibe that they believed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they were going to ship and then it turns out they very much didn’t. And I think they hopefully have learned a lesson, it sure seems like they have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they shouldn’t be advertising these things unless they are really truly about to launch or already launched.
Apple’s fab options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a couple of stories with regard to Apple and Intel and Samsung. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting on May 4, Mark Gurman writes, Apple Inc. has held exploratory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussions about using Intel Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. to produce the main processor for its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device in the U.S. Apple has had early-stage talks with Intel about enlisting the company’s chip-making services.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple executives have made visits to a Samsung plant under development in Texas that will also make advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chips. Discussions with both companies started before the latest shortages took hold.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Samsung is already working on building more peripheral components for the iPhone and other products, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones for managing device power, said Apple, or Apple had said earlier. Additionally, we will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point you to a link in Apple’s newsroom, wherein they are increasing, they announced they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increasing their US commitment to $600 billion.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where they said that they were, you know, when German said, Apple said earlier, I’m like, wait a second, is this an
⏹️ ▶️ John officially confirmed Apple thing? But it was the press release. Like that’s that’s where they said that their Samsung is building
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff for Apple phones, not the main SOCs, but I forget what is peripheral components as German
⏹️ ▶️ John describes it. That is apparently in this press release.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from German, Apple prefers to have at least two suppliers for any major component, giving it leverage in pricing negotiations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and protection from supplier disruptions. As far back as 2022, Cook told employees in an all hands meeting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that and I hi, this is Casey. I didn’t remember hearing this particular quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anywhere. So this was new to me. And certainly I think it was John that bolded it in our internal show notes. Let me read this quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Cook from 2022. Regardless of what you may feel and think, 60% coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of anywhere is probably not a strategic position. Referring to chip production concentrated
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So this is, I also had not heard this quote or if I did hear it back then I had forgotten about it. Again, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is back in 2022 and this is Tim Cook talking to employees. And if you think he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more candid with employees than he he is with the public, I don’t think he is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because A, he knows
⏹️ ▶️ John everything’s gonna leak, and B, I don’t think he’s candid with anybody like that. But here he
⏹️ ▶️ John is stating plainly, we don’t like that we get so much
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff from TSMC. And his thing was like 60%, you know, 60%, if we’re getting 60% of anything from a single place, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. It’s like, well, I have bad news, Tim, that’s not gonna get better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, TSMC’s making all your chips for the phones. It is just, you know. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it shows that it’s not as if Cook was unaware and, you know, repeat for China
⏹️ ▶️ John and other things, not as a cook was unaware that a non diversified supply chain is bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just seems like the process of trying to, you know, turn that
⏹️ ▶️ John ship and, you know, whatever it was, like half of new iPhones were created in India in the recent batch
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. Like, how long does it take to start to diversify your manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the extent that you can? And the answer is many, many years. here we are in 2026 and they’re still working
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. And TSMC is still a massive bottleneck. But just what the story is about is like the Apple looking
⏹️ ▶️ John to Intel and Samsung to help them out here. And, you know, Samsung is already making whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John peripheral components for the iPhone and other products are. But, hey, you know, something is better than nothing. Same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with diversifying manufacturing and doing more manufacturing in the US and the various TSMC Arizona
⏹️ ▶️ John plants. Yes, it’s still TSMC, but at least it’s in Arizona and not Taiwan. So baby
⏹️ ▶️ John steps towards diversification. But I like this quote because it really if you’re looking for proof that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook understands that this is a bad situation, at least as far back as 2022, he knew that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good place to be. It’s just that in the in the subsequent four years, he was not able to change that appreciably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Continuing from German, since then, Apple has worked closely with TSMC to help expand operations in Arizona,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where the supplier now produces a limited number of chips for Apple from a single plant. It’s ramping up work quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple, which said it will get 100 million chips from Arizona in 2026.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple also is contending with shortages of memory chips, but Cook said that finding enough main processors, the SoCs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or systems on a chip, is a bigger challenge right now. Quote, the primary constraint is the availability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the advanced nodes our SoCs are produced on, not memory, Cook said during the earnings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call. That’s making it harder for Apple to satisfy demand for products like the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, he said. quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe it will take several months to reach supply demand balance.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s interesting. This was on the earnings call, I think, basically confirming it’s like, uh, Ram
⏹️ ▶️ John is not our main problem. Ram is a problem, but it’s not our main problem. And that makes some sense because, you know, instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John there being one company in the world that can make the best chips, there’s three for Ram. Wow. An
⏹️ ▶️ John embarrassment of riches. I think it’s three, right? Isn’t it? Micron, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco uh, high S K high net Samsung. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s better than one, right? But like what this is arguing for is that like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio with the big RAM configs, the fact that you can’t get that, that the SOCs are more of a problem than the
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, like that’s weird, but you know, it’s plausible because the RAM is all being used by, you know, AI
⏹️ ▶️ John data centers, but you know what’s also being used by AI data centers? NVIDIA fabbing
⏹️ ▶️ John their GPU things to run all the inference and training,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever that story was that went by recently that like essentially Nvidia is now TSMC’s biggest customer, ousting
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. Apple used to be TSMC’s biggest customer and now it’s Nvidia. So yeah, I guess when
⏹️ ▶️ John they asked for that hot lot of A18 pros, maybe they bumped some Nvidia GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John off the line and paid some money to get the FastPass in there. But yeah, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the most recent earning calls. I believe it will take several months to reach supply demand balance. This is also more
⏹️ ▶️ John bad news for me waiting for a Mac Studio. If Tim Cook is saying we can’t get the SOCs
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s really bad for products like the Mac mini and the Mac studio. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so all of that was May 4th. Fast forward four days to May 8th,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and Intel, or perhaps together again. So Robbie Whelan and Rolf Winkler right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the wall street journal, Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary agreement for Intel to manufacture some of the chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that power Apple devices. According to people familiar with the matter, the wall street journal says that it’s quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still unclear quote, what Apple products will get Intel chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think there’s any more detail on this, but like the right before the hundred million chips from Arizona,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the TSMC Arizona plants are not on the cutting edge like two nanometer that are also not
⏹️ ▶️ John three nanometer. I think they’re five or maybe seven. I forget, but like the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole idea is like we can’t, you know, the best chips still come from TSMC in Taiwan.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but if we can take some chips off of that line and manufacture like the mouse, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like the older chips, the, the age chips with lower numbers, the that we’re still putting in some devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe we put them in our Apple TVs or whatever, those aren’t three nanometer. Can we make them somewhere else to free
⏹️ ▶️ John up some capacity in TSMC in Taiwan? And then we can get them to fab the M5
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra for us there, you know, whatever, like whatever SOC that can only be done in Taiwan, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not clog them up with, like if they could have asked for that hot lot of A18 Pros from
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere other than Taiwan, and maybe they did for all we know, that would be great because you don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John bottleneck that And yeah, so I would love to know what Intel is making for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they’re making just peripheral like support chips or something, but this is all part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the diversification effort. And I guess it’s kind of, I mean, I don’t know how much to read
⏹️ ▶️ John into this, but like, you know, the Apple and China book talks so much about how Apple just dumped buckets and buckets
⏹️ ▶️ John and buckets of money into China to help turn them into the
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturing, you know, uh, Colossus that they are today. It was a symbiotic
⏹️ ▶️ John relationship. We will dump in lots of money and you will make the things for us and we will pay for them and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll just, you know, as, as we succeed, you’ll succeed. And we’ll go, but like there was a huge investment there and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, Apple’s press releases say, Oh yeah, we’re investing more in us manufacturing or whatever. And going
⏹️ ▶️ John to Samsung and Intel is essentially Apple investing in competitors to TSMC because
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, you’re not going to be able to compete with TSMC unless people buy stuff from you.
