544: Valid in a Marco Way

49:04And so I think, John, you said a minute ago, that was this rejection. I did not cross a T and I did not dot one of my I's. Okay, fine. I still don't really understand why this is a thing, but sure. Okay. So I resubmit, and they replied. I've resubmitted sometime yesterday morning. I forget exactly when it was. But yesterday, 4.13 p.m., AppReview writes, Hello, thank you for your efforts to follow our guidelines. There are still some issues that need your attention. If you have any questions, we are here to help. Reply to this message in App Store Connect and let us know. Guideline 5.2.2, legal.

49:37Your app includes features for streaming TV channels, the content of which may be copyrighted. the use of third party copyrighted materials requires documented evidence of your right to use such content in your app. Your app and its contents should not infringe upon the rights of another party in the event your app infringes on another party's rights you are responsible for any liability to Apple because of a claim. And then it goes on with next steps. They provided a screenshot. The screenshot is a season, season two specifically, of the show Mushoku Tensei Jobless Reincarnation. And it's a list of episodes, two of which have screenshots, the other, what is this, like the other 12 or so do not.

50:16That is their justification for the fact that apparently you can play video in Call Sheet, which was an extremely interesting thing to read because I am the only author of code in Call Sheet, and I don't remember ever doing anything with video. You mean it's not a streaming television app, Casey? It is not. Did your description neglect to mention that you can't watch television shows using your app? apparently it did neglect to mention that because you accidentally say that you could watch television shows sure didn't and the funny thing is like your app as a video streaming app anywhere put it in that category or anything like that i did not uh and the best part about it is you can't even watch a trailer in the app like that's something that hypothetically i would like to do at some point but today impossible there is no video playback of any sort this is why people hate app review because it's like they're you know they're spending enough time to look at all the little details of your app, but the person who sent this rejection has no idea what your app is supposed to do.

51:13Like literally, it's not like they stumbled upon video in the app because it's not there for them to find. And they apparently didn't read your description or understand what you're claiming the app is supposed to do, nor did they use your app to determine what it does. It's not a video streaming app at all in code, in description, in reality. And to get a rejection like this is incredibly frustrating because you feel like someone's got just a dartboard and they're like reading a book and your app comes in and they're like, I don't know, let's say video streaming already rejected. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what it felt like.

51:48And so I am upset, but I write back and I try not to swear and use kind words and say in so many words, hey, my app doesn't play video. Can you be more specific about what are you talking about here in so many words? So that was, I replied again, this was 4.13 yesterday. I reply at five o 'clock, 5.25. I get my third and final so far rejection. Hello, thank you for your response. We did not find any streaming contents within your app. However, upon further review, we noticed that your app is not in compliance with the following guideline, 5.2.1, legal intellectual property. Your app includes content that resembles Disney slash Pixar material without the necessary authorization.

52:30Your app and its contents should not infringe upon the rights of another party. In the event your app infringes another party's rights, you're responsible for any liability to Apple because of a claim. They helpfully provided screenshots to me. These screenshots are my own App Store screenshots that I provided to them. One of them is the movie page for Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse. One of them is the person details page for Ming-Na Wen. And one of them is, as I'm loading, oh, the Discover screen that has Elemental amongst many, many, many other movies on it. So I wrote back to them in so many words like, what?

53:13The IMDb app exists and I'm pretty sure they don't have bespoke agreement. Again, I did it in a very nice way, but they don't have bespoke agreement with Disney and Pixar for this. Is the issue that my screenshots contained it? Because I still think that's dumb. I didn't say this. It's very likely that's the issue. And so here's the thing. so I said you know is the issue the screenshots can't contain the content because I mean I understand well I don't entirely understand it but I can get behind that but I don't I don't understand the way it's written right now and actually what I said verbatim is hello again first of all let me request again that perhaps a phone conversation would make more sense here question mark my phone number here in the United States is yada yada yada I am happy to discuss That being said, is the issue of the screenshots, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

54:02And so here it was, I assumed, because I'm a dummy, hey, presumably, since they seem to be looking at this reasonably quickly, you know, within half an hour to an hour of each of my replies, surely they're going to call me, aren't they? So that I wrote in at 531. And I thought, you know, I'll get on the phone with somebody. We'll spend five, ten minutes hashing this out. They'll either tell me I cannot have Disney, Pixar, anything, anywhere, or maybe they'll just say it can't be in the screenshots. and whatever the case may be, I will work through it, and we'll reach some sort of verbal understanding between me and AppReview.

54:36So that was 531 yesterday at 552. Hello. We appreciate your response and have scheduled a call with an Apple representative to discuss your app's review. Okay, cool. An Apple representative will call you on the number you provided in the AppReview information section of App Store Connect within the next three to five business days to discuss your app. Yeah, that's about right. i mean you're lucky they're calling you at all i think yeah i mean i was like you're at it yeah you are like you're getting cold but here's the thing like so that's that third one now we're kind of getting somewhere but i would still super be super mad about that because like oh so that one you sent about streaming video that was just your first lazy guess it's like when you're talking to one of those large language models and they sell you like two plus two equals five and you say no two plus two equals four not five the response is always oh i'm so sorry you're right i was mistaken i thought that two plus two equals five but when i look now i see that it's actually four so they say yeah you shouldn't you're not allowed to stream video on your app and you say uh my app doesn't stream any video and by the way you're lucky your turnaround time was fast in this because imagine there were days between that oh yeah that's true right that's very very my app doesn't stream any video and they say oh you're right i'm sorry when i look again i realize your app doesn't stream any video it's like when you look again oh sorry for the mistake you can understand how i would make that mistake since i put the minimum possible effort into my job of doing app review but now that i look again that's not actually the problem actually the problem is this and the problem they're talking about maybe as far as we can tell based on their terrible writing and complete vagueness makes sense because we don't know what the legal situation is with doing cover art for things like that or you know that you we're not lawyers we don't know how this thing works out or whatever but it's you're in the situation that i think everyone when we were discussing this app was is like well apps like this already exist so probably this is a thing you're allowed to do because like you said casey it's not as if every single app that is like a tracked client because i have 50 of them right you know there's the one i use is tv television time which is different from the tv time which is different than tv forecast but there's like a million apps that do this and they sync with the track service every single one of them show cover art for every tv show your your thing letterboxd shows cover art for all the movies that are in the entire thing like every movie that's put out do we think letterboxd and tracked and television time and TV time and TV forecast all have individual licensing agreements with every single movie made in the entire world for every single year for the entire history of movies and also into the future?

56:57No. So we assume it is possible for a single developer to make an app like this without a team of lawyers to obtain rights for everything. And, you know, because again, the TV forecast is a single developer, just like Casey, and that app is filled with cover stuff. But still, Casey's never made an app like this. For all he knows, there's some sort of process you have to go through maybe they could describe that in the response and say here's the deal imagine you you can't have it in your screenshots you can't have it in your screenshots you you can't have it in your app but you have to do this you have to like explain and the reply you sent casey is totally the reply that any sane person would send or any small child would send to because you say jimmy's doing it how come he how come jimmy gets to do it and you know what the response to that is if you've ever been a kid the response from any teacher or parent or also or any cooperation is, we're not talking about Jimmy right now.

57:45Right now, Casey, we're talking about you. The App Store always does that. You cannot tell them, but App over there does the exact same thing. They'll say to you, we can't talk about App over there. That's proprietary. That's between us and them. I can't reveal anything about us and them. I can't tell you whether they did buy the rights to every movie in the world. I can't tell you whether they didn't. We're talking about you now, Casey, and your app. So just look at me. Look right here at me. Don't look at those other apps. those other apps don't matter maybe they're older apps that we just allowed to exist maybe they gave millions of dollars to someone who works for us maybe we needed to do a deal with them maybe we had a handshake agreement with bill gates maybe this maybe that maybe netflix is getting a better rate but don't worry about what netflix is doing don't worry about amazon is doing don't worry about with with all those tracked apps are doing we're talking about you now and it's so frustrating because it's like is there a common set of rules or is there not right you could go over to uh matt comey who does the tv forecast app and say hey matt did you got your thing through app review right and say yeah i did and you know it was fine this is what he did and you can say matt would you mind joining me on this call and saying here's another part look we can talk about matt he's right here on the call with me he says it's fine he's ready to talk like he says hey why did my app get through and you won't let casey's and apple would be like i'm sorry i can only talk to one of you once i feel very uncomfortable having you both on those calls like for crying out loud Like, is this their first day on the job?

59:10Are you allowed to have apps on the App Store that show covers for movies and TV shows, or are you not? And if you are, explain how that's supposed to work. I am so mad for you. I'm just going ballistic. Because, like, what is the purpose of App Review? What are they even doing there? There are so many apps like this on the App Store. You should not be going back and forth and trying to get a call on three or five business days about the existence of you even having an app like this, because there are so many of them out there. What the hell is going on? I'm so angry. I'm so angry for you, Casey.

59:38I've never been this angry for you. Your documentation stuff, it's like whatever bad docs that happens all the time, I understand. But this, it's madness. I'm sure it will get resolved and I'm sure it will be fine. But the maddening thing is, why do we have to go through this? And I understand you're begging for a voice call because you're hoping you'll get a human on the end and you'll be able to talk to the human and perhaps curse at the human and say, what are you doing? Even me, I don't, well, I mean, I want to do that, but I'm not looking to like, you know, have some sort of confrontation.

1:00:04But I just want someone to, I want someone from AppReview or perhaps Marco to just say, look, this is what we're looking for or not looking for. Do the following or stop doing the following. Or what you want to hear from them is you want to hear them to affirmably say, I understand what your app is, Casey. I would make them say it to me. Say, do you know what my app is supposed to do? Can you explain it to me? Because you have to start from that foundational knowledge of you look up movies and TV shows and see who's in them. And you can see actors and you can see shows and episodes and movies.

