717: Two Hot Streaks
12 Nov 2026PROLED details and hands-on impressions, Siri AI’s expansion, living with the iPhone Duo, and how you all proved (once again) that you’re the best podcast audience.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Hacking Marco’s Unforgetful
- Follow-up:
- ATP Store donations
- Thank you to Mark Zeren 💙
- Transgender Law Center
- iPhone Duo
- Marco did no listen to Casey’s advice
- MacBook PROLED
- HTX Studio (Video timestamp link to 3m17s)
- To darken the illuminated Apple logo:
sudo defaults write com.apple.CoreBrightness LEBacklightMode -int 0 - To illuminate it again:
sudo defaults delete com.apple.CoreBrightness LEBacklightMode - Backglow lets you customize the glowing logo
- Austin Evans on the exhaust ports (Video timestamp link to 5m49s)
- …and the airflow (6m28s)
- MaxTech’s review
- …including a thermal camera view (Video timestamp link to 13m)
- Geekerwan uses smoke to show airflow change (Video timestamp link to 8m44s)
- iFixIt Teardown
- Chinese YouTubers
- Tim Pan 🤝 Tim Cook (via Elijah)
- Comparing and contrasting channels (via Adeiko)
- HTX Studio Q&A (via weiran)
- Apple “Business Specialists” (via Rich)
- Ternus as CEO
- A suggestion from Matyas
- A suggestion from Kári Helgason
- ATP Store donations
- Siri AI is now open to all developers (in beta)
- Ask ATP:
- Why bother with an Apple TV when smart TVs exist? (via Denis Berger)
- What’s the whole point of Tailscale anyway? (via Richard)
Note: Tailscale is a past sponsor - Is AI going to bring us into a golden age of software? (via Chris Koerner)
- Post-show: Marco throws in the towel on the Duo
- Marco’s grip tape (the thin edge’s piece was cut from a wider piece)
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Future iPhone form factors
Sponsored by:
- Base44: Build the real thing with Base44. Describe the software you need in your own words and get a working build. Get 30% off the Builder plan for your first year.
- Uncommon Goods: Get 15% off your next gift.
- Quince: Elevated essentials and staples that last.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- New server, who dis
- ATP Store results
- MBP PROLED details
- Sponsor: Base44
- HTX Studio and Tim Pan
- Apple Business tidbit
- macOS updates without reboots
- Sponsor: Uncommon Goods
- Siri AI expands in beta
- Siri AI unreliability 🖼️
- Siri’s Personal Knowledge Graph
- Sponsor: Quince
- #askatp: Smart TVs vs. Apple TV 4K
- #askatp: Tailscale for Synology, etc.
- #askatp: New era of efficiency?
- Ending theme
- Marco’s Duo experience 🖼️
New server, who dis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We changed out the entire server that the site runs on, and no one seems to have noticed. So that's a good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was only one post-update error that I had to fix, which is pretty good. Yeah, that's what
⏹️ ▶️ John was it? I don't remember anymore. It was like, oh, some page.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like the store page. The store page has like embedded PHP, and it was like a thing that could potentially send
⏹️ ▶️ John output after the HTTP headers had already been sent. And PHP sends
⏹️ ▶️ John to the log that says, Hey, you tried to do a thing, but I already sent the HTTP headers. That was literally the only thing I had to fix. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John was basically content-based, like because of the data in the store page that triggered that error.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that's pretty good. And that's, I don't blame myself too much for that because at the time that I did the PHP update
⏹️ ▶️ John branch, I didn't have that store content page content, so I couldn't have caught that beforehand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it went very well. I was, I mean, it was heavily AI assisted, I will say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was amazing for like server transitions and stuff. Like, figure out everything on this server and make sure it also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works on this server and set it all up and help me transition and everything. Oh, man, what a what a help that was.
⏹️ ▶️ John It did miss a lot of stuff, I have to say, though. That's why I was telling you, and this was a miscommunication with us. I was trying to tell you, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John before you switch it over, set up the new server, but don't change the DNS yet and let me hop onto the new server
⏹️ ▶️ John and fix all the stuff. And you didn't do that. You switched over the DNS and said, now it's switched over, check it out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it was missing a lot of stuff, but it wasn't that bad. Yeah, I don't work well with others. That's basically
⏹️ ▶️ John Just to get a little bit extra drama of me to jump in. Oh, this is already the live server. I guess I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fixing it live. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly just like periodic jobs that I needed to set up and directory permissions that I needed to change and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. It wasn't, it wasn't things that were causing the functional site to not work in the moment, but it was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I hadn't fixed it by that evening, there would have been problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, Marco, a few days ago, we'll do it live.
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming you didn't understand what I was saying when I said, let me look at it before you switch over. I probably just forgot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had the momentum going. Again, arguing for giving us access to your unforgetful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you say that publicly? I think that might have only been private.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like after we went offline or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John made a tongue-in-cheek plea for he and I to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to Marco's unforgetful so we could put things on his to-do list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and By the way, you can do because like unforgetful just reads the system reminders. Well, system reminders do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like a shared list that you can set up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don't tempt us with a good time.
⏹️ ▶️ John with this, like we didn't discuss it seriously, but the real problem is like the potential for griefing is massive and that would just make Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John start ignoring it or delete
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that shared thing. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John we would Casey in particular would not be able to resist the temptation to put stupid stuff in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, come now. I would only do it once every two or three days.
ATP Store results
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Let's do some uh follow up And we should start with a great big thank you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone who purchased merch. The store is closed. So far, I think I've only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen one person say, oh no, oh God, it's me. But I did see one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so you, the listener, did a pretty good job this year. I'm pretty happy about that. Usually we see at least a smattering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. And I believe I've only seen one. Or maybe you're just learning to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John quiet. about it i shame them so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey much. they don't want to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So anyway, we did complete the sale. Obviously, Cotton Bureau takes it from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. And we hope that they'll get you stuff by the holidays, but no promises. But we told you we would talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more about the ATP Pride and ATP Trans Pride t-shirts and what we're going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that money and all that stuff. So this is mostly John's bag. So take it away, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell us, how did this turn out?
⏹️ ▶️ John So people really responded to those two shirts. I think if you combine them, I think they are our single
⏹️ ▶️ John best-selling product ever. People just showed up for those charities.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we're very proud of our listeners.
⏹️ ▶️ John the preliminary totals we have. As we said, we're donating 100% of our profits from those two products to charity.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much will that be? Now, a disclaimer, they're preliminary because Cotton Bureau always gives
⏹️ ▶️ John some amount of time for like payments to settle and everything. So we don't have final, final numbers, but it'll be within
⏹️ ▶️ John the ballpark within like within like 10, 15, 20, 100 bucks of what we say now, depending on how
⏹️ ▶️ John various fail payments get sorted out. And the second thing is, of course, we have to wait for Cotton Bureau to send
⏹️ ▶️ John us the money before we can send it to the charity. So we're not making the donation today, but I wanted to tell people immediately as soon
⏹️ ▶️ John as the sale ended what the totals are. And we did collectively
⏹️ ▶️ John as a community, we did amazing. So the total is just over $10,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John Holy shit! Seriously? $10,071 in change, but that's
⏹️ ▶️ John going to fluctuate as it, but it's going to be around $10,000. So that's around $5,000 for each charity.
⏹️ ▶️ John But wait, there's more because our listeners are incredibly amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark Zerin, a longtime ATP listener, was inspired by our Pride and Trans
⏹️ ▶️ John Pride products and and has pledged to match our donation to Trans Lifeline
⏹️ ▶️ John and Transgender Law Center. So it's not $10,000 in change. It's $20,000
⏹️ ▶️ John in change. And he will make his donation when we make ours when I give him the final numbers. That is flabbergasting
⏹️ ▶️ John and amazing. That's
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey awesome. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Incredible. Apologies. I've been a little sweary so far, even though I'm in a very good mood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe that's why. That is being incredible and incredible, incredible thanks to anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who bought one of these shirts, to anyone who wears one of these shirts, but most especially to Mark.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark, please feel free to reach out directly to me. I will send you a pile of stickers if you're interested.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is incredible, incredible work by everyone associated, but most especially Mark. Thank you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every single one of you. I'm genuinely, really and truly, extremely proud of all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us. I really, truly mean that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And also, we heard from lots of other listeners who donated directly to charities, either the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones we picked or other ones. They didn't want to buy a shirt because it was too expensive and shipping and tariffs. Like we understand, but they still donated
⏹️ ▶️ John directly to charity. So it wasn't just Mark, lots of people. And they didn't just give small amounts. Some people gave a small amount, but some people gave
⏹️ ▶️ John literally hundreds of dollars to these charities. So it's been an amazing response.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Our listeners are the best. Like I, I i know there's other podcasts out there. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love them, et cetera. Our listeners are the best. And I think, you know, you you all out there, you, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prove it. You have a number of occasions per year where you prove it. And this is definitely one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those occasions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I'm I'm incredibly, incredibly thankful. I could spend the entire next two hours just saying that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over and over again. I will try to shut up about it. But truly, from from all of us, this, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so incredibly proud. I mean, I don't want to get into politics, but like the last Tuesday was an incredibly strong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and good day for the three of us here on the show. I think it was probably a strong day for anyone who would buy one of these shirts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm riding a real happy wave right now. And this feeling of what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it called? Hope, I think is what it's called, is one I'm not familiar with. And I'm just, I'm so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thankful and proud of genuinely everyone involved. So thank you so much. I also wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take note, we got some feedback from a listener of the show, Zinnia Bynum, who, as it turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the major gifts manager for Transgender Law Center, which we had no idea was a listener. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's freaking awesome. Zinnia writes, as a member and longtime listener of ATP, I was delighted to hear that you all will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be supporting Transgender Law Center with this year's merch sale. I wanted to send you a bit more information about TLC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Here's a link to our one-pager, which I'll put in the show notes, which goes over our work in a bit more depth. Since you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all dads, I'd love to shout out our recent campaign that shows how dads can have a huge impact on their community.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also in the show notes, we have a toolkit for how to start these conversations in your neighborhood and how to support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trans people in your life. We also have a short advertisement about this campaign and radio attached and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video form, which will be in the show notes. If you'd want to share it out, please feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free to mention that the email address, giving at transgenderlawcenter.org,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will repeat that, giving at transgenderlawcenter.org. You can use that for anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who wants to reach out with questions or if they'd like to know about more ways to give.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, It's just amazing that they were already an ATP listener. So that's great to hear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Really, really good stuff. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so proud of us for what we all did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in September. I'm so proud of us for what we did in October slash November. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we're going to stop asking you for donations for a little bit, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John nevertheless. This
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn't like strategically planned or anything. It just so happens to come after we did, you know, September childhood cancer Awareness month,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it just, you know, that makes it all the more amazing that people reacted so strongly to this and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey didn't go, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I already gave to charity with the cancer thing. Do I have to do it again? No, the response was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
MBP PROLED details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk some nerdy stuff. Let's talk MacBook Pro with ProLed XDR Display. HTX
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Studio, which is becoming our favorite YouTube channel, has a video about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MacBook Pro in the, and I believe the Mac Mini, or excuse me, the iPad Mini was stuck on the end of that video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But interestingly, at three minutes and 17 seconds, again, link in the show notes, they note that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the front-facing camera has software stabilization to combat screen wobble caused by touching the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen. And they do a demonstration of that. It looks pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was in that was in like the bullet points that we read on like the release day. like what does that mean? This is what it means. I
⏹️ ▶️ John forget what the wording was. It was something about advanced camera stabilization, blah, blah, blah. This is what it is. It's when
⏹️ ▶️ John you poke the screen, we do on the fly software stabilization to try to reduce the wobble.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, if you poke it hard enough, the screen is still going to wobble, but that's that's pretty neat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, there is the illuminated logo on the back of the display,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we're going to talk about that on and off for a while now. But anyways, there is a knowledge base document,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we will link in the show notes. And it reads, to make the Apple logo dark in all lighting conditions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can turn off its illumination using terminal. And then you have a defaults write that Apple provides. We'll put that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. or If not the defaults write, we'll at least put the link in the show notes. This change affects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all macOS user accounts, including when starting up for macOS recovery. When migrating to a new Mac, the setting transfers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the new Mac. To turn logo illumination on again, you do a defaults delete. Reinstalling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey macOS also turns the illumination back on. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when I see a tech note like this, this is officially from Apple. I mean, we're going to get to some third-party stuff and people are experimenting. In
⏹️ ▶️ John last episode, we were like, oh, people are exploring. And They think, you know, I think it was Gearambo or like they found the private framework or blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. Apple put out a tech note basically at the same time they released these with a pseudo
⏹️ ▶️ John default write command. And it's like, Apple, if you find
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yourself doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that, just put a damn GUI in settings for it. Like how long before this, this set this GUI
⏹️ ▶️ John appears? It seems so clear that they like, maybe they ran out of time, couldn't fit the GUI in the whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John 27.2 or release, but they're like, we just want people to know, because it makes sense. Like if you're
⏹️ ▶️ John like in a studio type of environment or like you're shooting on a movie set or something, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you actually would do want to turn that logo off so the light isn't shining in a particular direction. So surely there's a way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there is, but Apple's like, yeah, just defaults right until we can get to the GUI for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is an app called BackGlow, B-A-C-K-G-L-O-W, that lets you customize the glowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple logo. Joe Rosignol at Mac Rumors writes, a new a new BackGlow app created by designer Juan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Buies lets you customize the illuminated Apple logo on the lid of the new MacBook Pro models. The free version of the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allows you to manually adjust the brightness level of the Apple logo independent of the MacBook Pro's display brightness level.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can also turn it off entirely with a single click rather than having to use the terminal. There you go, John. Another free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option is a breathe mode that makes the logo's light gently pulse, similar to the sleep indicator on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey older MacBooks. Rest in peace. God, I love that so much. A one-time payment gives you two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey additional modes. Music mode that makes the logo's light move to the beat of the music you play on your Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while agents mode makes the light pulse while cloud code is working and blink when your attention is needed. It's
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of lights on the outside of MacBooks, like the breathing one, that used to be the light on the power adapter,
⏹️ ▶️ John which, you know, I suppose they could still do it today because MagSafe has that. And there are some USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John connectors that have little screens on them and light up. But anyway, that made sense with the breathing because it was the
⏹️ ▶️ John power supplying thing. Maybe the logo doesn't make that much sense as breathing. But anyway, the other lights that used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be visible on the outside of Mac laptops where they had like a series of lights
⏹️ ▶️ John for the battery to show you what your charge remaining was on the battery in units of like quarters
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. It was like three or four little tiny lights, just like on your little DeWalt battery. If all four lights
⏹️ ▶️ John are lit up, your battery is full. If three of the four lights are lit up, it's 75% full or whatever. It's very crude,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was a way for you to check your battery um, charge level without
⏹️ ▶️ John opening your laptop. Uh, And they were so small. They were tiny pinpricks and they wouldn't
⏹️ ▶️ John be on all the time. You would press a button or something near them and they light up. And I've just been waiting for someone to
⏹️ ▶️ John discover those in the past and go, you know, we could add those pretty cheaply. They don't take up a lot of room.
