catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

711: Hot Dog on an Actuator

The Apple Watch’s upcoming Live Rewind and Siri Recap features, some (strong) feelings about CarPlay, and the solutions to all of John’s problems.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Granola: The AI notepad for back-to-back meetings.
  • Claude: Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today.

Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

Transcribed using NVIDIA Parakeet-TDT 0.6b v2 + Whisper large-v3 (ensemble transcription, disagreements adjudicated locally by Gemma 4 31B) + Pyannote Community-1 (speaker diarization).

Chapters

  1. M6 transcription performance
  2. Donate to St. Jude
  3. John’s mouse pad
  4. John’s drive enclosures
  5. John’s AirPods 5 With Wireless Charging Case issues
  6. Purging Intel apps
  7. Sponsor: Granola
  8. M5 Ultra vs. ancient GPUs
  9. Mac Mini NAND
  10. Screen Time in 27 OSes
  11. Unclogging Casey’s pi-hole
  12. Casey feels strongly about CarPlay
  13. Live Rewind and Siri Recap
  14. Sponsor: Claude
  15. #askatp: Highest car mileage
  16. #askatp: Gmail third-party sending
  17. #askatp: Future Mac Pro design
  18. Ending theme
  19. Casey’s latest project

M6 transcription performance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, as you know, it is very important to me to never guess

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or BS about anything. So I have some actual data this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. It kind of bothered me last episode that I didn't have good performance numbers for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M6 Mac minis in my transcript machines. So now that I, well, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco single Mac mini, the one of 48 is an M6. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm happy to report that now I have actual numbers. So in this role of being my transcript machine,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M6 over the M4 is about 20 to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 30% faster.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that's so I now have actual numbers to say that like it is it hovers between those two. Now keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mind, these are doing more than just transcription. They're also now, thanks to Claude,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using two different transcription models. I'm now falling back to parakeet for languages

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple's speech transcriber does not support. So they're doing a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more, but with that mixed workload over like 12 hours averages,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on when I look, it's between 20 and 30% difference.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now here's the question. How does that work out when you divide by price?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh.

⏹️ ▶️ John In other words, is it still more economical to get more M4s?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, at the price I paid for them back in the day, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John But even today's prices, presumably you can get an M4 mini cheaper than an M6, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, probably, but the difference might not be as big as you think. Like, used Mac minis

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always cost more than you think they will because there's always a market for used Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco minis, especially at the low end. Like if you're, you know, if you're trying to sell a used Mac mini that's high spec

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that cost you $2,000 when you bought it new, you're probably going to lose some money on that. Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just are trying to sell a base model that you got a good price on, you're probably not going to lose that much money.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the thing, like, you know, because it is so important to so many people to just have a Mac, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Mini is usually in many ways the cheapest way to do that, although the Neo throws

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wrench in that plan. But there's always, this is why used Mac Minis, like when you go on eBay and stuff, they're

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never that much cheaper than the new ones, just because everybody wants them. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's probably better for me to just buy M6s at this point, but it would probably be close. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I compare it to what I was actually paying for these M4s, you know, a year and a half ago or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year ago, like that was a very different situation. Like almost all of these, like their, their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco list price was $600. I don't think I paid that for a single one, but it was definitely like you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, around 500 bucks for most of them, maybe $550 at the highest.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, for the final time for 2026, I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey begging you to go to stjude.org slash ATP and send a little bit of money their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. So, what are we talking about? So, September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And this month,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey September is running at least 32 days because a week from today as we record

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, I will be in Memphis, Tennessee on the St. Jude campus, and I will be recording our 12-hour podcast-a-thon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that begins at noon Eastern and runs until midnight. And we are doing this in service of St. Jude

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Children's Research Hospital. Why St. Jude? Because they do whatever they can to make sure that no child

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dies in the dawn of life. They have done absolutely tremendous work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are astonishingly good people who care. Everybody there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cares. How do I know? Because I've been there many times and I've spoken to many different employees in many

⏹️ ▶️ Casey different parts of the organization and they care. It is astonishing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much everyone cares about their mission. It's really, really, really impressive. So, here's the thing:

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when St. Jude opened in 1962, childhood cancer was largely considered incurable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since then, St. Jude has helped push the overall cancer survival rate in the U.S. at least from 20%

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to more than 80%. And St. Jude won't stop until no child dies from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cancer. Curing childhood cancer is an absolutely astonishing undertaking, and St.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jude needs our help to do it. That's you, the listener, you, yes, in the headphones, you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The generosity of donors like you everywhere supports cutting-edge research that saves lives, ensures

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing, or food. Every child deserves a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chance to live their best life and celebrate every moment. When you support St. Jude, you can help make cures possible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for kids with cancer. And why wouldn't you want to do that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is really astonishing the generosity of the ATP and relay community. I meant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to highlight this earlier and I completely forgot to. And as I vamp for time, I can't find

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the actual thing I'm looking for. But if I recall correctly, the leading donation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey last I looked anyway, a single donation was $20,000. And I just want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann congratulate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that person. I've spoken to that person. I am friendly with that person, or at the very least,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey casually acquainted with that person. Um, I don't know if they want to be named, and that's why I'm being cagey about it. but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope at that level, everyone's friendly with this person. Exactly right. You should be if you're

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have friends in all of us for sure. Um, So, yeah, so it is absolutely incredible the generosity of the ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey family, but and relay. But here's the thing: what if you don't have $20,000 laying around burning a hole in your pocket?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if you have $2 laying around burning a hole in your pocket? You know what? We'll take that too. Don't feel bad. That's

⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking great. It really is. You should go to saintjude.org/slash ATP and you should donate whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can because I can tell you, I've seen it with my eyes. This money goes to good things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And who doesn't want to try to eliminate the sickness, sickness in kids? I almost said eliminate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sick kids. That'd be very bad. Thankfully, I caught myself. We're not going to fix it in post. We're going to leave it in. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey why wouldn't you want to get rid of childhood cancer? So, additionally, and I know that October

⏹️ ▶️ Casey does end on September 32nd this year, but there are some new devices coming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in a couple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of weeks. I'm just on a roll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco today. We're just going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep that all in. Yep. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's all staying in, baby. Not going to fix anything in post. It's perfect. But yeah, so October

⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn't running as long as we maybe could desire it to because the iPhone Duo isn't shipping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey until a couple of weeks after the campaign ends. But you probably have already figured

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, if you're a prospective iPhone duo buyer, you probably have already figured out what you're going to buy. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you feel guilt about your rampant consumerism, which you probably should, there is a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way that you can set yourself right with the universe. You can erase that bad karma

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and even it out. You know, it's like a carbon offset for karma. And the way you do that is by listening to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my dear friend Marco Arment, tell you about his offset.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Absolutely. Because, you know, throughout the history of the world, no one has ever had any problems with using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco money to absolve you of potential sins or guilt. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to offset your indulgences, figure out the base price of the indulgence family that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you've selected, whether it's an iPhone, an Apple Watch, maybe an upcoming foldable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, or maybe some kind of foldable computer in a month or two or whenever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those launch. You got to figure out what are you probably going to spend on that or what did you spend on that? Take the base

⏹️ ▶️ Marco price. Whatever you spend on top of that with everything all in, storage upgrades, tiers of different things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco available, different options, cases, AppleCare, whatever it is, $1,500, say, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the base product is an iPhone Pro. That's $1,100. So the offset between those two is $400.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is your suggested minimum donation. This will absolve you of all your sins, at least

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this particular area. And what I suggest also, if you can, go to level two, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco adds on to that, whatever you spent on paid AI plans or API costs this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco month. Level three, even above that, is whatever you spent on paid AI plans and API costs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year. I challenge you, try to find a better way to absolve yourself of rampant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco consumerism, guilt, and AI usage guilt than this. You won't find one, I assure you. And there's nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong with the system whatsoever of using this to absolve you of this guilt. So please go today. Consider that as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your minimum donation if you can swing it. Thank you very much.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John your last opportunity. This is everybody's. That's what I was going to say. This is everybody's. If you've been hearing this, you know, pledge

⏹️ ▶️ John drive thing I'm like, oh, yeah, I should probably do that. This is it. This is the last chance. You're not going to hear

⏹️ ▶️ John us talk about it again. Although we may have talked about Casey being on that podcast account. That'll be in the past tense. And keep in mind, you can donate to

⏹️ ▶️ John St. Jude all year long. Obviously, we try to get people to do it during the pledge drive, but if you miss it, it's not like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John I can't donate anymore. You can always donate. But please, if you want to do it during our pledge drive, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John it. This is the time. If you're hearing this, stop the podcast. Go donate. S-T-J-U-D-E.org

⏹️ ▶️ John slash ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you very much for all of you for listening to us talk about this. It really, truly is important to us.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It means a lot to all three of us. It obviously means an incredible amount to Stephen and the relay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey community. So thank you very much for going on this journey with us, St. Jude.org slash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP.

John’s mouse pad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, last episode, which as we sit here now is two days ago, but we already have some follow-up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andy writes, which mouse pad does John use? I want that new mouse pad feeling.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was thinking about this. I was showing my daughter my new mouse pad when I was FaceTiming with her earlier today and explaining

⏹️ ▶️ John what I did. So I'll put a link in the show notes to what I get. I haven't always gotten the same one, but it's usually

⏹️ ▶️ John just like a cheap, generic black sheet of mouse pad. You know, those big

⏹️ ▶️ John ones that like gamers use to cover like their entire desk. I get that, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John I cut rectangular pieces out of it to fit in the area where I want the mouse pad because it's not

⏹️ ▶️ John like a regular mouse pad shape. And mouse pads come in like what I think of was the 80s size,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is too small. uh And now they

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey come

⏹️ ▶️ John in like the 2000 size, which is cover your entire desk. And there's one or two in between sizes

⏹️ ▶️ John that I've toyed with, but they're never quite right. And I have a metal keyboard tray that my keyboard and

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse are on. And there's room for the mouse pad part of it. And I want it

⏹️ ▶️ John to basically be the exact depth of my keyboard tray and then as wide as I want it to be.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so I just, you know, bought this Amazon basics rolled up mouse pad because I had run out of my previous

⏹️ ▶️ John roll or rather, I'd run out of parts that I could cut out of it. And then I just took my old mouse pad,

⏹️ ▶️ John put it on top of it, took a razor blade and cut right angles. And now I have a nice new piece of mouse pad.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when I was showing to my daughter, I was like, she was like, why don't you cover the whole keyboard tray with it?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like Previously, I couldn't find a sheet that would fit the dimensions of it, but now my current sheet would fit

⏹️ ▶️ John the dimensions. I was thinking about it. I might do that, but I kind of like the idea that the keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ John knows where the keyboard area ends. Like I can never accidentally move the keyboard over too far and encroach on

⏹️ ▶️ John my mouse area because the, the mouse pad will stop it. You know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So

⏹️ ▶️ John I'll think about that. For five years from now, when I'm replacing this mouse pad again, I might think about cutting

⏹️ ▶️ John off a piece that is the size of the entire keyboard tray. I would definitely do it if my keyboard was sliding

⏹️ ▶️ John around, but it doesn't. The metal grips the little rubber feet pretty well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, Goldilocks, how do you make sure that you get exact right angles when you're cutting this?

⏹️ ▶️ John You use a metal, like an L-shaped metal ruler. You know what I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mean?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. I had a feeling that anything that is not an exact perpendicular cut would be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely intolerable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to me. Why

⏹️ ▶️ John would you do that? It's not hard to make right angles. I have a million tools in the house that will, you know, metal squares and stuff that will

⏹️ ▶️ John do that. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that's it. You can use that as the cutting edge, right? But you can't get the nice rounded corners that mouse pads always have.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, there's only, I do have this, the one I cut from the sheet, one of the rounded corners is

⏹️ ▶️ John on it and the other are all sharp, right? And I put the rounded corner in the corner of my um, keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ John tray. Cause I don't know. That just, that feels like the right place to put it. But I don't I don't want the rounded corners. I

⏹️ ▶️ John want every I want the whole thing. It's like Tahoe. Rounded corners just cut into space. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ John my God gracious.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John was just pointing that out. So we were discussing in another Slack with somebody on a recent post about what makes Mac Apps, Mac Apps, or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John I'm like, this is a good companion piece. Maybe I'll put the link in the notes. I'll give it to Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John in a moment, or I'll put it in the chat room actually. Um, Hammering home, like in extreme

⏹️ ▶️ John length, the point that everyone made, and we all made on this show back when Tahoe was released, which is that

⏹️ ▶️ John rounded corners cut into the space of content. And people go, all right, sure, whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ John like, this person's like, no, seriously, think about how dumb it is. And just goes on and on at length to

⏹️ ▶️ John say, look at how this screws up every aspect of the infrared interface for no good reason other than round corners

⏹️ ▶️ John look cute. Still

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bothers

⏹️ ▶️ John me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, my mouse pad has round corners and it has never bothered me once, but that's also because I'm not going near the corner.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, you're not trying to display content on your mouse pad, at least not yet. I'm sure that someone has a mouse pad. Someone has

⏹️ ▶️ John a mouse pad that has a screen on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I need to remove my mouse so that I can really show off the content beneath it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You just get a translucent mouse and then make your hand translucent and you'll be all set.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There you go. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Problem solved.

⏹️ ▶️ John The, the image on the display underneath it. Did you see that guy who had the transparent desk with the little charging coil

⏹️ ▶️ John that follows his devices around? Did you see

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that? No. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ John my God. It was, I saved it for, God,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I gotta find this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, yeah, he, he was riffing on air power of all things, which I feel like is a

⏹️ ▶️ John really obscure clickbait way to do clickbait for YouTube. It's like, no one remembers this. I don't know if this kid was

⏹️ ▶️ John born when air power existed. Um, You don't have time to watch it now, but it is. uh I can't tell

⏹️ ▶️ John if it's real. So there's that. So let's just chalk it up to maybe the whole video is AI. I don't

⏹️ ▶️ John know. i

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just It almost doesn't matter with that kind of thing. like It's just a fun thing to see. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Might all be AI, including the person. Yeah. right

John’s drive enclosures

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, your drive enclosures, you were debating where to put them, if I recall correctly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a couple of days ago, how you were going to mount them into what. Can you tell me what is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the situation today?