⏹️ ▶️ John We want there to be healthy competition for TSMC, so it behooves us to
⏹️ ▶️ John give you money to do whatever. What can you do until it’s like it’s kind of like a like we know you can’t make the good
⏹️ ▶️ John chips, but what can you do because we want to give you money. We want you to succeed because we need TSMC to have
⏹️ ▶️ John competition. It’s not good even setting aside the whole Taiwan and you know geopolitical thing
⏹️ ▶️ John just even if they were regardless of where they are in the world. Having one source, you know, is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John he said, 60% coming out of it. One place is not great. And I think they’re way over 60% for like the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone chips, at least. So I think they’re going to Intel, Samsung and anyone else who has
⏹️ ▶️ John any chance of manufacturing anything that could be used in any Apple product and saying, saying to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John what can you give us? We will pay you if you can give us anything. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco we have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that need to be fab. We’ve got some old chips and small products. We want you to not go out of business.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, we want you to do well. So take this I just get why don’t but I don’t know if we’re reading this is is this just
⏹️ ▶️ John like a piddling amount of money to Satisfy us political BS things or whatever or is this the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John of a China style investment where Apple is gonna start funneling more and more of its cash to
⏹️ ▶️ John other companies to try to balance out the lopsided arrangement of silicon manufacturing.
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#askatp: Moving files on Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brandon Wichard writes, how do you actually move and copy files on your Mac? There are plenty of ways, drag and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drop, keyboard shortcuts, command line. I’m curious which approach each of you defaults to and why. Do you switch depending on the situation?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thing that’s always bugged me, why can’t you move a file with command C and command V? You can use command
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C and what is that option, command V, I believe, to actually move it rather than copy it. That feels like an intentional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey design decision, but I never heard a good explanation for it. So let me start with how do I move stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey depends on the context. I will do it with command line. I mostly do it with Finder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say that’s all the time, probably most of the time. I found that, and I’ve talked about this a long,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long time ago, but there’s an app called Yoink, Y-O-I-N-K. I don’t think they ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sponsored us, but if they did, it was literally like 10 years ago. This is an app, I think it’s by an individual person,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that what it does is as you drag like a file around your screen, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will put up like a little sidecar, for lack of a better word. It’s like a little floating window
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the side of your screen. You can specify where this floating window goes. And you can put things in that window.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so that window holds these items as like a little drawer sort of kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or shelf, as Sage says in the chat. That’s a better word for it. But anyways, it’ll hold those items
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a little bit. And then you can go click around and find the destination of whatever it is you want to move, or copy, or what have you, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drag them out of Yoink and into your destination. makes these sorts of things much easier to do with the mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I would say, generally speaking, finder with yoink occasionally command line.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with Marco and finish up with John. Marco, how do you handle this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually move and copy files on my Mac by opening up two different finder windows, the source and destination, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dragging them. And that’s it. Like, you know, if I if I’m intending to, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going on an external drive, and I’m intending to move them, I’ll hold down what is a commander option to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, just as muscle muscle memory at this point. I just I don’t even think
⏹️ ▶️ John What modifier are you asking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re dragging files to a different drive the default action is copy Oh, you want to move it to a thing yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do that. Yeah anyway So yeah, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then ask for like why you can’t move a file basically with cut and paste I think the answer is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. Where do where do the cut files live? What where are they? when they are cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if you cut and never paste are they gone do they cut into the trash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first but if you know like it creates a weird concept because files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like can be real solid lots of data where is like when you’re dealing with the clipboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conceptually the pasteboard rather sorry my windows is showing when you’re dealing with the pasteboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was called clipboard on the Mac before Windows even had it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay well anyway that is considered by most people to be like temporary ephemeral data, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who don’t have clipboard history apps, or now the built in whatever it is in Tahoe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was always considered like throwaway data. So if you cut something, it was just like, okay, well, that text is gone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And maybe I’ll paste it later. Maybe not. Files conceptually don’t work that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so files have to live somewhere. And I think if you like cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files and then forgot to ever paste them anywhere, that might be that like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might cause problems for people or unexpected results or unexpected data loss. So I think that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, so moving copy files. I mostly use the Finder for stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I am at the command line doing things like I’m, you know, working on a coding project,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will use the command line to move and copy files there. I’ll use the
⏹️ ▶️ John command line when I I want to have a little bit more control over the stuff like my various
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac applications that deal with file systems and things, I guess it’s just hyperspace, but there are some
⏹️ ▶️ John other, you know, making test files for my other apps or whatever. I’ll do that from the command line because I feel like I
⏹️ ▶️ John have more granular control over the files, especially since like I’m creating like
⏹️ ▶️ John test files or temporary files, I can use the XADR command to mess with the extended attributes. I can,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, chmod and chown and just, you know, I can mess with the metadata with a variety of command line tools to get the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing exactly the way I want it. When I wanna copy a file, like a quote unquote Mac file, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a file that’s part of a programming project or something, but it’s just like a document created by one of my Mac apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of my GUI Mac apps, I tend to wanna use the Finder just because I just wanna, whatever the default
⏹️ ▶️ John metadata handling that the Finder does, I’m like, I’m assuming that’s the right thing to do and that’s what apps
⏹️ ▶️ John expect. So I would prefer to move and copy files in the Finder to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The command line, like the CP command line tool on macOS has at
⏹️ ▶️ John various times been updated to try to stay in sync with something close
⏹️ ▶️ John to the default finder behavior when it comes to copying metadata and ACLs and all that like this. There’s tons, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have no idea how much weird metadata there is in Mac files. And the macOS CP command can
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with a lot of it, but I’m never sure if it’s exactly the same behavior as finder
⏹️ ▶️ John copies, and if it even is capable of having exactly the same. and there’s other commands like the ditto
⏹️ ▶️ John command and there’s the clone file API. There’s lots of things you can do from the command line, but like for GUI
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac files, and because I’m an old school Mac user who was using a Mac for a decade and a half before there was a command
⏹️ ▶️ John line, I just do it in the finder using the GUI. And related to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John copy and paste of files, that is a Windows-ism. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows did that first, and my reaction to it when I learned that Windows did it way back
⏹️ ▶️ John in the day was, this is a terrible idea for all the things that Marco just mentioned. Okay, so you wanna use
⏹️ ▶️ John copy and paste files. Doesn’t make any sense, but if you wanna do it, okay, but then what do you do about cut? Hand wavy,
⏹️ ▶️ John hand wavy. Well, we’ll put a little dotted outline around the file, so it won’t really be gone, it’ll still be there, we’ll just change
⏹️ ▶️ John the appearance of it in Windows Explorer, and if you never paste it or if you copy something else, we will remove the little
⏹️ ▶️ John dotted outline from around the file, and then you don’t have to worry about it. It all makes sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are ways around it. Mac OS X, I believe, essentially copied the Windows implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John of this when it first implemented this. And you could cut,
⏹️ ▶️ John copy and paste files and it would do something similar to Windows where when you cut it, it wouldn’t really remove the file, it
⏹️ ▶️ John would still be there, but the Finder would either hide it or dim it or do some other crap like that. I use this
⏹️ ▶️ John feature so little as in never, except when I was writing my Mac OS X reviews to like test
⏹️ ▶️ John it, that I don’t actually know if it still exists. My guess, before you started talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, my guess would be that you can currently in the Finder, cut a file and then paste it somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know that for a fact because I would never ever do this, both out of habit. And I think it’s a mismatch with the,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the semantics of cut, copy, paste are so well-established, they’re not a good match for what people expect from
⏹️ ▶️ John doing file stuff that I would never try. Can one of you try that out right now? Find a file you don’t care about and cut
⏹️ ▶️ John it and then paste it somewhere? I bet it will work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there is no, like Command X doesn’t do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John You sure? Let’s try it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Let’s see. Oh, you’re right. It’s disabled. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I’m pretty sure if my memory is correct, I’m pretty sure it used to, and it used to behave as I described