⏹️ ▶️ John We could do some clever thing where the button is like one of those invisible capacitive buttons. It doesn't look like a button or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. And I do think that does serve some function. If you're just peeking at your laptop and your bag and those
⏹️ ▶️ John lights are along the edge of it, just to sort of touch a thing and see three out of the four lights light
⏹️ ▶️ John up and know whether you need it to charge or not. I don't think it's essential, but it is in that same family
⏹️ ▶️ John of cute, interesting features they added back when they thought putting stuff on the outside of computers was a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would argue the battery ones, even though personally I would love to see them again, I would argue that's a lot less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a big deal now that these things have effectively infinite battery life. But you're not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John wrong. But when
⏹️ ▶️ John you're traveling, though, like you're, you're, oh, you are going to run out of battery eventually if you're working it hard. And like laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John in particular, like, why wouldn't you just open it up and check the battery? It's in your bag. Like it's closed up. Like you're peeking. It's the
⏹️ ▶️ John edge of it just poking out of your backpack. Backpack, I still think it has utility.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I agree with you. I definitely agree with you. I just think it's less critical than it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, Nevertheless, Austin Evans in his video review uh, says that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey newly divided air slots on the sides of the MacBook Pros are less sharp than they used to be. And he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was very excited about that. We'll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of reviewers have said that. It's not just him. So they look less sharp in the pictures. And everybody says they run
⏹️ ▶️ John their fingers along them. They are less sharp, which I think is great because I said last time when I revisited the old
⏹️ ▶️ John models and when I was looking at the duo in the Apple store, I was struck again by how sharp those
⏹️ ▶️ John slots are on the old models.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. In fact, I actually went to an Apple store yesterday and handled these for the first time. And that was one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first things I did. Of course, I pick it up. I twirl it around, see how light it is. And immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the next thing I do is run my finger along that bottom edge. And it was actually useful because, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've been using a 14-inch for years now. So I know pretty well how they felt. But they're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still selling those models. And so immediately next to the new one I was playing with was one of the old models.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I could compare them side by side. And yeah, the difference is night and day in terms of the sharpness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that slot. You can, if you like really dig your finger into it, you can still feel a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a sharp edge, but it's nothing like before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Austin also noted, regarding the fans and screen cooling, he also says that he was told that the exhaust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no longer blows up, now it blows down and out. And as someone who runs his computer clamshell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of the time, this sounds pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Maxtech had some, in their review, took out their little thermal camera to show
⏹️ ▶️ John the front, like the laptops are open in front of you. So you can see the keyboard and the screen. They showed the old model and the
⏹️ ▶️ John new model. And on the old model, you can see two big, bright hot streaks coming
⏹️ ▶️ John out and going up the screen. You know, they're just above the keyboard where that crack is between the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John and the screen. And you can visualize where the fans are inside there. And they're blowing hot air up
⏹️ ▶️ John and out across the screen. So you get two hot streaks going up the screen. And then you look at the new model and you
⏹️ ▶️ John see the same heat under the keyboard where the SOC and everything is, but you do not see hot streaks
⏹️ ▶️ John going up the screen. Instead, the screen looks much, much cooler.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Uh, so then Geekerwon used smoke to show the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey airflow change. This is very slick. I didn't see this when I was studying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm going to have to go back and watch this, but we'll put a link in that in the show notes to that video as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so it's funny. Like, um, So first of all, Geekerwon was another, uh, I don't know
⏹️ ▶️ John if it's a Chinese YouTube channel, but it's a non, non English speaking YouTube channel that's dubbed into English uh, for us.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the side views of these computers, it looks like the computers
⏹️ ▶️ John are farting. Let's be honest. It looks like they're shooting out. All right. So how did they do this? They went
⏹️ ▶️ John to Taco Bell tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ John As they noted in the video, these were like not ones that they had purchased, but they were the review units. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like, well, we can't really crack them open because they're not ours. Apple kind of frowns on you taking apart their computers
⏹️ ▶️ John they loan you. But apparently they felt fine about letting it inhale smoke through
⏹️ ▶️ John its input ports and shoot the smoke out of it. And so you compare it. They were comparing the
⏹️ ▶️ John 2025 model to the OLED one. And the old model has fart
⏹️ ▶️ John gas coming out the back, you know, basically shooting out, shooting directly out the back, like along the table,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, away from you. And also pretty much an equal amount of smoke
⏹️ ▶️ John going straight up the screen, right? Because, you know, some of it goes out the back, but some of it goes up the screen. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John new one has barely any going in front of the screen and a much, much bigger plume
⏹️ ▶️ John shooting out the back. That's what Austin Evans was getting at is that the new ones fart out the back
⏹️ ▶️ John way more than the old ones did. And additionally, Geeker wan noted that
⏹️ ▶️ John in the old model, if you open up the screen really, really wide, first of all, the fart gas starts
⏹️ ▶️ John going down at an angle, which is funny. But also, it blocks a lot of the back
⏹️ ▶️ John port, the one that shoots out the back of the laptop, because the screen is blocking it. As you move the hinge down, the screen blocks
⏹️ ▶️ John more and more of that port. And even more hot air goes shooting out across the surface of the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John With the new ones, the hole in the back is bigger. So even when you open the lid to its maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John openness, still there's enough room for all the fart gas to come out the
⏹️ ▶️ John back down at an angle. And there's still barely any going up the screen. So that is the cooling thing. um
⏹️ ▶️ John It is sending less hot air across the surface of the screen. Because before you
⏹️ ▶️ John never had occasion to touch the screen because it wasn't a touch screen. So however hot the screen got, you didn't notice that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your fingers were never going to touch it, but now they are. So they're trying to focus all the heat out
⏹️ ▶️ John the back instead of going up the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There's also a chart that they provided about power use. Can you tell me about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So that's the other thing people were doing is like temperature testing. So with all this, you may be wondering,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, is that compromising cooling or anything? Apparently, the new models,
⏹️ ▶️ John the new OLED models, have better performance when the lids are closed in the default fan
⏹️ ▶️ John mode. So if you close the lid on both of them and you run them, the thinner, lighter one has better
⏹️ ▶️ John performance. And they measure this by saying basically how much power does it consume because that's that's their proxy
⏹️ ▶️ John for like, is it thermal throttling? Like if it's not throttling, it should be using the maximum amount of power. you just
⏹️ ▶️ John measure how much power it's drawing when they run whatever benchmark or whatever. So the chart is hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to understand because some of the labels are not in English. So I can't read them. But according to
⏹️ ▶️ John the narration, which is in English, uh, the top two lines are for the lid open and the top two bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John lines are for the lid closed. And in both lid open and lid closed mode, the OLED model
⏹️ ▶️ John is drawing more power, which means it is thermal throttling less than the old models, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty amazing. Again, it's lighter, it's thinner, uh it has fewer places to
⏹️ ▶️ John eject hot air, but still it is thermal throttling less than the old
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Now, I will point out that when they tested it, they forced the fans to max RPM, and we'll get to fans
⏹️ ▶️ John in a second. When they force both fans to max RPM, they both perform identically. So apparently both have cooling
⏹️ ▶️ John systems that are capable of cooling it to the point where they either don't thermal throttle or thermal throttle
⏹️ ▶️ John equally, but no one runs their fans at max speed all the time. like that you use the software
⏹️ ▶️ John that the computer comes with to throttle those fans. And maybe the throttling curve on the new
⏹️ ▶️ John one is better than they were on the old one. But the bottom line is if you just use it out of the box the way it comes and allow it
⏹️ ▶️ John to control the fan speed, you will thermal throttle less with the new ones, which is amazing Cause remember, that's the
⏹️ ▶️ John same exact SOC in there in a thinner, lighter laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is bananas. Apparently, there's some bad news about fan speeds, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you think this is bad news, but this is the thing. So they they measured it. They were comparing, again, the 14-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John old to the 14-inch new OLED one. And the 14-inch OLED new one has faster, higher fan
⏹️ ▶️ John speeds. And actually, they're different max fan speeds. So the old ones were like 7,800 RPM for both fans.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new one is 8,400 RPM for the left fan and 9,000 RPM for the right fan. You're like, wow, that
⏹️ ▶️ John must be terrible. They must be louder. No, they're higher RPM and also they're quieter,
⏹️ ▶️ John 50 decibels on the old model and 48 decibels to the new one, which is amazing. Like, I don't even know how they did this. Like, that's why
⏹️ ▶️ John this channel was like, we can't wait to crack these open and see, did they get a better model of fan? Do they have
⏹️ ▶️ John different fan blade designs? But the new fans can go faster and at
⏹️ ▶️ John the faster speed, they have lower noise level. They did a bunch of experiments. They're like, let's just make them
⏹️ ▶️ John make the same noise level and test the cooling. Or let's make them run the same RPM and then test the temperature. They
⏹️ ▶️ John really did a good job with these laptops. They basically just took the old ones and bettered them in every possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such good news so far. Again, we had a lot of damage in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast about the previous screw-ups where it just seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time Apple touched certain things about the Mac, we were like, oh, no, don't make it worse because they kept making it worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and had a history of making it worse and telling us they were making it better, but it was actually worse or the same. We're staying you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, broken. Anyway, not that we're upset, but this is such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an amazing progression because like in many ways, this is actually really boring. And that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we want. In many ways, it's like, yeah, it's like the new one, but better. That's it. That like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In many of these ways are pretty small. Many of these ways are pretty big. That is exactly what we want
⏹️ ▶️ John product line. And it's such a weird thing. Like the fact that they decided or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the fact that we don't have M6 Pro and M6 Max, right? It gives us this weird opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John to, because when they do change the SOCs, it's like, well, how much of this is attributable to a better design? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John how much is it attributable because of a new SOC on two nanometer? But they they kept the SOC the same,
⏹️ ▶️ John which again, is not good. That's not a good thing, but it gives us this opportunity to say, How have
⏹️ ▶️ John they improved fundamentally the design of this laptop? Or are we just seeing the benefits being reaped by a
⏹️ ▶️ John new SOC? And now we have apples to apples comparison. They have the exact same chip in there. And it's
⏹️ ▶️ John clear that even with the exact same chip, they made it faster, lighter, quieter, better in every possible
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Oh, I can only imagine what this will be like when it has an M7 Pro or Max or whatever, a two nanometer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, I know we're kind of in the middle of follow up, but I can't help but ask, I know you're not a laptop person, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know we all concluded, two-thirds of us concluded at least, that now is not the time to buy one of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you were to buy a new laptop today, would you spend the 400 bucks and get the OLED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, or would you stick with the previous one?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why am I buying a laptop? like i
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don't know, just don't know what it's just hypothetical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't know because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forced to use it instead
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for a portable thing or what am I doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pick your poison. Whatever hypothetical will actually get you to answer this question.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, i when I do uh muse about potentially getting a laptop, like because right now when I go on my
⏹️ ▶️ John long island vacations, I obviously use a laptop to do all my photo processing and stuff. And I basically
⏹️ ▶️ John use one of the kids' quote-unquote kids' laptops. They're not theirs. We bought them. But anyway, like they're
⏹️ ▶️ John like the laptops we bought them for college, like the M4 MacBook Air and M2 MacBook Air. And I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we'll probably give those to the kids to be their laptops when they finally, you know, leave the nest
⏹️ ▶️ John someday if that ever happens. So I might need to buy myself a laptop. And when
⏹️ ▶️ John I think about that, I'm like, oh, an M6 MacBook Air. Like, that's what I'm thinking because for the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey purposes I have,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like, I want a small light laptop that I use one week a year. And there's no way I'd
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pay it and spend eight grand on something like that. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And hey, if I
⏹️ ▶️ John hold out long enough and or if they don't leave the house long enough, maybe I'll get like an OLED MacBook Air in 2032
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. Right. So that's what I'm currently thinking. I wouldn't spend I wouldn't spend the eight
⏹️ ▶️ John grand on these, even though they are amazing and accomplish great things. You know I wouldn't spend it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The screen corners can't do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that's both the OLED and non-OLED, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, just the OLED, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think you're right. I think it is just the OLED, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John until all their desktop monitors have rounded corners then you're going to really hear me go ballistic. But anyway, I'm hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John hope they will snap out of that one before it comes to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you snap to grid when it's a curved corner? You don't.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just make the UI squirm out of the way. It's great. Make
⏹️ ▶️ John of the window have a different radius.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apologies for the digression. I couldn't help myself. Coming back to the ProLED, Maxtech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talks about, well, where did all the weight go and noted that the aluminum corners are carved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out a bit. Uh, And there's, I think, some other things that he had noted, if I recall correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was watching this earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ John He had some guesses. He was like, oh, it looks like the batteries are physically smaller. But I, when I was watching the video, I'm like, this is great, Max Tech,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we're just waiting for the iFixit video because they're going to put things on scales. And they did. Yep. So where did the weight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So that brings us to the iFixit video. And again, all these will be linked in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, the 14 inch compared to the 14 inch pro led compared to the M6 MacBook Pro. The battery is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two grams lighter. The track pad is eight grams lighter, but it's also not as tall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, the chassis is seven is, excuse me, 92 grams lighter. The bottom cover is 44
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grams lighter. The lid is 101 grams lighter. So the total is 203 grams or 0.55
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go. That's where the weight went. That is all of it. Uh, Most of it went. Shockingly, they saved the
⏹️ ▶️ John most weight in the lid, like the screen, the backlight. The lid is physically thinner. And
⏹️ ▶️ John second place is the chassis, that part that had the corners cut out of it or whatever. But yeah, a little bit here
⏹️ ▶️ John and there adds up to a half a pound in the 14 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And even like the, you know, I fixed it broke it down further, like the bottom cover,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just like the whole frame and chassis, like of the bottom assembly, but the actual bottom cover, like the part that if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unscrew the screws, that part that comes off, that was like half the savings of the lower chassis savings right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like. No, that was in addition to the chassis savings. That's why I have it listed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 92, bottom cover 44. Yeah. It's, I mean, this is an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco savings due to a lot of, you know, different manufacturing and, you know, carving out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the aluminum. And I'm looking forward to hearing more about this because like some people had speculated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that maybe they were using the same process they were using for the MacBook Neo. Because remember when the Neo launched, they said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they, basically they said that they found like a cheaper way to make the aluminum. But the Neo is not light.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Neo weighs as much as the MacBook Air. So I don't think that's
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is. like The bottom cover might also be stamped, but like when you have something that is flat, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom cover, that just you unscrew the screws and it comes off, whether that's stamped or machined almost doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John matter. It's like if I have a flat sheet of aluminum, if I machine it flat or if it's stamped flat, it's just flat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the difference in the final product is very minimal. Whereas if you have something that is a tub or
⏹️ ▶️ John a frame or something, that makes a big difference whether you're stamping that or machining it
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of the strength and how precise you can be with removing material. I'm looking at like at the corners and stuff. It reminds
⏹️ ▶️ John me of the things car manufacturers do to like, especially with like advanced computer design.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's why they have all the suspension arms that look like they're like bones from an animal because they
⏹️ ▶️ John just put into a computer. They say, here are the stresses. here is the durability we need from it.
⏹️ ▶️ John here it's where it's connected. Here's all the stuff that's going to connect to it. Here's how much the car weighs. you know They put it into a machine. They say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just want it to meet these specs. And it just comes up with the least amount of metal you
⏹️ ▶️ John can use to meet those specs. And it turns out, perhaps not surprisingly to biologists, that it ends up looking
⏹️ ▶️ John like a bone because our bones are, you know, evolved over millions and
⏹️ ▶️ John millions of years. And the animals with slightly less efficient distribution of calcium in their skeletons
⏹️ ▶️ John had a slightly lower chance of reproducing. And so we get things that look like bones. And so that's why you get cars that look like bones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the inside of the chassis doesn't look like bones yet, but some of the carved out portions are like, I can't imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John a person choosing to do that. And how do they know that that's a safe thing to do? I don't know if they're using
⏹️ ▶️ John the same design techniques that they would use for car suspension parts, but that's the direction
⏹️ ▶️ John this kind of stuff goes. If you really want to save weight, rather than having a human guess about where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John remove stuff or just do some stress diagrams and like, let's carve some stuff out here with computer controlled milling
⏹️ ▶️ John machines. You can come up with almost anything you want and then it will mill it for you. And they're
⏹️ ▶️ John traveling that path with these laptops, it seems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This reminds me, I think we had this in the show notes, but never quite got to it. And I think it even fell out of overtime. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ford, when they've been designing their new pickup truck to replace the Lightning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was an article on like The Verge or something about how they were obsessive about efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how giving the car like a half mile more range.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, if you do this 500 times, that's 250 miles more range. Like, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm being hyperbolic, but you know what I'm saying? And I feel like this MacBook Pro is a similar thing. Like, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can we get a few grams here, a few grams there, a few grams here? And suddenly that adds up to 203 grams, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, as we said before, over half a pound.