⏹️ ▶️ John They are now mounted. I used Velcro command strips to hold

⏹️ ▶️ John the little brackety things that I got. Like it's like a laptop holder and like these J-shaped hooks.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I Velcro command stripped them to the back of my desk and I slotted the stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann in

⏹️ ▶️ John and ran the cables to them and they're all set now. So it's nice to have all the stuff off my desk. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John I just have a Mac Studio on my desk with cables plugged into every port except for the HDMI port.

⏹️ ▶️ John I even have the headphone port filled with the same thing that was in the headphone jack of my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, which is one of those L-shaped adapters for headphone

⏹️ ▶️ John jacks, right? With nothing plugged into it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and why is that?

⏹️ ▶️ John So it won't ever play anything over the speaker. Wow. I've done this for years. This is like an old school

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac thing of like, if you don't want your Mac to make noise and you have external speakers, if you never want the internal speaker to play

⏹️ ▶️ John like off to the side of your desk, if you have like a tower thing, you put one of the headphones adapters in there and then it always

⏹️ ▶️ John thinks it has headphones in. So even like all the inputs, all the outputs of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco audio get messed up

⏹️ ▶️ John and it's like, oh, it's, it's you know your speakers are offline or this or that, it's never going to make a noise.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, is that so? Maybe, I don't know, maybe 10-ish years ago,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple changed the way the audio devices in Macs work such that the headphone jack and the speakers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are now separate audio devices and you can actually address them separately in the software.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think if you have the bong turned on, which I do still have to not even turn that off,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but you know, the startup

⏹️ ▶️ John bong turned on, that will still play even with the headphone jack in. So yeah, I think they are

⏹️ ▶️ John separate.

John’s AirPods 5 With Wireless Charging Case issues

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, your weird AirPods five issues. Can you reintroduce that before

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tell you what Bomb Squad has to say about it?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I got AirPods five and I was like, I didn't, is this something to do with my new phone or my new AirPods? But when I

⏹️ ▶️ John put them in, first of all, it sounded like a head tracking was on because I would hear the sound like come from my left and then

⏹️ ▶️ John go to my right or whatever. And then they would even out. And I didn't know what the deal with that was. And then the second thing was

⏹️ ▶️ John when I took the uh, the AirPods out, I take out my right one, fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then when I go to grab my left one, my fingers would brush against the microphone grating on the

⏹️ ▶️ John outside. And the microphone would pick that up as if I'm rubbing my finger on like a lavalier mic or something. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it would make huge static in my ear. I'm like, what the hell? Like, because I have everything off, like

⏹️ ▶️ John not in any mode. Just all effects are off. So it shouldn't even be using that microphone. But every time I did it,

⏹️ ▶️ John when I took out the left one, because I take them out one at a time, when I took out the left one, my fingers would hit the little speaker grate and make

⏹️ ▶️ John terrible static. And I couldn't figure out why.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Bomb Squad writes, the AirPods weird sound change when putting in the second AirPod and the microphone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey being activated when you take out one AirPod is almost certainly the same thing. The listening mode, like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey transparency or noise cancellation, setting is discrete between one AirPod and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two AirPod use cases. The fix is to only put in one AirPod, then go to your AirPod

⏹️ ▶️ Casey setting and control center and switch to the listening mode that you want. Do the same with two AirPods

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. Now they should be fixed. Have you tried this, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John I did this and it worked. And I think Bomb Squad has the right idea that essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John there's two sets of settings. there. There's the settings for when one AirPod is in. It doesn't matter if it's the right or left,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think, but there's the one AirPod setting and then there's the two AirPod setting. And for whatever reason,

⏹️ ▶️ John the one AirPod setting was defaulting to transparency mode. And so when I put the AirPods in, I put them in

⏹️ ▶️ John one at a time. I put one in, it would be in transparency mode. And then went to put the second one in and It would go to my

⏹️ ▶️ John two AirPods mode, which was everything off. And so that's why I heard the weird difference between left and right, you know, when I was putting them

⏹️ ▶️ John in. And same thing when I take them out, as soon as I take out one AirPod, it's like, oh, you're in one AirPod mode now. And one AirPod

⏹️ ▶️ John mode is configured for transparency. And then I would take out the left one and I would hear the speaker. So many people wrote in to

⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, this is because when you have one AirPod in, they always default to transparency

⏹️ ▶️ John mode. And those people are close, but I think that Bomb Squad gets it right in that

⏹️ ▶️ John it's not, regardless of what the default is, it's not like, oh, they always do one, they always do transparency with

⏹️ ▶️ John one AirPod. They do whatever you set it to with one AirPod. That may be the default, but they're just simply

⏹️ ▶️ John two sets of settings. It's not as if they're saying, oh, they always default to transparency mode when you have one.

⏹️ ▶️ John When you put one in and change the settings, that will be the setting forevermore, I think. So that's the situation. I

⏹️ ▶️ John would not have guessed this. It has solved my problem.

Purging Intel apps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. With regard to excising all of the Intel apps

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from your computer, there's a way to do this that I presume John found. You can go into system

⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings and then about and then Intel-based apps, and it will tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you all of the Intel-based apps. There's a sheet that comes up that says support ending

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Intel-based apps. Intel-based apps running on Rosetta will not open in macOS 28. The following apps need to be updated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple Silicon. An update may be available on the developer's website. And then there's a learn more link. We will put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the learn more link into the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ John So a couple of things in this. So last episode, I was saying I was going to like what used to be called System Profiler. I think it's called System Information

⏹️ ▶️ John now, Cause that, of course, lists all your applications and the uh, architecture, um, activity

⏹️ ▶️ John monitor also show running applications and their architecture. There's a bunch of ways to do this. But apparently

⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac OS 27, they added this like, to a much higher level. Like, In system

⏹️ ▶️ John settings about, it's right there on the about screen. There's an Intel-based app setting.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Wait, I'm sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it's in general about.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did I miss something? Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, you missed general. That's okay.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Anyway, but the point is, you don't have to launch a separate app. You don't have to click on details or more info. It's much

⏹️ ▶️ John more prominently placed. And the second thing is, as many people have noted, there's this text that you just read,

⏹️ ▶️ John and there's also a notification. If like, the system finds like a printer driver

⏹️ ▶️ John or some other you know, background thing that is Intel only, it'll pop up a notification in macOS

⏹️ ▶️ John and say, you know, this is Rosetta is going away and this won't happen in Mac open in macOS 28. Blah, blah, blah. Are we

⏹️ ▶️ John still using printer drivers?

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John I've found a bunch of them. and I'm excising them. But anyway, as many people have pointed out, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the rare occasions when Apple is officially

⏹️ ▶️ John saying there will be a macOS 28, which is so dumb because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey everybody knows

⏹️ ▶️ John there's going to be another version of macOS, just like there's going to be another version of iOS. But Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John in its way, is always so cagey. If you say, like, well, an iOS N plus one, they're like, what are you talking about?

⏹️ ▶️ John There is no iOS N plus one. It's like, okay, but like if you were to make another version of iOS that has the same

⏹️ ▶️ John number as the current one, but one more, like they'll never admit that a future product is going to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ John But here they are within macOS 27 saying that a thing called macOS 28 exists,

⏹️ ▶️ John which most of the time is, you know, I guess for the number discontinuity, it would have been a spoiler to know that they were going to jump

⏹️ ▶️ John from 15 to 26 or something. But this is a very, very rare and strange

⏹️ ▶️ John occurrence where they're not saying in the next major version of macOS ever. They're saying macOS

⏹️ ▶️ John 28, that's going to be the name of a product. They might as well have announced it. Very un-Apple-like.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm surprised they didn't reject it from the App Store for mentioning a future.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So

⏹️ ▶️ John they've supposedly gotten better about that, but I still do because I've been burned too many times. I still do latest version of macOS,

⏹️ ▶️ John future version of macOS. I never say the name.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, me too. It's like, it's like, it's like, you know, it's like theater superstitions, like, never say the name of a future

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And well, here's the thing: like, regardless of whether it's like, oh, it's fine now, they say it's fine. They say a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of things, first of all. And second of all, the price of getting it wrong could be an extra several days or a week of waiting. And is it

⏹️ ▶️ John worth it? No.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are sponsored this week by Granola. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have an odd job, not the bad guy, but a unique job wherein

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't really have meetings, but we wanted to make sure that Granola was the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey real thing. And so John and I had a meeting and we talked about ATP membership stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we talked for like something like an hour or hour and a half. And while we were talking, Granola

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was there listening and capturing meeting notes for us and a transcript as well. And this worked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out really well because one of my big failings when I had a jobby job was that I would oftentimes record

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bare minimum amount of action items, particularly for myself, that I would then look back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on later and be like, I have no idea what these words mean. And I'm the one who wrote them. I lost

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the context completely. So Granola is an AI powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It captures what happens in your meetings and turns it into clean, structured notes with decisions and action items

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pulled out and made easy to find. So like I said, action items are pulled out and made easy to find. So at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bottom of the notes that Granola generated for our meeting, there's next steps. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the next steps, I'm reading this verbatim, is approve sponsor product in the doc assigned

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Casey, which is exactly right. That is one of the things that I needed to do. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is very helpful because not only does it tell me what I need to do, but I can click on that line item

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get a transcription summary. And then if I really want to go back to the actual transcript,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can do that as well. This makes it really hard for me to lose context, which is really,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really helpful. So once you try it on a first meeting, it is hard to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go without. You can try it totally free. You can head to granola.ai slash ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's G-R-A-N-O-L-A dot A-I slash ATP. To get your time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back, go to granola.ai slash ATP and try it on your next call.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you to Granola for sponsoring the show.

M5 Ultra vs. ancient GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hal Lee writes: The M5 Ultra is the first Apple GPU to beat the AMD

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 6900 XT, a GPU I once owned and that was released in December

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2020. It wasn't even the top of the line at the time. NVIDIA had faster GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, looking at Geekbench, the M3 Ultra with whatever this unit is, 232,267,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Radeon RX 6900 XT, 237,041,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the M5 Ultra, 350,305.

⏹️ ▶️ John So, congratulations to Apple Silicon for finally besting a six-year-old

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU that you could put in a 2019 Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm excited.

Mac Mini NAND

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. New Mac Minis have some issues, caveats,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, about their storage. Joe Rosignol at MacRumors writes: NAND storage

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the new Mac Mini models with the M6 and M5 Pro chips is soldered to the logic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey board, whereas the previous models with the M4 and M4 Pro chips have removable storage that can be upgraded.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ahem, Marco. In addition, all new Mac Mini configurations with 256 gigs of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage reportedly have a single NAND chip rather than a pair of 128 gig chips. As

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a result, 256 gig configurations have slower SSD speeds compared to configurations with 512

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigs of storage or more that do have dual NAND chips, according to some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey person who was doing some testing with Blackmagic's disk speed test benchmark tool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it looks like a pure doubling. Like the 512 has 6.4 gigs per second compared to 3.2,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the M4 has 2.8. So even with the single chip, the the M6 one is still faster than the

⏹️ ▶️ John M4 one with the quote-unquote good 2128s in them or whatever, but it's worth knowing.

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn't matter for Marco's case because all he cares about is the SOC. Like he's not constrained by disk size

⏹️ ▶️ John or disk speeds or anything like that, but just FYI, they cheaped out a little bit on the lowest end

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, M5 with 256 gigs, if that matters to you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and this is fairly common. Apple does this a lot with their lower-end products. Like almost in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all of their products, the base storage uses fewer chips and therefore is slower

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the upgraded storage.

⏹️ ▶️ John But they did that and then they reversed it. Remember the first time they did it, everyone made a big stink, and then like the next round of computers

⏹️ ▶️ John came back and they didn't do it. We're like, yeah, they've stopped doing that thing, but now they're back.

Screen Time in 27 OSes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. uh, the OS's 27 have a rejiggered screen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time situation, or so we're told. A friend of the show, Steven Robles,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put up a great YouTube video about many things, but the end of it, we'll put a timestamp link in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes. At the end of it, Steven talks about this. It requires every single device,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, in your family, if I understood him right,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann to be upgraded,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey updated to a 27 OS. uh, And if you've just got a new device, stolen device protection

⏹️ ▶️ Casey won't let you remove old devices from the list without waiting five days first. In Stephen's case,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey his mom is in his Apple family, but he doesn't have anything to do with her screen time specifically.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, because she's part of the family, she also has to update to OS 27 before

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stephen can use any of the new screen time features for anyone in his family. And then also, what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens to older devices that can't go to 27? Do you never, ever, ever get the new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen time stuff? Like, this, I get that you have to draw a line in the sand if you've completely rejiggered

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like how this data is stored or whatever, but this kind of stinks.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the mystery about it is like, I mean, if you have old devices, it doesn't stop you from updating to the new

⏹️ ▶️ John screen time features. But then his question was, can I no longer control screen time on those devices?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like they just become uncontrolled and only the 27 devices. He was comparing it to like HomeKit. Remember

⏹️ ▶️ John when they did the HomeKit architecture change where you had all these prompts were like, so you want

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to convert your

⏹️ ▶️ John home to the new HomeKit architecture or whatever? But that wasn't as restrictive. But this like, I mean, so the

⏹️ ▶️ John two things are combining. He was annoyed because he's trying to put out a video like day and date of the iOS 27 coming

⏹️ ▶️ John out. And the stolen device protection is like, hey, you just got this device. You don't have enough time in this device

⏹️ ▶️ John for us to let you start removing devices from an Apple ID. Like that's a security thing. If someone snatches your phone in an unlocked state

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, like to stop you, stop them from like deleting all the devices off of your Apple ID so

⏹️ ▶️ John you don't have any control anymore. So I get why that protection is there, but he can't remove, that means he's

⏹️ ▶️ John got to wait five days, which is an eternity in YouTube time. So that was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey annoying him. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John like having to have, you know, his mom is part of his like Apple family thing, but he doesn't want to control her screen

⏹️ ▶️ John time, but she has to update. They won't let him. He can't see any of the new features. He can't upgrade anything until

⏹️ ▶️ John everybody, every device that can be upgraded to 27 is updated to 27.

⏹️ ▶️ John And who knows, maybe those features, you won't even care or care about them or like them. But this is just this sort of like, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a transient problem. This will go away in a few years when everybody's devices are updated. And like this will solve itself. It's not a big

⏹️ ▶️ John deal, but it is kind of frustrating for one of the headlining features. Like it got its own section and they're like in the

⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC keynote about all about the screen time things. They did not emphasize that this is one of those things that

⏹️ ▶️ John you're not going to be able to use unless everybody updates.