⏹️ ▶️ John and as it does in Windows, where it would like, it’s not really gone. Maybe they changed their mind about that, but honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John once I stopped writing Mac OS X reviews, I didn’t have a reason to explore every feature that I don’t use. But all this is to say, is I
⏹️ ▶️ John never, ever, ever, ever use cut, copy and paste for files in the Finder, because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a bad interface and a bad metaphor for those functions. And I was saying to Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t command drag to another volume to move it, because there have been finder bugs in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John where, oh, by the way, that move failed and also the file is now gone from the source.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you should think that would never happen, but let me tell you, the finder sometimes has bugs. So I never hold down
⏹️ ▶️ John command to move. I always allow it to be default copy, which it is when you cross volumes or explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ John make a copy. And only when I’m sure it has landed for real, completely successfully on the target
⏹️ ▶️ John volume, do I then command delete the source one. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, yeah, just, it’s like defensive driving, defensive findering. Like, you know, don’t, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can hold down command to turn what would be a copy into a move, but don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, one thing I will say is that it is not infrequent, particularly when I’m moving things to or from the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I will do an MD5 of the file on my Mac and the file on the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to make sure they match. Why do I do this? I don’t know. Has it ever not matched?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so. I think it’s always matched every time. But for whatever reason I get a little nervous about it occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ll do that and I’ll do that via the command
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What you need is a file system that guarantees integrity with some kind of checksumming
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of that I got a feature request for hyperspace the other day It was like when you’re doing like reviewing the files
⏹️ ▶️ John that it found that have like they put some of these groups of identical files and you’re reviewing them there’s a little like
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever SF symbol for the eyeball like the quick look eyeball thing where you can hit spacebar and get like a quick look preview
⏹️ ▶️ John of the file so you can glance at it in the app instead of having to open it in the finder or whatever to see what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, to see whether you want to merge it. Anyway, they said, hey, when you do that and you find a group of
⏹️ ▶️ John identical files, you’ve just got the one little eyeball icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you do show the list of all the files in the group. I would like an eyeball icon next to all the files in the group.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, well, the point of the program is those files are identical. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they would all do the same thing. And he’s like, yeah, but I just want to make sure. I’m like, listen, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to make sure, don’t use my app. The whole app
⏹️ ▶️ John is premised on, oh, I’m going to make sure. Right? If you don’t think the app is doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would you trust my eyeball icons to show you the things? I’m debating adding that feature. It’s like the paranoia
⏹️ ▶️ John feature. Like, are you going to eyeball a text file or a giant like image file and say, yeah, I know these are
⏹️ ▶️ John identical. It’s like KCMD5 thing. It’s like, well, it says it copied it, but can I check? and I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could let you visually inspect the files, but like, like they’re, they’re, the whole point is they’re the
⏹️ ▶️ John same file. And if they’re not, I’m not gonna, anyway, I’m still debating what to do with that one. Like I know why people will
⏹️ ▶️ John want to check, but it’s like, man, if my program doesn’t get that right, it’s going to be destroying everybody’s day.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s going to be real bad. As I, as I replace files with different files that have different
⏹️ ▶️ John contents, that would be really, really bad, which to be clear could theoretically happen, but I have so far,
⏹️ ▶️ John literally zero reports of that ever happening to anyone. I hope it never happens to anyone. I try
⏹️ ▶️ John my best. But as I say in the help documentation for Hyperspace, could it happen? Yes, it
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely positively could, because of the magic of race conditions and the inability in macOS to get an exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ John lock on a file, because that’s just not how it works.
#askatp: Terminal themes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Chris Harper writes, do you use a profile or theme for your terminal windows or just the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey default Mac OS profile? For me, I was a terminal user always until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a few months ago, and I’ll get to that in a second. But while I’m using the terminal, I don’t know why, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to have a black background with white text on top. And so what I do is I set the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out-of-the-box theme called Pro as my default, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gives me the look that I prefer. Let’s try Ultra. Well done. Well done. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, a few months ago, I decided to try Prompt 3 mostly because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted a better terminal for my iPad. And I’ve bounced through several different terminals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on iPad over the years, and none of them have been exactly what I wanted. And Prompt is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as close as I’ve gotten to what I want. And so once I started using it on the iPad, I started using it on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac. And so now I’m pretty much all in on Prompt 3, and we will link that in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since I started with Marco last time, start with John. John, what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John When Mac OS X first came out and had the terminal in it and the, in the betas and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John the default theme was, I believe I believe it was Monaco nine
⏹️ ▶️ John pack in the day, like bitmap Monaco nine, and it would show it bitmap like no smoothing, no subpixel
⏹️ ▶️ John anti-aliasing, just like sharp individual non retina pixels for what is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John a pixel font from the, you know, the earliest days of the Mac nine point Monaco,
⏹️ ▶️ John on a white background. So the window had white background and the text was black. And the only tweak
⏹️ ▶️ John I made to that default theme was I changed the cursor to a block
⏹️ ▶️ John because I was used to that from using literal hardware VT220s back at BU
⏹️ ▶️ John and they had block cursors, albeit on interlaced CRTs. But anyway, I made
⏹️ ▶️ John the cursor a block and I make the block, because in Apple’s terminal you can have it be a block or an
⏹️ ▶️ John I-beam or like an underscore or whatever. And you can also make it blink or not blink. I made it not blink,
⏹️ ▶️ John made it a block, and made it zero, zero, 255, zero, zero, complete red, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And over the years, the only thing I have changed in that theme has been
⏹️ ▶️ John to mess with the font because eventually getting a non-anti-alias, non-subpixel
⏹️ ▶️ John anti-alias bitmap Monaco 9, I did all the hacks you could do to keep that as my terminal
⏹️ ▶️ John font for a long, long, long time, down to the point where there were bugs with showing
⏹️ ▶️ John that in Terminal and I would complain about them on Mac OS X reviews to get them fixed, which worked, yay! Running the
⏹️ ▶️ John press always helps, especially when you are the press. But you know, eventually, like retina comes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Retina comes for us all and say goodbye to your bitmap fonts. And so I did and I had to pick a new font. I actually
⏹️ ▶️ John have to look this up because I don’t even know. I think I might’ve done Menlo for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John What am I doing now? No, now I’m doing Monaco 12, right? because I’m old and I can’t see as
⏹️ ▶️ John my monitor is very big. So I’m doing Monaco 12, obviously it’s a retina display. So it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have anti-alias text unchecked but I believe it is anti-aliasing because, I don’t know, let
⏹️ ▶️ John me zoom in. It’s gotta be. Yeah, it is, the text is anti-alias. I don’t know what that checkbox still does
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple’s terminal, but in the text section of my theme, which is just called John,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be called JCS at various times. It’s Monaco 12 font and anti-alias text
⏹️ ▶️ John is unchecked. my cursor is red, it is a block, it does not blink, and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else is basically the default. And that’s what I go with. I was kind of surprised to see,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was recently, I recently had occasion to create a fresh user account on Tahoe to test a beta
⏹️ ▶️ John version of some other app. And I opened a terminal to do some stuff. And I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the default terminal theme in Tahoe. Like, there’s a fresh user account, not associated with
⏹️ ▶️ John any Apple ID, so I don’t see how it could be anything other than the default. and it opened a window
⏹️ ▶️ John that had basically a black background with I think maybe a little transparency
⏹️ ▶️ John on it and like white or otherwise light colored text on it. And it looked pretty attractive, like
⏹️ ▶️ John for a dark theme terminal, I was like, oh, this is actually a pretty nice default. I don’t prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I am a black text on a white background kind of guy. And I was very excited when Mac OS X came out
⏹️ ▶️ John that my preferences were so close to the default. But yeah, ever since, you know, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS DP two developer preview two, Mac OS 10 developer preview two, I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ John this basically the same terminal theme. And I have to say the Apple terminal application, which I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John is currently maintained by 0.15 employees. It
⏹️ ▶️ John has a lot of features, but its interface is
⏹️ ▶️ John not, I’m not able to understand how it works enough to get it to do what I
⏹️ ▶️ John want. And in particular, if the 0.15 of people who maintain this app are listening, whoever
⏹️ ▶️ John hear this. I’m pretty sure, I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple Terminal Application has the ability to restore
⏹️ ▶️ John the windows that were open during the last session. Like if I quit the app and launch it, it will restore the windows that are open
⏹️ ▶️ John during the last session, including all the tabs and all the windows. And also restore
⏹️ ▶️ John the current working directory of all the tabs and all the windows to what they were before.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it maintains the scroll back and says, here was what was in the scroll back when you quit the app. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John in some conditions, I’ve been able to get it to restore the tabs, the windows and the current working
⏹️ ▶️ John directories. But most of the time I can’t, and I cannot figure out for the life of me how to get