⏹️ ▶️ John it's like Gordon Murray Automotive. Gordon Murray famously
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey obsessive about
⏹️ ▶️ John weight and every single screw and every single piece and everything in his cars. And it's the same strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like, you don't care about this one screw now, but there's 300 of these in the car. And if you just repeat that over and over again,
⏹️ ▶️ John it adds up eventually, which is why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his car is a very lightweight. You got it. All right. Continuing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, the hinges, iFixIt found. It's hard to paint a word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picture about this, but if you imagine the hinge, there's a lateral bar that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has what appears to be like rings on it. John, I think in the show notes, theorized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they're spring windings, which makes sense to me. But on the MacBook Pro without ProLED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display, there's something like six or eight of these. And on the MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the ProLED XDR display, there's two more of those rings. So the hinges are very, very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking, but there's two more of these rings, which I presume has to do with it being a little more
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there was some speculation like, oh, the hinge on the new one feels so good. They must have totally redesigned it. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like it is exactly identical with two more rings. And the two more rings translate into it
⏹️ ▶️ John being a little bit stiffer, which makes sense. Like they didn't totally redesign this hinge, but it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John it's just the old hinge with more stiffness. And, you know, that's good. You want it to have a little bit more to defend against it, but it's not like
⏹️ ▶️ John they went back to the drawing board and came up with an all new hinge, it seems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly, like when I knowing about this, the redesign hinge,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was in the Apple store with them side by side, I poked them both because I'm like, it's not my screen. I don't care if I touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So, you know, I poked them both and I moved the lid back and forth a few times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, I could not tell a difference between the two hinges, to be honest. If you poke either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them, it does like jiggle a little bit. Like, if you think the hinge is going to be super rigid and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can like touch it and have it not wiggle, nope, it's not. But neither was the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to me, they felt exactly the same, to be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Then coming back to iFixIt, they also took apart, of course they did, the logo light.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what they found was there's four LEDs that are all along one edge that shine into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a diffuser. And that's how you get the glowing logo.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's edge-lit. Yeah, this kind of puts a damper on the hope that you'll be able to do RGB stripes
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything with the LEDs because it's just not the way it's set up. It's just edge-lit into a diffuser with a little reflector behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think we mentioned this last time, but the light-up
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple logo, when it's not lit up, it looks like the past mirrored ones because it's basically like a one-way
⏹️ ▶️ John mirror or a two-way mirror. Isn't it fun how one-way and two-way mirrors, both of those phrases in English
⏹️ ▶️ John describe the exact same thing, which is a mirror that if you look at one side of it, you see your reflection. And if you look through the other side, you can see through it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you see in the TV shows when they're interrogating somebody and people.
⏹️ ▶️ John That thing. Anyway, that's what the Apple logo is. So when the light is off, it actually looks very similar
⏹️ ▶️ John to the old non light up one. Not exactly the same because the old non-light up ones were like shiny metal and this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of mirrored glass.
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HTX Studio and Tim Pan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then we've been talking on and off about these Chinese YouTubers over the last few weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because we're now getting exposed to them. And Elijah writes, like HTX Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tim Pan also did a Tim Cook collaboration. We'll put a link in the show notes to it. Elijah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continues, also regarding Media Storm's size, they also run a clothing brand, Storm Crew.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My roommate from China has one of their shirts. MediaStorm is the HTX people. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? I forget who's who now.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think that's Tim Pan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, my bad. Uh, Adico writes, Tim Pan is more like a Linus Linus Linus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where did that come from? A Linus Media Group operation from China. They have courses, massive e-commerce, clothing, and started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a TV production company. HTX is a much smaller operation, similar in size to MKBHD. I don't know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that's really true. Does MKBHD have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John company? I think they're bigger than
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the idea is that Tim Pan is like bigger. Is Linus Media Group that much bigger than… Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this this is what they said. So I'm just reading, reading some feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watching their behind the scenes videos, they just seem much more focused on having big production quality, different style.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Geekerwan as we mentioned earlier, is also a good Chinese YouTube channel. Then Y Ron writes, HTX
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Studio just posted a Q&A video that answers a lot of your questions about what HTX Studio is and where it came from. And I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch this and it was very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like it's so clear. Like the reason we're seeing these now is because they're, first of all, they're posting their things to YouTube when before
⏹️ ▶️ John they were doing it on whatever the Chinese YouTube is, like Billy Billy or whatever that's called. So we wouldn't see them. And second, they're dubbing
⏹️ ▶️ John them in English. Like they're, they're going after an English-speaking audience by taking their existing content and either
⏹️ ▶️ John like in the case of HTX, the guy speaks it in English because he can speak English. And then like the
⏹️ ▶️ John other ones, like the giga one but they just dub it in English to get an American audience. And so HTX Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess this is the question everybody had when they saw the videos. were like, like we all had, like, who is
⏹️ ▶️ John this person? And where did these videos come from? Because they just, for us, they came out of nowhere because we weren't watching them on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Chinese YouTube or whatever. And that's what this video is about. Who are we? How did we get where we are?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it is a very MKBHD kind of story. In fact, he said he was a kid growing up watching MKBHD videos
⏹️ ▶️ John and he wanted to be a YouTuber as well. And he mentioned some more, a few more of his influences. And yeah, he was just a kid
⏹️ ▶️ John who wanted to make videos and started to be successful. And it snowballed. And yeah, watch the video. It's great and it's
Apple Business tidbit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then with regard to Marco and I's best friends, the Apple business specialist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rich Richmond, writes: The business specialists at Apple are fairly useless around phone launches. They can try their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best to advocate for business customers, but there's not much they can do. In fact, at the store I used to work at, management would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take phones by the hundreds to sell to resellers that could have gone to business customers, but they'd count them as quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey business sales. Source, I was one for five years. I'm writing a book about my time at Apple Retail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Read it next year.
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go. An ex-Apple business specialist writing in to say it's a farce
⏹️ ▶️ John that he was part of for five years.
macOS updates without reboots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then we, I'm not sure why, John, you wanted to include these in the show notes, but I'm going to read them and you're going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about them. We had some suggestions for John Ternus, the CEO. Mattias writes: If I were advising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Ternus, here's a software bet that I think would put Apple in the lead: patch continuously without restarts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI is about to surface a steady stream of severe bugs, many exploited before they're announced. Fixes should install automatically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as often as hourly, without interrupting the user and usually without a reboot. macOS already has the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bones for this. Is it XNU? GNU? What's the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John verbalization?
⏹️ ▶️ John I've only ever read it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. XNU sits on mock, which was designed to run OS services as replaceable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user space processes. And driver kit and FSKit already move drivers and file systems out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kernel. Finish that move and let components update independently. And most fixes become a background
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restart of one process. Only kernel fixes would need to reboot, and those would be rare, so we think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoever gets there first owns the security story for the next decade.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the reason, before I get to the next one, the reason these are in here is just this follow up on us talking about Turnus as CEO, and people
⏹️ ▶️ John all rolling in to say, here's what I think about Turnus and CEO. And this one was a particular suggestion I thought was worth talking about because we
⏹️ ▶️ John are currently in a time when security bugs are being found and people are scrambling to patch
⏹️ ▶️ John them and we're scrambling to apply patches. We didn't talk about this story, but most recently
⏹️ ▶️ John with related to macOS, one of the SSL certificate, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John authority companies had hilariously insecure private keys on
⏹️ ▶️ John some of their SSL certificates that became exposed. The private key on one of them was 4,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this was amazing. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the private key. They had to pick a 256-bit private key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thought that meant like a number.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John A number between 0 and 255.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And so they picked like four as
⏹️ ▶️ John the like. Another one was 16. Yeah. Like this is some bad security. Anyway, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John discovered. And so there's this mad dash to be like, hey, if your system trusts those keys,
⏹️ ▶️ John which it used to, these were part of like the root authorities for, I don't know the terms for this, but like these are, these are certificate authorities
⏹️ ▶️ John that every device trusted because they were part of like the trusted set of root authorities. But
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, once it's discovered that the key is four, that's trivially exploitable. Anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John can imitate that, blah, blah, blah. So there's this mad dash to run around and say, make sure none of your devices trust
⏹️ ▶️ John those keys anymore. And that has been difficult for Apple. They
⏹️ ▶️ John patch pretty quickly like the system like certificate authority stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, So like Safari and whatever would work with it. But there's other sources of that information for command
⏹️ ▶️ John line tools. Like there's a there's a file in Etsy something, whatever. Like There's in fact multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John sources on a default Mac install, one that like the Python tools trust and one that like command line tools like curl
⏹️ ▶️ John trust. And Apple didn't patch those. And not only did they not patch those, I mean, I patched them manually.
⏹️ ▶️ John First I did it manually and then people were releasing scripts and GUI tools to patch it or whatever. But not only did Apple not patch it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you patched it manually like I did, and then you updated to 27.2, they undid
⏹️ ▶️ John their release process is so far behind being caught up on security flaws that they're undoing
⏹️ ▶️ John fixes that people apply. That is too slow in
⏹️ ▶️ John the current age of fixes, especially since this is not like, oh, we have to figure out how to fix it and we have to come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a, no, this is very straightforward. You just literally delete the
⏹️ ▶️ John compromised certificate authorities from a file that say, don't trust these anymore. You just delete lines of text.
⏹️ ▶️ John that fixes immediate, obvious, straightforward. Everybody knows what it is. And they couldn't
⏹️ ▶️ John get it through their release system to get that out to people in a timely fashion. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn't even get it out to the point where like, you know, oh, we're about to release 27.2. Let's at least make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John we don't undo their changes. No, they couldn't do that either. So they're not quick on their feet. And
⏹️ ▶️ John two things. So this particular feedback of like, oh, they should be able to like do it without rebooting and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, use these technical, you know, features of the OS to apply patches
⏹️ ▶️ John faster without disrupting the user. The first thing is, as is clear
⏹️ ▶️ John from the certificate exploit thing, the the first hurdle you have to overcome is bureaucratic
⏹️ ▶️ John and not technological. There's nothing technologically stopping them from patching the dot .pm file in
⏹️ ▶️ John some Etsy directory, and they couldn't do that. That's not a tech problem. That's not a microkernel
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. You don't have to reboot for that. That is a bureaucratic problem. And if you can't solve the
⏹️ ▶️ John bureaucratic problem, all the technical stuff doesn't matter at all. As for the technical
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, the mock microkernel is the underlying thing in all of Apple's OSs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it's the XNU or ZNU or whatever. That is the name of the whole kernel.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is mock plus the entirety of BSD welded to it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John same memory process. And if there's a bug in any of that BSD kernel
⏹️ ▶️ John code and everything, and I think all the like the BSD, you know, there's it's a huge amount of code. It's not just mock.
⏹️ ▶️ John If there's a bug anywhere in there, it's a reboot. uh Now, there are ways to patch
⏹️ ▶️ John even this type of system without rebooting, but historically, Apple has not
⏹️ ▶️ John just not taken on that task. There are a lot of things that you could look at the way macOS is designed
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, you should be able to patch that without rebooting, right? And the reason Apple doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ John take it on is they're like, well, maybe, but what about
⏹️ ▶️ John all the apps that are currently running? What about all the frameworks? Does everything in the entire stack
⏹️ ▶️ John handle this service disappearing and coming back in a graceful way? It's
⏹️ ▶️ John not too hard to make the services, especially things that they've moved into user case like a driver kit and FS kit.
⏹️ ▶️ John it's not too hard to make them be able to you know, reboot and replace themselves on the fly. But then
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to validate, does every other part of the system that is above this
⏹️ ▶️ John handle that and not just flip out and be like, oh my God, I don't know what's happening. The thing I was talking to is gone and now there's a new thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don't know. And that's even before you get to like third-party apps and stuff that are built on top of it. So it is a much, much bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John problem than you think it is, which is why changes like this happen very, very slowly. You really
⏹️ ▶️ John have to get everybody gradually used to it. And they are traveling in that direction. And I bet they're going to get closer and
⏹️ ▶️ John closer to that goal. But the bureaucratic problems have to be fixed first
⏹️ ▶️ John because those impact are impacting us now, even for the easy fixes. And those other changes are going to take a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time because you have to do them slowly and carefully. And it involves everybody in the entire ecosystem becoming
⏹️ ▶️ John acclimated to changes to things they thought would be constant and unchanging.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that's going to take a really long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other suggestion we got was from Kari Helgeson. Kari writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it occurred to me, listening to you guys talk about John turnus's wish to squeeze more out of developers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that one potential interpretation is not to squeeze more from developers already paying, but from developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who get away without paying anything, like Meta and Netflix, that primarily offer free apps through the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The new platform fees that are charged in the European Union are an example of how Apple could change requirements for larger developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that currently bypass paying Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is an optimistic scenario. We may get to more hopeful and optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John listeners who wrote in to us later in the show, depending on what we cover. uh But trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to get more money from Netflix and Meta is probably really hard. And
⏹️ ▶️ John every time Apple has pushed in that direction, Netflix and Meta have said, yeah, no, we are backing
⏹️ ▶️ John out even farther from your platform. We will take the hit. We will just not do it. And we will just
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to offer our free apps. Now, Apple can do whatever they want, but they have to be careful because
⏹️ ▶️ John those companies have some leverage over Apple as well. Because if you buy an Apple device and you can't watch
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix on it and can't use Facebook, that currently hurts Apple a lot.
Sponsor: Uncommon Goods
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Siri AI expands in beta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do some topics. And let's start with Siri AI. And there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a news item in the Apple developer site about Siri AI. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes: Starting on November 3rd, with the 27.3 betas, a new developer preview enables
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any developer to integrate their app with Siri AI. Today's preview allows any app to bring its content and actions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly into Siri AI by using app intents. So people can just ask for help in their own words, and Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI carries out any custom action you've built, from checking a delivery to booking a reservation to placing an order.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For complex requests, we're also introducing skills to let you teach Siri AI how to combine several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actions into a single experience. And Siri AI can now surface any entity in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spotlight semantic index, not just the ones that fit an existing schema. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I've been very busy with like life stuff. Everything's good. I've been busy with life stuff. And so I haven't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a chance to dig into this really at all. But I don't think I understand at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the technical side of this. Now, maybe we're not going to get into that this episode, but I am deeply unclear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I am supposed to do with Call Sheet in order to support this and how it works and so on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, if we don't want to talk about that today, that's totally fine. But tell me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do we think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you the high-level overview of it. Up to this point, for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app to integrate with Siri AI or Siri at all, it had to basically conform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a certain preset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of actions. And it would be like notes, ride sharing, reminders,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. And so that way, if your app was somewhere close to that, you could say, all right, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, for unforgettable, my app complies with the, you know, the create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco task API for Siri. And I implement a few endpoints and it says, okay, this is how you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco create a task. This is how you update a task. This is how you delete a task. And Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of presupposes, or it predefines like, okay, well, what a task means is it it has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a title, a description, optional URL, optional image, like that kind of stuff. And it presets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these things in like a big definition. And your app can say, all right, I comply with that or I don't.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the only way to integrate with Siri was to comply with one of those preset roles that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had defined. What this means is that they are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowing an app to just basically describe itself and in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AI will read and will try to understand. So your app can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expose whatever kind of API it wants with all sorts of different capabilities, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just describes to the system what these capabilities are. And then the on-device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably cloud LLM will try to interface with that and try to figure out, okay, so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user just asked, like, look up a movie in Call Sheet. Call Sheet has an API that says, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list movies for users and get information about them and their cast and things like that. And so Call Sheet describes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the system in like English, you know, what it is, like, you know, what it offers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the system says, hey, this person just asked for this request. It sounds like something Call Sheet can answer. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they want Call Sheet to answer it. Let me try to figure out how to get what they said to match this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API over here that Call Sheet says it advertises. So this is the promise of Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI. This is the whole thing. And Apple intelligence, like this, this is part of what was advertised, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, whatever it was, two years ago, and you know, didn't ship until now. Like This is a core part of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's a big deal. I, um, Based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on how Siri AI is going so far, I'm a little hesitant to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get excited about it, to be honest. um also this is like the fourth time they've tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. And so, again, I'm a little hesitant to get excited about it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do occasionally make progress in this area. So maybe this is the time that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will actually work. But until they really show us that, I'm not going to believe it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So do you plan on doing any of this for any of your apps?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it, – I mean – Unforgetful, I don't really need to, because Unforgettful already complies closely enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reminder role that just continuing to comply with that is probably the best move there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. Overcast complies with the play media role
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has for many, many years. And again, I think Overcast basically, like, that's basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all it really needs. Like, I can expose a little more functionality that's kind of Overcast specific,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don't think I'm heading for major changes there. It's going to be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like minor additions. And Fineliner is basically a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Notes app, but not quite. like And I already expose the Notes API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Fineliner, at least for reading, for spotlight indexing. And so that you can ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri in theory, hey, what did I say? You know, what did I write in my grocery note in Fineliner?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it should be able to tell you, although honestly, I've never gotten it to work. But So who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows? I have some some investigating to do there, I'm sure. Um, So already my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are kind of close enough to the the existing stock endpoints that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already were there. So I don't, I don't foresee major changes for my apps. But again, minor changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pop probably like, you know, adding little things to the API to Siri that like maybe Siri's template
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn't have that my app has. Um, So things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got you. The interesting part of this is uh, the, the guts of it and the implementation. of
⏹️ ▶️ John haven't been messing with like, I mean, coding agents what I've been messing with, but I'm sure this is
⏹️ ▶️ John true of other type of things. And you've used these things called skills. Like that's a term of art. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's plugins, skills, whatever, blah, blah, But skills has become a term in the industry
⏹️ ▶️ John for uh things that you can install that will teach your agent how to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something that it didn't previously know how to do. And it sounds really cool and sophisticated, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what skills are? Text files with English in them because they're
⏹️ ▶️ John large language models. And if you open up these text files, they have English that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John read. For example, we said this on a past episode, like the Xcode 27 or whatever version they ship this in,
⏹️ ▶️ John came with a bunch of skills to about like Apple computer-y
⏹️ ▶️ John platform stuff. And you can export them. You can do XC run, something, something, export, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John will spat out a folder with a bunch of text files in it. And you can read them. And they'll
⏹️ ▶️ John be like modernizing your tests. And it will be a page and a half of concise English saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John here's what you do to modernize your tests. If you're using XE tests, here's, you know, Swift testing is the new thing. Here's how Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John testing works. Here's best practices. Here are things to avoid. There's a Swift UI one, modern Swift UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you're using old Swift UI, you might want to think about this, that, and the other thing. here are the like It's like a miniature, very
⏹️ ▶️ John concise like lesson, you know, that you can imagine being a series of slides or a transcript
⏹️ ▶️ John of a WWDC session explaining in English concepts. These are built into Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you use Xcode's coding agents, it will read these text files into the giant context window along with all the other things
⏹️ ▶️ John that it puts in. And that advice will influence what it does. You can find third party skills
⏹️ ▶️ John from a bunch of people. Like Paul Hudson has a bunch of them. He's a hacking with Swift that he's got a Git repo.