Unclogging Casey’s pi-hole

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Uh, I was trying to figure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out just a day or two back why was my pie hole did not seem to be working,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly on my iPhone. I was getting loads of advertisements. And let me tell you, if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you haven't done, I swear to God, I swear to God, this just happened.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just got a text from Aaron. True story. It literally just happened. It says the following:

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My phone is inundated with ads with like the raised eyebrow emoji. I could not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have planned that better. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John hand on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey heart. That literally just came in as I was trying to talk.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did somebody uh, shut your pie hole?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could say that exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, though I, I, I'm shook that this just happened. Uh, I, I, I'm

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like completely blue screen now. Uh, So, anyway, so sorry, let me try that. We're going to leave it in.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco We're going to leave it in, Marco. It's fine. We're going to leave it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. So, yeah, I was trying to figure out why the pie hole was not really working. Now, Aaron is asking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same question. It wasn't working, particularly on my phone. And the most

⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious place I saw this is: well, if you ever go to any news-related website where you have an advertisement

⏹️ ▶️ Casey every other paragraph

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any website,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey these days just Go to any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco website to do anything.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I noticed this most especially, it was most concrete when I did Wordle in the morning,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because typically, you know, I will say play Wordle and it'll show you an interstitial. And with the pie hole,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you'll see advertisement. And you wait a couple of seconds and then you can click continue. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, then you would, you would just go and play your Wordle. But in this case, I'm seeing like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey video advertisements. Like, what is happening right now? This is driving me batty. And I was going to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring it up on the show at some point, but I hadn't gotten around to it. I've been very busy recently. We all have very, very busy recently.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, And all of a sudden, I got copied on a tweet or a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey toot or whatever, which originated with Daz Fuller, D-A-Z-F-U-L-L-E-R.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it reads as follows: In the latest version of iOS, there's something called connectivity assist. We're going to come

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to that in a second. If you're running a pie hole or similar, then this seems to be bypassing it by routing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rejected requests over mobile data instead. Even the text below the settings says you should probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn it off if you're running an ad blocker. So, connectivity assist, I was all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in for before I knew this. And what connectivity assist says is: well, if you're trying, if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone is trying to cling to Wi-Fi, but it ain't working, go ahead and just go to mobile data. And they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried this like 10 years ago or something like that under a different name. I forget what it was called. And it never really worked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And this was one of the kind of headline features of iOS 27: was your phone is going to do better about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey releasing Wi-Fi. And I guess this is the primary way in which it does that. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it turns out, what I think is happening is when it's getting no good response

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from DNS for a lot of these queries, because the way pie hole works is it'll give you like nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. I think it responds with like a, I don't know what that is, when when your device does a DNS request for something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it knows is an advertiser. Well, apparently, the iPhone or whatever iOS device is saying,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, all right, I'll go to mobile data instead, which is not at all what you want. And I'll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey give you one guess what happened when I turned it off. Then all of a sudden, it all started working again, just like it had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been before iOS 27. Now, friend of the show, Aaron Vay, who writes, is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the authors of Indigo, which is my preferred Blue Sky and Mastodon client.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron writes, This is not a new feature. It's the Wi-Fi assist from previous versions renamed and turned on by default.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I run piehole on my home network and started seeing ads on my devices. This is why. Think about this. Apple enabled a feature

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that sees a block while downloading ad stuff, then reaches out through the cellular network to get it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand to a degree how Apple landed here. Don't love it though. And let me tell you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was in a much better spot once I turned this off. And now Erin will be too, after

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell her about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I would still leave this feature on. I mean, obviously, the alternative is like pie hole is like it'll solve the problem once

⏹️ ▶️ John for everybody in your house because all the DNS will go through the pie hole and problem solved. But the other alternative is

⏹️ ▶️ John run ad blockers on your individual devices, which is more annoying, but also doesn't run

⏹️ ▶️ John afoul of this situation. And I think I want this because very often, like if I'm leaving the

⏹️ ▶️ John house to walk the dog, I have seen my various past iPhones

⏹️ ▶️ John struggle to decide should I cling to the Wi-Fi that I can still get through the wall of the house as I

⏹️ ▶️ John walk down the block or should I switch to cellular? So if I'm doing like a FaceTime call or I'm on like a regular,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, doing anything where I'm like talking to somebody or videoing with somebody while I walk the dog, you can see the part where it's

⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don't know, should I be trying to get that one little bar of Wi-Fi from the house or should I give up and use cellular?

⏹️ ▶️ John like, just give up and use cellular. We're going for a walk, but it struggles. So I i like

⏹️ ▶️ John that feature. I like this previously named Wi-Fi assist now called connectivity assist. And if it was interfering

⏹️ ▶️ John with my ad blocking, which is not because I don't have a pie hole, I would just switch to using something on device. Like that's

⏹️ ▶️ John how much I want that feature more than the, uh, the, the hassle of having to run an ad blocker as an individual devices,

⏹️ ▶️ John which for me is not much of a big thing Cause if you use like one blocker, it's on Mac, it's on iPad, it's on iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you're an all-Apple house, you can get one app and it'll take you pretty far.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I, I totally get why that juice may be worth the squeeze for you, but for me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely turned it off and immediately was so much happier when I did it.

Casey feels strongly about CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, um, this is a little bit of a journey, just like that last topic ended up being actually.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But um, there was some news about GM and car play.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I didn't put this in the show notes, I presume John did, but I'm going to tell you something that I wrote on my blog a couple of days

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. Uh, I wrote just shy of a year ago, GM CEO Mary Barra extended this lunacy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey edict to that they will never do any more CarPlay in their cars to include all future internal combustion

⏹️ ▶️ Casey vehicles as well. Unsurprisingly, this did not end well. The backlash was immediate and the data was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey brutal. Surveys at the time found 79% of new car buyers would only consider a vehicle that offered car

⏹️ ▶️ Casey play and that was available on 98% of new cars sold. Dealers warned buyers would simply walk to a rival

⏹️ ▶️ Casey showroom. Forgive me, that was a quote from somewhere. I don't have my own blog post in front of me at the moment. I'm going off our show notes. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming back to my blog post, well, look who did an about face after realizing they scored a tremendous own goal.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, from whatever source I quoted, this week GM unveiled a new infotainment interface

⏹️ ▶️ Casey debuting on the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups that folds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey smartphone projection back into the dashboard and runs alongside GM's native system.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, look at us. Look at us. We knew it. We called it. We told you you were idiots.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The internet was aflame in the happy way for once about how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exciting this was The GM was finally getting a frigging grip. That was whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey day the 21st was. That was Monday. Then later that same day, after

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I posted my blog post later on Monday, reading from Joe Rossignol at MacRumors, GM

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants you to know it still plans to ditch Apple CarPlay in future EVs. Joe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, recent reports claiming that General Motors is reversing course on its controversial plans to ditch CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in its future EVs appear to be incorrect. As noted by Joanna Stern in her New Things YouTube channel, a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey GM spokesperson has confirmed that its new software interface that shows CarPlay or Android Auto

⏹️ ▶️ Casey alongside its own native system in 2027 models of pickups is specific to the gas-powered versions of those

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pickup trucks. GM previously stated that CarPlay and Android Auto would continue to be offered in its new gas-powered

⏹️ ▶️ Casey vehicles for the foreseeable future. So the 2027 models of those trucks still supporting these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey platforms is not a change. Of course, boo this man. Not Joe.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess I should say boo Mary. Boo that person. So I did post a mea Culpa on my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey website earlier today, but I really, really hate this. And just to be clear,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my mea Culpa, I have been keeping track of the sorts of devices that you can get CarPlay on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you can get it on most new cars, as we talked about, at all kinds of different price points.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'd forgotten to note, and this has been true for years now, but I'd forgotten to note that several motorcycles have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. I picked out like the Honda Goldwing and the Harley Road Glide as two examples. Those are larger, more luxury

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bikes, but it's not just them. You can get it on boats.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it's MasterCraft. Yes, MasterCraft has announced that they will do it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on some of their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey boats. And you can have CarPlay in your freaking shower.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is not a joke. Upbeat Sound Company at upbeatsound.com,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sponsor, makes like one of those dinguses that you would put in, I don't know, maybe a Rivian,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you stick to your shower wall and it has speakers on it and you get a CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interface, like a waterproof or water resistant carplay interface in your shower.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is 100% a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco true story. Kind of awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it's incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey kind of want

⏹️ ▶️ John one. I kind of want one, but I want to be able to text from my shower, though. I don't want to be like, keep your eyes on the road.

⏹️ ▶️ John and like, I'm not going anywhere. Like, I should be able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to text. Does it work with wet hands? Like, because normally… I would assume. Normally touchscreens don't.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You know what I know, but the point

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is… if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has like a resistive touchscreen, it could

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like pressure

⏹️ ▶️ John sensitive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the case may be.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, there's this entire family out there of like hundred-ish dollar little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tablets that run CarPlay that are made to be stuck in a car or like a Rivian. And That's what I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use now for testing overcast CarPlay stuff because it's easy and it's on my desk. And they're fine and they're cheap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they work just fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it's bananas. So just to recap, almost every new car, a bunch of new motorcycles,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey boats and showers, but not Rivian and not GM EVs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Great work, guys. Just stellar work. Really proud of you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, everyone was getting all excited about this. Like, don't you guys remember this is not a change? But like you said, the follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ John story came like moments later. So it's like, okay, everyone will be corrected. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey couldn't

⏹️ ▶️ John save you, Casey, but I could have told you if you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey were telling me you're

⏹️ ▶️ John writing that, I would have said, this is not a change. This is just them continuing what they said they were going to do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, and I thought this, but everyone was so excited. I read a few things and I was like, oh, I guess I'm wrong or I've forgotten.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John so here's

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing about it. All right. So those are the facts as you've read them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But reading between the lines, as you noted, I think this experiment is currently

⏹️ ▶️ John not going well for GM. So start your timers, right? At a certain

⏹️ ▶️ John point, there'll be a change in leadership or they'll have a change of heart. Like I think this does,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the longer this goes on, the more likely they are to eventually reverse, especially if Tesla ever

⏹️ ▶️ John actually goes through with their supposed plans to add carplay. Like I don't, just because

⏹️ ▶️ John this is still the status quo does not mean that every day that passes makes everyone

⏹️ ▶️ John realize inside and outside of GM what a stupid home this was. So I think, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John despite the fact that this is not an actual change, it's not going well for them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. And the thing that blows my mind is that if you're Rivian,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if your primary competitor, at least in people's minds, maybe not like literal competitor,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I feel like almost everyone I know that's even vaguely interested in Rivian is at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey least considering cross-shopping Tesla. If you're Rivian, why wouldn't

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you use this as a differentiator? And one of my earlier blog posts on this subject, because I've been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey banging this drum for a while now, is that Wasim Ben Said

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is his name, who is like the CTO at Rivian, was on, I want to say it was Decoder. It was one of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey great Verge podcasts and said, well, it takes over your screen. That's why we can't do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. It doesn't, though. Like CarPlay, CarPlay Ultra does, but regular CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn't. In my BMW now, it uses most of the screen, but not all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. In Aaron's Volvo, in her old Volvo, it used like half the screen. Now it uses the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey majority of the screen, but not all of it. And so if you're Rivian, why would you not use this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a differentiator? It's freaking additive. If your infotainment is so freaking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey great, then no one will use it. And it's fine. What does it hurt you? Why would you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not use that as a differentiator? It blows my mind. And so there's been rumblings,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as John said, there's been at least a moderate amount of smoke, which makes me think there's fire, that Tesla is potentially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to juice their, as far as I understand, pretty bad sales these days because, hey, guess what? The CEO

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a freaking maniac. But anyway, they're trying to juice their sales potentially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by adding CarPlay. And then I think John is exactly right. The second that happens, Rivian

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to suddenly discover that all of their issues with CarPlay just magically disappear.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think GM will also do the same thing. But why would you not differentiate? Why would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you not do it now? It drives me batty. This is on the long list of things that I get very worked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up about that I really shouldn't. But I just don't understand what they're doing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, it's additive. If your infotainment is so freaking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spectacular, then maybe your owners won't use it. Maybe what'll happen is all these people,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I don't know, me, who refuse to buy a car without CarPlay, will buy the Rivian

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then see, you know what? Maybe I don't need this after all. But at least now I've gotten in the door.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I just don't get what they're doing here for such an admirable company. It's,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's, it's in so many ways, Rivian, to me anyway, seems like Tesla, but not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey evil. So why wouldn't you do this? I just don't understand. It drives me batty.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think once Tesla does it, like, you know, there's, I think there's enough smoke behind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, like that it's probably going to happen. And, you know, you start, you see, like Apple made a few changes in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the latest couple of iOS versions that seem like they're aimed at getting Tesla on board with CarPlay. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like it's probably going to happen. The only question is when. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once Tesla caves, first of all, I think it will be a big deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it will be a big deal to their sales. I think Apple will want to brag about it. Um, and, And I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a huge thing that buyers look for in new cars. And so once Tesla caves,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's only a matter of time before Rivian does. But I think it will take that. Like, I don't think Rivian is going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change their mind until and unless Tesla caves.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree, which is so dumb. It's so dumb.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I love the idea of going back to Rivian in the future. Like, you know, because the only reason I got rid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my Rivian was because it was a service nightmare because it was such a young company and it had a lot of little bugs that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn't be fixed for 12 weeks or whatever it was. But I would love to go back to Rivian

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future. I still miss things about it and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still really respect what they're doing as a company and their vehicles are very capable and very appealing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me. But one thing I don't miss is is having to put my phone in a stupid dock next to the dashboard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and having

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to operate little tiny phone apps manually with my hands because there's no CarPlay, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their maps sucked and there's no overcast and there's no other like it everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the infotainment thing was terrible. And I know I've heard that they have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better maps now, which that's great, but what you don't have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is any maps. Like you don't you don't give me the ability to use any map app I want. What if I like Waze

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than Google Maps or Apple Maps better than Google Maps? Like whatever it is. Like if what I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want is not exactly the one app that you've selected to build a half-assed version of in your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco infotainment system, then it's a bad experience for me. And what are the odds that you're

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to guess right on everyone's preferences? I said it before, never bet against

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smartphone. And the good thing is you don't have to. And every other car company has figured

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this out. Like just show the phone thing in the window and that's and it's