⏹️ ▶️ John this to happen. They have so many concepts of saved window groups and what you do on launch
⏹️ ▶️ John and just, it’s so, so complicated. So I keep waiting, is this gonna be the year
⏹️ ▶️ John that the 0.15 developer goes through those settings, sweeps through there and says, I just wanna make this a sensible set of settings
⏹️ ▶️ John that works, you know, like BB editor or something where you say, hey, do you want me to restore Windows from the previous session? If
⏹️ ▶️ John I do restore Windows, do you want me to restore the current working directory? Do you want me to restore the tab titles? Do you want me to restore
⏹️ ▶️ John the scroll back? And I’ll be like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And that would make sense to me. As it
⏹️ ▶️ John stands now, I have no idea what my current Apple terminal settings are, but I do know that
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t restore the current working directories, but it does restore the Windows and the tab. So I’m like, just don’t touch it. And when I make a fresh account
⏹️ ▶️ John on newer versions of macOS, make a fresh account and I try to get it to do what I want and I can only get like 50%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the way there. The current working directory is the one that kills me because I’ve seen it do it. I know it’s possible and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s a terminal thing and not a shell thing, but I can’t figure it out for the life of me. So please,
⏹️ ▶️ John please Apple, someday work on terminal again, even though I do really like it, there’s a couple of features that I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco, I am pretty boring here. I use the default basic theme,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is white background, black text. And I use the SF Mono 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco font, which I think might be the default. Long time ago, I was also very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much a Monaco person, but at some point I had to increase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the font size by like one and that broke the bitmapness of that font and made me have to switch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same thing with Xcode and with TextMate. A few years back, I basically increased the font size by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and had to change everything as a result.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s fine. And I think the Apple Terminal app is totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not like a ridiculously amazing power user app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t need it to be because I’m not that much of a terminal power user. I always have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terminal windows open and I’m always using terminals, but I’m not such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a power user that I need any kind of really advanced features that for whatever reason this wouldn’t support. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve always been pretty happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve messed with other terminal apps a lot, like Prompt, I’ve mostly only used on like the iPad and phone, but I,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t know if I’ve ever even tried the Mac version, it’s probably like ARM only, so I probably haven’t on my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. But there’s the tricky thing about terminal apps, and there’s so many of them, like I have like iTerm2,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s other even fancier ones. A bunch of them tout their performance,
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, like it’s a window full of text, it should be lightning fast, and it’s like, well, guess what? You know, and those
⏹️ ▶️ John text editors do the same thing, I figure which text editor had this philosophy, but it’s a good summation of the
⏹️ ▶️ John design strategy, which is we’re going to create a terminal
⏹️ ▶️ John text editor or whatever, but we’re going to treat it like a game. That was Zed. Yeah, like a game engine
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of like GPU rendering and stuff like that. Like we’re not going to design it like a text editor. We’re going to design it like a
⏹️ ▶️ John game with like how quickly can we render? And it’s like, well, you’re not rendering polygons or textures. You’re rendering text
⏹️ ▶️ John like I know, but we want to render text like as fast as possible. So Zed is one of them. There’s a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John other text editors that have taken this philosophy. And there’s also terminal apps that have been like, back in
⏹️ ▶️ John the day, we use OpenGL to do special custom rendering of texts. We don’t use the system text system. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John we want it to be really, really fast. And I love that philosophy. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I want that too. Like, you know, I remember my days using more primitive systems like those VT220s,
⏹️ ▶️ John which were not fast, but also like the, you know, the Tektronix X terms with like bitmap displays
⏹️ ▶️ John with no compositing, just blitting out to the screen. And they were pretty fast back in the day. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple terminal has always been pretty fast. It’s okay. Like it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John lightning, lightning fast, but it’s pretty fast. And the Apple terminal has also always had the option for essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John infinite scroll back, where you could say, how long do you want your scroll back to be? And the choice, this is from the next days. It’s choices
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, you can pick a number of lines or you can say, I think they have called it unlimited. They used to call it
⏹️ ▶️ John like, until you run out of memory or
⏹️ ▶️ John limited or whatever. So I’ve always just put it on unlimited because I’ve got a lot of RAM, why the
⏹️ ▶️ John heck not? If you use one of those other terminal apps that’s designed like a game,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like a fancy OpenGL engine, or the ones that used to simulate CRTs, remember those, that would like, it would curve it and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I never use those.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are all fun, but like, especially like the really fast ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John the things they get wrong in their defaults make me have to spend an
⏹️ ▶️ John hour with their stupid text-based config files because they always have text-based config files. They don’t want to make a GUI for it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Things like things you take for granted in the Apple terminal. Look at an Apple terminal window right now and let me tell you the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John you are taking for granted about this window that you don’t realize that you will, maybe you won’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that I will miss when they’re gone. Look at just a terminal window that you have now and put some text in it, like type LS or something to fill
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing. Here are things you’re taking for granted. How much space is there between the first character
⏹️ ▶️ John on the left edge and the edge of the window? How much space is there between lines of
⏹️ ▶️ John text? How much space is there between the first line and the top of the window and the bottom of the window? All the
⏹️ ▶️ John margins, all the spacing, all the text layout, you just take for granted, because it’s just a window full of text, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Until you use one of those fancy OpenGL GPU-powered terminal apps, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the line spacing is wrong, and they’re too close or too far away from the edge. And so you go into the settings, and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the setting for this? And you’re typing floating point numbers into a text file, and making the app reload
⏹️ ▶️ John it to try to get something that looks quote unquote normal to you. And I cannot stand
⏹️ ▶️ John that. I’m like, just make it nice. You can’t don’t let the letters touch the edge of the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but don’t make it like too much space. And the like the line spacing is always all messed up. And like the font
⏹️ ▶️ John rendering is different. Like we don’t use the system finder and we use our own font rendering and, and put in a, a
⏹️ ▶️ John integer value from one to 7,000 for darkness. I’m like, what? I just, can you just make the text look
⏹️ ▶️ John good? And granted, it’s just like, you know, I’m used to what I’m used to. And the, I’m used to the Apple terminal, but it’s not like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I went from, I went from Monaco nine to Monaco 12. It’s not like I’m, you know, I think I stopped off in Menlo and some other fonts
⏹️ ▶️ John in between there. So I’m like, I’m not opposed to change,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we all had a Menlo phase.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I don’t want to have to, uh, I don’t want to have to tweak stuff like that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John give me sensible defaults is what I’m saying. And I think the sort of like the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the aesthetic taste of the people who make these highly accelerated, uh, terminal and text
⏹️ ▶️ John editor apps is so divergent from mine that what they think are sensible defaults, I think are just like
⏹️ ▶️ John stabbing me in the eye. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you really feel, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause I want those and I go in them and I try to edit them. I have a terminal window open next to it. And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to make this window look just like Apple terminal. And I try and I try and I try, I’m like, it’s close. But it’s like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John just spent an hour on this and I can’t quite get it to be the same as terminal. I go, you know what? I’m just going to stick with Apple terminal for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I just, I’ve never had any motivation to move from Apple terminal because I like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it so much and I know it so well that even you know I can say all the same things about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple mail. I know these programs so much I use them so well and even though other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other apps have come out that offer different power user features you know that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be useful to me here and there. They’re so ingrained in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my workflow my habits my aesthetic what you know what my computer looks like how things work, so many different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like minor detail levels. And even if something else is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better in some way, it’s probably so far, nothing has really been compelling enough for me to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these apps. That’s better that because it has to be like a lot better in some way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it worth the inertia of moving and tolerating like what you’re just saying, tolerating all the things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be a little bit worse or need a little bit of work or a little bit of setup or a little of learning. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a huge perceived switching cost to switching like a core app that you’ve used for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decades and you use all the time. So any alternative has to be a lot better for it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it. And I’ve just, I’ve never found anything that was that much better in ways that I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed or cared about. And also I haven’t had enough dissatisfaction with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in apps to motivate me to even want to move in the first place.