1:00:35and what, like, have you ever used IMDb? Have you heard of IMDb? It's like that, but not sucky. Then now we can talk about, okay, are apps like that allowed on the App Store? Because I totally think they are because there's 50 million of them. Okay, what do I have to do to get my app that's like that through to the App Store? Just tell me and I'll do it. Yep, exactly. I'll tell you. Here's probably all you have to do. Complaint one, they misunderstood what your app did and thought it streamed video. oh well you got you got some you know moron with no time you're not dealing with the same person every time here and all of course not there's no continuity of care we right number two rejection is only about your screenshots that resemble disney pixar material now i just looked while john was ranting i just looked at uh tv forecast tv time and letterboxd apps and in the app store and what is in their screenshots none of them and i'm not an expert on a lot of these things Maybe some of these are Disney Pixar properties, but none of them appear to have any obvious Disney Pixar shows in the screenshots.

1:01:33Humorously enough, TV Forecast has Ted Lasso in one of its screenshots, but that's not Disney Pixar. That's Apple. So look, you have three to five business days. You have a while, especially since there's a weekend in the middle here. I would say during that three to five business days, resubmit the exact same build or change just the build number and resubmit it again with different screenshots. that don't contain anything specifically from disney pixar i don't know why disney pixar gets special treatment it always has with apple that's why but but it but like yeah i understand pixar for the steve jobs characters but disney because disney owns marvel and tv forecast has across the spider-verse in its screenshot oh well you can tell i don't know many many properties but like you don't know who owns disney owns everything did he owns marvel disney owns star wars disney owns pixar they own everything there is no it's very difficult to do a screenshot of a media app without including a disney property and tv forecast totally does wait wait i'm looking at letterboxd on the app store the very first screenshot on letterboxd is ant-man and the wasp quantum mania i don't know how to pronounce it uh that is a disney property because it's marvel the very first screenshot front and center focusing on one movie alone ant-man and the wasp that is marvel that is disney whatever it is so i would say either be less obvious about it or don't do pixar that can't be i am not as obvious as they are they're more obvious so what was in your screenshots from disney and pixar uh there was a tiny tiny tiny little uh poster from elemental that was one of literally 30 posters that's the problem i guarantee it they're looking for high profile pixar stuff i bet so look resubmit it with screenshots that don't have any pixar stuff in it and and maybe don't have any like super big name disney stuff like Star Wars and see if that's all it is.

1:03:22Because I bet that's all it is. It could be. But I also don't necessarily want to lose, like, even though I want to get this through, there's no real urgency behind it. Like, of course, I want to get the app out. But there's no immediate urgency behind it, right? And I kind of don't want to lose the thread of this whole rejection and conversation and whatnot. Because I want to follow through and see. I'd like for them to define for me what the hell they're looking for. If they could communicate with the English language, they would have said, you can't have any Pixar or Disney properties in your screenshots.

1:03:55So just redo your screenshots, but pick things that aren't Disney or Pixar. And then this would have already been taken care of. That's two sentences. You know how simple it is to say that? It's so easy to just explain. Like, to say, because, like, why do they put Disney slash Pixar? Are you saying that I can have my screenshot? First of all, is it just a screenshot? It's like you said. And second, is all I have to do to pick, you know, you're allowed to have, they should have said, it's okay for you to have the posters for movies in your screenshots. So we have special rules for Disney and Pixar.

1:04:19So any property that's owned by Disney and Pixar, and yes, I know Sony kind of owns Spider-Man, but they're doing a thing with Marvel, so it's messy. Anyway, just tell me what to do in English language. It would take you literally three sentences to do. Instead, now we have to schedule a call because you don't know how to write an email. You don't know how to communicate with the English language. They're just wasting everybody's time. They know how to communicate. They know that they should communicate as little as possible in the written form. This is why these phone calls, I've heard mixed things.

1:04:45Now, I haven't had an App Store phone call since a while back. I think it was over the magazine. I forget what it was. Anyway, I had one of those phone calls where you get, like, the Agent Smith guy calling. And I don't know if he – I later learned this one guy made all those calls. And he was apparently, like, a really, like, hardcore – I think he was an ex – I think he was a veteran of the military. And he was, like – he was able to do it super dispassionately and keep everything cool, keep everything from getting elevated. I had a couple of those calls early on in my career, and they were really quite something.

1:05:21Because it was like talking to a really stern lawyer from California. So you couldn't get him to budge. And you would ask a question, and there would be a momentary pause, and then he would very calmly basically just say the same thing over and over again. He was able to never put Apple in any kind of uncomfortable situation, never admit more than necessary. he would call and say something like you know let's see let me read your exact line here your app includes content that resembles disney pixar material without the necessary authorization so you would say something like okay well but look do you understand that it does this and then pause your app includes content that resembles disney pixar material like it was that kind of conversation and you would say so so can i include content that's not disney pixar and what he would say is pause well your app includes content that looks like disney pixar and that we rejected because of that so please do not include that in future submissions okay so i won't include that i'll do that great he'll say thank you that's what we want but can i include other movie posters and you would say well we i can't tell you anything about your submission until i see it so please submit it and then we'll tell you what's wrong with that one yeah like it's just it's wasting everybody's time to to prevent them from legal exposure it actually is not a hundred percent of a waste of time because when you learn how to talk to apple people you can start reading between the lines a little bit because that's usually what you have to do because they won't come out give me give me a non-answer if i should resubmit with different posters right it's like a trap and usually usually as long as you are you know it's you know keep your keep civil and polite and everything because you know you got to figure like a lot of the people are talking to are not going to be doing that so as long as you keep civil and polite and everything you you can usually figure out what they actually want you to do even if they don't come out directly and say it they'll talk around it enough they're basically screaming how much more obvious can i be while still keeping my job right but exactly although i would consider calling him from canada with one party consent recording you know it's funny i would not do that i would definitely not do that i i if in the heat in the in the depths of my anger about this yesterday i might have looked up virginia's laws and uh virginia is a one-party consent state i'm just gonna throw that out there yeah well running the press never helps casey so don't do that i i would i would not i would not do that no no no all kidding aside i do not plan to like you know the only reason i would record it is not to be like oh do gotcha whatever but just because honestly because when you have calls like that and i've had them as well not for the app store but for other reasons you often find yourself forgetting what was actually said yeah you know what i mean because it's such an unanswered like erases your mind so it is actually useful to have a recording that you can play back to yourself and say what did they say because again like marco said they're basically saying i can't tell you the sentence that would help you but i'm trying to help you while still keeping my job bingo and when they do that sometimes it's hard to tell like did i imagine that and so if you could play it back and say oh no i see this you know what i mean because in the moment it's hard to tell that's actually the use of recording this not as like a gotcha or anything yeah and i mean i i don't think I have the deftness and the ability to be as dispassionate as Christian was with the Reddit stuff.

1:08:38And I don't, even if I were to record something, it's exactly for that reason. It's not because I want to leak it or anything like that. And like we said about Apple, they're not going to trash you. That's not what Apple does. You don't have to worry about that. Exactly. But it's just so frustrating because, like both of you, I think, have said, if they were explicit about what the problem was, or maybe specific is the word I'm looking for, about what the problem was, I would be happy to rectify the problem and get to a position that makes us both happy. But because they're so hand-wavy about it, and they're just, well...

1:09:13They're direct. The problem is their response, or their initial response at least, is basically, we don't want to deal with apps that show content from big publishers of media. like look i i am right there with you because my app does that like it's just not movie producers but you know i'm not i'm not that far off um and and i know that you know at any time i could get rejected and possibly have a problem with the app store because they might come to me and say i have to get rights from every single podcast in my directory or they could say i found one podcast that had pornographic content and pornographic content is not allowed on the app Please resubmit without pornographic podcast, Marco.

1:09:53Right, which is funny because it would be from their directory. But that could happen. We're not talking about our directory right now, Marco. We're talking about Overcast. Your app contains pornography. When you have an app showing third-party content, that's always a risk. You always run the risk of this might snag an app review because of this weird technicality. And the answer really is if this ever goes before a human who has a little bit more authority to make a judgment call, which it might. It might get kicked up the chain a little bit as you go through the different processes. As soon as somebody has a bit of a judgment call they can make about it, they can look and say, yeah, this is fine.

1:10:32But the hard part is getting to that person or banging your head against this wall enough to get through the lower level people and just then have them mostly leave you alone after that. Honestly, I really do think if you just submit different screenshots that don't have that particular movie, i think that might be enough to get through i mean you could you could just pick five different disney properties and roll the dice and hope you get a different reviewer because that's what it is like people get rejected and then they get approved for like they didn't change anything or they change things in a way that shouldn't have made a difference and it's just it's just who you get and like maybe it's an automated tool looking for the pixar stuff but who knows it's it's it's not consistent that's the another wonderful thing about it yeah and i mean And the other frustrating thing about it is, like, I have never done subscription stuff before.

1:11:18And genuinely, even though I do believe, I can look in the mirror with an honest heart and say, I genuinely believe that I'm doing everything right. I'm doing it by the book. I'm doing it with the user's needs and wants in mind. I really am trying very hard to do the right thing here. but I was actually looking forward to having Apple tell me, you know, yeah, we've looked at it and you're handling subscriptions the way you're supposed to. That was the whole point of this build in the first place. And that is what I think is the point of the App Store. To me, as a user and as a developer, the point of the App Store is to make sure that I'm doing right by what I would call my customers, what is really Apple's customers, as they're often reminding us.