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. And no other car company has had any problems just doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and the customers love it. So it's only a matter of time before Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs to juice their sales that way because they, you know, as you mentioned, they're always looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something because they're always getting themselves into trouble. And uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. And the thing is, and I, I, I so hope that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, like I have one more year on my lease. Next year, next next summer, I'm picking a new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. I don't think Rivian is going to come around by then, but maybe the one after that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to go back to Rivian like three years after that. Maybe by then they'll have a nice big service network.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The R3 and the R3X will be out and they'll be super fun and maybe they'll have car play. One can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dream.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. No, I agree I agree with you completely. And here's the thing. Let's take it as writ that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey both Tesla and or Rivian infotainment is without

⏹️ ▶️ Casey equal. I don't care if it's both of them, one of them, it doesn't matter. Let's just say Rivian is without equal. Let's say it's better than Tesla. I don't

⏹️ ▶️ Casey care if that's true or not. Let's say it's the best infotainment in any automobile. Let's say that's the case.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do they have overcast support, Marco? No, of course not. Right. And they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey because it's never worth Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is never going to be worth either Tesla or me building that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or Rivian, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Or Rivian. We're saying the same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. And there's so many. Like if when I plug in my phone to CarPlay,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't just see three apps. There's like 40 apps on there, right? There's so,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Audible has an app. like, There's so many. like, Every map app has one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like Instapaper has an app that'll read articles to you. Like there's so like there's stuff you would never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even think about. The AI providers are now having CarPlay apps. WhatsApp has a CarPlay app. There's

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many. There's no way any car maker is ever going to cover them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. And they don't need to. So it's just a self-created problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. That's the thing is that even if Rivian's infotainment is miles better than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything else out there, let's say it's better than CarPlay. But the problem is, if I want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go and switch what podcast I'm listening to in Overcast while connected to a Rivian,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I'm ignorant maybe I'm missing the point here. But as far as I know, I would need to pick up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phone and use Overcast. Or if they supported CarPlay, I could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pop over to CarPlay for a moment if it's not already up, do what I need to do in Overcast, and then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pop back to Rivian's infotainment. Like, I just, I don't understand what they're thinking. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you said, Marco, and it's exactly on the nose, every one of us has a different

⏹️ ▶️ Casey array of apps that we want to use in the car. I want to use Overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't typically use Waze, and I don't typically use Google Maps. So that doesn't bother me, but I want to use Overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, presumably you want to use Overcast, but you also use Waze. And that's fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's the beauty of CarPlay is that we don't have to all agree, as you said, on the same

⏹️ ▶️ Casey six frigging apps. It's just, I don't get it. And it drives me so batty. It's just such,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, hubris, for lack of a better word. I don't know. It's just, it's deciding in Rivian's

⏹️ ▶️ Casey headquarters that they know better than you. And that's so frustrating. And you know what I've heard a very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey smart man say from time to time? In fact, as recently as like five minutes ago,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't bet against the smartphone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love how fired up you get about this. this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey is you're so mad. It's so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dumb. It's

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco so dumb.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Rivian guy, you know, he's very calm and soft-spoken. He's

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, well, we believe this is a better experience. And and I can, I don't get all fired up like Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this. I can very calmly address, and I say, I believe it's not. right. And therefore, I believe I'll buy a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different car.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And that's exactly it. Like, I genuinely, I think I've said this a couple of times on the show. I genuinely, even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey though I just got a car, I will probably put a deposit down on an R3 because I want, the, or the R3X

⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically, Cause I just think that would be such an amazing car. It's like a little hatchbacky thing that's supposed to be like a little hot rod

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hatchback, like my Golf

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco R. It looks so cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It looks so freaking cool. And having driven a couple of R1S, or I've

⏹️ ▶️ Casey driven one or two R1S's and an R1T, and I love the whole vibe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Rivian. Like everything about it, I love, like the concrete things and the not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so concrete things. And I can absolutely see myself driving a Rivian, but I will not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking do it without CarPlay. So I will probably put a deposit down when they're willing to take them. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they don't cave on this, which I think Marco's right, it's at least a year or two away, then I will ask for my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey money back or or maybe I will just sacrifice you know, whatever that money is because I will not buy a car without CarPlay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just won't do it. John, am I crazy?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but not for this reason.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Very crazy. My car

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn't have CarPlay either, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, it's time for you to get a new car. Um,

Live Rewind and Siri Recap

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we are in an in-between-ish area where you could squint and say this is follow-up,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe this is a topic. I don't know. We'll see what I end up deciding in the show notes. But we're in that kind of gray zone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what we're going to talk about is the Apple Watch and it listening to you. And we're going to start with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some feedback from Steve Riggins, who writes, I'm not sure why Marco is so concerned over the new Siri audio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey features when voice memos have been sitting there for years. It only automatically records the last

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 15 seconds, this new feature, only automatically records the last 15 seconds. Otherwise, it's not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as bad as voice memos, which just records audio flat out basically forever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the main difference between the announced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri replay and Siri Rewind features is that they're always recording. Voice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco memos requires the user to explicitly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco decide, I'm going to open up the voice memos app and hit record, and I'm recording.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a different level of thing than something that is always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recording, than a product that just always records all the time without you initiating the recording.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, there's all sorts of, you know, there's all sorts of opinions and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco laws about whether it is right to record people around you possibly without

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their knowledge or whether somebody can record, can like leave a recording device somewhere and record the people around it with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of their knowledge. There's lots of laws and opinions about that. But I think for this particular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco question, that distinction almost doesn't matter. It's

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when when you are deciding, I'm I'm taking out my phone and I'm hitting record on this app and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm making a recording, that is a very different degree of surveillance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and recording than a product that is always doing it in the background.

⏹️ ▶️ John So my follow-up to this to Steve's question was, so let's think about hey Siri. Sorry, I just did it. Hey, Dingus,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Which has existed for years and years on phones, right? That

⏹️ ▶️ John technically works in a very similar manner and that you may be wondering, especially when they first

⏹️ ▶️ John roll this out, how does it know when I say, hey, Dingus? Is it always listening?

⏹️ ▶️ John And the answer is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John it's always listening. And it technically, you know, setting aside the secure exclave

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, it's a similar type of thing where there's some very low power corner of the logic

⏹️ ▶️ John board or potentially chip that has a tiny little buffer that's

⏹️ ▶️ John constantly recording audio through the microphone in a very low power state. And the hey dingus one is saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John I'm just going to be constantly recording a couple seconds of audio and I'm just going to be looking at it saying, did they say hey siri

⏹️ ▶️ John did they say Hey Siri? Sorry, I can't do it. Did they

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco say hey siri

⏹️ ▶️ John That's all that's all it's doing all the time. And they change it to eventually look for just just the word without the hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John but that's all it's doing. It's just, it's constantly quote unquote recording as in taking in digital

⏹️ ▶️ John audio, taking in audio, analog audio, converting it to digital, and it has some buffer of, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, the past one or two or three seconds of audio. And it's analyzing that buffer to see,

⏹️ ▶️ John is anywhere in this buffer? Did anybody say, hey, Dingus at any point? And if it did, it says,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I'm gonna wake up the whole rest of the phone and say, oh, they, I, they said the thing. So, and by the way, here's

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, the beginning of the audio that they said after that. And then piece it all together and blah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah.

⏹️ ▶️ John That feature has existed for a really long time. Most people have not uh worried about it because they don't think about it. They're

⏹️ ▶️ John just like, oh, like a human, you just say, hey, whatever. Like, I mean, people do this all the time where

⏹️ ▶️ John someone, you know, says something and then says your name at the end of it. You have this phenomenon

⏹️ ▶️ John where they shout something and they say your name at the end to realize that they were addressing you.

⏹️ ▶️ John And suddenly you hear all the stuff they said before that. Whereas if they didn't

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco say your name at the end of

⏹️ ▶️ John it, you would have ignored it as background noise, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they think, oh, the

⏹️ ▶️ John phone's

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like a little person.

⏹️ ▶️ John When I say, hey, Dingus, it wakes up and it's like, well, how? How does it wake up? How does it know you

⏹️ ▶️ John said that? How does it know you're addressing you? It doesn't know your intention. It's not reading your mind. It is always recording

⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny bit of audio. But what it does with that audio is it's just looking

⏹️ ▶️ John for the wake word. Okay. Enter the watch, which is always recording

⏹️ ▶️ John audio, but it's not just looking for Hedengus anymore. First of all, the buffer seems bigger. I

⏹️ ▶️ John don't know how long, how big the Hey Siri buffer is or whatever, but this buffer

⏹️ ▶️ John we know is at least 15 seconds. Second, it's not just constantly scanning that buffer

⏹️ ▶️ John looking for a wake word. Instead, it's got that buffer all ready to go.

⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, it's a rolling buffer. So it's just throwing away the data that's, you know, it's keeping a 15

⏹️ ▶️ John second window. It's just letting it kind of sit there. I mean, it's probably also scanning it for the wake word, but it's

⏹️ ▶️ John making it sit there waiting for you to double tap the crown on your watch. And then it goes, oh, they

⏹️ ▶️ John want to know what was said in the last 15 seconds. Well, luckily, I've been recording audio all day, and I have the

⏹️ ▶️ John last 15 seconds of audio, as a matter of fact, in this buffer right here. Now that they've tapped that, instead

⏹️ ▶️ John of me just scanning that buffer for the wake word, I'm going to run it through a speech

⏹️ ▶️ John to text thing. I'm going to get some text out of it. I'm going to summarize it and I'm going to put it up on the screen in a bubble.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's what this feature does. Well, hold on. There's a fine distinction here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This feature does not summarize it. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the 15-second one just transcribes exactly what was said, does not do any summarization.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it does. Doesn't it do some sort of like anonymization or something in it? I think it might do some processing on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I don't think so there's, I forget, that's replay, not rewind, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I know you're talking about there's there's the distinction between the one that summarizes versus transcribes in 15 seconds is the transcript, but I

⏹️ ▶️ John thought they had also said that in the 15 second transcript, they'll try to like blank out people's names or something. But either way, uh

⏹️ ▶️ John what it's doing with the audio is not just scanning it to find something and say, have I been triggered? Yes, no. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John feeding the audio to the the system to like do a command or whatever, but they're making text out of it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Okay. Whether it is literal transcription or a summary, either way, I don't think it actually makes that much of a difference other

⏹️ ▶️ John than like trying to make it digestible because 15 seconds you can transcribe and that's it's a lot of text, but it's not too

⏹️ ▶️ John much. Whereas if you've been an hour-long meeting, the transcript of that is going to be much longer than the summary.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, so that that distinction, I think it's mostly because people think of

⏹️ ▶️ John a wake word as being just, again, they they think of the phones, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann they

⏹️ ▶️ John conceptualize the phones the way, the way we conceptualize living things is in there. It's just responding to its name. It's

⏹️ ▶️ John not recording me. It's not listening to me, but of course it is listening. Like in the same way that you're not listening until

⏹️ ▶️ John someone yells your name, when you hear your name, your brain wakes up and says, oh, I was just, I was just, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, blocking out all that background noise of people chattering behind me. But when I hear my name, I'm like, oh, I suddenly pay attention.

⏹️ ▶️ John That's all the phone is doing, right? So that's fine. Versus, oh, you didn't know I've been listening to you, but now when you

⏹️ ▶️ John see that, that I transcribed the last 15 seconds of speech, you're like, wow, you've really been listening this whole

⏹️ ▶️ John time because here I see the things that were just said in the last 15 seconds, including what

⏹️ ▶️ John the people at the next table were saying. And they didn't even realize they were being recorded. So anyway, I don't want to belabor this, but that's,

⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to bring up, hey, Siri, at this point, because technologically, oh, sorry, both of my

⏹️ ▶️ John phones lit up.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Technologically speaking. You brought this on yourself.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my other phone is going to the Pokemon Mines. It's got a new, as in, actually, I found a

⏹️ ▶️ John new not used orange apple silicone case. this is what my wife wanted to put

⏹️ ▶️ John my phone into embarrass it while it goes to the Pokemon line. So they both lit

⏹️ ▶️ John up. Yeah, we should continue with the feedback because there is more.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Carlo writes, my basic position is simple. If I legitimately hear something, I don't think another person has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a privacy right over how well I'm allowed to remember it. If you tell me something, I might remember it perfectly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might write it down afterward. I might dictate myself a note. None of those things are normally considered privacy violations.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if my watch privately creates a summary to help me remember the same conversation, what exactly changed? The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey information reached the same person. It wasn't disclosed to anyone else. Technology just made that person's memory

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more reliable. This feels much closer to augmented memory than surveillance. I get this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know. It just feels really different.

⏹️ ▶️ John There's a difference between surveillance and eavesdropping. Eavesdropping, some etymologists

⏹️ ▶️ John will let us know where that comes from or whatever, but eavesdropping is like you're around the corner from someone having

⏹️ ▶️ John a conversation and you're listening. That's generally frowned upon too. Like it's kind of, you know, like you're being sneaky, you're

⏹️ ▶️ John listening in a conversation, you shouldn't be listening. And sometimes you're not around the corner. Maybe you're just like at a restaurant in a booth

⏹️ ▶️ John and you can hear the people in the booth next to you and you're listening to their conversation. That's also kind of frowned upon, socially

⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, but you're right that you can do it. But surveillance is different from that in

⏹️ ▶️ John that you don't have to be there or do anything or participate. You can

⏹️ ▶️ John continue ignoring them, having your conversation, confident in the fact that your watch is recording

⏹️ ▶️ John everything and will summarize everything the next booth said without you having to concentrate on it

⏹️ ▶️ John or appear to be eavesdropping or anything like that. And that is a violation of the social contract, much

⏹️ ▶️ John more so than eavesdropping. is rude like you shouldn't be listening to our conversation, but at least people can see that you're listening

⏹️ ▶️ John because you're not, if you're having your own conversation or whatever, they're like, oh, they're if someone would see you and say, they're

⏹️ ▶️ John clearly being polite and not listening to the conversation on the next table. But no, you're not being polite. You put a tape recorder down

⏹️ ▶️ John on the table and you're recording it. And later you're going to listen back to it. And I know it's not the same thing as summarized or whatever, but that's the point.