⏹️ ▶️ John You would think of the various apps that do restore all the windows and the positions and the tabs and the tab
⏹️ ▶️ John titles and the working directories that that would be enough to bring me over. But it’s like it’s like changing
⏹️ ▶️ John text editors. It’s like, OK, I like that. But now I have to do a bunch of extra work to
⏹️ ▶️ John get your new thing set up the way my old thing was. And it’s probably possible, but it is a lot of work and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John work that I find frustrating, especially if I can’t get it exactly right. So in the end, I just don’t change because basically I
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like of all the built in apps in Mac OS, despite the fact the terminal gets no love and its settings
⏹️ ▶️ John are incomprehensible, like the mix of like all those different,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, it’s madness. Like try to come up with a mental model on how like their presets work with their
⏹️ ▶️ John window groups, with their save sets, with their on launch site. Like it’s, I cannot understand how it works, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the day to day experience of using the terminal windows is like, they work, they do what want, I’m satisfied with them.
#askatp: IDEs other than Xcode?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and kind of related, Chris Harper, the same Chris Harper, writes, also, do you use any other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IDEs when working on projects outside of Xcode? Or do you just do everything in a terminal window? For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use Visual Studio Code for website stuff, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s basically it. I don’t think I use any other kind of IDE for anything. Who’s turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it to go first, John, I think? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so the only thing I use Xcode for is writing backups. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the only time I’m ever in Xcode because I don’t I don’t prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John any aspect of it to my other tools that I use except for of course when you’re writing Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John apps because it’s just it’s the least friction way to do it. I don’t dislike the Xcode editor. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. I basically leave things mostly default there as well but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have anything that makes me say oh no I want to edit everything here and honestly Xcode doesn’t make that particularly pleasant either
⏹️ ▶️ John like they you can use it as just like, oh, I’m just gonna use Xcode as my text editor. You can do that, but Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John fights you a little bit on it. And then Casey’s complained in the past about how the heck tabs are supposed to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John keep changing their mind about it. And I’m a separate windows kind of guy anyway, which Xcode can do, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it also fights you on that. Oh, you wanted a separate window? Guess what? Your separate window has got three sidebars and a bottom thing. Oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I can turn them off, but it’s just, anyway, Xcode only for Mac stuff. The modern
⏹️ ▶️ John answer to this question, I think this question has been in here since before this happened, but the modern answer to this question is, Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Codex and Claude Code. There’s my other IDEs that I’m using.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not really, for my Mac apps, my three dinky Mac apps, which are mostly like already written,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not using the coding agents to code in them. I’m using the coding agents to try to find bugs or to try to help
⏹️ ▶️ John me diagnose crash reports by like reverse, you know, disassembling binaries as part of AppKit
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like, help me find this bug. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cannot figure it out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, they can’t figure it out either. So we’re all having trouble here. But anyway, the bottom line is I’m in a terminal window
⏹️ ▶️ John in the project directory of MaxCodeProject, add a Claude or Codex prompt, feeding
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you know, dragging in a.ips crash report file into the window, which is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you, in case you don’t know this, if you use Terminal, if you just grab any file and drag it into the Terminal window, it will put the full path,
⏹️ ▶️ John the escaped full path of the thing that you dragged in in there. That’s a feature of Apple Terminal. It’s very convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do that with coding agents. And so that’s, I guess, my other IDE for Mac apps these days
⏹️ ▶️ John is Claude and Codex. And occasionally I’ve used the Gemini one, but I didn’t like it. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John for everything else, it’s BB edit for me. So I’m, if I’m writing node stuff, I’m using BB. I’d like it pearl
⏹️ ▶️ John B everything, everything that is not a Mac app. I am using BDA, which is not an IDE
⏹️ ▶️ John really. It’s a text editor, but I have a lot of features built up. Like when I’m, when I’m writing my blog
⏹️ ▶️ John posts, which happens every once in a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco um, or just editing
⏹️ ▶️ John the editing, editing my website, I’m writing HTML and and BB edit with all my
⏹️ ▶️ John weird macros and text snippets. And like, I forget how much stuff I’ve customized
⏹️ ▶️ John and BB edit until like, you know, you launch BB edit on my wife’s account on her computer and I type keystrokes
⏹️ ▶️ John and either nothing happens or the wrong thing happens. Like, oh yeah, I guess that’s a customization I’ve been using for
⏹️ ▶️ John two decades. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that was the default keystroke
⏹️ ▶️ John but apparently it’s not. And then I find out not only is that not a default keystroke that feature doesn’t even exist, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple script from like 1997 that I’ve been using since then that is bound to that
⏹️ ▶️ John keystroke and I gotta find the, anyway, I am so, like anyone who has used a text editor for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time, you get so entrenched. And it’s the same thing, like, if you wanted to use a different IDE or
⏹️ ▶️ John a different system, I have all these ones installed. I’ve used Visual Studio Code, Sublime, Atom,
⏹️ ▶️ John like you name any kind of IDE text editor thing for the Mac, I have used it, tried it, probably still
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t installed in some version, Zed, I’ve got that, I’ve got everything. I have a big applications folder, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I always tried them, I was always interested in them, but I always end up coming back to BBEdit
⏹️ ▶️ John just because I have so much stuff built up there. And yeah, I could recreate my BBEdit world elsewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it would be a lot of work for not a particularly big win. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, and ever since BBEdit gained language server support many releases ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been in the habit of updating and expanding the language server support, LSP,
⏹️ ▶️ John Language Server Protocol, is like a specification for how text editors talk to things
⏹️ ▶️ John that know the structure of source code. So you can do things like right click something and say take
⏹️ ▶️ John me to the definition of this or bring up quick help or whatever. All the things that you expect out of an IDE. BBEdit,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not really an IDE, it’s just a text editor, has these features. So I can edit a shell script, a JSON
⏹️ ▶️ John file, an HTML file, XML for an RSS feed, like anything you could
⏹️ ▶️ John possibly imagine. BBEdit understands it. Like PHP, I paid money for a commercial
⏹️ ▶️ John extension to bbedit for like the whatever, Intellisense, but it’s spelled with a PH
⏹️ ▶️ John because PHP, that lets me do IDE like stuff in bbedit with the
⏹️ ▶️ John PHP source that I’m messing with. Like, and obviously I have them for Perl and Node and all that stuff. And I know
⏹️ ▶️ John this is ridiculous because you’re like Visual Studio Code does that and 10,000 other things. I’m very aware
⏹️ ▶️ John that Visual Studio Code has so many more features. It’s just, I’m a bbedit person from
⏹️ ▶️ John head to toe and I’ve been using it for so long that I’m probably never gonna leave it. And so that’s where I do
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else having anything to do with source code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so Xcode for iOS apps, obviously. But yeah, for anything else that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing like in a text editor, for me, I’m still using the ancient TextMate 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my. I mean, it’s really showing its age in lots of ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, at least it still runs. It does, it still runs. You know, it’s certainly, obviously it’s in Tahoe squircle icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jail. It still works, but I am just now starting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think like, the reason I was able to call it Zed so quickly earlier was like I saw the blog post breeze by about like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s how awesome it is. I’m like, hmm, maybe I should actually start looking at these modern text editors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now that like we are in an inflection point now where like AI coding agents are now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being integrated into our workflows, like the world is shifting. This might be a time for me to finally jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to something more modern. All the things that John was just talking about having like PHP, IntelliSense, kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of… or IntelliSense, I don’t know where they even put the P in there. But having that like, you know, autocomplete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any kind of integration, or, God forbid, a debugger in my IDE or in my text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editor. I’ve never had that for any web development stuff. I’ve only ever had that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of advanced functionality in Xcode. I’ve never… like all the PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve ever written in my entire career, every web backend I’ve ever written, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done without any of those tools. I’ve done with just text editors and looking up things in documentation and having things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if I mistype something, having it just fail on runtime or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m interested in that world of like making my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-Xcode development more modern. But right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not yet done that. So the answer still is TextMate 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it is not an answer I can actually recommend to anybody because it is very dated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does seem pretty clearly abandoned and not even for a short amount of time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a significant amount of time. I think it’s been abandoned for most of the time that I’ve had a son.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s been a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the only thing is, exactly what John was just saying and what I was saying in the last answer, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have tried other things. Like I back between TextMate 1 and 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I briefly was I tried Sublime Text and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple other ones. I don’t remember all of them that I tried, but I it was like previous code being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the thing everyone did. And I was they were fine. I learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can switch. I just don’t want to. And then when TextMate 2 came out, did everything I wanted. So I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been using that since. But I think like the problem when I try to switch, I do have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of paper cuts I have to get over of things like little muscle memory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard shortcuts or little behaviors that have always worked some way in TextMate that work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differently in the thing I’m using next. It’s just it’s a lot of friction to get over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So again, there has to be a good motivating reason. There has to be like both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a push to get me off of what I’m using and a pull of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, what is going to pull me towards this other alternative? Like what’s going to be a compelling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, new, useful set of features or benefits or whatever for the new thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so far, I have not yet had a compelling push away from TextMate or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pull towards anything else to make that jump worth doing. But I do think now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like with agents coming into workflows more and all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new tools that I really could and should be using to make my PHP coding a little bit less of a manual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and error-prone process, I should probably start looking at that. So I think I will look at that in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of not using an IDE, also for my entire 25 years of having a jobby job