⏹️ ▶️ John He's made a bunch of skills. Go look at them. They're just text files in his repo that have two pages of
⏹️ ▶️ John text from Paul about things to avoid and things to do with Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John with Swift UI, with Swift testing, which whatever whatever That's what a skill is. And so this,
⏹️ ▶️ John not only are they breaking you out of, oh, you have to say that you're a Notes app, you have to say that you're this app, and then you define your intents
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. This is saying define whatever the hell app intents you want and then provide
⏹️ ▶️ John some text files that describes, hopefully in a concise way, because you don't want to blow your context window. And there's actually fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John strict limits on a lot of uh coding agent harnesses or whatever. Like don't allow the skills to be too long,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because otherwise you'll just fill the context window with your skill that's never being used. Anyway, and you can enable and
⏹️ ▶️ John disable skills, which is a good idea to narrow things down. But just describe how your app works.
⏹️ ▶️ John So for example, you'll say something like, you know, pretend that you had a reminders app, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ John not like unforgettable. you say, my app organizes things into buckets, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John buckets are named after the seasons of the year, winter, spring, summer, and fall. So if the user
⏹️ ▶️ John asks to do something, first find out what the current season is from the calendar. And then based on what the current season
⏹️ ▶️ John is, look in that season bucket. And whatever thing they said, look in there first. But if you don't find it there,
⏹️ ▶️ John look in one of the other season buckets. You can just write that. And then your hope is,
⏹️ ▶️ John crossed, like with everything, your hope is Then when they say, you know, hey, Michael, reminders
⏹️ ▶️ John app, add this to my whatever list, it will look at the, it will have that instruction in the context when
⏹️ ▶️ John it'll say, oh, I'm not just going to look for that whatever thing. I have to first find out what the season is with a calendar API
⏹️ ▶️ John that I hope I know how to do. And then I know which bucket to look into. Like you're describing the user model,
⏹️ ▶️ John the information structure of your app. Instead of just saying, I'm a reminders app and I have reminders. Good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here's a bunch of API. You tell it like how to do this stuff. You know, these are the steps you should take.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will look at your app intents and look at that skill and be like, oh, I'll call this one to do a list. Like you can see it
⏹️ ▶️ John if you're ever using like the Xcode MCP and you see what it's doing. It's like, I'm listing all your workspaces. and looking at all your open tabs.
⏹️ ▶️ John and seeing what the current schema is. And like All that stuff is informed by a skill that is telling it
⏹️ ▶️ John when, you know, when the user asks for whatever, here's how my app works. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is incredibly freeing. And it is also just throwing a dart at a dartboard and being like, God, I hope I'm what I'm writing here
⏹️ ▶️ John has some beneficial effect to Marco's point. Like, yeah, you can write whatever you want in that text file. Is that going to
⏹️ ▶️ John result in a user saying a thing and getting a useful response? Or is it just more, more words
⏹️ ▶️ John thrown into the context window and you're just hoping something nice will happen? And on
⏹️ ▶️ John that front, based on my use of skills for a bunch of stuff, like you'll see skills for everything, by the way. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, when working on the payment back end of my hopefully soon to be released app,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are Stripe skills for the Stripe payment processor. You can, the Stripe itself distributes
⏹️ ▶️ John skills that says, hey, load these into your coding agent if you're trying to debug some Stripe problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will tell it, here's some common pitfalls for using Stripe. Here's a thing to look for.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you're checking a configuration to make sure it's right, look at this, this, and that, right? Incredibly useful just to read as
⏹️ ▶️ John a human, not forget the coding agent, but also you're hoping the coding agent will get something from that and make itself more
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful. Now, Siri AI is slow, even on big, powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John computers, and it's frustrating and it is not as good as the top tier, you know, ChatGPT
⏹️ ▶️ John or Claude, current and former sponsor. It's just not. you know, and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it's free or free-ish and it comes with your Mac. So it does have advantages, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes frustratingly slow. But the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me hopeful about yeah, the thing that makes me hopeful about incorporation of skills and opening up third party apps to Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John AI is that I'm much more willing to tolerate slowness
⏹️ ▶️ John if it's doing something sophisticated and impressive. I would much rather be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to ramble off a big long thing and have it read in all the skills for these three apps that I'm using
⏹️ ▶️ John and actually figure out how to use those specific apps the way the authors of those apps intend
⏹️ ▶️ John them to be used so that it knows to check the current season and then check the season bucket and then call
⏹️ ▶️ John the API that searches by task name instead of just doing a task name search across the entire thing and picking
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong one because it doesn't know how my app works. I will wait for that. I won't wait for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, remind me in 10 minutes to change the laundry. That should be fast. Okay. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the more sophisticated things get, the more I'm willing to tolerate waiting. So
⏹️ ▶️ John here's hoping that this change finally gives Siri AI
⏹️ ▶️ John something that plays to its strengths, something that is
⏹️ ▶️ John acceptable when it's slow. Because the things, the simple things that it can
⏹️ ▶️ John do now are not acceptable when they're this slow. A more complicated thing that takes even longer,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would find more acceptable because in the end, you just want it to do the thing. And once you can trust it to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this, because the apps that you're talking to, asking it to use or whatever have skills that teach it how to do it, then
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes you more confident in it.
Siri AI unreliability
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn't help the set a reminder for 10 minutes case because Apple Inc. had just fixed that. Oh my God, it's so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. Like, I can't even set timers anymore. Like, I timers. Set a timer for 10 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even that, it'll just you see the spinner for a long time, don't you? It just spins for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the, it's the other day, I just couldn't set one. It just, it just didn't, it never worked. I mean, maybe if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have sat there for another 20 minutes, but it was a 10 minute timer. Like, it, it just doesn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am so anti-Siri AI right now because it has broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many things for me that used to work a lot better than this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's why a lot of people are downgrading to classic Siri. I forget how you do, but there's like ways you can say, I don't want to use the Siri I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the old one. My stance on that is I've had enough of the old one, man. Like, I know it had strengths and weaknesses,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I know it's faster to set timers, but like, there was no hope of the old one ever doing anything sophisticated.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for some people, it's worth it to them. They're like, I just wanted to do the simple thing fast. Like, I get that, but I am,
⏹️ ▶️ John I am, you know, I'm going forward. Like, I just, I've had enough time with the old Siri. It's so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want the possibility of it doing something smart. And I'm currently willing to pay the price
⏹️ ▶️ John of having to wait 10, 15 seconds to set a timer. Because in the end, for me, it has still eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John set it. It's just embarrassingly slow. Apple needs to fix this. Let me ask something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is there anything that Siri AI does reliably for you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it does. When I do ask it to set timers and reminders, it other than it coming back to me and
⏹️ ▶️ John asking me to clarify pronunciation when I'm in a noisy environment, which I find frustrating, but other than that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has never failed in the way you described. Like it always does eventually set the timer. It does eventually set the reminder.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I clarify the pronunciation, it does accept my clarification. Although, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the the alternatives it gives me is like, which one of those do you think is plausible? One of them has the name of my child in it and the other one
⏹️ ▶️ John is just gobbledygook. So anyway. The amount of words in your response makes my point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple question and you just had to give like three paragraphs of qualifications to your answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, it's like it can do more things that the old one couldn't do. That's not
⏹️ ▶️ John what I asked. But it still does the things that I want it to do eventually. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm willing to tolerate the performance decrease for the potential of it doing things that are more sophisticated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see. I don't want to harp on this, but just so far, Siri AI for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me is the same playbook. A huge amount of promise, some impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things it can do, but so much unreliability and slow performance that I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never want to do it. I never want to ask because it lets me down so often.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I'm still asking it to do the same things. I ask it to tell me when to change laundry. I ask it
⏹️ ▶️ John to remind me to do a thing when it occurs to me when I'm on a walk. I'm using it the same amount
⏹️ ▶️ John I always was. It's just that every request now takes longer. Great. What an upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But all I'm saying is it's not, but my point is it's not actually deterring me. It is annoying, but it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John actually deterring me. It deters a lot of people, though, again, which is why they downgrade to Classic Siri, which, again, totally
⏹️ ▶️ John makes sense. But for me, I'm sticking it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco had made mention an hour ago about all the different domains and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. And there's a post that we're going to link to where Swiftjective.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they talk about Apple's finally freeing us from domains. We'll link that in the show notes. Oh, I'm sorry. This is Jordan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Morgan. Before 27.3, unless your app fit into a blessed domain, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weren't many opportunities we could take advantage of in our apps. Why? It's simple. Apps do not fit into pretty little buckets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now Apple is finally freeing us from domains. You can supply your arbitrary app intent definitions to the system and even supply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skill files in Markdown, like John was saying, to help Siri know how and when to use them.
Siri’s Personal Knowledge Graph
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Uh, there was a link that I didn't mess with until earlier today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and was both very cool and mildly alarming, but mostly cool, if you ask me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dario Pasquini and Mike Michelle Baisley, I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got that somewhere near right. At eighth rank, right? What if we told you that every Mac ships
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pair of demons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about you and the people around you? Who you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, whom you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you go, with whom, what do you do, and when? This graph is built on device by cross-referencing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much everything on the machine. Context, calendar, photos, messages, mail, location, screen time, and a long tail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of behavioral signals. And more importantly, it's held in a queryable store that LLMs retrieve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from allegedly, or that that LLMs allegedly retrieve from, I should say. Would you believe us? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that's what's happening. And interestingly enough, there's a little, there is a little documentation of how this whole mechanism works on your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac. Well, TLDR, they built or they vibe coded a front end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this that you can run on your machine. And it only runs you know, privately and, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can try it, which I did. And let me tell you, there was an astonishing amount of information on there, including like who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my spouse is, who my parents are, who my children are and stuff like that. Now, I don't think I'm particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worked up about this. Like this is how this is supposed to work. I'm a little worked up that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's just sitting there and easy to read as long as you have full disk access. Well, easy-ish to read.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But by and large, I am not currently worked up about this. Ask me again at the end of the segment. Maybe I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. But I mean, how do I expect Siri to be helpful if it's not going to try to figure all this out for
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this article went around and it's phrased a little bit provocatively in the beginning, like, what if I
⏹️ ▶️ John told you that your computer is
⏹️ ▶️ John And for people who aren't, you know, ATP listeners and keeping up with every nuance of the industry, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably surprising for them to know, what do you mean my computer is compiling a database of information about me?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn't ask it to do that. That seems invasive or whatever. But if you have been keeping up
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple's announcements, you know, especially the 2004-24 one that never came to pass,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know that Apple has talked about this again and again by various names, a semantic index, blah, blah, blah. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the things they're demonstrating, you know, when is mom's flight arriving? How can it know that if it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn't know who your mom is? Like, like it, it's not, I'm not saying that people are wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John to feel that this is invasive, but it is also wrong to say that Apple is trying to do this sneakily
⏹️ ▶️ John behind your back. Like they're literally advertising that this is what their thing's going to do. In fact, they're advertising things that they
⏹️ ▶️ John they hope it will do that it can't currently do, but they're trying. And the, this is basically like, how is
⏹️ ▶️ John that implemented under the covers? Well, of course, it's implemented, you know, in a way where they build, you know, whatever, the semantic
⏹️ ▶️ John index or whatever. I think semantic index means something slightly different than this. But anyway, in the end, they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John build a data store that knows this because they're not going to derive it in real, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like they are. They're not going to derive it in real time when you ask your question. They're not like, oh, I better start searching
⏹️ ▶️ John their contacts to find out who their mom is. No, it's going to do that in the background ahead of time and build
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a concise way so that when you ask a question, it can, in theory, respond without taking a half an hour to
⏹️ ▶️ John dig all this information out of your messages history, which that's the laboriously download from iCloud or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it makes for a good sensational story of like, I cannot believe that Apple is building
⏹️ ▶️ John up this dossier on me. And to your point, Casey, if it is unencrypted at rest on the disk
⏹️ ▶️ John and exploitable and grabbable, that is a way for people to steal information about you. But on,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, on the flip side, if they have that kind of access to your computer, they can just take your actual context database and your actual email.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they don't need the index. They can just get the raw data. But either way, like I can understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why people are upset about it. But when I read this, I'm like, Apple, whatever you're doing, do it harder
⏹️ ▶️ John because it's still not good enough. like but But that's me. like I want to be able to ask it when his mom's flight
⏹️ ▶️ John riding and have some faith that it's going to get the correct answer in a reasonable amount of time. And I currently don't have that
⏹️ ▶️ John faith. But maybe that's not a thing people want their computer to be able to do. Like, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is kind of a thing where it's like, it's all just like a threat and evil and everything until it passes some threshold
⏹️ ▶️ John of reliability and usability then everybody's like, oh, well, that's too usable now. Now I accept like the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it's building this index of my relationships because I didn't want to build a relationship when this was not benefiting
⏹️ ▶️ John me in any way. I didn't ask for this. I don't want it. Turn it off. Get rid of it. But if it ever
⏹️ ▶️ John crosses that threshold where you're like, oh, actually, I did want to know when Mama's flight arrived and it told
⏹️ ▶️ John me and it was right. And now I trust it. Then suddenly you may be willing to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John the cost of having this big index being built. And of course, the complaint is I was never asked about this. This is not a thing that I did
⏹️ ▶️ John with my consent or whatever. And I get that perspective. But again, it's not like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has secretly been doing this and not telling you. they've been They were advertising it before they were even able to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it famously. They had a TV ad, but a thing that they could not do,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they were telling you, we want to be able to do this and we're trying. We just suck at it. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's cool there's like, you know, things to visualize this database and take a look at it and stuff. But most people I know who have
⏹️ ▶️ John tried it have said, yeah, it figured out who my wife and kids are and it knows where I live. And it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, anything, thing anybody can get by looking at your contacts calendar, photos, messages, mail.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, yeah, you can get that information by looking at that stuff. By the way, Google knows all this about YouTube as they read all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? Uh, Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is worth, if you're interested anyway, it is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing with this app that they built. And it's open source. Again, Vibe coded, but open source.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, it was, it, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say fascinating, but it was definitely interesting. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, it's worth checking out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And the other part of this, of course, is like who has access to the information
⏹️ ▶️ John and to what purpose? Apple's whole pitch is this information is private to you. We can't
⏹️ ▶️ John see it. We don't store it. You don't send it to us. When you send it to our servers, they're private cloud compute. Those
⏹️ ▶️ John servers can't store anything about it. We never see it. We can't peek into the servers and watch the data you're sending. We
⏹️ ▶️ John can't do any of that. Like, this is your data. Yes, it is on your Mac and it's a potentially a security problem
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone breaks into your Mac and steals it and so on and so forth. But Apple does not want this information
⏹️ ▶️ John and carefully constructs its system so that it can't even get it, even if someone asks for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can't get at it. Google, on the other hand, has had complete access to the plain text of your email
⏹️ ▶️ John and Gmail for the history of Gmail. And Google does use that information
⏹️ ▶️ John for its business, for advertising, targeting, and figuring out stuff like that or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I'm not saying this should make you feel better about Apple. Like if you don't like what they're doing, you don't like what they're
⏹️ ▶️ John doing. it's just you know this It is what it is. But if you look across the industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, I feel like, scarier to
⏹️ ▶️ John give for companies who want access to this information. Facebook wants to know this about you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook wants this information because they use it for targeted advertising. They want this information.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don't want anyone else to have it. They want to sell ads against it because they would say, hey, we know all the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are currently in the market for a new lawnmower. We're not going to tell you and we're not going to sell you that information,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we'll sell you an ad that you can send to people who are currently in the market for a lawnmower who live in this state,
⏹️ ▶️ John who are this old, who are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's their business. So they need that information. And Google, same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, search results and stuff like that. They need that information to power their business.