⏹️ ▶️ John Surveillance is a machine doing a thing that would be too socially unacceptable for you

⏹️ ▶️ John to do, but you just set the machine to do it. And so you can appear not to be violating that social norm when you totally

⏹️ ▶️ John are, which is why it is usually considered more invasive to, for example, plant

⏹️ ▶️ John cameras in your neighbor's house than it is for you to look out your window in through their window.

⏹️ ▶️ John Both of them are bad. You shouldn't be peeping in their windows. But if you went into their house and planted cameras and tape recorders,

⏹️ ▶️ John that would be more of a violation of you looking out your window at their house.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There's also there there's a lot of differences in in degree and situation here. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if, first of all, if, you know, if for a product like this, it is creating an artifact that you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can refer to, and and that might have some kind of authority. So for instance, if if there's some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dispute over what was said, you know, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco point to this. You can go open up your app, you know, your Siri app or wherever these recordings land, and you can say, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, no, look, this is what you said. And that's a different type, that's

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different nature than you know, you just trying to argue that you remember something.

⏹️ ▶️ John Although I feel like you could be that pretty easily in court, given how poorly these things summarize.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But again, you're creating an artifact that maybe somebody else could have access to. Like, you know, when we first discussed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, I brought up the example of like, you know, a lot of spouses or partners have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco access to each other's Apple IDs or know each other's passcodes to their devices. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could plausibly, like, if you if you're if you had like a partner or an ex maybe who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew your passcode to your phone and could open it up and read these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes, it is plausible that they could maybe see an action item or a summary of a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco conversation that could give away something that you would rather they not know. So for instance, what if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are planning to move out and they see in your Siri app when they're spying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on you that you met with like an apartment listing agent? that they, and they, Even if it says something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like met with Michelle, what if they know that your friend Michelle is an apartment listing agent? And like there's there's

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many ways this this can be a privacy violation unintentionally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, or in this case, you know, intentionally, but like when you when you're creating these records of everything around you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does change things dramatically because you know also in that situation,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you as the wearer of this recording device, you again you like what we were saying earlier,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might forget that this is a feature. You might not even know this is, or you might have turned it on once months ago, forgotten about it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it's been recording your conversations for months, and or rather, it's been taking notes on your conversations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for months. um So even though it is not creating an audio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco recording that persists, it is still creating artifacts automatically all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time that could have major privacy implications and could backfire on you and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people around you in ways that you would rather they not. Again, think about law enforcement. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you know, suppose that this becomes one of those things that the TSA agents make you check when you enter the country

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that, you know, the customs agents, like they want to see what you've been talking about with your friends. Have you been saying anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe against the president? This sounds ridiculous to only some people out there now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because most of us, you hear an example like that, and you're like, oh yeah, that could happen. That probably will happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco These kinds of scenarios are not ridiculous. So meanwhile, why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they creating this? It does seem like if what you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want is something to take notes on your meetings, there's lots of other solutions for that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will do a better job and will be like, you know, they'll be more thorough. They'll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually have things like searchable transcripts and or recordings in those kind of contexts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes a lot more sense. It is more defensible. And they'll probably do a better job. So Apple's going to be here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this kind of very limited, possibly very mediocre version and bring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all this baggage for what? And then finally, I would also say that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you consider it a memory augmentation, that is an interesting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco approach. That is an interesting theory that you're saying, I'm not recording conversations. I'm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just automatically taking durable, you know, automated notes on everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around me all the time. Okay. Isn't that a similar argument

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to LLMs are just reading things like humans read them and just learning them?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then just it can repeat them back perfectly. But that's not a copyright violation. It read it just like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like you or I would read it. And if I can read a news article and recite it perfectly back to you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm, that's not a copyright violation. Well, it might be a public performance, but you know, there's,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can see when you change the degree or the nature of something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by this much, it does change a lot of the legal questions around it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there's a lot of precedent for that throughout all of technology and history. When you change something this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dramatically, the law and the perception and the judgments around it often change.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In this case, something that takes constant, persistent, automatic notes of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything is a difference in degree versus me having the right to remember what you said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John A couple of things on what you said first. I hate that LM analogy because LMs aren't people, but I'm setting that aside.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think another thing I want to push back against, although you keep bringing up as an example to help people understand it, which makes

⏹️ ▶️ John sense from an emotional perspective, but technically speaking, and I feel like from like the principle of all

⏹️ ▶️ John this, it doesn't actually matter if anything that has been recorded is sensitive in any

⏹️ ▶️ John way. Like this is not bad because you might say a thing that you don't want people to know. It's bad

⏹️ ▶️ John even if you never say anything. It's the whole like, well, if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't have to worry about it. No, surveillance

⏹️ ▶️ John is surveillance. Even if you never say anything, if nothing is ever recorded that is harmful

⏹️ ▶️ John in any way, okay? It's still just as bad. It doesn't change the badness of it based

⏹️ ▶️ John on whether you had said something that is potentially sensitive. Because that that way leads you to, okay, well, it's fine

⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you have nothing to hide. We'll just record everything. And if you object to the recording, then obviously you have something to hide. and And

⏹️ ▶️ John your argument is like, well, everybody has something to hide. But really, it doesn't matter if

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have anything to

⏹️ ▶️ John hide. The principle is I should not constantly be recorded. And I think this is getting to the heart of the difference,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is what is surveillance versus taking notes or memorizing

⏹️ ▶️ John or eavesdropping or whatever. Surveillance is constant, ambient, and

⏹️ ▶️ John back referenceable, as in it's just running all the time. You just have the camera pointed at your garage and it's just there

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. It's just recording 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Maybe once in a blue

⏹️ ▶️ John moon, someone will come and try to break into your garage, but it's recording all the time. That is surveillance. You don't

⏹️ ▶️ John have to do anything to make it. It's not an intentional move where every morning you wake up and say, well, time to record the garage in case someone's skilled.

⏹️ ▶️ John It's just running all the time. That's what surveillance is. It's the difference between sitting

⏹️ ▶️ John down at a meeting at work and starting your note-taking thing. And then you have the meeting and then it summarizes your

⏹️ ▶️ John notes as one of our sponsors does, you know, I think for this episode.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And then

⏹️ ▶️ John you're done. That is an intentional act in a particular context where I think everyone is socially acceptable

⏹️ ▶️ John to take notes during meetings, whether you're taking them with a pad and a pencil on your computer or with a note-taking app.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is an intentional act that everyone is aware of that's going on in a particular context versus

⏹️ ▶️ John my watch is recording everything all the time. Oh, I can geofence it, but like just because

⏹️ ▶️ John it is ambient, because it is surveillance, once it is off and running, it's just filling up your

⏹️ ▶️ John Siri app with like summaries of things that have happened all around you all day because surveillance is not an

⏹️ ▶️ John intentional time limited act where you say record now, stop recording. It is just I've set a camera up pointing

⏹️ ▶️ John at my garage and that's going to be there forever. And I might only look at it when someone breaks into my garage,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it's recording all the time. And surveillance, you know, video surveillance audio surveillance, there are

⏹️ ▶️ John laws around that because of the nature of surveillance. It is not as simple as, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, an intentional recording act, although we have laws about that as well. It is like, it is, it is

⏹️ ▶️ John different in kind. And again, it doesn't matter if anything ever happens that is important in that video.

⏹️ ▶️ John The act of surveillance is still the act of surveillance, even if nothing ever happens,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the

⏹️ ▶️ John thing you pointed the camera at. At certain scenarios, you can't point your camera. You can't play, again, you can't plant cameras in your neighbor's house and say,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, it's not a problem unless something sensitive happens in their house. Like, no, it's problem that the camera is there at all,

⏹️ ▶️ John recording all the time, again, without their, without their knowledge or whatever. So Carlos's point is like, well, they

⏹️ ▶️ John don't know that I'm listening to them and I'm memorizing everything they say and now I'm recording everything they say. And it's like, yeah, you've just crept right

⏹️ ▶️ John up to probably existing laws on on eavesdropping and surveillance. And this is turning a thing that was

⏹️ ▶️ John previously a thing on your wrist that would tell you time and do stuff into, hey, you may not know it, but we're constantly recording

⏹️ ▶️ John and summarizing every conversation that happens around you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nick here writes, Apple swears up and down. It's doing all it can to make this private

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and secure. And I have no reason to believe otherwise. The audio is not actually saved and is instead merely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey transcribed. That text is automatically deleted unless the user takes an action to save it too.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But good luck explaining that to anyone around you after you read back an exact transcript of what they just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said. I think normal people will continue to react negatively when you tell them that you've been passively recording

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them because outside Silicon Valley, that is considered gross and invasive. Let me just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus one, the very last thing there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that Nick

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said. I have not spent inordinate amounts of time in Silicon Valley, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I've spent more time than most East Coasters, I like to think. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't think reality as the rest of the country, I'm not saying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the East Coast, I don't think the reality is the rest of the country and perhaps the world sees it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really exists in Silicon Valley. It's, It's very different

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann In some ways, that's

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. In a lot of ways, I don't think it's great. And I think Nick hit the nail on the head

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this is considered absolutely gross and invasive everywhere except maybe in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the valley.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it is, again, it is confusing. I'll emphasize again. There's the 15 second transcript, and then there's the thing that summarizes

⏹️ ▶️ John conversations that have happened. And the 15 second transcript is a small time window, throws it away. If you don't

⏹️ ▶️ John keep it, blah, blah, blah. You have to double tap the crown, blah. That's business. But the recap thing is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it's just constantly listening to everything. And it's not transcribing everything, but it is summarizing the conversations. It is just a condensed,

⏹️ ▶️ John compressed version of constant surveillance. And that's the most dangerous one because you're just living your life, going

⏹️ ▶️ John through your day, and somewhere on your phone, it is filling it up with paragraph long summaries

⏹️ ▶️ John of conversations that you had. And that is just a different form of surveillance. It's the old school kind. Like if you're

⏹️ ▶️ John watching um Star City on Apple TV, there's it's like a 70s era Soviet

⏹️ ▶️ John you know type of thing. And they have they have they have actual audio listening devices spying on people, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But it's just too much content. So they have a room full of people who listen to the audio tapes and then summarize

⏹️ ▶️ John them. They're basically doing what the recap feature does. and they It's too long to listen. you know they didn't They're not transcribing

⏹️ ▶️ John them word for word, right? They're just being like, okay, they listen for 15 minutes and they say, this person talked

⏹️ ▶️ John with that person and they argued about shopping, right? It's just a summary, but it's

⏹️ ▶️ John still, you watch the show and you're supposed to believe this is oppressive surveillance. He's like, oh, no, no, it's not surveillance. The tapes,

⏹️ ▶️ John they throw away the audio tapes. They just have these people summarizing it. So you just get a summary. It's like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John that's still surveillance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, like, everyone thinks their phone is listening to them. That's true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it is. It's listening for it's listening for Hey Dingus.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But like, you you've had, you as the nerd in your life, you've had everybody tell you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, your phone's listening to you because this one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John time. I can

⏹️ ▶️ John run ads. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because i this one time I mentioned this water filter and then the next day I was seeing ads for water filters all over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone. They was listening to what i didn't I didn't type in anything. It heard me. Everyone has stories like that. And,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, even and it's already been hard enough as the nerd to try to explain like, well, actually, that's

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, you know, they don't need to be listening to you for that. You know, this is now. now it's just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out the window. It's like, no, yeah, your phone's listening to you. It is.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so here's the thing about that. The reason people would freak out about that is because they, like, if you explain

⏹️ ▶️ John how it's actually working, like, you know, based on their IP address and other things and all sorts of like they're like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, that's boring and I'm not interested in. But as soon as you say, but no, but imagine it didn't work that way, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is actually probably the better way. But imagine instead it was literally listening to you. That bothers them

⏹️ ▶️ John so much more because it is more more connected to the human experience of eavesdropping,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? That is more a violation of the human social norm of don't, hey, don't listen in other people's conversations,

⏹️ ▶️ John that it's the phone being rude. Whereas when it does it the computer way with IP

⏹️ ▶️ John addresses and cookies and stuff like that, they're like, oh, that's computer junk. I don't care. what It doesn't like,

⏹️ ▶️ John there's no social norm around like persistent tracking cookies and

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Like the actual tech, the actual ad tech that does this thing, that gives you the ads that are based on the stuff you've

⏹️ ▶️ John been doing online, that ad tech doesn't bother people because it doesn't have an analog

⏹️ ▶️ John in human society, but listening on conversations that you shouldn't be listening to does. And that's

⏹️ ▶️ John why they latch on to the idea that it's listening. And now that it literally is listening, of course it's

⏹️ ▶️ John going to bother them. It's a fact of human nature that

⏹️ ▶️ John just like things that are outside our lived experience seem alien and not as interesting to us.

⏹️ ▶️ John But now that the phones are doing things that are analogous to our own sense experience of living in the world,

⏹️ ▶️ John it makes people angry, which is exactly why they were angry when they thought phones were doing this. And then when you explain what

⏹️ ▶️ John they're actually doing, they're like, oh, that doesn't bother me. But if it's listening, that does bother me. Well, now it's listening.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, and I think what this also, what we've seen is like people don't, like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Nick here was saying, like, good luck explaining these minor differences or these minor technical things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to anybody. Like, do you think anyone is going to sit through an explanation about,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, it's not actually storing a recording.

⏹️ ▶️ John It's only 15 seconds or whatever. You read back what they just said. They're like, they hate you now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's only transcribing. It's like it's like it's taking notes for you and it's super secure and it's it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco streams the audio from this part of the chip to this part of the phone chip and no one cares.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone will just say, oh yeah, so it's recording everything we're saying. Okay, great. None of those technical distinctions matter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to any regular people. It's just, okay, yeah, now every Apple watch is a recording device.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes, I'm a lawyer and I live in Washington state. Although I'm not a privacy expert, I do think it's

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting to consider the implications of this kind of recording under various state laws. In Washington, for example, we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a statute that expressly makes it against the law to record any, quote, private conversation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by any device, electronic or otherwise designed to record or transmit such conversation,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey regardless how the device is powered or actuated without first obtaining the consent of all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the persons engaged in the conversation, quote. On its face, then, I can't see how anyone wearing an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch constantly recording others without them knowing wouldn't be violating Washington law.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it depends on the definition of record. It depends on the definition

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of conversation. That's how laws like this are tested. It's like you evaluate all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the words. Well, is this a recording? What is a recording of a conversation?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does a loosely transcribed series of notes about facts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it, does that count as a recording? If you talk to me and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco take notes on the conversation, is that a recording? Apple, I'm sure their lawyers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviewed all this and I'm sure their lawyers determined no, it's not. We are not lawyers, so we are not really qualified

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make that kind of determination. But even if it is technically skating by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the law, it almost doesn't matter because, again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's a PR problem. It's a perception problem. That is going to do far more damage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple than you know if some state sues them for violating

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some edge of a law that they can talk their way out of.