⏹️ ▶️ John and writing Perl and node code and stuff like that. I was using a BB edit and it didn’t have language
⏹️ ▶️ John server support. So I had the closest thing I had was that at some point in BB edits history,
⏹️ ▶️ John they added a function pop up menu that understood Perl. So you could
⏹️ ▶️ John pop up the menu at the top and you know, you’d see the list of all the functions in the file and you could select one of them and jump to that
⏹️ ▶️ John function. Uh, but nothing in the, in the document of like, right, click this and go to the definition
⏹️ ▶️ John or chair, you know, forget about like find symbol or refactor, rename, All these features that you take
⏹️ ▶️ John for granted in like modern IDs were not there. So I was writing my Perl mostly just like no
⏹️ ▶️ John features, no nothing, just like Marco, you just, you type, you find out whether it runs, no auto-complete,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, you know, tab completing symbols, even for common, you know, library, nothing, just nothing. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I didn’t think, and I knew it existed. I like, I’d used it, what is it? IntelliSense,
⏹️ ▶️ John was that the first one in Windows? The first like sort of auto-complete in, what was that called, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Visual Studio. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Studio. By the way, when I said, in telefence, I was joking, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently actually the name of the PHP. As I said, that’s what I was trying to pronounce.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you said they put a P somewhere, but I just I was just guessing a pH. Yeah, for his PHP. Oh, wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I don’t know what age. Anyway, I, you know, I had used it without that stuff. And when
⏹️ ▶️ John I started doing, you know, after I quit my jobby job and was just doing this and then suddenly I’m editing PHP, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, I have to do something to make this not as painful. And so I’m like, well, it would be great if I could right click a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and find definition. And I’m like, well, there’s gotta be a way to do that. And BBEdit’s got language server support, it
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed me to this, and I bought it immediately. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely been worthwhile. One thing, this is a question for both of you, like, well, maybe you don’t have, maybe you can
⏹️ ▶️ John market us with this TextMate stuff, but like a couple of keystrokes that I am accustomed
⏹️ ▶️ John to in BBEdit, I found that I could not live without an Xcode. And Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John does let you customize most key bindings of stuff in the IDE,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the features aren’t exactly the same as BBEdit. So I mentioned the function pop-up before. I bound, and I believe this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a custom binding, in BBEdit, I bound Control F to basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will pop up that pop-up menu, the function pop-up menu. Instead of me having to click it, I just hit Control
⏹️ ▶️ John F and it will pop it up, and then you can type to like narrow the list and use it. You know, you basically, with the keyboard, you can jump to a function
⏹️ ▶️ John definition. And Xcode has a feature that’s sort of like that, which I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John for the life of me ever remember what that, right now I can’t remember what it is. So anytime I have a fresh Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John setup, like I have need to bind Control F to that thing. What is it called? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like show item. Is it in the go menu? Is it one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things that’s not in the menu, but you could only find in the settings? And so I think I have a screenshot saved in a notes
⏹️ ▶️ John document saying, hey dumb, when you go set up Xcode and you’re trying to remember what you bind Control F to, it’s this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then of course it always conflicts with like move forward one character, which is this insane Emacs based key binding that lots of editors like
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. I’m like, I will never want control F because in Emacs, by the way, I immediately bound in 1993
⏹️ ▶️ John I bound control F to find cause I’m a Mac user. I’m like, no control F is not move forward. One
⏹️ ▶️ John character control F is fine. And then I would go to anyone else’s Emacs and I’d hit control F and the cursor would move forward
⏹️ ▶️ John one space. And I’d be like, so I have a bunch of weird habits from BB edit that I
⏹️ ▶️ John poured over at Xcode. Do you take any text mate key bindings and or do either one of you
⏹️ ▶️ John customize any of your key bindings in Xcode to either enhance them or make them feel familiar from
⏹️ ▶️ John like VS Code or text mate?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the main reason why is I don’t like having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of custom settings that I have to change because like, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set up a new laptop every couple of years. I’m always like, I just, I, and you know, if I have to use some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other setup or some default setup, like I don’t wanna be totally lost and broken And I just I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having things that are that custom. I try to stick to default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behaviors and looks mostly most of the time unless I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate it. The the now what I do customize an Xcode like settings. I do change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are around things like indentation. I do not like the default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indentation rules and Xcode uses. What are they? I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are. they they suck and and I also don’t like the editor inserting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the closing brace or parenthesis or whatever for me. So I turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off those things and I do I do indentation and closing punctuation manually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are certain rules of indentation that Apple has used even in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Objective-C the way they would indent very long methods to break over multiple lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines. Like sometimes they would line up the colons. It was weird. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Swift, some of the ways they do it, I’m just super not compatible with my taste. I also think the Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John a separate setting for that. I was so excited when I saw that because I also disagree with the way so the way they do
⏹️ ▶️ John switch statements. But there’s a setting like there’s all the indentation settings in Xcode. But there’s this separate setting,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, hey, when I do switches, do you want me to do it the way I want to do it or the other way?” And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, no, the other way.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Where is that? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I switched that setting.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m looking right
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you where it is. Basically, what we’re disagreeing with is I believe it pushes the case statements
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the same indentation
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco level as the opening switch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is, it looks so wrong. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate it. And yes, that’s what they
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s wrong. And I just launched Xcode. I’ll find the setting for you. I believe there’s a separate setting just
⏹️ ▶️ John for the switch statement stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Editing indentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, wow, I forgot they just changed Xcode settings to be this stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switch statement case labels. Oh, there it is. But it’s saying it is indenting it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so mine is set to Swift in C languages. I don’t think that’s the default. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John default was like none. The default is Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I believe, or none.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, mine is set that way too, but it doesn’t indent
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Mine does. I have it on Swift in C languages, and when I do a case statement, it’s indented from the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey switch. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll have to play with it. It’s certainly, like if I let it do the autocomplete thing where if it’s switching over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an enum, John, if I… Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the auto-generated code that it generates still has them all shoved against the left.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, try it. That’s what I have it set to, and it does the right thing for me. As
⏹️ ▶️ John for settings on stuff, I’m of the opinion, I don’t super-duper customize it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve proven to myself that there’s certain things that I just can’t live without or can’t deal with or just disagree with, so there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always gonna be some customization, and I’m of the opinion that every single modern Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John application should have a way to cloud sync settings if that’s what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the ones that don’t, like Xcode, drive me bonkers, like guys, come on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two areas, one, obviously settings. Like if you customize your settings, I’m not saying you have to cloud sync it for everybody, but you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does have this thing called iCloud and settings aren’t that much data. Give me the option to cloud sync my Xcode settings and let
⏹️ ▶️ John me say if I want to or don’t want to, I can have sets of settings. Like it’s not that complicated. they could totally do it. The other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with Xcode in particular is all your signing certificate crap. iCloud Keychain, it’s synced
⏹️ ▶️ John through iCloud, but Xcode’s like, you know, all Xcode’s crap. It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John some of it we sync through iCloud Keychain, but sometimes when we make it, we’ll make it in your local keychain. So when you go over another
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, it won’t be there. And that’s a security feature and yada yada. Please just give me the checkbox that says, just do it all through
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud Keychain. I don’t want to have to think about all my signing crap. I don’t want to accidentally make new versions on different laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John where I’m doing development. Just iCloud sync everything. So if you’re out there making a Mac app and you have any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of substantial settings that are not just like two screens worth of checkboxes or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John like Xcode’s gotta have like hundreds or thousands of settings, cloud sync those optionally. Please give
⏹️ ▶️ John us the option to do it because Xcode, I don’t customize a lot, but the stuff I
⏹️ ▶️ John do customize, I have discovered that I can’t live without it and it has made me non-functional on default Xcode. The one
⏹️ ▶️ John that is probably the worst is, for whatever reason, I guess this is from, Was
⏹️ ▶️ John it Visual Studio? I guess it was Visual Studio. But like, I’m thinking of like, again, 1992, 1993, the when you make Windows 95 apps
⏹️ ▶️ John and this IDE on Windows. Casey, what would that have
⏹️ ▶️ John been? Would that have been Visual Studio as well?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you thinking like MFC? I think there was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John some- Yeah, yeah, but what
⏹️ ▶️ John was the IDE called?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that was before my time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that IDE had a button that you would press to make essentially what Xcode would call an
⏹️ ▶️ John archive build of your application. And Xcode by default,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe does not have a key binding to the thing that says make me an archive
⏹️ ▶️ John build and don’t put up a dialogue. Just do it, just make an archive build. And I bound that to
⏹️ ▶️ John Command Shift A for archive. And I had to steal it from the thing that every presenter
⏹️ ▶️ John uses at WWDC when they bring up that little pop-up. Like what is that, quick entry? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Command Shift A is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the most commonly typed keystrokes in WWDC videos because it doesn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John an archive build by default, it does that other thing. And I never use the other thing and I’ve stolen
⏹️ ▶️ John it from it. So I just feel like I just wanna hit Command Shift A and do an archive build. That’s like, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like the, I’m ready to ship this new test flight build, Command Shift A, and then I just walk away and wait to see the
⏹️ ▶️ John organizer window pop up. So a couple of the settings like that, like Control F, Command Shift A.