⏹️ ▶️ John Currently, for the most part, Apple doesn't want and doesn't need this information. Famously,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple absorbs tons of information about what you're doing on the App Store because they sell search ads there. But that
⏹️ ▶️ John information is like, what apps did you look at? What you know, what things did you click on? What apps did you buy?
⏹️ ▶️ John So stuff you do in the App Store, it's kind of like being in Google Land where Apple is absorbing all that information. But stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like your contact information and where you live and who you're related to and
⏹️ ▶️ John who your kids are, currently, none of Apple's business models
⏹️ ▶️ John require that information as input. And so when Apple says that we keep this private and we can't
⏹️ ▶️ John see it if we wanted to, I believe them because it is not useful for them and in fact is a liability to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is as compared to the App Store activity, which is useful to them and they sell ads against. So that's
⏹️ ▶️ John the way I measure things. Like, is there a reason the company would want this information?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that influences whether I believe that they really are never going to touch it.
Sponsor: Quince
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Quince. So the seasons
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey case may be. But it's more than just your closet, right? Maybe you want to redecorate the house a little bit. Maybe you
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Michaela an organic cotton long sleeve fit and flare pocket dress. This is the perfect fall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey colors. It's like a coppery color. The official name is Caramel Confetti Floral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I'm and it has pockets, which is great. And so she loves this thing and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is perfect for this time of year. And as I'm recording right now, it's under $25,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which ain't bad. So hey, if you want to give the gift of quality this holiday season, download the Quince app for app-exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offers or go to quince.com. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com. You can get free shipping on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your order and 365-day returns. Quince
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, you should let them know it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the Accidental Tech Podcast. It's the best way to support the show. And speaking of supporting the show, thank you to Quince for
#askatp: Smart TVs vs. Apple TV 4K
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's do this thing that we almost forgot about called SKTP, And we're going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Don't worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Upgrade will periodically remind us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right? We're going to start with Dennis Berger, who writes: I'm genuinely curious why you guys use dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV devices instead of the built-in Apple TV app on your smart TVs. Is there a noticeable difference in picture quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or do you use your Apple TV for things other than watching Apple TV Plus content? For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm trying to be not so sweary. I have a LG C9, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love as a television, but all of the built-in stuff is trash. It's slow. It's not very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user-friendly. It's garbage, or at least it was five, six, seven years ago, whenever it was I bought this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV. And maybe it's gotten better since then, but thanks, but no thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do a lot with my Apple TV, not just watch Apple TV Plus content. Plex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on there, although I'm mostly not using that for myself. I have several different jellyfin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey front ends that are on there, which is what I am using for myself. We, I forgot to put the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We're going to have to talk about it at some point. The, The death day for my cable card has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come and passed. And so my new alternative for television is on there. But before that, channels was on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Like, the Apple TV was literally everything that I watch on TV. It's not just Apple TV Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let me tell you, the Apple TV, while hilariously expensive and and kind of ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overpriced, if you ask me, is far and away, not even in the same universe, better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than everything else I've personally tried. And I've tried a handful of these things, not as much as Snell has, but I've
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried a handful of these things, and it is way better than anything else. I cannot fathom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hating myself enough to use the stuff built into my TV. Thank you, but no, thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it's less about picture quality for the most part, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the overall user experience. Now, TVOS is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly half-butted by Apple, but even when Apple is only using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half their butt, it is still so far, so many miles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead of what everyone else produces in this in this area um It is really quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staggering when you when you are accustomed to Apple's you know Apple TV experience and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go try to use smart TV software from anybody else. um Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that's the only world that you know, it's similar to if you only ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Windows PCs or Android phones. If it's all you know, you might think it's fine. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for many people who know more, they might think it's fine. But when you are accustomed to Apple's way of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing things and Apple's standards for doing things, everything else is full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ridiculous paper cuts. It's also just incredibly user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hostile. Like we um somebody in my household
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently connected our LG TV to the Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This did not happen on my watch. This would never have happened on my watch. As a result of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, the LG TV is now stopping it's is now showing in the middle of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us watching TV fully bright white dialogue boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco randomly advertising upgrades to us. Like, I'm so unbelievably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoyed by this. And just, yeah, this is, this is the standards of what the software does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, they used to promote baseball games to me. They don't do that anymore. But like, Apple does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put a bright, fully, you know, full white overlay over your dark TV show in the middle of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you watching it, telling you, hey, you should really upgrade your software for the Apple TV right now. It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, they don't do that. They just quietly take care of things in the background. It's just one of many examples. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, tvOS is not perfect, and it's really not a high effort platform for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. And the new Apple TV 4K is horrendously priced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at $300. So there's a lot of reasons. Well, there's one big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason not to get the Apple TV, which is the price. But if what you want is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice experience, then it is unparalleled. It is the only option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the game. Nothing else in this market provides a nicer experience or even a close to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as nice experience as the Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John As Casey touched on something that I think is a key to the general
⏹️ ▶️ John advice to if you can stomach the price to get an Apple TV box for your television. People don't
⏹️ ▶️ John replace their TVs that often. They don't need to. You can buy a TV and use it for many, many years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey's C9, I believe that 9 is for 2019. right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe that's right.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the year numbering model scheme that
⏹️ ▶️ John have. Yeah. And as your TV ages, the
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny little chip and RAM and whatever and storage in there that is running the smart TV OS does
⏹️ ▶️ John not get better with time. It just becomes more and more outdated, more and more wimpy compared to what modern
⏹️ ▶️ John technology can provide. Apple TV boxes, for all their expense,
⏹️ ▶️ John the day they're released, are tremendously more powerful than the chips that are inside
⏹️ ▶️ John even modern TVs that are contemporary with them. And as times go on, the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV doesn't get updated that often, but it maintains that lead. I'm not sure there has ever been an Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John that was sold long enough to see the chips in televisions be more performant than it is. There's plenty fast chips
⏹️ ▶️ John in televisions, but they are running like the image processing for the TV, right? They're
⏹️ ▶️ John not running the smart TV apps. Those always get scant resources compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to what an Apple TV can do. So Apple TV is massively overpowered for what it's asked to do. So the performance is usually
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good. One of the things I will say about built-in smart TV apps is
⏹️ ▶️ John there have been times in the past and probably somewhere somewhere today where a built-in
⏹️ ▶️ John app will have better picture quality for certain sources of content than the Apple TV app is
⏹️ ▶️ John simply because the built-in app is made in cooperation with the people who make the TV
⏹️ ▶️ John and has access to TV controls or is willing to use TV controls internals of the TV
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple TV can't because Apple TV is a generic device. You connect it to any TV, whereas the built in apps can really
⏹️ ▶️ John get, they know what TV they're inside. So at various points, there
⏹️ ▶️ John have been built-in apps that like, if you want to see this with the best picture quality, with the highest
⏹️ ▶️ John bit rate, use the built-in whatever app because it is better than the other one. But that is a rare
⏹️ ▶️ John exception. Almost all the time, the truth is that the built-in apps are slower and also uglier
⏹️ ▶️ John and have worse picture quality and fewer features than the Apple TV one, which again makes sense considering the
⏹️ ▶️ John smart TV apps are running on $1.50 worth of the hardware that's inside there. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John for $300, you're getting at least $100 for the hardware, probably. All right, maybe $50 for the hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, it's an order of magnitude more hardware being thrown at the problem. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have huge numbers of complaints about Apple TV. It is the worst, except for all the other
⏹️ ▶️ John ones. So that is the frustration with Apple TV. Like, again, I said when, you know, pausing during the previously on
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn't allow me to unpause. That is an unacceptable level of crappy functionality. But its
⏹️ ▶️ John competitor products, even if they don't have that reliability problem, have worse things. So their business
⏹️ ▶️ John models are based on throwing advertisements in your face and crap like that, or they have slow hardware or some combination. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John thus far, Apple TV's business model is mostly focused on getting you to subscribe to Apple TV Plus
⏹️ ▶️ John and getting you to buy the $300 box. And there is not as much, you know, hurting
⏹️ ▶️ John you towards viewing ads or whatever the other cheaper things do, including,
⏹️ ▶️ John as Marco pointed out, the built-in apps on your TV. And this is before we even get into LG apps spying on you and Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs listening in and all that other stuff. So, and you know, Apple, again, Apple TV has a better
⏹️ ▶️ John privacy story there because uh they, you know, they say they don't do that and we believe them because no part of their business
⏹️ ▶️ John model, uh you know, would be benefit from that. Whereas people selling
⏹️ ▶️ John tele low margin televisions, some companies like vizio or whatever, if they're still in business, I forget, but a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John the lower uh lower cost television products, they sell their TVs at a loss and make all of their money by
⏹️ ▶️ John spying on you. So it's not a question of like, is this beneficial to their business model? It's their entire business model
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, and showing you ads and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, there's a reason everybody uses Apple TV boxes, even though we complain about them incessantly,
⏹️ ▶️ John because everything else is sadly worse. It doesn't mean Apple TV is good, but it just means everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John is so much worse. I could not agree more.
#askatp: Tailscale for Synology, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Richard writes, and I actually dug up this email because I replied
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it when it was sent in the 5th of August. So if you're curious, do we get to Ask ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff in a timely fashion? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That's why we respond
⏹️ ▶️ John by email, by the way, because we know, like, oh, this might be on Ask ATP, but the poor person needs to hear now because they have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which, to be clear, we are not offering tech support. Don't hear what John did not say. We are not a tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support solution. But for what it's worth, we do try to answer if we have something worth saying. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, Richard wrote on the 5th of August, Casey often espouses the benefits of using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Synology while away from home via Tailscale. While I have port forwarding configured on my home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey router in order to remotely access my Synology DS423 Plus, I don't have a Tailscale VPN
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set up for authentication and access, nor do I have HTTPS set up for accessing my various
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Docker images. What does your Synology VPN topology look like? How did you set it up for authentication?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And are there any memorable challenges you encountered along the way? All right, so let me just start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by saying Tailscale is a former sponsor. I think they are a future sponsor as well. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking love Tailscale. And if this sounds like an ad read, truly, from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bottom of my heart, I'm not trying to make it that way. It's just I really, truly like the software that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you want to skip this chapter, I totally get it, but I think I have some interesting things to say. Now, as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very brief overview, Tailscale uses VPN technology. It uses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WireGuard under the hood, but it's so much more than that. And what Tailscale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, is if you think about a typical VPN, it's generally speaking hub and spoke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you are dialing in, so to speak, to a server, and then that server will get you onto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a network where you can ping away at other servers, right? So you're dialing into like your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey employer. Your employer has one or more servers in a particular location. And once you are dialed into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that server, I shouldn't say dial in, but you know what I mean. Once you're connected to that server, then you can connect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to other things with behind your corporate firewall. So Tailscale on the surface uses the same technology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it's a mesh network. So the idea with Tailscale is as many of your devices as you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can will get onto your quote-unquote tailnet, which is to say it will connect to Tailscale.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you're not really, when I say connect to Tailscale, you're really just advertising, hey, I'm here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you need me. And all of your other devices say, oh, I see where, let's say, the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. And what Tailscale lets you do is it's a mesh network. So any of your devices, if they need to access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Synology, they directly access your Synology. You're not going to some Tailscale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server and then bouncing back onto the Synology. You are going directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from your node, from say your Mac, to your Synology. Now, there's asterisks and double daggers and daggers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and double asterisks and so on, but I'm trying to keep this less than an hour. What this means, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that effectively, it's as though any device on your Tailnet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on your local network. So all of your Tailscale devices get 100.xyz
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IP addresses. And as long as you're connected to Tailnet, you're, and I'm making this up, your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 100.1.2.3. That will always be your Synology.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Always. I don't care if you're in your house, if you're at Marco's house, don't be creepy, if you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overseas, wherever you are, 100.1.2.3 is always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your Synology, no matter what. And your Synology can be on a different continent, different network. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not matter. And it's that that makes Tailscale incredible. And Tailscale also has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really trick ways to like punch holes in network into NAT situations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you don't even know what that is, it's probably for the best. But basically, if your other device is behind a firewall, Tailscale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn't always isn't always able to poke through and get a direct connection between your two devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it's like damn near always. And if it can't do it directly, Tailscale, here's one of those asterisks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tailscale actually does run some servers where it will be an intermediary. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you connect to it and your other device connects to it, and it just is a pass-through if it can't make a direct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection. This happens very rarely. Everything that does get transmitted is fully encrypted. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have no clue what you're sending, but it is an option that they fall back upon. So with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all that said, what do I use it for? Well, basically all my devices are on my tailnet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I can always connect to anything. It doesn't matter. My instance at Linode is on my tailnet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's in the DC area. No, it's Atlanta, maybe. I forget where geographically it is, but it's on my tailnet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it's effectively on my local network. Not literally, but effectively. I have a droplet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at DigitalOcean for the kids' school. That's on my tailnet. It's effectively local. I have a Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at my parents' house. That's on my tailnet. It's effectively local. And you can see where this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going. My KVMs that we've talked, that Marco and I have talked about are on my tailnet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My NUC, my NUC that runs all my Docker containers is on my tailnet. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and so on. So what does Tailscale provide more than just connecting your devices?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, one of the really great things it does is if you're a Docker Sicko like I am and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have all of these different containers, well, typically you would access them by like, you know, 192.168.1.7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a port number on the end. And that's not SSL secure. You know, it's HTTP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not HTTPS. Well, you can use one of the features of Tailscale called Tailscale Services,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it will proxy, well, it's complicated, but the short short of it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it'll proxy those and it'll terminate an SSL endpoint for you. So you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to, instead of, you know, 192.168.1.2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey colon 12345, you're going to, I don't know, like jelly.sumname.ts.net,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that could be your jellyfin server. And that's HTTPS, jelly.sumname.ts.net.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now you have SSL termination for all of your different Docker containers and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. So it's things like that that make it really cool. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also provide an OIDC provider, which sounds like a corporate thing, but with a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these projects that I'm running on my Docker server, like Home Assistant,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Paperless NGX, and among others, you can actually configure them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to use OIDC as their authentication setup. And then what happens is when you log
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into paper is what I use, paper.sumname.ts.net. That's my paperless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NGX, which is like a PDF repository. If you log into paper,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if you want to log into your paperless NGX instance, you go to that URL, which is SSL terminated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don't have to fiddle with port numbers or anything like that. And you hit log in with Tailscale. And then you're logged in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's awesome. The big thing, though, and what I said to Richard when I initially replied to his email,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I said this is verbatim, I mean this with respect. If you're opening ports, you've
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already failed. That's kind of the number one benefit of Tailscale is you don't have to open ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when I back up, when my Synology backs up, it's backs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself up to my parents or the Synology that's mine, but at my parents, it's doing that via Tailscale.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They don't have any ports open on their router. My Synology over, actually neither of my Synologies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are accessible via the internet, but they are accessible via Tailscale. And so you never have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to worry about port forwarding because why? Because effectively speaking, all of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices are in your local network. I know that's not literally true, but effectively true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that's what makes it powerful. It's the SSL termination. It's not dealing with port forwarding. It's that they're always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available as long as your two devices are connected to the tailnet. It's really, really incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, now I'm definitely sounding like an ad read, and I am sorry for that, but it is some of my favorite software I've
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever used in my entire 30, whatever years of using computers. If you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multiple computers or multiple devices, I should say, that need to talk to each other, it is truly amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I would like to hear John's input if you have any, but Marco, you have a lot more experience than John with Tailscale. Is there anything you'd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you basically covered it. This is exactly the kind of thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would hear about for years, never really try,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just think, I probably don't need that. Correct. And then once I tried it, I was like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes, this was exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Exactly my experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is why, again, I think what you said a minute ago, like, if you're opening ports, you're doing it wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you're having to deal with dynamic DNS, you're doing it wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems that, that we had to deal with in the past that we no longer have to deal with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even simple things, like if you if you want like remote access to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, you know, a Mac mini that you're running somewhere or 47 more of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's it's much more secure and much easier for you to have a tailnet going than for you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give them all public IPs or route them over a public IP somehow. Cause then like when something comes around, like that remote desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exploit, anything on a public IP or on a public port might be exploitable. Whereas if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's all within your tailnet, you have a lot more protection. So there's there's all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasons to do it. But mostly it just, it just makes things work a lot better with a lot less fuss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. And actually, one other thing I'd like to add, and and I think you might have said a second ago, helping out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like parents or whatever, or maybe I just made this up. But anyways, my parents, you know, they're getting older.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And while both of them are fairly technically savvy, they still have questions, they still have problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have this other Synology at their house. And Tailscale has this feature called subnet routing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what that basically means is you can use a Tailscale node to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be kind of the hub and spoke or the hub in the hub and spoke model of a traditional VPN.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what that means is I have my Synology at my parents' house allowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to access any of the devices on their network. And they also have a separate but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey related feature called something like IPv4 over v6 or something like that, where basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it's really complicated, and I'll put a link to where I wrote this up in the show notes. But basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I use a particular host name, that tail scale will then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey translate internally to mean, oh, this is actually this funky IPv6
⏹️ ▶️ Casey address. Oh, actually, this funky IPv6 address means he would like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get to such and such IPv4 address, but on the other network.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So again, I would have to explain for like another 20 minutes to get it verbally. You'll just have to read this post that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'll put in the show notes. But what this means is I can log into my parents, my dad's Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his MacBook Pro, as long, I mean, I'll tell him before I do it, of course, but I can say, hey, I'm going to log into your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer and I can screen share into his computer from my house. And his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his computer has never heard of Tailscale before. It's really incredible, incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. There's so many different things you can do with it. It really, I cannot agree with Marco more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'd heard about Tailscale for years. All my nerd friends were like, oh, you got to try, got to try, got to try it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What what does it really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do for me? I don't need any of this. And then I finally saw the matrix and now I cannot live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without it. John, any thoughts? Are you good?