1:12:05you know i'm doing right by whoever's customers and making sure i'm not accidentally or deliberately hoodwinking them and that's what i wanted out of this review but now i'm in this like legal hell that i'm not entirely clear how to get out of and like someone's in the chat room saying like marco's right that's what it is don't show blatant copyrighted brand content okay how every movie poster is copyrighted content every television show poster is copyrighted of course every single thing that any app shows the names are all trademarks too right it's not a possibility the names are all trademarks the art is not art that casey made and again i'm not saying that it's legal this is such a legal slam open and shop case but the fact is tons of apps on the app store do this and we're pretty sure they don't all have rights to all content for all movies for all time so there must be a way for casey to be successful and casey just wants to know what is that way yeah exactly tell me what i have to do and the answer is not just don't show copyrighted content because if he shows no copyrighted content his app has no graphics yeah like there is it's only text it's text only it's a terminal based app i mean that would be kind of cool it would be but that's not the app it's not the app that people want it's like just don't show copyrighted content then his app can't exist oh wait oh my god what okay look everyone loves nostalgia right What if you make it like one of those 90s library card catalog lookup computers that had the monochrome green or yellowish screens?

1:13:31Remember those? It was all text-based, and you would type in your library thing you were looking for, and it was so cool because it wasn't the card catalog. Those ancient term... Whatever the heck system that was. They don't smell as good as the card catalog, though. No, they don't. But yeah, whatever the heck kind of computerized whatever that was, if you end up not being able to use any images in your app, You can just re-theme the whole app to look like one of those cool lookup things. That would be awesome. Or you can just submit it with different screenshots and see if that gets through. Well, I mean, again, I think for now, because there's no dire urgency, I'm just going to let it chill until I have this phone call.

1:14:05And then I suspect what's going to come of this phone call is nothing, like Marco said. And so then I'll just be, you know, I'll just stick my thumb in the wind and see what happens. I'll try to submit with, you know, with no Disney Pixar stuff and see if that gets through. and if that doesn't get through, I'll try something else. Somebody else in the chat is like, hey, just put in a bunch of placeholder things. You can make a bunch of fake movie posters. That'll be compelling to customers. Right, exactly. If I'm a customer, a potential customer, why would I be interested in this app with a bunch of useless data?

1:14:35It would be like, what are these movies? I've never heard of any of these. This is weird. And here's the thing about the screenshots for the App Store. Obviously, they care what you put in your screenshots, but not in the way that you might think. I'm sure everyone has seen screenshots on the App Store that don't, you say screenshots, like they don't actually show the app in use or they show something that's not really in the app app store doesn't care nope you could show you can just like basically you can make a black background put white text on it and say my app is cool you should buy it that counts as a screenshot doesn't have copyright material it's fine you can put anything you want there including up to and including like the little you know those little templates that they have that show like an iphone like have an iphone like a little virtual iphone and then on the screen of the iphone put any old thing you want put a screenshot from marco's app in there put literally anything does not have to be your app in that shot it's just a picture yeah they don't check at all yeah whatever as long as it doesn't have disney pixar content or like whatever the hell those doesn't have a giant apple logo in the middle of it as long as it doesn't have a naked picture of tim cook that you ai generate like they're checking for stuff but they're not checking for the stuff that that like they're not looking for truth in advertising like well we don't want customers doing this led your screenshot shows a screen that's not even in your app they do not care yep and so we'll we'll see what happens like it's frustrating honestly i wasn't even the one that put this in the show notes to talk about today.

1:15:47That was John, I think, that did that. I'm angry on your behalf. Well, and I appreciate it. I genuinely do. And I mean, I'm very... Yesterday, I was angry. Today, I'm just very frustrated because I just, like you both had said, I just want to understand what the way forward is. Honestly, I think if you... You said a second ago, if you have that call, you're pretty sure you're going to get nowhere. I don't think so. I think if you have that call, you're going to come out of it knowing exactly what the problem is, even though they won't directly say it in all likelihood but you will know it and then when you get your next rejection you can say to them but i had a call and they said if i did this i would i would get approved and they would say we're not talking about the call now casey we're talking submitted it blah blah blah section blah blah section blah blah blah please resubmit if you have any questions feel free to contact us yeah yeah in three to five days i don't know it's just it's it's frustrating and it's tough and again like i i kind of almost wanted a rejection in hear me out.

1:16:44I wanted the rejection because I wanted to know that they really looked particularly at the subscription flow and they looked and they gave it their stamp of approval because I genuinely hand on heart, I really don't want to mess this up. I, and I've tested the snot out of it. I've done everything I know how to do to test it, but I'm one guy. I don't know if I've gotten it right. And I really wanted them to look at the subscription flow and really, really, really try and make sure that this is good. That to me, again, as a user, as a developer, that's what the purpose of review is, is to just be another system of checks to make sure that I, as a developer, am not doing something nefarious.

1:17:22I'm not hoodwinking people, either deliberately or otherwise. That's the whole point. And I'm really sad that I'm mired in this other stuff. And I have zero indication that anyone's used the app for more than a couple minutes. And that's what I should expect, but it's not what I hope for. So it is what it is. All right, moving on. Let's turn this round upside down. When I went and moved to FastMail, one of the things I did was talk about it because it genuinely is very, very good. And I also looked up my referral code and I made a convenient URL for it, like we were talking about with hypercritical.co.shirt.

1:18:07And what I did was caselist.com slash fastmail. And that will refer you to signing up for fastmail. And it uses my, you know, not promo code, but referral code. And if one signs up for fastmail using that code, I get a small kickback. It turns out enough of you have done that, that they gave me a couple hundred bucks. And you know what turns out is a couple hundred bucks? AirPods Pro 2, baby. And so I treated myself to a set of AirPods Pro 2, even though they were completely frivolous. I have perfectly functional AirPods Pro 1s that are only, might even be less than a year old. It was, I think it was this past Christmas that Aaron got them for me.

1:18:45I had zero reason to buy these AirPods Pro 2, but they were quote unquote free. So why not? So I got myself some AirPods Pro 2. Here's the thing. I don't think that Marco necessarily needs to put in a spoiler horn here, but if you are a happy AirPods Pro 1 owner, just go ahead and skip to the next chapter because this is not going to make you happy, I guarantee it. This is going to be an expensive chapter for you to hear? This is going to be a very expensive chapter for you. Why didn't anyone tell me that the AirPods Pro 2 were so much better than the AirPods Pro 1? Not any of the seven podcasts that have talked about this over the last year repeatedly.

1:19:20They're so freaking good. They are so good.

1:19:27On the surface, it seems like they're the exact same until you start using them. The swipey-uppy-downy for the volume, I actually do like that, but I've barely used it because I'm not used to having it. I've never had it in any of the AirPods that I've ever owned. I guess it's a transparency. I don't have them near me. I think they're in the other room. But whatever it is with the noise cancellation that's intelligent, they had a term for it, like a marketing term for it. Adaptive? Maybe that's what it was. Thank you. The adaptive noise cancellation where it cancels all the junk you don't want, but lets through like when people are talking to you.

1:20:00all I can think about now just having received these after being aware of the Vision Pro, it seems a lot like that breakthrough thing. Again, I forget the marketing term for it, but where somebody walks up and they bust through your virtual reality so you can see them in the Vision Pro. Having never used a Vision Pro, it's spiritually the same thing. All the background junk I don't care about, it goes away. And not only that, in the AirPods Pro 1, it was active noise ducking, in my opinion, or deafening, I don't think is the word I'm looking for, but you know what I mean? Attenuating, maybe. It would bring down the noise level of a fan or like an HVAC system, you know, or something like that.

1:20:45But you could still hear it. It was way quieter, but you could still hear it. hand to God, most of the times I've had a fan nearby when I have the AirPods Pro 2 in, it is literally gone. It is active noise cancellation. It's like nothing I have ever experienced. It is unreal. It's not that way always, but a lot of the time it is active noise cancellation. It is bananas. I am so impressed by these things. They are so freaking good. I kind of wish I bought them when they first came out. I would have paid, I think, an additional$50 for them because they seem to be perpetually on sale at Amazon, which is a very un-Apple thing, but nevertheless.

1:21:33But yeah, even as the owner of AirPods Pro 1, that work great. even though they're only a few months old and even though i am cheap i mean frugal as they can as they get oh my word it really is true i mean when marco says you should spend money on something i always say okay sure whatever no marco's right you should spend money on this because it is so freaking good i i cannot even begin to tell you they are so good and i'm so incredibly impressed by them You should consider doing what I'm doing with my also apparently accidentally unneeded pair of AirPods 3. Remember I said I was going to get AppleCare Plus on them because, you know, they seem to go wonky after a certain period of time.

1:22:18So I should just pay for it. And I can't do it on a subscription. So it's just a one time chunk of purses you could buy. I was about to buy it when I got them. But then I looked at like the fine print and it's like, oh, your AppleCare begins and it lasts for like whatever it is, one year after the date of purchase. of apple care i think that's what it said i'm doubting myself but i think it said one year after after you purchased the apple care not after you purchased the airpods themselves but when you make the apple care purchase because you can make the apple care purchase after you buy the airpods so i bought the airpods and i went to buy the apple care and i said wait a second if it's if the clock starts ticking it's only one year and if the clock starts ticking i don't remember it was a year but whatever it's a fixed period of time the clock starts ticking when i buy the apple care why don't i wait until the last possible minutes by the apple that's a good point and i'm wondering all right so how long can i wait apparently you can wait like 60 days or something like it's a long period of time or whatever 90 days 60 days i don't remember what it is i think it's 60 i'm not i'm not sure but i think it's 60 but here's the good thing for once apple stupid nags in the settings app on your iphone because right in the settings screen it says like apple care coverage available there are 45 days remaining to add apple care plus coverage to your paired airpods like right in settings right at the very top of the screen so i always know what the countdown is i'm not going to miss the date i put it in my calendar and i put a reminder for it anyway but every time i go to settings i see how many days left i have to buy it so when there's one or two days left i'm going to buy it and get the maximum possible apple care time on my airpods i'm debating whether or not i want to do that because i actually have not yet knock on wood i've never had any sort of crinkle or failure or anything like that but i know it's a very common occurrence so i am thinking about doing um doing the AppleCare Plus, and I think it was like$30 or something like that.