⏹️ ▶️ John The 15-second one would be pretty easy to to you know win in court because that is

⏹️ ▶️ John straight up you know, transcription of what was said, maybe with a little

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco misogyny.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is a transcription a recording? I don't know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think they would say it is like, they say electronic device. If you had an electronic device that recorded

⏹️ ▶️ John audio and immediately turned it into speech, I think that would pretty easy to win. But anyway, someone will try it, I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ John The summaries are maybe a little bit harder, but that's just like, there. I'm sure there's existing

⏹️ ▶️ John laws in the book with particular wording, but if people rebel against this, and especially

⏹️ ▶️ John with state laws where there's actually a chance of passing laws on like the federal level, you could just have laws

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that say,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, whatever the Apple Watch is doing, that's now against the law.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another anonymous, a different anonymous, writes, on the topic of audio intelligence, it seems Apple is following

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very similar strategy at the Genius Bar. If you have a Genius Bar appointment, you're asked to agree that they are not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey responsible for data loss, followed by an additional agreement page that asks about audio collection for note-taking during

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the appointment. This happens right at the beginning of every appointment. The audio consent agreement covers the fact that audio is transcribed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iPad they use, and that transcript is sent to the cloud for processing.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is an example of a social norm that I think we've pretty well established. For decades, I guess, you

⏹️ ▶️ John call a customer support number and they say this call will be recording for training quality purposes and blah, blah, blah. That's

⏹️ ▶️ John an example of a confined scenario, like a meeting at work where everyone agrees. All right, fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I understand why it's being recorded. In fact, it might actually benefit me here. It's like similar if you're having a meeting,

⏹️ ▶️ John you might want it to be recorded. So both sides, you know, you can't argue about what took place or like literal audio

⏹️ ▶️ John recording. There are limited contexts where we say, fine. If you don't agree, hang up the phone. But if you do agree, we're

⏹️ ▶️ John both here. This is being recorded. and And both parties have an interest in it being recorded because you don't

⏹️ ▶️ John want like the customer service person lying about what you said. And you want to be able to prove what they said. Obviously, they have the recording

⏹️ ▶️ John and you don't. And so it's not quite fair. But in some states, you can record your end too and blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, like essentially AI technology uses the genius bar. That's a great idea

⏹️ ▶️ John because people, there's a lot of conversation happening in the genius bar and it's hard to keep track of what everyone is saying. And people are

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to take notes in real time, but also pay attention to the customer. If the customer and the genius bar

⏹️ ▶️ John person agree that that we're okay with this, I think, again, it benefits both of them to have

⏹️ ▶️ John additional data about their interactions so that they get the best service

⏹️ ▶️ John possible. That's so different than, by the way, on your walk from the parking

⏹️ ▶️ John lot, we were recording you and we heard your conversation and we already know what you are.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We already know what you're coming here to talk to us about. And it's like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I'm not okay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that. That

⏹️ ▶️ John is surveillance.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, uh, you, I believe John noted that MKBHD has a segment in his watch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey review that discusses exactly this.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right. So here, one of the things that when we first discussed this, I'm like, well, uh, this from a

⏹️ ▶️ John technical perspective and a, a principled ethical perspective is very, very bad. But

⏹️ ▶️ John it's the type of thing where, depending on what the defaults are, again, this hasn't actually shipped yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John So we don't know how this will be configured out of the box, if it ever ships. We'll see. um but like depending on

⏹️ ▶️ John how this is deployed, maybe this stuff is off by default, right? And it's the type of thing

⏹️ ▶️ John where if it doesn't occur to you, I would love to just record, and get summaries of every conversation

⏹️ ▶️ John that happens to me all day. And you seek out this feature and turn it on. And if it's off by default, it's so obscure

⏹️ ▶️ John that like, I don't think it's a need that people will be seeking out. And basically what it would mean is the, you know, the tyranny of

⏹️ ▶️ John the defaults. Most people will have no interaction with this feature and it won't even rise to the level that people

⏹️ ▶️ John know about it. It won't become a PR problem. But then MKBHD made a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco video

⏹️ ▶️ John about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John well, that ship has sailed.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because now millions and millions and millions of casual tech enthusiasts know about these features.

⏹️ ▶️ John And his take on it was very similar to ours, which is, this is a bad idea, Apple. Why are you doing this?

⏹️ ▶️ John And so now any hope that Apple could weather this storm with smart defaults and

⏹️ ▶️ John obscurity, I feel like is out the window. Not that like MKBHD is talking to the public, but he's talking to

⏹️ ▶️ John the broadest possible swath of people who care about tech stuff, like literally millions of

⏹️ ▶️ John people. So, and he's not the only one who has talked about this, but yeah, Apple really,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it's great that this didn't ship in 27.0 because Apple now has a chance to think

⏹️ ▶️ John better of it and do something different and maybe say, oh, we're gonna delay this feature while we think about it. But

⏹️ ▶️ John we'll see how this goes. But yeah, he, MKBHD, is on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I i just, I can't imagine this providing enough utility to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be worth all of the reputational damage and downsides. Because like we were saying earlier,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the products that do this, like our sponsor of this episode, the products that do this, like for business meetings,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are much more thorough and much more specialized and intentionally don't

⏹️ ▶️ Marco strip out a whole bunch of information because that's not the point of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And

⏹️ ▶️ John they have a long history. Like when

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I was in my

⏹️ ▶️ John jobby job, every meeting we had was recorded, whether it was in WebEx or Zoom or Teams or all the different, like

⏹️ ▶️ John every meeting was recorded, full audio, both ends of every meeting. And it was beneficial to everybody. We didn't

⏹️ ▶️ John have any AI note taking or whatever, but it was if you couldn't, if you missed the meeting, for example, you couldn't attend it, you could

⏹️ ▶️ John go and play back the recording of the meeting. Incredibly beneficial. Like no one was like, you're recording

⏹️ ▶️ John meetings. Like, that's just, that's just the way things work in this office. It's fine. Not surveillance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I had to guess, honestly, I bet this feature never ships. I bet it kind of gets, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, delayed, you know, very similar to the CSAM scanning thing from a few years back. Like, I bet it kind of gets

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, delayed, rethought, and then, oh, actually, never mind. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in some form.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And the thing is, this, a lot of the same tech has been used in Apple devices and could

⏹️ ▶️ John be used in the future in Apple devices as an assistive technology for people who can't hear what's being

⏹️ ▶️ John said and basically getting closed captions on people. Like it's a potential thing of glasses. Like if you can't hear what people

⏹️ ▶️ John are saying, if you just looked at them and can see subtitles of how as they speak, that's an incredibly valuable

⏹️ ▶️ John assistive technology. Most people would not consider that surveillance because it is just someone

⏹️ ▶️ John using an assistive device to live through the world. It's not recording those the transcripts. It's

⏹️ ▶️ John just putting the words under their face so you can understand what they're saying when they're talking to you without being able to hear them.

⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously they have actual hearing aids for people who just need the sound boosted or whatever. Like as an assistive technology,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it does have value. And that's why I feel like the the one that could reasonably survive with some tweaks

⏹️ ▶️ John is the 15 second rewind thing. Um, I, I'm not sure of the utility of that,

⏹️ ▶️ John but like that is less, that is much more like Haydengus right? It's like it's just a rolling buffer.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you never listen to the rolling buffer, it all just disappears. Just like the rolling buffer that was listening to Haydengus,

⏹️ ▶️ John all that audio is gone like tears and rain, right? Lost. Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco will

⏹️ ▶️ John be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John and so those 15 second buffers, if you never double tap the crown, it never shows up. When you do double tap it, arguably you could say

⏹️ ▶️ John I'm using it as an assistive technology, especially if you can't actually save that 15 seconds and it's just on your watch briefly.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the recap one, that's surveillance.

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#askatp: Highest car mileage

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have been very busy, and I apologize we haven't had more time for Ask ATP, but this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the benefit of having two shows 48 hours apart: is that we can do some Ask ATP. So, Elliot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes: What is the highest mileage you have ever got to in a single car? What do you think is the highest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mileage that you should go? For me, when I had a 1994 Saturn

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SL2, I believe that got to like 120,000 miles or thereabouts.

⏹️ ▶️ John Before or after the wheels fell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off. That one, first of all, excellent memory. Second of all, it was one wheel. Thank you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very much. And third of all, it was after.

⏹️ ▶️ John Really, if any of the wheels fall off, that's bad, by the way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Even if

⏹️ ▶️ John it's just one, I don't feel like it's not much of a defense.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was not great. So to be fair, that was dad's commuter car until it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually handed down to me. Um, That car bombed up and down the Sawmill

⏹️ ▶️ Casey River Parkway at truly heinous speeds at like four o'clock in the morning when dad would go to work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, It was astonishing. He was like the Sabine Schmitz of the Sawmill. It was really something else.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, And that reference probably made sense to six people, but that's okay. Uh, anyways, uh, that car got to like 120,000 miles

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on one clutch, I should add. Um, And then the Nissan 300ZX

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we bought with something like 70 or 80,000 miles on it from a coworker

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my dad's. And I think that had like 110-ish when we got rid

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, when I got rid of it, because at that point it was mine. But nothing since then has been anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ Casey close to that mileage. I think the original BMW was like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 70, 80,000 miles. I could look it up, but I'm not going to do that while we're on the air. The Volkswagen had 35-ish

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thousand. um I'm starting life with this BMW at 23,000 or something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. So we'll see. But I have a feeling that Marco will probably be on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey par with me and John will shame us both. But let's see. Marco, let's start with you Cause I think you're going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey close. What is your world record holder? Well, your Maxima probably had a bunch of miles, didn't it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So um, growing up, you know, my family cars, we would go past a hundred thousand miles. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not that far past, um, but you know, maybe 110, 120. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My personally owned ones, my Nissan Maxima was the highest at 94,000.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you never crossed 100,000. Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I would have loved to, but at that point, there were a whole bunch of repairs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car needed that were not related to the engine. That car,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't know what happened to it before I owned it, but the weirdest stuff would break on that car. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to replace like the windshield washer fluid tank. Why?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don't know. Like there's, I had to replace like thousands of dollars

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth of really minor little crap all around the car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey What

⏹️ ▶️ Marco year was it? I'm sorry. 96.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, see, so the 300ZX was 91, and it was very much the same at the end of life. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just started falling apart.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And like, and I wish, like, cause you know, it was a, you know, 90s Japanese car. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have been able to go significantly longer than 94,000 miles. And it could have if I, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I actually, like, kept up with all these repairs. But I honestly, at that point, it was costing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much in minor repairs. I was like, you know what? I'm just going to get a new, and that's when I replaced it with a new accord.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that's right. I forgot about that step in your journey. Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, there was a gap between where I didn't have a car for a few months, um but that didn't last very long.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was the Maxima? The Maxima was not a stick. Is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no it was it was a 96 Nissan Maxima SE.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Four-door sports car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. It was all leather inside with the Bose stereo. It had like every other option you could get on a Maxima

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SE was all there, but with a stick. That car, I loved that car.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, man. Those were so hot. I swear to you, if you think of like, well, I don't think they make the Maxima

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore and haven't for several years, but the most recent Maxima that I can think of was…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It's

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably a crossover now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, right. The most recent Maxima I can think of was like very bulbous and gross. It had like a vertical sunroof

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that didn't open or something like that. They really have not been good for a long time, but like the mid to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey late 90s and the early aughts, they were so hot. And you could get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them with decent power with a five speed, maybe even a six speed toward the end of this being an option.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, they were so hot. Oh my God, I wanted one so bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, I would greatly prefer the climate control in this car to the car I have now. Look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all those buttons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Physical controls. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like high fan speeds, strong AC. I love the IX in lots of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. The climate control sucks. Like it's not good. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey hear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. We'll come back to the highest mileage we think you should go. But first, John, how high have you been?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I think it's different for cars that I've owned versus cars that I've driven. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John put in, I was trying to find pictures of this. It's always frustrating when I can't find any pictures of the exact car. But anyway, you can see

⏹️ ▶️ John on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey our

⏹️ ▶️ John Slack channel. 1980 something. I think ours was 1981. uh

⏹️ ▶️ John volvo Volvo 240 wagon. That's what I learned to drive stick on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, these were these were hot in the like, they're actually hideously boxy and gross, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still love them way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, very,

⏹️ ▶️ John very ungainly, very awkward looking,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco very hard

⏹️ ▶️ John clutch to press because it needed to be stiff for that 80 horsepower engine in there. um

⏹️ ▶️ John No pickup whatsoever. It had, uh, The stick shift was four gears in an H pattern

⏹️ ▶️ John and uh, with a button on the top of the shifter to go into the fifth overdrive gear, like

⏹️ ▶️ John an

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey electronically

⏹️ ▶️ John actuated overdrive. There wasn't actually like a shift position for it Uh, and reverse was like

⏹️ ▶️ John a ring to pull up to get into reverse anyway. Really weird. Um, I was driving this

⏹️ ▶️ John car when it crossed a hundred K cause I would drive this around, you know, as a teenager with my friends and stuff. We were

⏹️ ▶️ John all in the car. We saw that we were going to get close to 100K. So we drove around the neighborhood and I watched the physical

⏹️ ▶️ John odometer

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco roll

⏹️ ▶️ John over to 100K

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco while going up

⏹️ ▶️ John the steepest hill in the neighborhood at a very high speed. So we timed

⏹️ ▶️ John it out just so we would be going up the big hill on a grassy pond, if you know where that is, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you probably don't. Very steep hill I used to go down on my bicycle and go like 40 miles an hour down the hill on my bicycle.

⏹️ ▶️ John Incredibly dangerous. I don't know why I did this. It's amazing that I'm still alive. The same hill, by the way, where the bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ John teenagers who were a couple years younger than me died by going too fast and losing control of their car going

⏹️ ▶️ John over the crest of that hill and hitting a tree.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So

⏹️ ▶️ John lovely. So I was in this car when it crossed 100K, but that wasn't the end for this car. This car continued to live

⏹️ ▶️ John on and I believe it crossed 140, 150 before we got rid of it. By

⏹️ ▶️ John that point, it was so rusted through that like we had a, you know, a a plus sign shaped

⏹️ ▶️ John tire iron like wrench thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, yeah, yeah. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that fell out of the back of the car through a hole in the bottom of the car someone was driving

⏹️ ▶️ John because it had rusted the bottom of the car and rusted out so much that that just went Yeah. and it made

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of noise. And yeah. Um, So I think that is the highest mileage car I've ever

⏹️ ▶️ John driven.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I'm sorry, you said that was a Volvo 200 series?