⏹️ ▶️ John So on the topic on Richard's question, like I know Synology has a bunch of VPN stuff that ships with their software
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Is your advice basically don't use any of the Synology built-in stuff and just do everything with Tailscale?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, that is what I do. I'm not trying to like throw shade at Synology stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could make an argument that maybe you'd want to stick with that for whatever reason. But for me, Tailscale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is universal. And I don't and I bought into a lot of Synology's ecosystem, but I don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to have to I don't want to have to use Synology's ecosystem for like VPN related purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, there's more to my network and more to my devices than just my Synology.
#askatp: New era of efficiency?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Chris Kerner writes, I'm going to sound incredibly idealistic here, but with the combination of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insane price increases on RAM and other hardware, combined with the efficiency and bug squishery of agentic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coding, will we see a golden age of software over the next few years? Listening to you all talk about how these new tools have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allowed you to be more productive has me thinking: will we see fewer bugs, more features, better efficiency? From
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indie apps like Y'all's to video games, to websites, to open source projects, to big software and OS packages. Could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you imagine? Am I too hopeful? I don't know if you're too hopeful, but I don't know if I share the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same amount of hope that you have. I don't know, man. I am really enjoying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my job right now, and I am also very worried that my job will effectively disappear any second now.
⏹️ ▶️ John So for the hope on efficiency, this has come up a few times when we've been talking about this of like
⏹️ ▶️ John increased prices in RAM and stuff like that. Like maybe it will make people make more efficient software.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'll address the AI and bug things separately from the RAM. But like the RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is like, it's a hardware situation. RAM is more expensive now. There's less of it in devices. but We
⏹️ ▶️ John have to presume, like we don't know, but like we have to presume that if the ramageddon had
⏹️ ▶️ John not occurred, devices sold today, some of them might have more RAM. Like that there was a planned RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John increase that if the roadmap had been followed for these products from whatever manufacturer, they might have had more RAM in it. But because RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John is so expensive, they're like, oh, we can't we can't do that RAM increase. We got a whole line. Maybe even iPhones have been
⏹️ ▶️ John subject to that. And then obviously for people buying their own computers, they're buying them with less RAM because it costs so much money.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just bought a Mac with less RAM than I would have wanted because it costs so much money. So that RAM situation is
⏹️ ▶️ John real. And the question is, how does the world react to that? And the hopeful Chris
⏹️ ▶️ John in his hopeful way saying, maybe this will motivate programmers to use
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM more efficiently. And I think this is how this is actually going to play
⏹️ ▶️ John out. There is some motivation to do more with
⏹️ ▶️ John less RAM when RAM is expensive. But the way that is manifesting, the way I've
⏹️ ▶️ John seen it manifesting, which makes sense to me, is there's a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of research, development, and effort on the part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest new RAM consumers to find a way to do what they want to do with less RAM. And those RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John consumers, LLMs. There are so many different technologies surrounding LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ John that the purpose of them is we want to do what we want to do, but we want to do it with less RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it's the sparse models that don't load all of the weights and everything or trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to find a way to make, you see it in all the LLM vendors, trying to take a model and like,
⏹️ ▶️ John here's a new version of our model. What is the selling point? It costs less. It uses fewer resources.
⏹️ ▶️ John It requires less RAM, but still is as good or better than the one we came before.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is where I'm seeing a lot of the motivation because those are the people they they the cause of Ramageddon, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They're sucking up all the RAM, but also they're incredibly highly motivated to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John how to do what they do more cheaply because that increases their profit margins
⏹️ ▶️ John and it makes their product better. And like they, you know, they want more margins. They want to lower prices for consumers
⏹️ ▶️ John so they get more business because it's a competitive business. Come to our thing. We'll charge you less money and our
⏹️ ▶️ John things are better. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann they are
⏹️ ▶️ John highly motivated to do that. Apple is highly motivated to figure out how do we run models that
⏹️ ▶️ John are worth a damn on phones that we can't increase the RAM on. And so so much of the effort
⏹️ ▶️ John that has gone into Apple intelligence has been about how the heck do we
⏹️ ▶️ John get whatever models that we just bought from Google or train whatever models we have, how do we get them on the phone?
⏹️ ▶️ John How do we get them to actually run locally and do something useful? And that has been a huge effort within Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John What it hasn't motivated is, let's make pages on the Mac use less RAM. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's not happening, right? Let's make the Finder use less RAM. Let's do a RAM audit of
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire system. Probably some of that is going on, but you don't get a lot of bang for your
⏹️ ▶️ John buck for that because all the action is happening in the, you know, the big Let's
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the big RAM consumers. The big RAM consumers are, oh, you're suddenly running you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John umpteen billion parameter lm on your phone and it's using like a huge percentage of your RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John Forget about how much RAM notes is taking. Unless it has massively increased recently, we're gonna get the most bang for the buck
⏹️ ▶️ John for figuring out how to make our models use less RAM, but still be efficient or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you'd like to think that like pressure in one area will cause this like
⏹️ ▶️ John re-evaluation of the whole thing. We've been wasting RAM all this time. We should be more efficient everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the idea of let's lighten all the screws on our you know, Gordon Murray automotive vehicle. It's just
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make all the screws lighter everywhere and we'll be such a big savings. No. What they do is say, look, the engine block is
⏹️ ▶️ John made of iron and we're going to make it out of aluminum. And that's where we get the most bang for our buck and forget about the screws.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that's my take on the RAM thing. I think there is motivation to do it, but it is all happening in the parts
⏹️ ▶️ John that you don't, not that you don't care about, but like in the LLMs parts and not in the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John rest of the operating system. Even though in theory, finding, you know, replacing all the screws in every single
⏹️ ▶️ John app on our entire Mac with titanium screws would give you aggregate
⏹️ ▶️ John overall savings. It's much better to, instead of having a thousand people do that, put a hundred people on
⏹️ ▶️ John figuring out how to make the models take up less RAM. And as for the coding and bug squishing
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that, all the studies I've seen about this is that a lot more code is
⏹️ ▶️ John being generated and a lot more bug reports are being generated. There is still some debate
⏹️ ▶️ John about how, you know, what is the overall productivity benefit? Because you have to filter through the bug
⏹️ ▶️ John reports. Like I saw a recent sort of summary of like, look, coding agents are finding a huge number of bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of them are serious. We've seen the ones that are serious, right? But there's just so much volume that
⏹️ ▶️ John the percentage is still low. So the volume of bug reports we have to deal with and sort of validate is huge.
⏹️ ▶️ John And because the volume has gone up so much, it's also finding more serious ones than, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, ever before. But is this increasing productivity or is it weighing us
⏹️ ▶️ John down with having to deal with all of the false ones and figure that out? And the same thing with code. You can generate
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of code faster. You can make individual developers much more productive. But I think it is still an open question about
⏹️ ▶️ John the long-term viability of continuing in this direction. Do you end up with a code
⏹️ ▶️ John base that's 20 times the size that no human can understand anymore? Is that fine if the models
⏹️ ▶️ John can understand it? Or do we reach a breaking point where now the models can't understand it either and the humans haven't understand it in 10 years? And
⏹️ ▶️ John now you're kind of screwed. We don't know how this is going to end up because the models aren't static. Like things things aren't
⏹️ ▶️ John staying the same. Every day they are changing and in theory, improving. So we don't know where this is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John end. But I don't predict a beautiful golden age
⏹️ ▶️ John where everything uses less RAM and all the bugs are erased and everybody is more productive and wonderful. I don't think
⏹️ ▶️ John that's where we're heading. We may get there eventually in 100 years, but it's going to be rough between now and then.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it has to be. Like I compared it early on when we were talking about this, I compared it to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial
⏹️ ▶️ John Revolution was really bad for a long time, especially in the beginning.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we're glad we have it because we like indoor plumbing. Like we ended up in some good spots, although
⏹️ ▶️ John we also cooked the entire planet. So that's bad. But it's don't, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the goal, I enjoy the optimism of people think this is going to produce a golden age, but you can't really
⏹️ ▶️ John hold that vision in your head unless you're willing to not look at any of the downsides, short term
⏹️ ▶️ John and long term. And there will be short term and long term downsides. There will be upsides too, but it's too optimistic to
⏹️ ▶️ John think we're going to get all the good things and none of the bad things. We're going to get it all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think going back to the actual question of like, you know, can AI produce,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, better software or will this result in better software that's more efficient, that's, you know, less wasteful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of resources and everything. And I think there's a couple angles to this that I also want to add.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One is that, you know, if you look at what actually uses lots of RAM on your computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge amount of most people's actual RAM usage is the web browser. And that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly just related to basically active tab management. How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many tabs do you keep open? How many tabs does the browser kind of keep in memory versus some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco format or some kind of like, you know, sleeping format?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, John. don't blame me.
⏹️ ▶️ John My browser tab. I can
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco browser tabs are the
⏹️ ▶️ John major user of memory. You know what the top user of memory in most people's Macs is right now as you speak? Chrome.
⏹️ ▶️ John File system caches.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, because
⏹️ ▶️ John unused RAM is wasted RAM. Any RAM you are not using, Mac OS, will
⏹️ ▶️ John use as a file system cache. You don't think about it too much, but like you will always,
⏹️ ▶️ John ideally, Mac OS will use 100% of your RAM at all times. But a lot of that RAM is going to be file
⏹️ ▶️ John system caches. So when you try to do some file IO, it doesn't even go to the file system. It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I've already got that in RAM. And then it just gives it to you. Cause that's, that's a good operating system. It's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John don't waste it. Don't let it. if Obviously, if it needs, if you need to allocate memory, it will pull it from that pool
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But like, yeah, file system caches. But I get what Mark was saying in terms of like, forget about the operating system infrastructure.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about what apps that most people are using using RAM? Browsers do use a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And of course, you know, if you're a developer, Apple does not care at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the resource usage on your computer of Xcode and its tooling. Apple will use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the memory because it certainly seems like their own engineers use very high-end computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don't care about memory or disk space at all and will waste all of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, most of us would trade that if it would make the compiles faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But for the most part, I think going back to the question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is possible to make software use less RAM, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to care about that and seek that out. Now, what the LLMs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make easier and better is whatever you want to make happen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can help make that happen more quickly and in many cases with fewer bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you trying to do it yourself, but definitely more quickly. And what that means is if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to tell it, hey, examine this algorithm and see if there's optimizations you can make to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it faster, it will do that. But if you didn't ask it to, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not. And I have found this with my expansion of AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coding use myself, when you just ask it to make a feature or to build some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of functionality, the first attempt it does, it does not pay that much attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to performance because maybe it didn't need to. Maybe it didn't think it needed to. Maybe it didn't have enough data or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it just tried something random until it worked. But then when I ask it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to find a way to make that faster. It immediately finds a bunch of ways to make it faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I had to ask for it. This has been true of software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efficiency forever. If you cared about making your software efficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you were able to and had the initiative to take time to try to speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up, profile things, see what actually is taking up a lot of time or a lot of memory,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then try to figure out, is there any low-hanging fruit here? There almost always is. But you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to have that as a value and a task list item. And most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people and most companies don't. Most people in most situations either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never think about performance at all or their jobs require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to keep doing stuff at a certain pace or to prioritize different things so they don't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have the resources they need to care about performance. And that's a shame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But LLMs make it easier and faster to improve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance and to reduce memory usage and to be more efficient. But you have to ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And not everybody will. So I don't think i think we are in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco golden age of software development right now with AI development, but I don't think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an inevitable side effect of it. What we have is more software coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out faster. And if people ask for it, it can be better software. But that's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge if. We will at least, we are guaranteed to have more software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster. That it's very good at. But the quality part still depends on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creator of that software valuing that and asking for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's like the bureaucratic problem with security updates. There is the problem of how can we update macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John without rebooting. That's a technical problem. But the bureaucratic problem is how can the organizational structure within Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco security updates out
⏹️ ▶️ John the door in a timely manner? And that is not a technological problem. That's exactly the same problem with like, oh, make
⏹️ ▶️ John this use less RAM or spend your time hunting bugs or whatever. That's a bureaucratic problem. That is a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, organizationally, where do we ask people to spend their time? Forget about the tools. Forget about anything. This is the same problem
⏹️ ▶️ John it's always been. It's just that now we have these powerful tools. But to your point, margo the powerful tools are worth nothing if
⏹️ ▶️ John what you're asking them to do is bad, if you're never asking them to find bugs. If like, that's why, you know, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John release of like, you know, a snow leopard type release or like the 27, we spent a lot of time fixing bugs. The first
⏹️ ▶️ John part is you have to say you can spend your time looking for bugs. And then we have these amazing tools that will help you find the
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs. But if we don't tell you you can spend that time and say instead you have to spend your time implementing features X, Y, and Z,
⏹️ ▶️ John the bugs aren't going to magically fix themselves. Somebody has to spend the time to fix them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, so that's, that's the other, you know, human nature being what it is. It's very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, have people say, oh, we're in this crisis where we don't have as much RAM. Everyone will look inward
⏹️ ▶️ John and find their inner optimizer and spend their time optimizing instead of spending their time adding features
⏹️ ▶️ John that will produce more sales in their apps. Nope, that's not gonna happen. Like it doesn't change people's hearts,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It doesn't change the hearts of the managers at Apple. doesn't change the profit incentives that that
⏹️ ▶️ John dictate what software is built and how it's built. If anything, the ease of making new software is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, I can make a buck faster by slapping together some crap and throwing it out there because that is the optimal
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy for making the maximum money. You're like, but wait, that's not good software design. And it's like, you have misread
⏹️ ▶️ John my motivations. I'm here to throw out some crappy apps that are vibe coded
⏹️ ▶️ John and make a quick buck off of them. And yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's true of all these things. Like, and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's, there's an upside to it. Like, for example, YouTube democratized and made it easier to make video.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there is way more garbage video than has ever been before, but there's also way more good video. And
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube, part of the magic of that is that it, you know, in its way, tries to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it so that you are not burdened by the crap, even though there is, you know, I forget what the ratio of like how
⏹️ ▶️ John many hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every like hour, every hour of clock time, how many hours of video are
⏹️ ▶️ John uploaded. It's astronomical. But as a user of YouTube, you don't have to see all that. We'll see how that shakes
⏹️ ▶️ John out in software. We all know way more software is being created than has ever been created before because now non-developers can
⏹️ ▶️ John create it and developers can create software faster. And it's overwhelming if you're in this industry. The
⏹️ ▶️ John number of like, you know, unsolicited emails we get about, hey, I have this new app that's coming out is 10x
⏹️ ▶️ John what it used to be for sensible reasons. The app store is seeing that burden too. I'm not sure what the equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of the YouTube algorithm is to try to surface the ones that are good, but that is the challenge we're faced with. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ John now, it manifests as a burden on all of us of like, I can't keep track of this. Every single person is creating apps
⏹️ ▶️ John now and it's amazing and beautiful and it's great for those people, but like it does make the market for software,
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps at least temporarily, extremely overwhelming and hard to tell good from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Uncommon Goods, Base44
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Quince. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about future phone form factors. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an interesting time for this. So there it is in Overtime. ATP.fm slash join to listen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much for listening, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's K-C-Liss, M-A-R-C-O,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann A-R-M, E-N-T, Marco, Armen, S-I-R-A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann U-S-A-S-Ira. It's accidental, accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann They didn't mean to accidental, accidental. tech
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann podcast so long