1:24:04So I might, but one way or another, I cannot say enough good things about these AirPods Pro 2. They are so freaking good. And Marco, remind me, you or Tiff, somebody in the house has them, is that right? Yeah, we both do. Oh man, they're so good. There was a whole bunch of like, I would say the AirPods Pro 2 over the 1, they're not like three times better. They're not even two times better. but i i would say they're it's i would say they're close to two times better i really would what what's great about them in my opinion is not that like no single feature about them is mind-blowingly better than the predecessor's version of that feature they just have a bunch of little improvements so i think the noise cancellation is decently better i don't think it's you know it's not like massively better it's decently better i don't know i might i might i might disagree with you there granted i'm in the honeymoon period but it is starkly better in my opinion like noticeably easily noticeably better i mean maybe it's maybe it also varies by like we know what kind of noise you're canceling that's also fair that yep but you know so that's and you know all that aside so there's little improvements there i even like i love the improvements to the charging case like that it makes sound when you charge it like so yeah like you know you've aligned it correctly you know it's starting to charge when it goes ding you know little things like that they've made a bunch of little improvements and overall the airpods pro one were also an amazing product besides that that crackle flaw that many of them had including both of mine um and and tiffs actually like we we had to get go through a few of those like through warranty repairs and everything um as i think many airpods airpods pro one owners did uh but the airpods pro one i would say if you are still work i don't think you need to be like be super rushing out there to get the upgrade but as soon as you have a reason to if you can justify like replacing them for some reason or handing them down or whatever or if they do die go right for the twos they're awesome uh but but i don't think you have to feel too bad for not having them yet if you have a perfectly working pair of ones yeah i mean they are very very good and i am very impressed by them and it was a frivolous purchase and i obviously resisted until I had what was effectively free money.

1:26:22But goodness, I am very glad I spent this sort of free money in order to get them because I am deeply impressed by them. I really am. Hello, listener. Please consider becoming an ATP member. Membership comes with some interesting cool perks. So number one, you get an ad-free version of the show. You get your own private feed. You can add it to any podcast app you want that supports URLs, which almost all the major ones do then you have an ad free version of the show you also get access to our bootleg feed if you want this is a very popular perk many of our members listen this way which is an unedited version of the live stream there's no ads in that either and in that you get to hear all of my bad jokes and casey swear words and john of course is perfect he doesn't make any mistakes but casey and i make tons of them you get to hear all of them and it's kind of fun uh and then you get to hear our post show discussion about title selection any little bits here and there at the beginning or that's all in the bootleg feed as well when we have big merchandise sales we give you a discount in the member panel and right now you even have casey's apps test flight link in the member panel so bunch of cool perks for members there check it out today atp.fm slash join it's just eight bucks a month and it is our favorite way for you to support us i know that sounds weird but you know there's lots of ways to support us any way you listen you support us whether you hear the ad version like this or whether you hear whether you have members or membership version but either way we love you thank you for listening uh if you decide to join which we would love atp.fm slash join thank you so much and uh think about it thanks

1:27:52all right let's do some ask atp a friend of the show dan provost uh who is one of the two co-founders of studio neat uh i freaking love studio neat stuff if you're not familiar with it you should go check it out uh i should put a link in the show notes i think i did under his name. Yes, I did. So look at Dan's name in the show notes. You can get a link to Studio Neat Stuff. He did not ask me to say that, but their stuff is excellent. Anyway, Dan writes, in 2023, how important are time machine backups? I feel like cloud services have matured to the point where they can be trusted as safe data storage.

1:28:22Every important file I have on my computer, I have in Dropbox. I backup my entire computer to Backblaze. My most precious digital files, my photos and videos are on my computer's SSD, Backblaze, iCloud photo library, and additional all of my favorited photos that I edit are also in Adobe's cloud service for Lightroom. So basically four places. The main reason I ask is I need a new drive for Time Machine, but like John, I want to leave the era of spinning disks behind. But a large enough SSD is quite pricey. How are we feeling about cloud backups only these days? Let me start. I run Time Machine off of my Synology and it is okay.

1:29:02A network-based time machine, particularly on a Synology, is not great. I have in the last, I don't know, two years that I've had my laptop, I think I've tried to do restores via time machine maybe once, maybe twice. I do think it's nice to have a redundant copy on some sort of disk, even a spinning one somewhere locally, but I can't in good conscience sit here and say it is compulsory. Like, especially, and granted, Backblaze is a former, probably future, infrequent sponsor of ours, but truly, Backblaze is very good. It works very well. And given that they'll ship you a hard drive, this is not an added rate, believe it or not, but given they'll ship you a hard drive with all your data on it, like overnight, I am hard-pressed to continue to say, yeah, you definitely need Time Machine.

1:29:51I think, John, you're going to have the most opinions about this. Let's leave you for last. Marco, your thoughts. as long as your stuff is other places and you have the backblaze as as like the fail safe you know the just in case oh crap uh solution uh i think you're probably okay i mean i i still use time machine um i also do it to my synology uh and and the the upside there are a few upsets to that number one i have found since the m1 era of apple computers the problems that i encounter occasionally by trying to use USB external SSDs are significant. Really? Just yesterday, I had to unplug my external SSD because Finder was just beachballing and everything was weird.

1:30:38Everything was beachballing and being weird on my computer until I unplugged that SSD. This is not the first time that's ever happened. Maybe I'm just getting weird ones. I don't know. I don't want spinning disks on my desk or in my office even at all, so it's SSDs only. Although, on the shopping holiday that just occurred from the Washington Delivery Service, there were some really cheap 8-terabyte SSDs that I was kind of tempted by, but instead of getting those, I got a pair of really cheap 16-terabyte hard drives for much less money that I'm going to put in my Synology. The whole reason I was looking was that my Synology is running out of space, in part because we use it for Time Machine, for both mine and my and TIFF's laptops.

1:31:20Quick aside, actually, quick aside related to that. I noticed, actually, my friend Sam had pointed out to me that the Western Digital Reds that I think all three of us have tended to use in our Synologies, those were deeply discounted, I think, two days ago. And so I am due to, I would argue we all are, but I am definitely due to upgrade or replace my Synology sometime in the next couple of months. And so I grabbed four 18 terabyte drives, which is something like even with two drive redundancy, it's something like what, 36 terabytes of space, which is considerably more than I'm using right now.

1:31:55It's like, I think I'm using like 10-ish terabytes and maybe a little less than that. Anyways, I grabbed these four drives for, in sum, quite a lot of money. But given the price of these drives, it was something like$210,$220 a drive, which was stunningly cheap. And I figure at some point I will get a chassis to shove all these in. Well, that was, it's hard to derail this further, but I think that was a bad decision for two reasons. Number one, I'm always tempted to do exactly what you're doing. But what I say to myself to prevent myself from doing this is that the longer you wait, the more megabytes you're going to be able to get for your dollars.

1:32:29I totally agree. Anytime you buy hard drives, if you don't need them immediately, you're just wasting money. And I know it's a sale. I agree with you in general, but yes, it's a sale. And beyond that, I think... It's like buying milk. Yeah. It's like, it's not going to go, in general, the trend is you get more bag lights for your dollar the longer you wait so even though it looks like there's a great sale if you don't end up buying a new thing for a year you still might have saved money in this but the second reason is going to make you sad and this is why you should read our reader feedback we haven't talked about this maybe we'll talk about more later but the latest synologies all say that you can only use synology branded drives in them what if you put well if you put a western digital drive in there it will complain to you that that drive is not supported and will throw up a bunch of errors and warnings and generally be annoying to you that's partially true let's not get derailed and spun around the axle on that that is more true than it is not but i don't think it's quite as widespread as you thought but let's let's save that for another time no it is like go to that go to their well anyway for a future show go to their config go to the synology website and they have a compatibility checker and just pick pick any synology that you want and then pick shows which drives it's compatible with and if you only see drives by the brand synology make sure you pick there's like a place where you can pick synology or third-party drives if third-party option isn't there or you go to it and you only see like one ibm drive or something you can't use those western digital reds in there without being nagged knowingly at things i think it doesn't even let you rebuild an array if one of those drives is in it because it's like oh no this isn't a supported drive it's very bad that's a joke my my synology is fairly young so it's not i don't think it's one of the absolute most current models but it's i think it's a thing they just started doing but like i said if you go to the compatibility checker you can pick synology by the year the year is always the number in the model thing so it's you can just go you know start with 2023 then go backwards 2022 2021 and you'll see oh when i go back to 2021 or 19 all of a sudden third-party drives are listed but when i go to 2022 or 23 no more third-party drives for such and such models like it varies by model so you have to check yeah i mean i think that the the model that i was planning to buy which is 1823 xs plus which is probably more than i need that's synology only i think that one i believe you're right is pretty much synology only now my understanding is there are definitely scripts that you can find on the internet that will add pretty much any drive to their bespoke compatibility list so it'll shut up and leave you alone like avoiding your warranty and no longer being supported and blah blah blah but anyways uh so uh i i generally agree with your point to wait for hard drives but i genuinely think i'm going to be purchasing a new chassis sometime in the next month or two so i'm not gonna be waiting long anyway poor dan has been waiting for us to answer his question uh so you were yeah time machine synologies both tiffs and your laptops carry on yeah um time machine over the network is really nice in the sense that you can still use spinning desks if they can be somewhere else in your house that you don't need to hear it like if you put your if you put like a synology in a basement or a garage or something like you then it's out of your way you don't have to hear it so you can use big cheap hard drives if you if you want to um and it's nice that for whatever reason network time machine i've been running i've been running time machine to synologies for a very long time and i've never had a problem whereas running it direct attached i've often had like the drive will run out of space in some way that time machine like doesn't know what to do and can't proceed uh or things like that whereas like over the network it's rock solid what like whatever open source package this thing is probably based on it properly enforces disk quotas for users it it never runs out of space mac os knows how to handle it it's still you know encrypted it mounted as a sparse whatever or something and so it's it actually works really reliably the one major downside is that it is slow as crap it is unbearably slow so if you ever extremely if you need to restore from it it's going to take days to restore a whole drive.