⏹️ ▶️ John 240, I believe it was.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Okay,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, But 200 series, though.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. A Wagon. And it was beige, but it wasn't the color. beige You see a white one in the in the

⏹️ ▶️ John slack and you see this beige one, but the our beige one was not that dark. um This is the right headlights. So in

⏹️ ▶️ John like the 85, 86 one, they did like the headlights where they wrapped all this around, but ours was the one with the little squares like this.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I don't know the exact year, but that was not my car. this was my parents' car. For my cars, usually

⏹️ ▶️ John what would happen is once they got around 90 or 100, we'd start thinking about getting

⏹️ ▶️ John a different car. So I think, well, my first car, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John so I should do that. I forgot all about that. My 1992 Civic, my very first car, which my parents quote

⏹️ ▶️ John unquote sold to me for like a dollar. When they gave it to me, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it was pushing up around 70 or 80. And then I drove that well into the hundreds.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don't remember what mileage it was at when it was dying. I think it was maybe 120, 130. And I

⏹️ ▶️ John sold it to a private citizen and the clutch was going. And they test drove it. And I'm like,

⏹️ ▶️ John please don't slip.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please

⏹️ ▶️ John don't like, and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it was just like the

⏹️ ▶️ John whole test drive. I'm like, just just need them to give me the money and leave with this car Cause I knew the clutch was going. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John 120, 130,000 miles in the first clutch.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It

⏹️ ▶️ John needs a new clutch. Okay. And I could feel that it needed a new clutch, but I didn't want to pay for a new clutch. And somebody did buy

⏹️ ▶️ John it from me and they probably immediately had to buy a new clutch. Sorry to that person. Although they didn't give me much money for it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that is probably the highest mileage champ. And then all the other ones I had, all the civics and accords I had, usually once they cross

⏹️ ▶️ John around a hundred, we're usually thinking of uh, swapping them out. Like the 2017 accord we

⏹️ ▶️ John have uh, is around 86, 87 now. And I bet we're going to keep that a while longer. Maybe we'll sell it

⏹️ ▶️ John to quote unquote sell it to a kid at some point. Um, So yeah, I don't have exact numbers, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I've never been past one 50. I think. I think the Volvo around around one 50 is the highest I've gone. And then that wasn't

⏹️ ▶️ John my car. And my 1982 Civic was around 120.130 before we sold it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So how high do you think one should go? It sounds like, John, you're in the 100,000 range.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, that's not. My answer to that is different. How high

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey should you go?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ John Keep driving it until you don't want to own the car anymore. Like that's always my policy, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Mileage shouldn't matter because if you still keep wanting to have the car, just keep paying for parts for it. And if paying for parts

⏹️ ▶️ John makes you not want the car, well, then you don't want the car

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like that's what it comes down to. So for example, my 2014 accord, which granted is very low mileage, my current

⏹️ ▶️ John strategy is if anything breaks in that car, I'm going to pay to fix it. And they're going to say, well, why would you pay for that? it's you paying

⏹️ ▶️ John for that is more than the car is worth. And I'm going to pay it because I want to keep driving that car.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like that happens to a lot of people. The car is worth 1500 bucks and it's going to cost you five grand

⏹️ ▶️ John to fix this engine. You sure you want to fix this engine? Some people say, hell no, I don't want this car anymore. But for this

⏹️ ▶️ John specific car, I would say, yes, fix it because I still want to drive this car. That's the

⏹️ ▶️ John decision. Like you see all these like Lexus things that go for like a million miles or Volvos that have a million,

⏹️ ▶️ John 1.2 million miles on the same engine or whatever. If people keep wanting to drive the car,

⏹️ ▶️ John they just keep putting money into it. And you just, you know, it's the car of Theseus. You're replacing the water

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey pump. You're replacing

⏹️ ▶️ John the head gaskets. Then you're replacing the head. You're replacing all the pulleys. You're, you know, like the distributor,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have all new wires, like you just, so many parts that are being replaced over time. And of course, all the wear items are replaced many times

⏹️ ▶️ John over and you get new shocks and you get new struts. And, you know, but if you want to keep driving the car,

⏹️ ▶️ John I'd say there is no limit. If the car continues to run and you can get parts for it and you want

⏹️ ▶️ John to keep driving that car, keep driving it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could say the limit does not exist, John. That's a reference. Marco, any thoughts on highest you should go?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it's like replacing your iPhone. If you want to rationalize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new purchase, you can at any time, like in some way, like, well, it's going to keep costing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more to maintain. It's, you know, gas is getting expensive. You know, you can always find some reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to rationalize replacing it, but usually just repairing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an old car is usually the cheapest way to keep going, Um, especially like if you average

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out over the years. Repairing an old car is almost always cheaper than replacing it for a very long time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, But it also depends on the car. Like sometimes you can get a lot of miles

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of a car before it needs the entire engine to be rebuilt, like John was saying like sometimes you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can go well past a hundred. Sometimes you don't even get to 50. Sometimes a pebble creates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some bad luck. Like there's, There's all sorts of ways that your car ownership

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can end. But if something is reasonably repairable for reasonable prices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you still like the car and it still serves your needs, repair it.

⏹️ ▶️ John That's one of the things you learn from watching car rebuilding channels is any modern engine

⏹️ ▶️ John in a commodity car should easily go hundreds of thousands of miles if you just continue to replace the wear

⏹️ ▶️ John parts, the parts

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that are always

⏹️ ▶️ John going to wear out. Certain parts are always going to wear out. You do have to replace belts and hoses

⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff that just rots out. But the heart of the engine should easily last hundreds of thousands of miles.

⏹️ ▶️ John The exception to that, I remember I said commodity cars. What if you don't have a commodity car? What if you have a fancy car?

⏹️ ▶️ John Those, unfortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco many

⏹️ ▶️ John of them are lucky to make it to 100,000 because they have some fatal flaw where the rod bearings

⏹️ ▶️ John wear out or the timing chain guard has a problem and needs to be replaced. And if you don't do whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John like if whatever the weakness of this exotic weird engine has, if you don't address that weakness

⏹️ ▶️ John preemptively, the engine potentially will not make it to 100,000, which is so not true of

⏹️ ▶️ John like a four-cylinder naturally aspirated Honda engine. Like you just like don't

⏹️ ▶️ John have to do anything to that and it will easily make it to 100K as long as, you know, again, something catastrophic doesn't happen, like damage

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But temperamental cars, you've got your fancy BMW M car. So

⏹️ ▶️ John many of them have something that everyone knows. Oh, these all have this problem.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So if

⏹️ ▶️ John you don't get these things replaced at this number of miles, this engine is toast. Like catastrophic

⏹️ ▶️ John things that will cause, you know, interference in the interference in the engine and just destroy it entirely. That

⏹️ ▶️ John won't happen with a stupid, simple Honda engine because there's nothing in there to go wrong. But performance

⏹️ ▶️ John engines, they're trying to, you know, they're not made to be like, we have to make sure this lasts

⏹️ ▶️ John 100,000 miles if no one ever pays attention to it. They're like, no, we want maximum power and, you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know,

⏹️ ▶️ John efficiency and all these other things about it. And they're not looking towards longevity. So that's one of the weird

⏹️ ▶️ John things about this business is the more exotic or interesting or exciting the engine,

⏹️ ▶️ John the less likely it is to cruise easily to hundreds of thousands of miles.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, But the canonical example of this to me is the Porsche IMS bearings, which I forget the specifics

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about what the IMS bearing is or where it sits or whatever, but it was on, I think, boxsters and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially 911s for like five, five or so years. And it's one of those things that you don't really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know when it's going to go, but if it goes, it's a catastrophic failure,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like John was saying. Like you have to throw away the engine and start anew, which is just astonishing. JJ

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat said the engine of fancy cars are wear items.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, there's always such weird things. Like one of the recent ones, like a particular Porsche engine, speaking of them, where there's like the little finger

⏹️ ▶️ John followers that actuate the valves from the camshafts or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and the little finger

⏹️ ▶️ John followers like wear out in a particular way. And once they start to wear, it screws with your timing. And it's just

⏹️ ▶️ John like, and you know, it's fixed in the next version of the engine. The rod bearings, I was thinking with BMW,

⏹️ ▶️ John there's so many BMW engines, like these are great, but at 50,000 miles, you better replace the rod bearings because the ones they come with are just going to

⏹️ ▶️ John be toast pretty soon and the whole engine's going to seize up. It's like, that doesn't happen with a stupid commodity car

⏹️ ▶️ John engine because they're not made fancy. They don't have the special silicon graphite impregnated rod

⏹️ ▶️ John bearings for extra low friction. It's just, no, it's just like the cheapest, most reliable thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, modern cars should last easily hundreds of thousands of miles if something doesn't

⏹️ ▶️ John go wrong, unless you have a fancy car, in which case all bets are off and you better know the lore about

⏹️ ▶️ John the particular model year of the particular fancy car that you bought or just be willing to

⏹️ ▶️ John constantly take it in for service and pay gobs and gobs of money. Vanos, by the way, as you found out, Casey, is also a

⏹️ ▶️ John giant source of pain in BMWs because their valve timing system and the way it works with oil

⏹️ ▶️ John pressure actuating all those little things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is temperamental. That's very gentle of you. I'm i'm very,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very impressed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think

⏹️ ▶️ John they also had the the the timing chain, plastic timing chain guards that shatter into a million pieces.

⏹️ ▶️ John That's also not what you wanted to happen

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah Tell Aaron's

⏹️ ▶️ Casey first Volvo. uh yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John yeah that was

⏹️ ▶️ John That was the Pebble did that one. like but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey i'm saying like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, but it broke through the timing chain guard and took out the timing chain and then it was an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John interference yeah no the

⏹️ ▶️ John timing chain guard is just like keeping the timing chain from like, you know, like it's wrapping around some pulleys and the guard like pushes

⏹️ ▶️ John it out a little bit. And that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey guard is made of plastic that

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually becomes brittle and breaks. And now you have pieces of plastic being caught between the gears of the timing chain.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that as they, it's, it's bad news.

#askatp: Gmail third-party sending

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, Mark Bramhill writes: Google recently announced the end of support for third-party email addresses,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sending and receiving mail through Gmail starting in January. I remember John uses this for routing all of his

⏹️ ▶️ Casey different accounts into one Gmail or Gmail account. Do you have a plan for what to do when the new year arrives?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey My email setup depends on this, and I don't want to lose my custom domain, make my account a Google Workspace account, or lose my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bajillion Gmail filter rules. What do we say for our friend Mark?

⏹️ ▶️ John I didn't know about this until this was sent in probably several months ago, based on how long

⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann things

⏹️ ▶️ John stay in SKTP. So I looked into it, and sure enough, there's like some little Google

⏹️ ▶️ John announcement that says, yeah, by the way, you may have been enjoying the fact that you can be in the Gmail

⏹️ ▶️ John web interface and send mail from any of your email addresses

⏹️ ▶️ John that you own. In other words, it will go through like the SMTP server of whatever your domain is,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you can do that from the Gmail web interface. So for example, one of the domains I own is hypercritical.co,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is where my website is. And I have email addresses at hypercritical.co, like switchglass at hypercritical.co

⏹️ ▶️ John for like switchglass support for one of my apps. I have email addresses for all my app names. Okay. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John And if someone sends an email to that address and says, hey, I'm having a problem with Switchglass, when I reply,

⏹️ ▶️ John my reply comes from switchglass at hypercritical.co. But I send that reply

⏹️ ▶️ John from gmail.com because gmail.com lets you configure, hey, when you're replying as switchglass at hypercritical.co,

⏹️ ▶️ John what should I use for the SMTP server? And I point it to the, now these days, the fastmail server that is my,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, SMTP server and, you know, anything, blah, blah, blah. This is separate from receiving

⏹️ ▶️ John email, which is way easier. Again, I've moved everything to FastMail a while back. I

⏹️ ▶️ John receive email for all my various addresses at hypercritical.co and they go to fastmail. But fastmail

⏹️ ▶️ John makes it easy to send a rule. It says, oh, do you want me also to send a copy of this to your Gmail address? And I say yes. So that's

⏹️ ▶️ John still going to work. You can still receive emails that were really sent to a different address because all that is is just forwarding, just

⏹️ ▶️ John Fastmail saying, oh, just forward this to this Gmail address. And I receive it and I see it there. It's the

⏹️ ▶️ John responding as a different address. I don't know why Google's getting rid of this other than just being punitive and mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh trying to get you to upgrade to some paid thing or whatever, which by the way, I would do if I wasn't terrified of it destroying

⏹️ ▶️ John my entire life because I don't trust any

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ability to

⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade this type of stuff. And I hear all these horror stories about how free Gmail is better than workspace until they lock your account forever

⏹️ ▶️ John and you lose access to everything, which I know is a problem. Anyway, just fingers

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just little things like that

⏹️ ▶️ John You have a chance of getting someone on the phone, but if Google locks your free Gmail account, you're never getting it back. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, so what am I going to do for sending? Here's what I'm personally planning to do. First of all, when

⏹️ ▶️ John people send email to like, you know, switchglass at hypercritical.co, half the time I don't even

⏹️ ▶️ John bother responding from switchglass I just respond from my Gmail address. Like I don't pay that much attention. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John they know it's me. It's not like I'm not pretending to be a big company. They send email. They know it's getting to me. When

⏹️ ▶️ John I respond, I respond from my personal email address. It comes from my Gmail. Who cares? Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ John I may probably do that. But if I decide that, oh, for whatever reason, it's important for

⏹️ ▶️ John me to send an email as switchglass at hypercritical.co

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'll

⏹️ ▶️ John just go to the fastmail web interface and do it from there. Like, that's what I'm going to do. Like, it's not going to affect my life too

⏹️ ▶️ John much because it was just kind of like a nice convenience that I can send email as my different addresses from

⏹️ ▶️ John the Gmail web interface. But if I can't, most of the time I just won't do it. And if I do want to do it, I'll go to the

⏹️ ▶️ John FastMail web interface.