Marco’s Duo experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, where we left our hero, I had begged of you, begged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you, if you're going to try the iPhone duo, give it two weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you can, and a week if you can't. I received a, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we received a message in Slack like 12 hours after that conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying 18 hours with the duo as my iPhone, and I'm out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You complete freaking wuss. What is your deal?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I reconsidered my out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I take it all back. See, I should have started with honey instead of vinegar. I'm sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all back. I take it all back. All right. Did you last at least a week?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I lasted exactly a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, well, then I have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poo-poo to give you. I did this ridiculous thing for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, then I take all my snark. I take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it all back. You didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John want to get yelled at on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's right. I think that's mission accomplished in my book. Okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I don't have to be quite so cranky about it. So what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so I used it as my phone for one week. I had a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things to do this week. It had a lot of varied use in a lot of different places and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases. Let me tell you what I liked first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I wanted to browse the web or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at a photo largely opening up to the inner screen and having all that screen real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco estate was very nice, actually. Yep. Um, I really did enjoy and appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to view more of a web page, being able to view a big wide photo. Um, At some point, a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of times I would like watched video by you know, kind of propping it up on something cause you can't prop it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on itself in big mode, but okay. Um, I watched video that way a couple times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those were all very nice. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also, I guess I can say one more nice thing about it. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, are we at the end of the good things with the one item? Well, I mean, it's a big item. I will say my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concern about Touch ID was mostly mitigated. Touch ID is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem if and only if you wear an Apple Watch full time and you enable the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlock. If you do that, it is fine. It is not perfect, neither is Face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID, but it is about as convenient as Face ID if you wear an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch. Okay. There's a lot about this that didn't work for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Now, a lot of people are really excited about the Duo, and it's working great for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me tell you some small issues and some big issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, it is a very difficult phone to hold comfortably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it's a very difficult phone to have good cases for. So if what you want is a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grip or a little bit of protection, what you're going to add is a huge amount of bulk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that bulk largely either won't cover the hinge, which is the main area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you'd like to touch and it needs a lot of protection, or it has to add even more bulk and have some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of folio thing, like Apple's folio case. The case situation is not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided instead of a case a few days into it, I added grip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tape to it, which I can actually strongly recommend. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there's, it's just, there's literally, it's like, you know, rubberized kind of grippy, you know, sticky decals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There's a bunch of them all over Amazon. Um, I added a big square to the back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I added a nice thin, skinny one to the to the, the edge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the right side when it's closed that does not have the buttons. So like the top edge. um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And having grip tape on it, and unfortunately, where I most wanted it is the hinge, but you can't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. Obviously, you can't cover that. You can't put tape on the hinge. It won't close or it won't open rather. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the grip tape actually made it a lot easier for me to handle. Pull it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and out of my pocket with the big square one on the back of it. That really helps like help get my grip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. The side one on the right side kind of makes me feel a little more secure holding it. And it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stayed the whole time. So I'll put a link to the one in the show notes that I used. um I think it's called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like dragon tape or something. uh Dragon grips. That's it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it is it gonna come off clean? Is it gonna leave sticky junk?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um It will probably leave sticky junk, but I can just, you know, I can wipe it off. it's I mean, it's on a polished steel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surface on a piece of glass. so
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those like magic gecko feet, like non-sticky stuff removing stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, like, oh, no, like the micro suction? No, it's not doing that. it's It's real sticky stuff. um and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i I even did the thing where it says, like, use a hair dryer or a heat gun to make it stick better. So I did. I went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the bathroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got Tiff's hair dryer and I blew them
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on there. Try
⏹️ ▶️ John this at home. Your poor phone. It was fine. Um, it's supposed to be connected to a
⏹️ ▶️ John cooler, not blowing a hair dryer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at it. I mean, for a couple minutes, it was fine. Um, anyway, so it, it stayed like the edges didn't peel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up or anything. So that's actually been really nice. And um, I have now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'll spoiler, I've switched back to a different phone, and I've actually put a little square of grip tape on the back of it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's actually, I like that so much from my week experiment here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I'm trying that without instead of a case on the new phone also. Anyway, fundamentally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they got the aspect ratio wrong. And a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things fall out of that. What most of the Android world has settled on is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a regular tall rectangle phone that unfolds into something close to a square.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we've heard over the last few months as Apple was getting ready to launch this thing that Apple had a better solution. This is much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. And I think a lot of people might still agree with that, but I think after using it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't agree with that. When it's closed, it's a terrible iPhone. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one problem is text input with the keyboard. Because when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard is up on a closed screen, you have room for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very little in terms of messages or notes or whatever you're writing it into.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And messaging is one of the most common uses for a phone. It might even be the most common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco application people use on their phones, some form of messaging, whether it's WhatsApp or iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And messaging on this is terrible because when the keyboard's up, you can only see a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines. Now, if you open the phone up, well, if you're opening it up in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco landscape orientation, it's still just as bad because the keyboard in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco landscape is still half the screen. And in the left column, you get like the sidebar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so then on the right, you have the same crappy little like, you know, two and a half, three lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of text that you had when it was closed. You really only get more useful real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco estate with text type applications if you open it up and also rotate it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to portrait. And then you get a little more space. But even then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's not, you're not seeing that much more text, even in the giant portrait mode with the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, as you would see on a regular shaped iPhone. You do see more, but it's not as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much more as you would think. Because again, the keyboard is massive. I just think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got the aspect ratio wrong. What I wanted the duo to be was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when folded, closer to a regular iPhone shape, and then opening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would simply be additive. But it's not that. It really is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty bad iPhone when it's closed. And then it becomes a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, you know, large screen when it's open and in portrait. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say open in landscape, I didn't find a lot of use for it besides like watching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco videos. I think that was it But open portrait, I did like that for browsing things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, reading things. However, the software is not there yet even for that, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here's the problem. If you, again, I think one of my favorite things to do on it was open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up and like read you know, a webpage, a document, you know, something in an RSS reader or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you open it in portrait, the margins are all wrong on almost every iPhone app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because these are not iPad apps that are running. they're iPhone apps with different bounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you lay out an iPhone app, you lay it out with pretty thin side margins.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what you have when you open this up is a very wide column of text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with very small margins in almost every app. Now, over time, I think the apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will probably start designing their way out of this. But what you have today is your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fingers are too close to the text and the columns are actually too wide to comfortably read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. My least favorite app to use on the duo is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mail. Mail sucks on the Duo because you have, okay, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you're composing, you have the keyboard problem where it covers up half the screen in almost every orientation and it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible. When you're reading Mail on the Duo, if you're on the outer screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have, you know, no space. If you're on the inner screen, both orientations suck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because if you are in landscape, again, it's kind of the short squat landscape. You don't have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of reading space, but at least you have the two columns. If you're in portrait, there's no way to pin the column on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the left so it's always visible. So you're constantly opening up the sidebar to deal with all the messages and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, though, all the swipe gestures on the message don't work very easily because one of the swipes is close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sidebar. So I found one of the most obnoxious things to do on this phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was anything related to mail. There is no good layout for mail on this phone. And that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately, probably will apply to a lot of different types of apps, like using the AI apps that are basically, you know, a sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list of your AI chats and then, you know, the stuff on the right, you have a similar problem there. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite as bad as mail, but really mail was her. Mail and messaging, I just couldn't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand on this phone. And the problem is I do a lot of those things. That is actually most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what I do on a phone, as I have learned. Also, when you are in portrait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode reading something long, which is again, this is all these trade-offs you're making to get this phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you're doing it to get the inside screen. So using the inside screen should be amazing in as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many cases as possible. Well, when you are reading things on the inside screen, you know what's really not amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that under screen camera. When you're holding the phone in portrait, it is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right where text will most likely be that you are reading. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, nothing split out with very, with very wide margins. So almost everything is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put text right under that in portrait orientation. And that was very distracting for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me as I was trying to read things on the duo. I was hoping the Apple Pencil use would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really useful to me. But because the duo just rocks like crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on any flat surface, it's not unless it is handheld in very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specific ways. I found one use for the pencil that I actually succeeded in, which was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had scanned a room. I was doing one of the furniture layout apps. So I had scanned a room, except, wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a minute, you can't scan a room for a furniture layout app with the Duo because there's no LiDAR sensor on the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I had to take out my 17 Pro, scan the room, transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything over. It was such a farce. But then when I got everything over to the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was out getting coffee and I just had the phone and my bag with me and I had the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pencil in the bag. And I was trying to move this little tiny nightstand around this app with my finger. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn't quite do it. I'm like, oh, let me get the pencil out. So I got the pencil out and I was able to like precisely move it with the pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was nice. Um, But that was you know, handheld. Taking notes on it, and unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as somebody who makes an app to do this, um, I just don't think it's very useful because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, it just does not sit flat on any surface whatsoever. Now, I actually custom designed and 3D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco printed a little desk, basically like a wedge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can sit on so it sits flat on a desk. Um, And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'll release the model. I don't know. It's not really done yet, but it's done enough to work. That made it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit better, but like I'm not going to carry this piece of plastic everywhere I go just for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chance that I might want the Apple Pencil on it. Also, the USB-C Apple Pencil sucks and constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discharges itself and needs to be recharged. I take it out of my bag and I try it. It doesn't work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so not the pencil aspect, the pencil use cases have not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really come through for me. Video playback, I mentioned it's good if you are standing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up in portrait mode with something else. um But if you want to like watch a video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it when you don't have anything to stand it up on and kind of use it as its own stand, that seems like a foldable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco win, except the way that you would do that where you kind of fold it like a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, then the outer screen is face down on a surface,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which if you care about screen scratches, you would never want to do that. uh Like, what are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you putting it down on? Is there a speck of grit on that surface? Are you putting it down on anything rough?
⏹️ ▶️ John That's why Apple sells that folio case, which both protects the screen and screen down, but also, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ John has a kickstand that allows you to prop it up in landscape open mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but that case, and that case is very nice. I felt in an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store for a few minutes. like, I think the folio case makes a decent case for itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it adds a lot of bulk. And then you also then it's closed over the front screen all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have to like flip it open to see your front screen. Already this phone is kind of clumsy to like, you know, get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out of a pocket and start using because it's so bulky and heavy and touch ID. So like to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add more friction to that process, I don't think is amazing. I also did have the problem of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequent pocket lint accumulating on the inside screen. Like someone, when I would open it up, like the inside screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crease area would have a little bit of pocket lint or like one hair or something. I have to brush it away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of the use cases for this, I think it's optimized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for someone, and that someone is definitely not me. And you have a, it's kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a great example. kind of like owning a boat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gracious. To make owning a boat worthwhile, there's a ton of hassles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and downsides and costs. But if you really love boating,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be worth it to you. But if you just want something to get you from place A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to place B, buying your own boat is probably not the best way to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought the boat analogy we were going to use is the two happiest days of a boat owner is the day you buy your boat and the day you sell
⏹️ ▶️ John happiest days of Marco's iPhone duo ownership is the day he finally got his order in for
⏹️ ▶️ John one and the day he stopped using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's more cruel, but not entirely wrong. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of trade-offs and downsides to get that inner screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it has to be really worth it to you. And you have to use your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone for apps and priorities that are pretty different from mine for that to be worth it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you. So it's not that it's for nobody or that it's a flop or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's just a, it's a very extreme set of trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for me personally, it is not what I want at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might be for you. And I think if you if you don't do a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of text entry, especially, if you don't use Apple Mail, if you don't do a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of messaging, if you don't do a lot of text entry, if you do a lot of like, you know, media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumption type stuff, reading, maybe like artistic things, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be better for you. Maybe if you want to view large documents, like if you're working on spreadsheets and stuff, maybe that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be better. But it is a pretty rough iPhone for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things I actually do on an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. When I was talking about the aspect ratio, the that's why when we were talking about like the cleverness of the software,
⏹️ ▶️ John I've always been framing it as like given the form factor, the chosen aspect ratio,
⏹️ ▶️ John if your software designer, like, you know, make the best of the situation. But it's always with the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know you're not determining the form factor. And the form factor determination is made, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that the software falls out of that. But like that form factor, it seems like it
⏹️ ▶️ John was made to emphasize what Apple thinks are the most important use cases. And they're
⏹️ ▶️ John not the ones that you just mentioned, right? So the obvious downside of taking like an iPhone 17 type thing and just making
⏹️ ▶️ John it fold in half is that when you open it, it's squarish. And then worst case scenario, I don't know if the measurements on this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you're, if your tall phone, regular phone, is more than twice as tall as
⏹️ ▶️ John it is wide, when you open it and you watch a, you know, 16
⏹️ ▶️ John by nine, like full screen video on it, doesn't matter what orientation you turn it in.
⏹️ ▶️ John That video may actually be physically larger if you hadn't unfolded
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That is the downside of a square screen It's like, I've got this big thing and when I unfold it,
⏹️ ▶️ John my TV show gets smaller. Yeah, because now you're taking, you know, you're, you're taking
⏹️ ▶️ John what was a vertical, you know, tall thing and turning it sideways and sticking it on a thing that is not as wide
⏹️ ▶️ John as your phone is if you had just turned it sideways. And that makes me think that Apple has really prioritized
⏹️ ▶️ John 16 by nine ish media consumption as a use case. And
⏹️ ▶️ John again, before this phone came out, we talked about MKBHD video where he was just harping on this because he'd been testing folding
⏹️ ▶️ John phones for years and years. And like his complaint, his specific complaint was, look at all these phones. I open
⏹️ ▶️ John them up. I try to watch a TV show or movie and it's smaller than if I just kept it closed and rotated it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or if I use a regular phone that didn't fold and just rotated it and that seems absurd. And it does seem absurd. But Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John what you point out is in exchange for not making that absurd, there are other sacrifices.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing is shorter. Like the keyboard thing really hits home with me because I frequently
⏹️ ▶️ John find myself adding things to our Google Docs show notes document from my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have an 18 Pro and before that, a 16 Pro. It's a tall phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And every time I go to that Google Doc and have to pull up that keyboard, like I
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot see anything anymore. And this is not the the iPhone Duo. This is a very tall phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not a max but it's a very tall phone. And I'm like, the second that keyboard comes up, I think I'm looking
⏹️ ▶️ John through a tiny like slit in a tank or something. Like, I can't see, how can I edit the document?
⏹️ ▶️ John I can't see anything. This keyboard is taking up the entire screen. So I cannot imagine doing edits
⏹️ ▶️ John like that on the duo with its much less tall screen. But yeah, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John prioritization, like Apple picked this form factor seemingly to solve
⏹️ ▶️ John that specific problem of video. And maybe what they know and we don't is
⏹️ ▶️ John that most people, the thing they want a bigger screen for is to watch TV shows and movies. And like there's
⏹️ ▶️ John something to be said for that because I do see a lot of people watching video on their phone in various scenarios.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the flip side of that, I also see a lot of people watching vertical video. And vertical video
⏹️ ▶️ John is not great on the uh, a closed duo either.