1:36:18So it's not great for whole drive recovery. It is really nice for, oh, what was that file I had on my desktop yesterday that I accidentally deleted? For point-in-time recovery or point-in-time browsing, it is really nice for that. And I don't need to pull something off a time machine frequently. It's maybe twice a year. But for those twice-a-year times, I am really glad I have it, and it is useful to me. If I had to cut one of these backup methods out of my life, I would cut Time Machine long before I would cut Backblaze. Same. But since I already have the Synology and everything set up to do it, and hard drives are so insanely cheap, I continue to do it.

1:37:02But yeah, if push came to shove, I would probably let it go. Here's why you shouldn't let it go. um so in the olden days we had a saying raid is not a backup uh because raid is what is it a redundant array of inexpensive drives inexpensive haha or independent disks depending on who you ask independent disks or whatever um we would say raid is not a backup because people would get a raid array and they'd be like i'm gonna make a you know a volume out of multiple drives and i have redundancy so that if one of my drive fails my array is still valid and i could take out the failed drive and put in another one it will resilver itself and i'll have my thing back up again and they're like i don't need backups i've got i've got one drive redundancy i've got two drive redundancies who needs backups raid is not a backup because that's your actual real data that you're using and if you delete a file and remember that you like oh that's like you were saying marco oh there's a file i deleted it was on my desktop last week can i go get that again on raid the answer is no because you deleted it and back in you know the windows and dos days use undelete programs to try to find it and but that stuff like that those kind of heroic measures that's not what you want to be doing when you want that file back you want to be able to go to your backups and pull that file raid is not a backup because raid is where your live file is a lot of those things you listed are also not backups icloud photo library is not a backup that's the live place where your photos are and yeah they have the recently deleted photos there for 30 days and so on and so forth but if something goes wrong with that or much more likely if you accidentally delete something and don't realize it for more than 30 days my cloud photo library is not a backup it's your live data your ssd is not a backup where you're actually using it it's like well it's on my ssd and it's on my icloud photo library first of all they sync with each other and second of all if you delete it off your ssd and that syncs to icloud and you wait more than 30 days it's not there backblaze is a backup so one you've got one backup because backblaze does take your stuff puts it elsewhere and if you forget about it it will be in backblaze backblaze has its own retention policy and you could do this they have an advanced versioning thing to keep longer versions but you do have to keep a minor retention period but backblaze will have like for example multiple snapshots of your desktop if you have that multiple version thing right and you can go back in time and get that time machine is also a backup it's not your live data and it will store multiple versions of everything that it's backing up until it runs out of space it won't just say like i save it for 30 days or whatever it's like however much space you have that's how far back you'll be able to go so adding more space lets you go back farther depending on how much you change on a daily basis or whatever so i would say your first thing is make sure i mean you don't make sure but like the more backups you have the better and cloud services dropbox is not a backup iCloud photo library is not a backup your actual ssd where it is it's not a backup you have one backup and that's backblaze and that backup is good to have and you should because there's an off-site backup if your house burns down but it's pretty far away from you and yes they'll mail you a hard drive but it's a little bit inconvenient i would want to have at the very least one local backup and one cloud backup right now you have one cloud backup you have no local backups time machine is one form of local backup super duper clone carbon copy cloner that's another form of local backup without versioning um you know me i have all those things and multiple time machine backups but having a local backup is convenient not just for when you want to pull that one file which you can also do from backblaze but if you ever have to do a full restore waiting for the drive to come in the mail is kind of a pain and then you got to send it back if you have the hard drive right there it might be faster than doing a network time machine restore yeah that's true it's always and what he's talking about is direct connected like that's why he doesn't want a spinning disk like a direct connect thing that will always be so much faster to restore from uh the fastest thing is not to have to restore at all and just be able to reboot from a clone that was made last night right and yes you you're missing the data that was in between you can pull those individual files in your back right but multiple backups one on site one off site right now you have one off site it's not about the reliability of the cloud things it's the dropbox is not a backup because it's the live place where your data is dropbox also saves versions too but it's not really a backup service it's not made to do that icloud photo library recently deleted folder but still not a backup service so that's what i would say and you'll be okay if you just have a cloud backup like backblaze and as long as the retention period is enough and the versioning is enough but it's more convenient to have a local backup and cloud backup and if you want to go further i would say uh you know have a second cloud backup you can count the lightroom thing as a second cloud backup if you want although i don't know if that counts as a backup if you're syncing things there then it's just another live copy of your data but have multiple local backups because multiple local backups chances are that you're going to accidentally delete something more often than your house burns down cloud backup is just this to save it in case is a disaster in your entire house but within your household you're more likely to accidentally delete something and to be able to pull from local backups that are fast and local and one thing you can do i mean you can't really do this with a synology but like if you want to do like a i think you can just do this mac it's like a time a time machine server like make a mac be a time machine server for other macs i think you can do that and then what you could do is if you ever needed to restore shut down that mac disconnect the drive from that mac and plug it directly into your mac and restore from that time machine disk locally instead of doing it over the network to save speed which again you can't really do with the Synology NAS or whatever so I would say local backups are still a thing there are other software that does them besides Time Machine but Time Machine comes with your Mac it does a pretty good job and if you have it locally connected it's way faster than network and you know now that I have all my you know my local backups are internal I have a local internal clone and a local internal Time Machine backup that are both on SSDs and they're way faster than Synology but they're not as fast as I thought they would be I really wish Time Machine would be would go faster right certainly again certainly faster than doing a technology which i'm also still doing that's why i can compare but i really thought that i mean granted it's just on sata so it's you know it's it's bottlenecked by the interface but when i look at the transfer speeds the transfer speeds over sata are not the limiting factor the limiting factor is just how slow time machine runs part of it is because i o throttled because all the time machine stuff runs at low uh low uh priority is not really a good way to change that without like eliminating low priority io across the entire system which you don't want to do because you do want some things to be low priority but part of it is just because it's like grinding over the disk to find out what the changes it's made it's got like three different strategies to figure out what has changed since my last backup and apparently all those strategies are slower than i think they should be like you know and using the the spotlight database is one using snapshot diffing is another i'm like shouldn't there be one of these that's lightning fast especially if i have it being like backup every hour like i'm you know if i'm not touching my computer and an hour goes by and it runs the time machine back up and it's like you know searching for changes i found 700 000 changes like really in the past hour when i wasn't using my computer you found 700 000 changes i haven't taken a single photograph no one in my family has taken a photograph nothing has synced no new email has arrived my email is in gmail anyway i don't have local met like 700 000 changes really and you know so time machine is not perfect but it is included it's free it does do the job it is well supported by apple i would encourage you to continue to have a local one all right torb writes oh this is the mac pro section do you even need me for this torb writes do you think a third-party arm chip provider could be the solution for the mac pro things like the fujitsu a64 f fx or m ampere ampere yeah thank you at least show that ridiculously scaled up arm solutions can exist feel free to apply the quote on an infinite timescale quote to this question there is no way apple does not make the chip for the mac bro correct yeah i mean there's that so let's set that aside obviously apple is not going to want to do third-party stuff but this gets to what we were talking about before of like when apple was buying zeons they'd have to pay these hefty profit margins to intel and they couldn't determine what was in the chips but they had the advantage that intel sold those zeons to tons of people and so apple benefited from the the quote-unquote volume discounts of the fact that app that intel wasn't just making those chips for mac pros because if intel just made a chip specifically for the mac pro they would charge so much more money because like basically zero mac pro so as far as intel's concerned in terms of volume so uh if apple was not apple mr marco's point if apple was not apple and did not want to own and control the primary technologies that contribute to their computers yes i think they could especially for why massively multi-core stuff use a third-party arm chip to give them a chip that is worthy of the mac pro it would be crappy single core performance but for if they found some specific tasks that you really need massively multi-core they could buy a third-party chip pay the profit margins and do that but they're never going to do that and honestly it would be worse because setting aside what they're doing now that chip is not going to have any of the stuff that apple wants out of its chips in terms of the neural engine the specific uh like the specific features the gpu to support metal the the multi-processing stuff they put it like it's just apple the the media engines for encode and decode for the specific codecs that fit directly with their libraries like that synergy would not exist with the third party thing so that would if a company other than apple was running apple they could do this and it would be it's better than it is in some ways but this is not going to happen unless unless they did some sort of like it's an apple chip but we partnered with some other company because you know if you look at apple's gpus like didn't they buy like imagination technologies or something to for the gpus and they bought pa semi to design their arm chips to begin with with the a7 it's not like apple's above partnering slash buying companies and doing stuff but they have to be the ones in control and it has to end up being called apple silicon so whatever they do that's what it's going to be all right david loring writes the server market is the biggest market for very large cpus in the rumored quad could apple use their own high-end chips and custom servers like Amazon does with their Gravitron processors, Graviton, excuse me, processors to improve the economies of scale and make the high-end desktop processor a more viable product?