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe I bound Command J to jump to line, even though you could already do Command L to jump to line just because
⏹️ ▶️ John BB does command J like a little bit of that crossover, because if I don’t do that, I find myself
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t successfully mode switch. I end up hitting the wrong key. So, yeah, I don’t I don’t have too many tweaks,
⏹️ ▶️ John but some stuff I can’t live without.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Zapier and Quince.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP dot FM slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime. Our weekly bonus topic. every episode has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an extra topic, usually 15, 20 minutes long, maybe. And it’s just for members. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join a team to join to hear it this week. And over time, we’ll be talking about non
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers now building apps. Obviously, a tool is playing a role here. We’re going to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that. So we want to hear that. Join us once again. A TV that FM slash join. Thanks, everybody. and we’ll talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast
Special filenames in macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John Overtime average is up 2725.7 minutes. How you want to know? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you. I will update my outro accordingly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, john, you want to tell us about this thing that’s been living in our show notes for like two years?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, goodness. Now I have to review it. Okay. So yeah, it has been a for
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time because it’s weird and boring. I believe the origin was this thread
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple’s developer forums where there’s like an answer from an Apple DTS engineer trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to to explain a particular behavior. I think the discussion was like, someone’s using like URL
⏹️ ▶️ John objects in like some Apple platform code, or maybe it’s bookmark
⏹️ ▶️ John objects or whatever. Apple has started using many, many years ago, like URLs for local file system
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, like instead of HTTP colon slash slash, they do file colon slash slash, just for uniformity.
⏹️ ▶️ John We can use URLs to refer to anything, whether it’s a local file or, you know, there’s a bunch of reasons why you may not do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll may not wanna do that, and we’ll get to that in a little bit. But anyway, various APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John take these or produce these and like someone was surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John when they got one of those URL-y things, I think, and I think it might’ve been a bookmark, from the system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re like, I was just trying to get like a path to a file, you know, slash A slash B slash C dot text.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what it gave me was a path that said slash period
⏹️ ▶️ John nofollow, all one word, slash A slash B slash C dot text. And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what the hell is slash dot nofollow? That’s not a directory at the
⏹️ ▶️ John level of my hard drive. And why did the system, because they were doing like a string comparison, like this string should be A, B,
⏹️ ▶️ John C. And they’re like, no, sorry, that doesn’t match. The string is actually dot nofollow, A, B, C. I’m like, what?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so an engineer had to explain this. And that set off a whole big discussion of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that exists in the Mac file system that you might not expect or things
⏹️ ▶️ John that have special meaning. So there are various things that you can put in file paths
⏹️ ▶️ John as in string separated by forward slashes on Mac OS that have meaning to the system.
⏹️ ▶️ John .nofollow is one of them. I believe it tells it not to follow symlinks in the directory
⏹️ ▶️ John that follows or something like that. We’ll link to this stuff and you can look up the specific meanings. I don’t remember it off the top of my head.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason, the explanation is like, hey, the system API provides this because we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to protect against security flaws that happen where
⏹️ ▶️ John a path looks like the path you expect it to be, but some path in the middle of that path specification is
⏹️ ▶️ John actually a symlink to a different place. And so we, you know, there’s various modes of the APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can say, hey, traverse this thing, but don’t follow symlinks. But that requires the developer
⏹️ ▶️ John to have to remember, oh, and every time you call this function, make sure you pass the option that says, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t follow symlinks because this is a security related thing and I don’t want you being like led astray by some sneaky
⏹️ ▶️ John symlink that sends you off to a place you’re not supposed to be, so don’t follow symlinks. But every developer doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John remember to do that. Well, it turns out that Apple has an inline way in the
⏹️ ▶️ John path itself, so that no matter what API you, what Apple API you feed it to,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple API or the underlying file system or whatever will say, hey, even if you didn’t pass the nofollow thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I see that this path here is.nofollow, and I will just remove that part of the path, not take it as a real folder,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now I know that you don’t want me to follow symlinks. And so the API started returning these.nofollow
⏹️ ▶️ John basically every single URL object or whatever you got from these APIs always had.nofollow
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, and so it was blowing up every string comparisons, but the app parsers like this is intended were basically
⏹️ ▶️ John like protecting against people for forgetting to pass
⏹️ ▶️ John the don’t follow symlinks flag in the API calls. Now, actual file system security
⏹️ ▶️ John is way more complicated than that. Let me see if I have the link to that in here somewhere. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think I do. There was, I’ll dig it out if I can remember it for the next episode, but there was a,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone posted from a Unix slash Linux perspective, how difficult it is to securely
⏹️ ▶️ John traverse the file system. And it is monstrously difficult. Like just way,
⏹️ ▶️ John way, way harder than you think it is. If you are a, not a developer at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t think about it at all. If you’re a sort of not novice to medium developer, you know about like the easy things
⏹️ ▶️ John to look out for, but then there’s always this stuff that’s like way beyond they can of like
⏹️ ▶️ John any sort of average developer who doesn’t specialize in file systems to actually securely
⏹️ ▶️ John traverse a Linux style Unix file system. And unfortunately for Apple, the nofollow
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is not a complete solution for the reasons this thing explained. I’ll try to find a link if I can. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, getting back to Mac OS,.nofollow is not the only one
⏹️ ▶️ John of these weird things that exists. There’s another page that I’ll link to that is from in 2019
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about files that have special meanings. So if you have a,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, this explanation, I’m assuming it’s accurate, because I don’t know any better, but I’ll get to how you can tell for sure
⏹️ ▶️ John in a bit. If any file or directory where the name contains.nosync
⏹️ ▶️ John is ignored by iCloud synchronization, any file or directory where the name contains.noindex
⏹️ ▶️ John is ignored by Spotlight, Any file or director where the name contains.no
⏹️ ▶️ John backup is ignored by Time Machine. Now there are other ways to do a lot of these things with like extended attributes
⏹️ ▶️ John and obviously dragging the things into the Time Machine exclude list and it writes to a plist somewhere and
⏹️ ▶️ John all that other stuff. But like these like special magic files or the one where it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John file slash dot dot named fork slash rsrc
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the resource fork of a file. Another magical thing that you can type that has special
⏹️ ▶️ John meaning to the OS. There are a bunch of these things in Mac OS that
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you hear about years ago and you try using them and forget about or maybe some utilities using it behind the scenes, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they tend to stay there for a long time. And writing hyperspace, I had occasion
⏹️ ▶️ John to have to actually like find out the real truth of these things because I needed to either rely on them or handle them
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And this is one of the things that I really enjoyed about hyperspace in particular.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m used to for all of my regular career as a developer, having access to the source code
⏹️ ▶️ John of the libraries and operating system that I’m working on. It makes things so
⏹️ ▶️ John much easier when that’s true. Now, obviously I don’t have the source code to AppKit or SwiftUI, and God,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I did. Many, many, many times. That’s why I’m using stupid decoding agents and like