⏹️ ▶️ John it's really not. Right. Now, on an open duo, vertical video is also good. Again, that is the advantage of having
⏹️ ▶️ John it open to be rectangular and not square because it gives you a long edge. So vertical video, horizontal
⏹️ ▶️ John video, there is always a long edge. You just rotate the thing and it will work. Right. But it just seems like this use case
⏹️ ▶️ John is like did they really prioritize that. And maybe, you know, to your point, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the correct prioritization for most people. Maybe most people aren't doing email on their phone all day. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John for messaging purposes, people don't care that they can only see one line. Like, I don't know. You know, we'll find out from the sales
⏹️ ▶️ John figures. But that is the, like, why is the phone look like the way it does? So when it opens, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John not squarish. It is instead more rectangular-ish. And Apple, Apple's not the first one to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this. Their copycats beat them to it or whatever, but the market will decide, is this the form factor we want this to
⏹️ ▶️ John be? There's tons of phones that are regular, like iPhone 18s that open and close. We have the flip phones that bend in
⏹️ ▶️ John half vertically. People have tried lots of different form factors. Apple is essentially popularizing this
⏹️ ▶️ John one, which was not popular before they did it. And we'll see what happens. Like the good thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John this folding phone tech and everything is like changing the aspect ratio is
⏹️ ▶️ John not fundamentally rethinking it. You still have to have a hinge. You still have to have the screen. Like if they
⏹️ ▶️ John decide, actually, we have some different ideas about aspect ratios, you can make that change without
⏹️ ▶️ John saying we got to throw everything out and start all over because a folding phone is a folding phone is a folding phone. It's just a question of the sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John of the rectangles and how you apportion the space. But yeah, I'm just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder if they've made the correct trade-off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously not the correct trade off for Marco, but I do wonder everyone else who has this phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John how they come down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hi. For whatever it's worth, by the way, though, on that front, so I also paid attention this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had spent a good amount of time in Manhattan this week, and I saw a number of people with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco duos. A few passersby, um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was getting my eyes checked and there was somebody in the waiting area who was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using a duo the whole time. And then I was at a coffee shop and I saw somebody using a duo for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a half hour. None of them ever opened it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of them were using it in closed mode the whole time. Wasn't it sponge worthy?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I noticed too, like in my own usage of it, a lot of times I had to remember, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I could open it right now. But I would almost feel like, ah, I can't be bothered. Because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like a thing. Like it did draw a little bit of attention sometimes. Like some guy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a subway platform asked if he could hold it. I said no. uh there like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did get a lot of, um you know, a lot of questions. Oh, is that worth it? I'm waiting for mine. How do you like it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, I was I was honest. I'm like, it's not really for me. you know But in reality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of what most people do seems to be typing. Like the one in the coffee shop, the guy was literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typing like mad the whole time I was there. It was like a half hour and he never opened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And i at first I was like, why isn't he opening up? Then I thought, well, if I'm like chatting with somebody on messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, I don't open it either because the open version of messaging isn't better because the keyboard's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wrong size. And so like most of what I was doing with it was closed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, again, I think most people, most of the time, they're going to be using it closed because that's what most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do on their phones. So I think it would be in Apple's best interest to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be willing to reevaluate the aspect ratio decision because that really, like everything else falls out of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, the design of the software, having the stuff on the right sidebar and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did, basically they optimized the phone for making the best,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their mind, the best open experience for media. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the elegance of having the inside screen just be two of the outside screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side by side and having like, you know, split view and everything. And OK, those are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, moderate use cases for sure. But is it better than messaging?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Should that take higher priority for someone's phone than messaging? I'm going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say no. So much of the phone would be better if the outer screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just taller. And you could make it also narrower. If the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outer screen was basically a regular iPhone Pro size or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even a little bit smaller, but still generally iPhone Pro shaped,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would solve so many of these downsides. And the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resulting downside from that change would be the inner screen would be closer to a square and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be a little less elegant in certain ways. But honestly, I think that's a worthwhile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-off for a phone because it's not a TV. It's a phone. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that's like so many of those limitations and downsides and problems would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alleviated by just changing the aspect ratio and making it a little taller and skinnier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you ready for me to tell you how wrong you are?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, please. Let it let it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rip. All right. So here's the thing. All, All snark aside. I actually don't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly disagree with anything you've said. Like, I disagree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you, but you're not wrong, maybe is a better way of putting it. That I don't know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I would make the trade-off of a taller outer screen and a you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, more squarish inner screen. But nothing you said about that was empirically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incorrect, right? So as you were talking, I was like, all right, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do think Marco has a point, I'm thinking to myself, that there is less visible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the duo in, on the internal screen, on the innie, than you would have expected,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? But am I right about that? Is he right about that? So I brought up, and I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to put these pictures in the show notes because it's kind of private stuff. Like I'm going to share it with Marco and John, but I'm not going to put it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. And I apologize for that, but I just, I didn't know we were going to go this direction. And so I didn't prep anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what I did was we have a shared note, the three of us, that's ATP merch promo codes, where Cotton Bureau will occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey send us promo codes and occasionally we'll, you know, tweet them out or whatever. But we have a shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey note where it's a preamble at the top and then just a long list of numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Cotton Bureau. And I looked at it on my 17 Pro and there's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the preamble at the top. And with the keyboard up, with the keyboard there, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see two promo codes on my iPhone 17 Pro. If I'm on the inner screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in portrait, I can see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight promo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey codes with the keyboard up. So this is apples to apples. The keyboard is up. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously, I'm on the inner screen, not the outer screen. But the keyboard up on the inner screen, I can see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey twice as many of these promo codes, which is my closest I can get to John's point about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh my God, I can't see anything on Google Docs. Now, Google Docs, of course, is not updated for the duo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably won't be for 10 freaking years. And so I can't do anything about Google Docs specifically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But hopefully you see what I'm driving at, is that there's actually a fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit more in notes on the duo when unfolded, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in portrait. So, I mean, I'm not trying to take away everything you're saying, Marco. I did not look at it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the outer display, partially because that ruins my whole point, but also because I just didn't have the chance.
⏹️ ▶️ John On this specific topic, though, like we're not going to share the note here, but like the preamble is a paragraph
⏹️ ▶️ John of prose followed by a bulleted list that is short. And for the purpose of
⏹️ ▶️ John messaging, if people are mostly sending short one line messages, the message bubbles
⏹️ ▶️ John and the margins and everything are going to be pretty harsh. Like the benefit you're getting of this being
⏹️ ▶️ John open in portrait is that the paragraph has longer lines, so it wraps less. And that's
⏹️ ▶️ John what's pushing all those things down. Now, physically speaking, you are right that there is physically more pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John and more data in the portrait mode open duo, but like that is a massive,
⏹️ ▶️ John massive open screen compared to a closed, tall, skinny phone. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think like the space efficiency of your entirely open best case
⏹️ ▶️ John scenario keyboard up duo depends a lot on how long the messages are that
⏹️ ▶️ John you are sending back and forth. If it's single line short messages, the advantage, it really
⏹️ ▶️ John eats into the advantage, where if it's paragraphs of text, then the open portrait
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard up duo wins. But I feel like this is kind of not a fair fight. It's your
⏹️ ▶️ John point, like, oh, well, this one does unfold, but like you have given the best possible scenario for the duo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I certainly have, but I knew you were going to say this because I know you, John, and you're a pain in my ass. And so the next thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did was, and again, we will not share these, but I looked at a text thread between myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a couple of friends. And on the iPhone 17 Pro, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can see the last three messages in their entirety.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the fourth message, so the fourth oldest message is, you can read it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's peer with the name of the group chat, if that makes sense. So it's like barely, it's barely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey within the acceptable range of visibility. That's four messages I can see with the keyboard up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With the inner screen, I can see one, two, three, four, five, six messages. Now, is that night and day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different? Of course not, but it is more.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, you have a message that wraps the three lines and then it wraps the five lines on the narrow phone. If they were all one-line
⏹️ ▶️ John messages, it would be eaten into. So you do need the wrapping advantage because you're taking advantage of the width of
⏹️ ▶️ John the width of the unfolded thing. Like if that middle message wasn't there, it would be closer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you're probably right. But I mean, I don't know. I'm looking at like my conversation with Aaron. You know what that is?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's a bunch of links that we sent back and forth. So it's a similar thing. I mean, I get your point. And here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, you're not wrong. I'm not trying to say that Marco's wrong. I'm not trying to say that you are wrong. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I think you're both overblowing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not overblowing. I don't have this phone. It's not my opinion at all. I was just explaining why the duo is shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it was and how it maybe means that Apple is really concentrating on the video consumption thing. I will also point
⏹️ ▶️ John out that the message, the second from bottom message also wraps to two liners on the narrow phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So really the wrapping is, is doing it here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but I mean, that doesn't negate my point, though, John, that it's wrapping or not. It's still more stuff on
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, right. But what I'm saying is if they're all they're all single line messages, the advantage is very, very small.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they're if they're multi line messages, the advantage grows. And and for the specifically for messaging, like a better case
⏹️ ▶️ John would be like reading an article because that's not going to be single line paragraphs. You know what I mean? That You'll
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely get more use there. But then if you're reading an article, you wouldn't have the keyboard up, you know? So anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. But I mean, how many, I surely do not send paragraphs every time I send a text message, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also wouldn't say that my text messages are one or two words each. Like again, you're not wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I feel like I talk in such a way that I have messages that wrap, you know, on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thin phones and on the wide phones. So I don't think this is as unreasonable a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey demonstration as you seem to be implying. But nevertheless, again, I don't think Marco is wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I do disagree. I was doing the dishes a little while ago and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been re-watching. Well, I watched most of Andor and it did not click for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. This was months ago. Didn't really get it. Just hold on. Just hold on. It didn't really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John get it. It did not
⏹️ ▶️ John shock me, but it got
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey me. No, hold on, hold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. I didn't get it. It didn't really click for me. Like, it was fine. And remember that, like, I enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Star Wars. I'm not a Star Wars super nerd like everyone else I know. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really thought, you know what? I don't think I gave this a fair shake. And over the last week or so, every great once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a while, I'll sit down and I will properly watch the show. And I think that's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I went wrong before is I was doing the standard like, oh, this is on and I'm also futzing around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my phone. And so I think that's my fault. I did it wrong because I wasn't properly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey focused. And now that I'm properly focused, it turns out it's actually not bad. And so I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching the show and then I realized I needed to do just a small amount of dishes. And so I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, well, I would like to continue to watch the show. I knew the general, the the, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beats of the story that were going to happen. So I didn't need to super duper focus, but I'd like to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch the show as I'm, you know, doing dishes. And so what I did was I put the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in tent mode, sat it on the windowsill that's behind our kitchen sink, and I watched the dishes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while I was watching the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John point out that you quote unquote properly watching the show as you watching it on your phone while you do dishes?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Okay. Yes, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, yes, yes, I know. that's, But this was the particular scene that I was watching, I knew exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was going to happen. I didn't, you're, again, you're not wrong, but focus. So the point is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could do something with this phone that I couldn't do before. Now, to be fair,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I typically was a pop socket person in the past. I probably could have propped it up on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pop socket and it arguably would have been a bigger screen. But the fact that I could do this at all, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find to be really freaking cool. And I was at lunch today with a couple of friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it was Aaron and me and a couple of friends. And I wanted to show them a short video of something. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what did I do? I opened up the screen and now, poof, I basically have an iPad mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with me. Again, Marco isn't wrong, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't find the trade-offs, with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the camera, both internal and external. I don't find the trade-offs to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too burdensome. I echo what Marco says about Touch ID being mostly a nothing burger. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is unquestionably not as good as Face ID, but mostly, as long as you're wearing an Apple Watch, mostly a nothing burger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I feel like it is incredibly great and fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be using NetNewswire with it open in Landscape.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I do this with my email. I happen to use the FastMail app, but your mileage may vary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But on the left hand, like third is your either list of articles or list of emails.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can just go bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop and triage everything super quickly. And then if I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to properly dig in and read an email or read an article, you know what I do? I flip to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portrait, and now I have this giant screen where I can read that email or read that article.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when I'm done with it, I flip back to landscape, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, blip, bloop, and I triage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything. Now, you, anyone, Marco, John, whomever, might find that to be burdensome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Look at this freaking acrobatics I need to do in order to use this device. I don't find it burdensome at all. I think it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of fun and kind of neat. And I don't find the external,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Audi screen, to be incredibly burdensome. Unquestionably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be a better phone. It would be a better phone if the outer screen were taller, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it would kind of ruin the inner screen as we just talked about. So the outer screen is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe a little too squat, but I've gotten used to it and I mostly don't mind it. Does it make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco wrong about what he was saying about messaging and so on? No. But do I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind it? No, not really. And so I can't
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that I'm right and Marco's wrong. And in fact, again, I've said it several times because I really want it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stick. Like, I don't think you're wrong, Marco. It's just the things that you find burdensome,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I either don't find as burdensome or I actually think they're kind of an advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And especially being able to flip that screen open whenever I want, and I have no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no compulsion or no shame about doing this publicly. None at all. Like I do not care.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm not trying to get people to talk to me about it, but I do not care. And I will open it publicly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I will do what I need to do and I will close it and put it away and that's that. Getting it in and out of the pocket, not a problem for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The lint on the inside, occasionally, but you just and then it's gone. Like it, it's, it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not been a big deal. I had somebody write me on Mastodon, like, is yours a fingerprint magnet on the inside? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it, there's a little bit of fingerprint.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I didn't have that problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I actually think the matte screen looks great. I concur with everyone. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know John is probably seething. It is not perfect color reproduction. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally get that. But I use my phone outdoors from time to time. And I think it looks great. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually kind of like the way that it's a little more muted. Maybe I'm just convincing myself to like this phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe deep down I don't. I just don't realize it. But I actually think it looks really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also agree, though, Marco, that the internal camera is way more noticeable than anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told us it would be before these things got released. And we said it to each other when we were in New York and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still think that. And coincidentally, when I'm holding my phone in Landscape and I'm doing my triage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dance in Fastmail, the freaking delete icon is like right on top of the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it looks fuzzy every time I tap it. And that's annoying. But all in all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually really like this phone. I don't know if next year I will get an iPhone 1202
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I will go back to a you know, slab phone. I genuinely, truly, hand on heart do not know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But sitting here today in basically mid-November, you know, three weeks in or whatever it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been, I am still really liking this phone. And I would really encourage you, the listener,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ask yourself, like, A, do you really want to drop $2,000 plus dollars on this freaking phone? But B,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you see yourself doing the sorts of things that this phone is great at, like triaging and reading and watching movies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or videos or what have you? And if you do, you should really give it a shot and check it out. And I would also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that I am glad you lasted a week. I really, truly am. And if you don't, if you're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not even getting a hint of joy out of the phone after a week, it's probably not for you. I think two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks would be better, but I'm not complaining about one week. If at one week you're really not getting any joy out of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's probably not for you. But let me tell you, the first time that I was able to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I realized I could do the open it up and landscape and bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, and triage everything, rather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than having the, what I never thought before was burdensome, but now I find burdensome, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, tap on an article, animate in. Oh, I don't really care. Animate back. Tap on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next article, animate in. Oh, I don't care. Animate back. And so on. Like it's not having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do that is really freeing. And I'm making a mountain out of nothing and I get that, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really freeing. Additionally, going too up on the inner screen when it's in landscape,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you're trying to like copy something down from a text message into your calendar or, I don't know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get two Safari windows side by side for whatever reason, that's really freaking convenient. Really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey convenient. Do I remember that I can do that? Almost never. But when I do, it's really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking convenient. And so, again, you're not wrong. And obviously it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your opinion regardless. So I can't even pretend to say you're wrong. But I find a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the things that you find burdensome to be actually kind of fun or useful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, the listener, may fall anywhere on the spectrum between me and Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to reiterate what I said when I was playing with it in the Apple Store, again, I just have to speculate because I didn't live with this phone, but
⏹️ ▶️ John my initial impression of it was that I found the outer screen less objectionable than I thought. I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine using this weird short squat thing. Like, And that surprised me. Like, not that it was ideal,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. And I immediately saw tons of places that I
⏹️ ▶️ John would use the inner screens at larger screen space, mostly for content consumption, whether it's reading
⏹️ ▶️ John a big complicated article with lots of like code samples and diagrams in portrait
⏹️ ▶️ John or watching video, obviously, or stuff like that. And I confess that I did not think a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John about how it would perform when doing things that involve typing. And I already said how annoyed I get about Google Docs on my
⏹️ ▶️ John tall phone. So maybe that would bother me. But my first impression, never having lived with the phone, was the outer
⏹️ ▶️ John screen is not as bad as I thought. And I could all the cases that you're talking about, Casey, about the inner screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John I also envisioned myself using those and enjoying those.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, John not having actually
⏹️ ▶️ John done it, I can't tell you what the reality would be for me. But I think I am kind of in between the two of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that I, that aspirationally, I feel like I would enjoy it as much as Casey. I don't know if I would end up where Marco