1:46:33Or does Apple Silicon simply not make sense for servers? Marco should just say the same thing you said last time. This is never going to happen. Yeah, I mean, it's not that Apple Silicon wouldn't make sense in servers. It's just that this is a business that Apple not only doesn't want, but I think would be ill-suited to serve, just kind of personality-wise. has been ill-suited to serve they they've literally done this we saw they were ill-suited yeah like apple and and the server market i think is an even worse fit than apple in the gaming market uh they they just they it's not really in their dna to serve that market very well although they did try like they gave a better try than gaming because you know the x serve line they made servers before the x serve but x serve was their first like rack mount server even even the apple network server 400 whatever it wasn't rack mount it came on wheels though uh but like yeah they've made a couple runs at it and the x serve error was and the x serve raid error was by far their most serious run at it and it was not particularly successful and they don't do it anymore um and i don't you know if they wanted to say we can get more economies of scale by making an awesome server chip and selling it to people who want awesome server chips you're left with the same problem first of all a apple doesn't want to give their chip to anybody else because why would they and b the chips apple makes are highly custom tailored to exactly what they want like specifically and not just like oh they want them for their hardware their software apple makes their chips to work well with their software and vice versa nobody else on their server has this the same software needs as apple does apple has like software and libraries their accelerate framework metal all that stuff that runs the headset the watch the phone all the mac stuff that is basically useless to most servers and super essential to apple so if apple made a mac pro type thing and offered it hey amazon do you want any of these they'd be like what the hell is all this stuff in the cpu we don't want any of that we want a million tiny little cores so for our gigantic service where we sell cpu power to people to run stuff or maybe we want gigantic gpus so we can farm them out to gpus and nvidia makes those giant gpu cards for us already and companies that make these arm chips for us just make tons of tiny little cores that we run you know linux on i don't really need a neural engine thank you very much i don't even know what metal is so that doesn't help us so no we're not interested in your chip so i don't think they wouldn't do this i think they'd be ill-suited to it and if they did try to make something they either have to compromise what they want for their computers or they'd have a chip offering that would be of no interest to the server market patrick melody writes would it be worthwhile or even feasible to for apple to put a dedicated d ram backed quote-unquote drive on some kind of hardware fast path to be a ram drive for virtual memory backing store to help make up for the fact that we can't expand ram in the in soc systems wow that was a lot uh would could this help or is this just a trash idea john can you start by explaining what the theory is here please oh what they're just describing is it like can we put another tier in the cache hierarchy every you know computer a personal computer has a has a cache hierarchy of like essentially how distant uh both actually physically but also like metaphorically how distant is this piece of memory that i want to get uh the least distance are registers which are right there in the cpu there you don't have to go anywhere to get them they're right there and then you've got a level one cache which is the slightly less distant uh cache that's also on the cpu and made with very fast transistors that are faster than the ones that you use in ram because they use like six transistors for each bit of memory or whatever instead of one or a half or whatever anyway there's a cache hierarchy there's level two cache which is cheaper larger but more distant level three cache sometimes which is still cheaper still larger and still more distant and then you get ram which is way bigger much more quote-unquote distant because it's at the other end of a bus or even in apple's things it's a bus that leads to someplace else in the same package uh and what this person is saying is okay uh but what if we add another level to the cache hierarchy that's you know farther away i guess it would be another pool of ram that is not on the package but it's off package ram and we've talked about this apple has patents for it like they could have external d ram and slots but also ram on on the cpu and if you put that in one giant hierarchy of memory that, you know, you pull things in and as you use them more often, they would move in closer and closer and they would push out less used data and all sorts of cache population algorithms.

1:50:46Yeah, you could do that. What that would do is if you overflowed into that slower, more distant RAM, it would it would make things slower. And you say, well, we could use that as like a RAM disk, but that dedicated RAM would just be used for disk. So instead of when we swap, we wouldn't be swapping to disk. That's not a great idea. Using a RAM disk is swap. I mean, you can you You can speed things up a little bit, but the problem is then you're going through the whole disk IO subsystem and running software to get data. Like, you don't want to be going to swap. Even if that swap is RAM disk, if you look at the code path that leads to you pulling a page from quote unquote disk, the actual IO part where you pull, because honestly, in a good drive, even a spinning disk, it's probably in RAM anyway.

1:51:27What you're pulling if you used it frequently because the spinning hard drives have RAM caches on them and SSDs have caches on them as well. but it's really it's all that code path you're going through to get to the point where you're reading something from quote-unquote disk that's what's killing you as opposed to pulling it over the bus so you know coming up with new novel hierarchies of memory is good but there's a reason every single thing every single computer doesn't have 75 levels of cache you have to sort of balance cost and efficiency to say how big should the caches be how far should they be and How many should we have?

1:52:02And I think Apple, I think using what this thing is describing, using a RAM disk for swap would be a poor choice of the expense for that. Making a separate expandable pool of DRAM and having that be part of RAM, but not part of swap may be a better choice, but only for applications that need like 1.5 terabytes of RAM or something. Fair enough. All right. Ariane Aneha writes, I wanted to know, why doesn't Apple consider using a dual socket CPU design for the Mac Pro? I know they did this before for our PC. Is it not an easy way to bump performance, especially with thermal headroom? With their thermal headroom?

1:52:37Excuse me. It's not really because – so back in the old days when we had dual socket CPUs, like there was an interface between the CPUs for things like cache coherency and cross-CPU communication. uh and what apple does now by putting you know multiple core cpus or using the what is it called the interconnect thingy the interposer that the interposer thing or having multiple cores in the same die all that is so much faster than communicating like over the logic board between two socketed cpus just so much faster it's physically closer the signal path is shorter and the the speed of data transfer is faster because you don't have to go out of the chip package into traces on the motherboard and into another chip that's busy doing something else you can much more tightly integrate them the interposer is as close as we can think of that but still faster because there's so many more connections and they're so much closer to each other and everything runs so much faster so like the world has moved on from that what we have now are these chiplet packages where you even if you have multiple dies on the same package they're still closer together and more tightly integrated than two socketed ones so i don't think that's a great solution i think it would be slower than doing the quad the right way uh or slower than the ultra because the ultra is like oh why not have two socketed maxes the ultra is faster and better integrated than that then jan lennart writes does the mac pro have any supercar aspects to it anymore the technology that could trickle down is getting scarce at this point what do you think is there any supercar aspects that you can think of of the mac pro maybe wheels yeah there you go what other mac has wheels i mean i think having any sort of internal expandability is something to be i think that's something to be i'm not congratulated but to be lauded i guess maybe is what i'm looking for but i don't see that as being a thing in basically any other mac so i don't know i can't think of anything honestly in my opinion not knowing much about like you know recording studios and specialty i.o cards and everything it almost seems like the mac pro is a giant pci express dongle like this is we have the new world of Apple Silicon and we really want everything to be as on-ship as possible and we want to use external expansion as much as possible through Thunderbolt to have these nice clean computers like the Mac Studio.

1:54:52And then for you legacy folks out there who need PCI cards, here's a giant dongle for you. That's kind of how it feels. And hopefully in the future, as we talked about, if they are able to do the quad chip, then they can raise the performance ceiling more and then that becomes kind of its own Halo-type justification of Like, you know, look how fast we can make this for people who really need it. But the way it is now, it's honestly super unexciting. I don't think it inspires anybody to do anything except complain about the price and the lack of GPU expansion and the lower RAM ceiling and lack of other forms of expansion.

1:55:28The idea of a Halo computer or Halo car, I think, is to excite your fans. To really show, like, look at how awesome things could be if you had infinite money to afford this thing. Also to excite your employees. Yes, yes. And this Mac Pro, I understand the reason they make it. It does seem to serve a very small market. But I don't think this excites anyone. In fact, I think it actually discourages a lot of people who want Apple to make really high-end hardware. Because this kind of shows that crowd, you know, we're not really interested. Slash, we don't think you matter. And to whatever degree that's true or not.