⏹️ ▶️ John disassemble, I bought a copy of Hopper so I could use a disassembler to say, I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John see what is this API doing? I need to, like, I want to see the source code, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John for file system stuff, remember that Apple, Mac OS X, Mac OS, and iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPad OS, and audio OS, and Vision OS, XR OS, every operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system Apple makes essentially is based on Darwin, Apple’s BSD, Unix, and
⏹️ ▶️ John MOX combination operating system. And that is open source. Darwin
⏹️ ▶️ John is open source. And guess where all the file system stuff is? It’s in Darwin. All
⏹️ ▶️ John the low level file system stuff is in there. Now, Darwin is difficult to navigate. We’ll link you to Apple’s open
⏹️ ▶️ John source, which is on GitHub. But you can see they do source code releases for every release of iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and MacOS and all the other things to see the Darwin base code for there. And this file system stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John like whohandles.nofollow, that I haven’t looked this up, but I’m pretty sure that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John end up being in the Apple open source. What about..namedforks.rsrc? Where is that?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s in the open source. And so if you’re wondering, hey, how does this stuff actually work?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get the source code for it. And it is incredibly illuminating because
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if Apple like is more lax with like private API use or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, you know, SPI analysis, where it’s trying to say, are you using private APIs that you’re not supposed to be using?
⏹️ ▶️ John They mostly care about using like private APIs in AppKit and stuff. Sometimes you can sneak one by if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re using like an API in the Darwin, you know, low level Unix
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system that someone had neglected to add to the list of private stuff, and you’re like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure if I should be using this or if it works at all, but I do have the source code for it. I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John I know how it works. And you will find treasures in there like the named fork, and I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John like the.nofollow. I’m not sure if the.nobackup,.noindex, and.nosenc are in there. They might be at higher level code
⏹️ ▶️ John that we don’t have the source for. But it really makes me wish that essentially we have the source for all of these
⏹️ ▶️ John things because it makes development so much easier. It makes debugging problems so much easier. I mean, people
⏹️ ▶️ John could give patches. Think about you file a radar and nothing happens for a year. Imagine if you could send a pull request
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, hey, I have the source, I found the bug. I think this fixes it. They’d probably reject it, but they’re like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t fix it in that way because that breaks some other thing, yada, yada. But maybe that would motivate them to
⏹️ ▶️ John fix it more quickly. But anyway, if you’re ever doing anything related to low-level
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, especially low-level file system stuff, look at the Apple open source
⏹️ ▶️ John repository because you will find the source code to the thing that is doing that stuff on Mac OS and
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS and all those other operating systems. And then finally related to all of this, there has been a, there was
⏹️ ▶️ John a recent Swift evolution proposal. These are all like SE something, which is Swift evolution
⏹️ ▶️ John hyphen some number, which is like a proposal for the, for some change to the Swift language
⏹️ ▶️ John and they go through a review process and blah, blah, blah. This one is a proposal to add a file path
⏹️ ▶️ John to the standard library, which is a fine abstraction for file paths.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not the thing I was talking about, about how hard it is to do secure file system traversal in Linux. I still have to find that
⏹️ ▶️ John one for the shouts, but this describes file path, you know, an abstraction
⏹️ ▶️ John for you, as opposed to using URLs for everything. This is a, you know, an abstraction for local file system file
⏹️ ▶️ John paths, but it’s cross platform because again, Swift doesn’t just run on Mac OS, it also runs on Linux and Windows and
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of other platforms. And they, they want this language to not just be an Apple platform language, so they’re trying to make it work everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And a portable implementation of FilePath that works on MacOS, Linux, and Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John is a useful abstraction. It already exists. They would like to add it to the Swift standard library. They would like to stop
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on URL, which I think is part of foundation, which is part of Apple platform crap. So they’re like, we need
⏹️ ▶️ John one that is not tied to Apple platforms at all. I would encourage you to the very least
⏹️ ▶️ John skim the FilePath, you know, the, what is this one? se0529,
⏹️ ▶️ John the proposal to add file path to the standard library, skim it to see what is involved in file path.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you will be probably surprised by at least one or two things in here about,
⏹️ ▶️ John wait, that’s a valid file path? You can do that? Because when you try to come up with an abstraction file path, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really easy. It’s just a bunch of path components and separated by some separate error. And there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John semantics about that, but yeah, maybe it’s a little tricky with character encodings, but that’s not a big deal, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows file paths alone have so much Byzantine crap in them. It’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they do mention.nofollow in here. They also mentioned.vol, which is another one of the magic strings that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can put in Unix path. But Windows, man, drive letters, yes, naturally. But there’s also like
⏹️ ▶️ John backslash, backslash, backslash, backslash, period, backslash, pipe
⏹️ ▶️ John syntax to get it like device nodes and stuff with special.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet neither one of you has ever even heard of half of this stuff. Like, and they have to make an abstraction
⏹️ ▶️ John that works with these paths, but also the same abstraction works with Linux paths that also works with Apple paths.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is way more complicated than you think. And it’s like, you know, if you were ever trying to do something cross-platform, you’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John thank God someone else wrote file path and I didn’t have to, but even just using it correctly is tricky.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would encourage you to check this out. And again, maybe you’ll learn something about
⏹️ ▶️ John the special magic strings that you can put in file paths on macOS that will have behaviors that you might find useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Today I learned. Did you skim it and look at the Windows things? I didn’t know half of this stuff. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know the one with the drive letter where it’s C colon and then a backslash versus C colon without it, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that both of those are still accepted by modern Windows. Obviously there’s the backslash, backslash, server
⏹️ ▶️ John slash share thing that you’re familiar with, but the backslash, backslash, period, backslash, pipe with name, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Never seen that. The
⏹️ ▶️ John N-U-L, all caps, The backslash backslash question mark backslash
⏹️ ▶️ John C colon backslash. It’s too many backslashes. What are they doing over there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I, it makes me so happy not to be on windows. Like I know we’ve got this weird dot file that macOS but
⏹️ ▶️ John the windows ones just so happy that’s not an operating system that I ever have to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Conventional, uh, drive letter forms, UNC forms, uh, current drive route and rootless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paths. So that’s all, that all makes sense. I was familiar with all those. Drive namespace, paths
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beginning with backslash, backslash, dot, backslash, followed by a Win32 device name, e.g. backslash, backslash,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dot, backslash, pipe, backslash, backslash, dot, backslash, com1,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backslash, backslash, dot, backslash, physical drive zero. Yikes, didn’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they have to make an abstraction over this. Like the file path thing has to have like accessor methods for like, like they
⏹️ ▶️ John came up with names, like what do we call it? Like, yeah, it’s drive letter, but what about when it’s like backslash, backslash, server
⏹️ ▶️ John side, like what is that part called? Like they have to come up with like a, you know, a word for
⏹️ ▶️ John that part of the path that is the same word on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John This amazing, pretty amazing work for the people who created FilePath.