#askatp: Future Mac Pro design

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ben Cooper writes, if Apple ever makes a new Mac Pro one day, probably with some or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of their AI super servers chips that will roll out in the next three to five years, will it reuse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 2019 design or have a new one?

⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of feel like it depends on how long it is. Like I've always said when they made this case design in 2019 that they were

⏹️ ▶️ John going to try to get mileage out of it because it was so expensive to develop. And it turns out they did get

⏹️ ▶️ John many years out of it, mostly by just never updating the machines that they sell in that case. So they sold the Intel

⏹️ ▶️ John one and they sold the M2 one. And that's it. Just just been, you know, it was the Intel. It

⏹️ ▶️ John was for the Intels. Maybe they was, I forget if they had a Xeon Rev in this case. Maybe not.

⏹️ ▶️ John um But yeah, and the M2 was the only Apple Silicon one to it. But they sold that stupid M2 thing

⏹️ ▶️ John for way longer than they should have. They did get a lot of years out of it. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John they feel like they recouped their costs on developing it. Maybe they feel like they didn't, which is why the whole thing is canned.

⏹️ ▶️ John uh If they came out with an x Mac Pro next year, they would reuse the case. If they come out with a Mac Pro 10

⏹️ ▶️ John years from now, I think they have a new case.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think they would do something new. It may look very similar to what you just left behind, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it would be new. Marco, any thoughts?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, besides my standard disclaimer that I think the Mac Studio is the Mac Pro now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think if they wanted to call something else the Mac Pro, it would probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just be like the Mac Studio in Space Gray, or maybe it would be a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ John They would call it the Mac Ultra. That's what they would call it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because, I mean, we'll see how they go with the rumored. It didn't work out for the phone so far, right? So the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco phone is the

⏹️ ▶️ John duo and not the ultra, and maybe the 20th anniversary will be the Ultra, but the rumor still is that the touch-based OLED

⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro will be the MacBook Ultra. If they do the MacBook Ultra, clearly in three to five years,

⏹️ ▶️ John if they're going to make something that is bigger and hotter than the Mac Studio, I feel like they would call it Mac Ultra.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or, I mean, you know, they're on their kick for like, you know, three-letter names ending in, O. we got Neo, we got Duo. Is there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything like Mac Bow? Quadro. They already did Quadra.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that's Quadra, not Quadro. Quadro is different.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's something. that doesn't Isn't Quadro an NVIDIA trademark? uh What was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that? Wasn't that their professional

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that weren't those the ones that were like for CAD, not games? Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Claude

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Granola. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic. This week in Overtime, we're going to be talking a little more about John Ternus' intelligent personal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hub remarks during that keynote and Apple's home AI hub that's rumored.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm going to be talking about that in Overtime. You can join or listen, at atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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. It was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's KC

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, E-N-T, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann accidental. They didn't mean to accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann accidental. Check podcast so long.

Casey’s latest project

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a problem, and AI hasn't solved it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it a cowbell joke? What are we doing?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I wish a cowbell would be the answer, but was that a fever anyway?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was a fever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann But anyhow,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bought my BMW a month or so ago, a month and a half ago. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like six-ish months ago, BMW in America

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cut off the API that some third-party individual

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like open source wrote um wrote a home assistant integration

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for. So with Aaron's car, there's a non-supported or not Volvo supported

⏹️ ▶️ Casey integration in a home assistant that'll let me tell it to like start cooling itself or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlock or lock or whatever the case may be. um And this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely unnecessary. Let me start by saying completely unnecessary. I recognize that. I get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But it's actually kind of nice. So as an example, instead of having the Volvo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey always start preconditioning itself every morning when Aaron is about to do the school run,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can use Home Assistant to make an automation that says, if it's over such and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey such degrees or below such and such degrees, precondition. If you're in that sweet spot in the middle,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don't bother. Again, for this entire conversation, I'm just going to take it as writ.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand none of this is necessary. It's a hobby. I think it's neat and I like doing it. I don't

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I need any of this for my BMW. I don't have repeatable common uses like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it's still nice to have. And it's still nice to be able to see that, oh, the BMW is charged at 80% or 20%

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever the case may be. It's nice to have that in Home Assistant.

⏹️ ▶️ John You have to make a new LED for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could make a new LED for that. You're exactly right. And I absolutely would 100%.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I'm frustrated again because I remembered that that was part of the plan and I can't do it. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to cut to the end of the story, I have not solved this problem. But there is a read-only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey API that BMW had to make, I think because of EU rules in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey EU, where you can get information about your car. You cannot influence your car. So you couldn't

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lock it or unlock it. You couldn't start it to precondition or whatever. But you can at least know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how charged it is, among other things. This API does not exist in the United States. There

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a Home Assistant integration that does work with that API, but when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go to register for it in the US, it just kind of hangs. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey figured I'd like to think of myself as reasonably smart. I should be able to figure this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. So my well, how would you two start to try to get access

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Home Assistant to the BMW APIs? What would be your first step?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'd go right to an LLM for this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have an example of a product that does this that you can reverse

⏹️ ▶️ John engineer? Like something that exists that you have access to that uses the API?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. My iOS app.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. Well, then just wire sniff that sucker.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is exactly what I did. Unfortunately, and now I'm talking a little bit out of my comfort zone, but unfortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it appears that BMW did the thing that they should do and they are certificate pinning.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I can't sniff that traffic. It, it, It rejects everything. Like I have Charles

⏹️ ▶️ Casey installed on my phone. Now, it could be that it's user error. Maybe I misunderstood how to do this with Charles, but I've done this with other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things with Charles that aren't as sophisticated and it's worked great. And I tried to do this with Charles

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the phone. Charles is a wire sniffer and I couldn't get anything useful out of it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know how the certificate pinning works. Does this totally stop you from man in the middling it with like a proxy?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, I'm talking outside my comfort zone, but my limited understanding, very limited and probably incorrect understanding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of certificate pinning, it's probably all wrong. So consider your source here.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But my understanding is it basically says the other end has to match this exact certificate. can't be a good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey certificate. And maybe Marco, you might know about this, but it has to match a particular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey certificate or something along those lines. I forget

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the details.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I do the same thing in Overcast. I've done it since day one. And so using the standard stock

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS APIs, there's ways to basically intercept the negotiation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the secure connection before it's actually made. And you can be presented with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the certificate chain of trust, and you can inspect it. And you return yes or no. Do I trust this or not?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can block it, you can cancel it, whatever else. But anyway, you can inspect, is it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco signed by one of the keys that you approve of? Or you can say, is it signed by one of the,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it an exact certificate that you approve of? Or is it signed by an intermediate certificate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you trust? So that's, you know, usually you can get very, very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco picky and low level with this. But the most common approach, I think, is to pin one of the intermediates.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That way you can reissue your certificate in, you know, as long as it's still signed by the same CA or you know, something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, then you know, you can, you don't have to issue an update to your app for it to work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank you. That is that is my, a much better explanation than I could have given. But yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that matches what I what I was experiencing, which is basically it was trying to man in the middle. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was, I think I might've said Wireshark, but I meant Charles. I used Charles proxy to, I used Charles Proxies

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to attempt to man-in-the-middle it. And even though I told Charles, or I told my phone to trust Charles's certificate,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the BMW app rejected it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So my next step would be, okay, decompile the app and see what the source code is doing. Because if you can't see what's happening

⏹️ ▶️ John over the wire, you can see the code that produces the content that goes over the wire.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is what I should have done, but I didn't. And I should try that. I don't know if it'll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter, but I agree with you. That is the next step. That did not occur to me, and it should have. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my defense, I was doing this a month or so ago, or shortly after getting the car. And I forget when you were talking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about reverse engineering something, but I think it was subsequent to that. But anyway, it doesn't really matter. I should have thought of it and I didn't. So what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought was, all right, well, I know the app works.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What if I used iPhone mirroring?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, no. I have. Does this end with like a hot dog on an actuator?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pretty close.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The water drinking birds

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Simpsons.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Exactly it. Exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I thought, you know what? I'll have Claude write me. And Claude is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey past and potentially future sponsor.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Current episode.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this episode. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this episode. I'm sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn't even think about that. Yes, current sponsor. But anyways, I thought, let

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me have Claude write a macOS app that will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tickle iPhone mirroring and do what I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco want it to do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the BMW app via iPhone mirroring. This took a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long time. There's a lot of back and forth, but I'll be damned, fellas,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it worked perfectly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that's awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is incredible. I could get information on my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about what was happening on my phone via iPhone mirroring via the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MyBMW app, right? It's the same app presumably you're using for your car, Marco.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would look at the, it would do screen, it would take a picture or you know look at the iPhone mirroring

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screens, which is my iPhone screen. It would figure out what was the state of charge, you know, is it locked?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it unlocked, et cetera? Then it got to the point that it would lock or unlock the car if I asked it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. Like it was interactive. It was incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is all well and good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like you're using the past tense a lot in this last sentence.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to say, instead of using your phone, I was like, you need like a sacrificial phone whose only function in life is to be that phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly right, John. And I am lucky enough to buy an iPhone every year, like a friggin idiot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco old

⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones laying around. And so I thought, you know what I'll do? I'll sacrifice my webcam phone, which is like an iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 15, maybe 14. I forget exactly what this is. I'll sacrifice that and no longer use it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a webcam for, you know, a handful of FaceTime, social FaceTime calls I do every month. I'll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just use my actual phone for those. I'll sacrifice this and I'll put this bad boy attached to my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey M1 Mac Mini. Job done. This is going to be freaking great. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey start that process. Everything's going great. I log into my BMW on this sacrificial

⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone and I connect it to the Mac Mini. I installed my little, I don't even remember what Claude ended up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey calling it, but it was probably just as bad a name as I would have come up with or maybe I told it. But anyways, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had Claude, you know, I had Claude help me put it on the Mac Mini. Everything is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going great. This is working perfectly. And the next step was going to be, all right, now let's put this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad boy in Home Assistant, which honestly, what I was, what I did was I had it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dump everything into my MyQTT or MQTT

⏹️ ▶️ Casey server, which is basically like a generic bus that a bunch of different things can talk to. It's

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really that important to the story here, but it would dump everything on MQTT. And then it's

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very easy for Home Assistant to pick up stuff on MQTT. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have it in MQTT. My next step was going to be to start integrating into Home Assistant using this bus.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I noticed that it was working great until

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I disconnected via screen sharing. This is a headless Mac Mini. I do everything via

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple screen sharing. The second I disconnect, it locks the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini. Okay, fine. I'll tell it to have an infinite screen saver.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Never, ever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey auto-lock yourself. It'll be great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have some scripts to set that up for you if you want. That's exactly how all of mine run.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? The second you disconnect the screen sharing, it locks the Mac Mini. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. I'm talking with Claude about this. Why don't you purchase an HDMI dongle so it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinks there's a physical connection to an actual monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey connected to the device? Well, you know what, Claude? I happen to have one laying around.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I plug that in. No good. The second you disconnect screen sharing, it locks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the computer. When it locks the computer, it locks the iPhone mirroring.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is where I ended up getting stuck. Ooh, the GLINET Comic Q. That is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting. I wonder Well, but no, but that's but the problem, though, is that is this, if I use

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac Mini for normal stuff, like with screen sharing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then as soon as I disconnect, it's going to relock everything, right? So the solution I could choose

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to to disavow screen sharing for the purposes of this one computer and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only ever log into it via like the GLI net or use like a more vanilla VNC thing or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. Um, And that is a solution, but I don't

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want this that badly that I want to rejigger how I access this Mac Mini because I do that more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey frequently than, than, than, than you would think. So I ended up throwing up the white flag,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the fact that I was this close, I was so close,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost got it. And if it wasn't for the fact that there's no way I can figure out to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey prevent the Mac Mini from locking itself the second I disconnect, if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn't for that, I think I would have had it. And that to me is absolutely astonishing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it was a really fun journey. I'm glad I tried it, but ultimately it didn't work

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think though, I think what's interesting about the, you know, part of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great loss that we've had as we've moved away from a lot of web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco browser apps and a lot of, you know, like kind of more open APIs into now everything has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco its own custom app, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John they're all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco super locked down, and they have no one has public APIs anymore, and those are all locked down,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything is through API keys and pinning and stuff like that. And of course, my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own app does exactly this, and so I can't really talk. But I think one of the things that we've

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lost in this world is like the ability for power users and tinkerers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and programmers to hack around stuff and make cool

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think one of the great enabling things about AI is that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it basically is like a complete, almost like, you know, like the world's best brute force

⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution. It's like, okay, well, what if we just have this intelligent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco automated agent just operate a computer and just click through all your BS?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want to have it log into your BS? Okay, it'll do that. You want to have it read the screen and scrape

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things because you don't have an API? Okay, it'll do that. And nerds like us can start rigging

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up things like remote KVMs or screen shares or iPhone mirroring to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually start doing the same thing to iOS apps too, or just have the iOS app run on your Mac if it can do that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like we now are in we're in an era now where one of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun things about AI is that it helps break down those walls that everyone else has put up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I couldn't agree more. I'll have to take a stab at having it decompile the app.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really should have thought about that. I'm really frustrated that I didn't. But I bring this up both because I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to fuss and moan about the fact that I can't seemingly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do this, although it also didn't occur to me to just run the app natively,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which it looks like I might be able to do, which presumably might get me what I want.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you both have saved me, potentially, potentially saved me. Um, So instead of running it in iPhone mirroring,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might be able to just run it natively on my Apple Silicon Mac Mini. Um, but it's,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's both fascinating to me that this is a potential like Rube Goldberg

⏹️ ▶️ Casey solution, which I was, I felt pretty proud that I came up with this and that Claude was able to basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it working. It was no fault of Claude that it failed. Um, But it's also a bummer that all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this, like you said, Marco, was locked in and there's nothing we can do to get at it. And as much as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have very mixed feelings about the EU's regulatory landscape, it's stuff like this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey When it's executed right, which the EU doesn't always do, this is the EU

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at its best, right? At the very least, I could have gotten read-only info out of the BMW if I lived in,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost said in Britain, but if I lived in mainland Europe. Too soon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Too soon. But yeah, no, I'm bummed that it didn't work, but I thought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a really fun experiment in Rube Goldberg machine to try to get it to work.