1:56:10And I say this as somebody who doesn't want this anymore. Like, I'm extremely happy with my MacBook Pro. And if I ever did want to have a massive upgrade from this in terms of performance, I would go with the Mac Studio which would roughly double my performance but even that my needs are covered so I don't need them to do this for my own personal needs but it is I think this product this particular revision of this product does not contain any supercar halo car excitement to me it is just one giant PCI dongle but that doesn't mean that it can't ever contain those things you know it's just it's this version that doesn't but i can foresee a future in which if they're able to do the do the quad and really push that performance even higher and push the capacities even higher as a result of doing that that could be more interesting so i think this even this one does still have some supercar aspects to it they're just are not as exciting as exciting as they could be so first of all on the pci thing i wouldn't just call it a pci dongle because the difference between this and like a breakout boxes this is on the same motherboard the path between the soc and the pci things is faster and wider than it would be if it was in a separate box because it's literally all on the same motherboard you can't do that with any other mac in in the mac it's obvious it's not supercar in the in the wider sense but in the mac world no other mac has this much has an expansion slot with this much bandwidth to the soc and so why does that matter i was looking about the mkbhd video where he was uh pulling a marco and justifying what he's going to get one of these which you're like well i can't wait to hear this what is what is your what is your excuse going to be um and what he came up with which i think is valid in a marco way is like well this is this is the only mac that you can buy that i can put this in and he holds up like what must be a hojillion dollar pci card that you you fill with ssd like m.2 ssd things and they all it's like an ssd raid that connects to like a 16x pci slot and he's like this is like 16 terabytes of massively redundant ssd thing storage that is so much faster than any one ssd drive you can get and so he's like now i can do my video and instead of this gigantic promise raid array with like a million spinning hard drives all my video is on this card that i shove inside my mac pro and now i have access to my like 8k raw data of this crappy android phone that no one wants uh and now i can grind through it at a million frames per second smooth like it's basically like no other mac can have disk io this fast because you can't attack it thunderbolt forget about it it's not it's too slow it's like sipping through a star straw internal ssd no other mac can touch this because it is essentially a massively redundant parallelized set of ssds of like think of the fastest ssd you can buy and put like seven of them or eight of them in parallel and read and write from all of them at the same time and god only knows how much that card costs but you can't put that card in any other mac so if if you know that's a super car aspect massive it's not massive storage like lots of space it's how fast can you read and write like if you do like a disc benchmark on it it's going to have numbers that are way bigger than any of their mac so there's one uh the other one i would say is the case it's old hat because we've seen it before this is a super car case it's expensive for no reason right it's over designed it's expensive to produce it's fancy uh supercars do that they have you know they have like carbon fiber bodies and things that are totally impractical and you know might not even help the car's performance in any way but they're fancy and they look cool and they cost a lot of money so that's another one i would say i i think that's about it um maybe you could say cooling which kind of ties into the thing but yeah you can put cards in here and some of these cards give this thing super car like uh capability uh and the case is like a super car but in most other aspects it's it's not really doing its job so we hope they do better next time finally david saunders writes do you think the vision pro is so ambitious and contains so much new tech design ux ideas etc that is now effectively apple's halo car product that's a pretty good argument in my book yeah i mean if you look at the just the basic like to get the Vision Pro we talked about this before when they announced it but like to get the Vision Pro from you know from not existing to being able to show you effectively like an empty desktop you know like just put this thing on your head and show the room and make it look like you're looking through it and show an empty screen that you can open up windows into like that just that just before you've even done any application usage or experiences with entertainment or whatever with the vision pro just the simple task quote i'm using simple here very loosely just the simple task of show your empty desktop that took so much for this product it's so many disciplines had to come together to not only do that passively but to do a good job of that and you then you think about the eye tracking the gesture recognition the audio processing, what it's doing, how it's mapping, how it's looking at the lighting in your room and figuring out where your walls are.

2:01:23And there's so much going into this product to effectively just create the empty environment for you to then later put applications into. That is both profoundly wasteful and profoundly overengineered and really cool. And nothing to me says Halo car like profoundly overengineered, logically wasteful, but really cool technology usage. So I think that actually is a better Halo car than any Mac Apple makes. Yeah, I don't think so, because I think when we talk about Halo cars, car companies make cars. They don't make dishwashers or swimming pools or other things. When you make lots of different kinds of things, like making a, you know, a really fast car is not the same as making a transparent 16K television that rolls up from a slot.

2:02:21But within their categories, those are both Halo products. So you make a bunch of TVs, but you also make this like ridiculous TV that costs$60 ,000 that no one can afford to buy, but it's amazing. Like you said, Marco, it rolls up out of the thing and it's clear and it's like just to get a picture on this TV, like so much advanced technology and expenses involved. And in the end, like it's just showing a picture on a television. It's such a waste of resources and technology to do this. And in the end, you're just watching like streaming Netflix on your 16K TV. That's a Halo car TV. But it's not a Halo car sports car.

2:02:56So if that same company made cars, because it's a conglomerate or whatever, I think you have to do it in different categories. Now, I think the headset does have some aspects of like advanced technology, kind of like the iPhone did. Like it's Apple doing something one notch better than everybody else, especially when it all comes together. Like the iPhone is like, was the iPhone screen amazing? Was the iPhone like processor amazing? Was the operating system in it particularly amazing? It was the combination of all those elements that gave you the iPhone experience. And that was amazing. And so you could say when the iPhone came out, it's is that Apple's Halo product?

2:03:28Well, it was certainly the Halo phone in the whole industry. Like, everyone looked at that phone, and it was like, people thought it was fake because it was so amazing. But if you look at the inconsistency pieces, it's not that amazing. So same thing with the Vision Pro. It's maybe one step ahead of all the other headsets. But, you know, Sony will sell those screens to other people. But it's the synergy of like, okay, well, Apple makes that, and they make the processors, which are low power, and fit in there, and don't get too hot. And also, they make the software that brings all this together.

2:03:55so i think within headsets the one and only one apple makes that is suffix with pro is apple's halo headset but it's different than a personal computer and it's different from a phone and that's just within apple with a bunch of products that are very similar to computer products if apple made a car um it would be much easier because we would say is this a halo car and if they made something that was like the i3 we would say does it do stuff better than like if they made something like the i3 but it literally drove itself and had no steering wheel we would probably call that a halo car of a different kind but if they made just an i3 that you had to drive yourself it would say maybe not a halo of course i feel like the vision pro i mean it's only 3 500 not that i say halo cars have to be really expensive but it doesn't hurt like they usually are right 3 500 is expensive but it's not a 50 000 mac pro so i would say some very advanced technology and amazing work is in the vision pro but i do kind of separate it that's why i always talk about apple should make the world's fastest personal computer don't say anything about their phones or their ipads or their headsets i think they should make the world's best headset too and i think they're they are so good job with that so far but i think they should continue to do so and i also think they should make the world's best phone although in the realm of phone computing speed doesn't matter that much but in general apple pretty much always has been in the running and we say this with the mac pro as well like i'm not saying like i say you should aim to make the world's fastest person you're probably not going to let's be real especially if you don't update it for three years you're going to fall behind in the realm of phones Apple's phones are often the fastest phones, but if they're not, they're always in the running.

2:05:22And by the way, they do it with smaller batteries, right? So we just want, you know, being in the conversation, being in the running, being comparable to your peers, being in the fight for best of the best. They're doing that with the headset. They're doing it with the phone. They're definitely doing that with the tablet. With the Mac, they're the best of the best in laptops, but in, you know, high-end desktop personal computers, they're not really in the conversation anymore. and that's where I want them to go. So I don't know if that bifurcation makes sense because people just think of Apple as one big company and they just want the company to have a halo car, but they make lots of different things, not currently including a car, but I kind of separate them mentally.

2:06:00As far as we know, they're not making a car. Yeah, right? Yeah, or if they are making one, we haven't seen it. Please don't make a car. Thank you so much to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Collide. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us to adp.fm slash join. and we will talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The Antimarko Arment S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to

2:07:19So, Casey, I lied to you. Oh, gosh. And I feel bad about it, but I lied to you for the sake of this moment on the show. Oh, gosh. Okay. A couple of episodes ago, after we went off the air, you asked me if I knew yet what we were doing for my kids' school. after he finishes the elementary school here and i said no that was a lie i actually did know exactly what we were doing okay uh and that is why yesterday we bought a house on long island oh congratulations you mean the second one i knew you were gonna do this again jesus okay so yeah explain to me what's going on We've built quite a life for ourselves out here at the beach.

2:08:14And we came out here full time for COVID. And our Westchester house was where we were going to go back for whenever we move back after COVID and whenever we move back for schooling. Out here, there is an elementary school, but it's only an elementary school. And my kid is about to exceed the elementariness of the school. and so we were faced with you know do we go back to westchester um this fall uh and take our house back from the spiders that have taken it over in the meantime um or uh do we look at maybe somewhere else and because we've built such a life for ourselves out here um we want it to be close because driving for you know it looks like westchester and fire island are close to each other but when you actually have to make that trip not only is it not brief uh but it's terrible It's a terrible drive.

2:09:05It's really grueling, and it can greatly vary in how long it takes. On a good day, it's two hours. Whereas Long Island is full of communities that have really good school districts. Long Island, in many ways, I always call it the south of the north. It's really very southern culturally in a lot of ways. What are you talking about? Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm offended, but I'm definitely confused. You try ordering like a Southerner at a deli and see how it goes for you. I guarantee you there's more pickup trucks driving around Long Island than there are in the South. There's more pickup trucks driving around everywhere.

2:09:44They're not just in the South. Yeah, so anyway, there's lots of delightful places on Long Island that are significantly closer. Like, it's the order of 20 minutes instead of two hours. and so uh we've been looking for i've been looking secretly for a house there i didn't want to tell you until on the show because i knew john would uh give me crap about it and that might be funny i could have given you some suggestions for uh good uh areas but uh i'm assuming you wanted to get someplace close to fire island or no yes yeah we wanted somewhere close um and so i i don't think i want to get too specific but yeah we we bought somewhere uh on the bottom of long island it's funny we actually uh there was a chance for us to potentially buy a place that was on a canal uh and the question came up of should i get a boat oh my word so you could like sail you're like that cat with the newspaper the cat with the newspaper meme i should buy a boat i've talked about this before on the show it's just a it's a path between where we are now and marco eventually getting a boat and we're traveling down it and everyone everyone keeps telling me that and and And this was the clearest chance I had yet.

2:10:51This was the clear, like, look, if you ever even think you might want a boat, this is it. And I had to really seriously consider, like, should I get this house and get a boat and then just zip over whenever I want? And the thing is, because I have lived here for a few years, I know lots of people with boats. And every single time they tell me about their boat, it sounds like hell. it's like every time i like and then the best thing is every time i'm actually on someone else's boat that's not a ferry i realize i don't think i like being on boats like i don't i don't think i like this even i don't not only do i not want to deal with the pain and the buttery of owning a boat but even the activity of riding a boat i don't even like that can't make a living as a bay anymore oh well done not on that down easter alexa i tell you that so anyway um so yeah so we didn't we didn't buy that house for lots of reasons but that was that was that i i did have a clear opportunity to become a botist and i and i chose not to oh and by the way what i would have said is you're so you're thinking of buying a house on a canal so both of your houses will be extremely susceptible to hurricane damage yeah right that's that that also factored into the decision making yes um but anyway yeah so uh we got got a house uh yesterday it was uh it's it's needs some work and i think this will provide a decent amount of uh possible topics for the slow news summer as we go through this because already so it because it needs a decent amount of work like we're not going to be able to move into it for a little bit already like i am so glad I resolved my iPad situation days earlier because, you know, now like we just close in the house.

2:12:37We walk in. This house has been vacant for some time and needs some work. So like we don't have and there's nothing in it. We can't really move into it yet because we're going to be doing a bunch of construction. So for it's just going to be like mostly vacant as we do all this crap. and so i'm looking at things like okay well we you know because we are going to be doing construction like while not living there and so we're going to be 20 minutes away for a lot of the time like do i want to put in some kind of basic cameras do i want like you know smart smoke alarms so i can learn if anything goes wrong you know stuff like that um but then you need internet service for any of those things to work really oh yeah what what is the internet service can you get files gigabit files being installed in two weeks all right prerequisite for any house yes i made sure of that and uh yeah so i i gotta go through like i i can bring over a lot of my westchester stuff slowly like once we can actually start moving stuff in but um you know all my networking gear there is all super old ubiquity stuff so i figure like i might as well get the new wi-fi six stuff yeah might as well what do you mean marco gonna marco you have perfectly good network equipment rather than moving it's like this is an opportunity to buy new equipment it's like 802.11n like it's it's not recent and new and network equipment's really cheap now like i was but you could can't you like just buy new access points i can't well but okay so it's a modular system mark i know so the system i this is the old ubicubi system i have back there i have um like this giant old switch which is fine it still works and one of those this was before the dream machine era they have like the cloud key and then like the router is a separate box and the cloud key is this almost like the it almost looks like a poe injector like it's this thing that kind of just hangs off your rack and like what you gotta like stick it somewhere and there's multiple pieces to it like more parts than usual and i had to order the vios yesterday and i'm i'm looking like i gotta get my own router there somehow what router do i have lying around like that i could bring there for the connection and i was like you know it's primed let me see how cheap is euro right now and the the basic euro router was normally is 200 bucks and yesterday during Prime whatever was 160 or 180.

2:14:51But the Ubiquiti Dream Router, their new all-in-one thing, is only 200. Oh, that's really not bad. No, and that includes the Wi-Fi 6 built-in access point. It includes the whole controller thing that they have. And it includes a built-in switch that also has four PoE ports. That's a no-brainer. Like, 200 bucks for all that? And I have the previous version of that, the blue cylinder thing that before they put the POE ports in. I'm using that now here at the beach and it's been great. I know this is a good setup and I know the Ubiquity system. I know that this is going to be a situation where I'm going to have this thing in the garage where the cable comes in and then I'm going to staple an Ethernet cable along the roof or something to get to the office on the other side of the house.

2:15:43and somehow i don't know this is going to be this is going to be quite an ordeal um getting this house worked on and and because of various logistical reasons i'm actually going to probably be like using it as an office for the first few months of school because we won't be able to move it's going to be a whole thing anyway yeah is adam is adam gonna like live there for when school begins i'm assuming i don't know if we're we're probably not going to be able to live in the house when school begins. So I will probably be driving him off the beach every day on the sand for the first couple of months of school.

2:16:15That's a long drive. Long drive early in the morning when it gets darker and darker. Well, that's, I mean, that part's fine. I can deal with that. But it's not going to be worth driving all the way back here to work all day and then driving all the way back to school. So I'll probably just stay over there all day during the school day and I'll like use my gutted house as an office if it's at all possible to do that. Make for some great echoey podcast recording. Yeah, right. Well, I'll be home by nighttime. I hope. We hope so. You'll be driving across the sand at night. It's fine. The whales don't have lights, but you just use yours and it's fine.

2:16:47I'm always amused when I'm driving on the sand. How many people's commutes involve a non-trivial risk of hitting a whale? That is not a common thing you have to watch out for. Oh my word. You have to look out for seals on the tracks and stuff. It's really weird. Anyway, so I think I'm going to I'm actually going to be a Long Islander for real this time and I'm kind of happy I beat John back just for the bragging rights well you still got a you already beat me back because Fire Island is part of Long Island as we know but it's not I think the number of years I've spent there I still have quite a bank that you need to catch up to I keep going to your pizza place you're eating all my pizza that's true I am yeah you're keeping my pizza place in business so I appreciate that yeah they're they're fine you should go at branch and always a couple times too they need some love it's not too far away it's here's the thing about branch and always like oh it's a different restaurant though but if you order the pizza there you're like but the pizza tastes the same why there's like a family connection there's some kind of feuding thing but it's always fascinating there's two pizza places that have basically the same pizza it's really weird yeah anyway so yeah that's gonna there's gonna be a bunch of tech stories about this i'm thinking like you know like i gotta figure out the network stuff i gotta figure out smart home stuff um some of my smart home stuff i would i will love to use again um some of it i will not use again i'm i uh today i actually for just coincidence today i was i spent a good part of today moving around some of my logitech circle view cameras which are the home kit secure video outdoor capable cameras and they are not good these are okay these are outdoor cameras i did not put an indoor camera outdoors they are powered by a roughly maybe 10 foot cable with a usb a plug on the end now of course usb a plugs are not weatherproof um in fact they're they have tons of metal and they're not you know and they're fully exposed so you have to put that put it in some kind of like weatherproof housing or or tuck that inside somewhere to actually plug it into the power adapter or whatever we had one of these that was in a part of the house that was a hundred percent shielded from the wind and the rain.

2:19:03It was under this kind of little tucked in area under the deck. This camera stopped working. What happened? The other ones all work. I think I have four of them. They all work. What happened to this one? I looked at the cable and it stuck to its power adapter. The salt air. Yes. And I eventually wiggled it out a little bit. How long do you have to live at the shore to learn how this works it's not exposed to the wind and the rain it's like the air is poison there for metal like it's filled with salt here i'm going to paste into our slack group um what does usb power connector looked like oh my word welcome to the seashore that's what i mean that's what your bicycles look like like unless it's in a hermetically sealed container where no air from the seashore can get to it yeah it's gonna happen yeah so outdoor cameras here i i think outdoor is a relative term.

2:19:58And this is definitely not an outdoor, you know, outdoors in other places. Maybe outdoors like in Arizona in the middle of land with no humidity. Like, yeah, it would work great there. Here, no, not so much. Well, this is very exciting. Congratulations. We should post the address on our Slack so we can look at it. Well, no, I completely and strongly agree with your desire to be vague about where it is however i am a little bit sad that the listeners won't be able to hear john heftily judging you and angrily judging you for whatever particular town you have ended up in there's lots of good places i'm looking at the map but things within that distance of where he lives in far around plenty good places to choose from yeah that's i mean the thing is like in general like long island has a lot of really good towns with really good public school systems that's what we were looking for like that's it's kind of an embarrassment of rickshaws like there's a lot of good choices like as much as i give it crap and it depends on like what kind of lots of good choices like do you like really dense population like a cute little town do you like things to be more spread out how close do you want to be to a highway like there's you have a wide variety of choices what how big a school do you want to go like you want your kids to go to a little school or a giant school all those choices exist yeah and and all within pretty like i always joke like you know it westchester was built you know all the rich people from the city moved to westchester or built houses there before we really had much of a strong car and highway culture.

2:21:26And so Westchester was designed with the car really as an afterthought. And pretty much everywhere you go in Westchester, you are constantly bottlenecked by local traffic on little skinny roads that happen to be like the only way to get from here to there. Long Island is not. Long Island is the opposite of all of that. And way cheaper in taxes. It wasn't always that way. It's time for you to read the Power Broker, Marco. Now that you have all this Long Island stuff, read the book. But that being said, getting anywhere on Long Island and shopping and go, like, if you have to like, oh, I got to go to like a Best Buy to pick up this thing today or whatever, that kind of stuff is such a pain in the butt in Westchester.

2:22:08On Long Island, it's like, oh, I got to go to Target. They have this exclusive thing I have to go get. Oh, this Target doesn't have it. It only took 20 minutes to get here, but I'm not mad. And then in another 10 minutes, I can get to the next Target and get it there. and everything is like easy and flat and there's parking lots and everything is no matter where you're going on the island it's 20 minutes away uh-huh back in the day though in my day there was no target there was no war there was no kmart on the entire island can you imagine that the days before the sort of hegemony of giant uh big box retailers like it was the same parking lots it was the same roads it was the same shopping centers but the stores that were there were not there was there was zero targets zero kmarts i had i didn't even go to one of those stores until i went away to college different time and look and look that you know obviously living in you know suburbia basically is you know there are certain downsides to that kind of culture and that kind of civic design for sure uh but the reality is you know modern american life requires a lot of that stuff and it's just so much easier on the island it is in westchester so and and the roads are in way better condition and the taxes are way lower property taxes are not lower are there oh my god it's like a third really it's a lot lower westchester must have horrendous property taxes yes it sure does yes it's a lot lower and the funny thing is the long islanders complain about them as if they're super high i'm like oh you have no idea they are pretty high on a national level well yes look where the property taxes are in florida yeah well you live in a swamp i get it right i mean i i would pay a lot to not live in florida and i do Beep beep beep.