545: My Butler Can’t Use It

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37:52i was on vacation last week as was john which is why we recorded early um and for the first time ever we actually timed them uh at the in parallel rather than serially so i was very proud of john and myself um but nevertheless that's neither here nor there so when we last left our hero that hero would be me hi this is casey um when we last left our hero i had submitted call sheet to the app store with a build that I could release, but I knew there were a few fixes left to be done. The screenshots weren't exactly what I wanted. I just wanted to get something across the finish line before I left for vacation.

38:28And I don't think I made it clear that that was the real push when we spoke about this last a couple of weeks ago, but I really wanted to get something through app review before vacation. So at least I could go on vacation, not stressing about it, knowing, hey, I've made it across the finish line at least once. I have something I could release if I really wanted to, everything's kosher, everything's good. As we discussed, and as John got extremely fired up about, which was very kind of both of you guys to get my back like that. But anyways, as we discussed last time, which was two weeks ago, I got three different rejections.

39:03The first was they want an unclickable URL in the app description. Fine, I did that. Then I got a rejection for there being a video player in the app that doesn't have a video player. Fine, we clarified that. Then I got a rejection for using Disney and Pixar copyrighted material in the screenshots that I provided to Apple, and I got rejected. And so I wrote Apple because this was happening as close to real time as one could be with AppReview. They would send something within a half an hour, 45 minutes, I would send something back. Within about an hour after that, they would send something back and it was going back and forth.

39:38And so in my ignorance, my naivety, I don't know how to pronounce that word. You know what I'm thinking of. Because I'm a dope, I thought, hey, let's just get on the phone. You call me or I can call you or whatever. Let's just get on the phone. Let's hammer this out in like five, ten minutes. We'll get it done. It'll be fine. And they said, sure, we'll call you back in three to five business days. Well, three to five business days meant that when I was on the beach in Cape Charles, I received a phone call from Apple. so i ran to the uh to the to the dune which was far away from all the people in the music and all that you're supposed to keep off the dunes casey yeah well i i ran to the cutout through the dune that you use to uh get to the beach and see i forget with whom i'm speaking uh by the way that was marco everybody that oh yes that lives on the beach hi this i'm the chief interrupter i don't know if that's true it's definitely true but i spoke with the gentleman who only identified himself as Richard, hand to God, he was incredibly kind and incredibly patient and incredibly chill.

40:39Like, I cannot, I probably shouldn't state this publicly because it's mildly embarrassing, but I cannot remember having a phone call that I was this, maybe not scared, nervous, worried, just a ball of emotion about. Like my heart was pumping a mile a minute. In retrospect, I should have done an Apple Watch heartbeat doodad. You know what I'm thinking of? I actually read my heartbeat. Did you get the alert that's like, hey, your heart rate's a little off? It looks like you're talking to AppReview. Right, exactly. It's so true. Do you want to begin a workout? People are always doing those fake icons for different kinds of workouts.

41:21They should do a talking to AppReview workout. Someone work on that. 100 % true. So anyways, I cannot tell you how I was not really moving, and I was mildly out of breath. I was so nervous for this phone call. And truth be told, Richard was so nice and so chill. And based on his demeanor alone, I really didn't need to be this worked up. I had built this up in my head. I've been stressed about it through the beginning of our vacation, and I'm just freaking the F out, right? and he gets me on the phone, and one of the first things he said, which kind of made me chuckle, and I don't remember the words verbatim, but as close as I can remember, he said, I just want to let you know that I have to tell you this call cannot be recorded, and I do not consent to it being recorded, which I thought was quite funny.

42:13I mean, that's an interesting sentiment to express, even to those that aren't the exact words, because cannot be recorded? Well, Richard, I'm not sure you're right about that. I'm pretty sure it can be recorded. And I register your lack of consent, but I happen to live in a state that requires only one of us to consent and I consent. So where are we now, Richard? But that's not a good way to start that call. So I'm glad you didn't do that. No, it is not. No, it is not. It's like this call could be recorded. It probably shouldn't. You probably should not record. As far as you know, I'm not recording this, Richard.

42:45Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And if you recall, I did briefly look at the state laws or the Commonwealth laws here in Virginia. and as far as I can tell, it is a single-party consent state. Now, California is not, if I remember correctly, so I don't know how that would work out, but it doesn't. Yeah, I mean, you can do whatever you want within the law, but then also Apple can just reject your app forever, so think about that. Yeah, there's that too. I did not record it because I was standing on a beach, so he gets me on the phone and he basically says, I've taken a look at your situation. Your app is good to go.

43:14Do you want me to release this one or do you want to send another bug fix through what do you want to do i want to pause you here casey because one strain of feedback we got after the show where i was complaining about your rejection how ridiculous was was from people with experience with copyright and dealing with uh ip law and ownership of stuff and many of those people were super duper confident that we were a bunch of dummies and just didn't understand how copyright law worked i think all of us were fairly deferential saying we're not lawyers we don't understand how copyright works but one thing we do know and what i tried to emphasize in that episode is there are many apps like this on the app store and there is no way that all of those apps some of which are made by individual developers like casey have gotten all the clearances that these supposed experts in copyright law think we need to get and i think richard saying oh no your app is fine pretty firmly uh puts the decision in our campus saying we were right You don't need contracts with every movie and television production company in the world to produce an app like Casey's.

44:18In fact, Apple said it's fine. Yep. And we had I could look it up. I have my phone next to me. But I would say we had a five to 10 minute conversation. But the TLDR, you know, the short short of it was it was fine. And they were good to release as if I was good to release. And so I genuinely have no idea if I got through because of ATP, if I got through because John Syracuse was upset and Marco Armin were upset. I really don't think that's it. I genuinely don't think it is. I think the app is fine. That's the whole point. Exactly. Like, there are so many apps like this. If just a single human who understands anything about the app store looked at it, they'd be like, oh, yeah, there's tons of apps like this.

44:58Does this do anything wrong? No? Then why are we stopping it? Well, and also I feel – oh, by the way, this is Marco. I feel like all that you need to know is it's now resolved. That's it. Like, don't even don't dwell too much on why. Just just move on. You know, what is it? Past performance has no whatever implications on future. Whatever they tell you about the stock stuff. This doesn't mean that the app won't get rejected for the exact same reason. Next time you submit it, that's the magic of the app store. Yep, that is the magic of the app store. And I asked him a few things, not in a challenging way.

45:26Like, hey, I think at one point I said, hey, you know, for the future, should I have handled this differently? Like, did I do something wrong? here and i was very deferential i was very you know i was trying to say in so many words like look i don't want to waste your time i actually might have even said that to him i don't want to waste your time but i think i know what you were trying to say but in a very nice way exactly i mean i was trying to say this whole process has been bs well yes i was trying to say this was a waste of everyone's time especially mine exactly do what should i have done for the next time and again he was very kind very chill he said no no you're you're good you didn't do anything wrong It's all fine.

46:02And you should have said, and Richard, what do you think you should do for next night? Is there anything that you want to talk about that maybe you could have done better? Oh, that's very funny. So anyway, so we were on the phone for like five or 10 minutes. And he said, OK, how do you want to proceed? Do you want to release this one? And it was all pending developer release once it gets through app review. But I said, you know what? No, I'd like to see this across the finish line. Would you go ahead and send it through, please? He said, absolutely. No problem. I'll give you a call. It'll probably be a couple hours.

46:28We'll get it through. This was somewhere to the order of one o 'clock in the afternoon Eastern time. Six o 'clock Eastern time comes around. The app still isn't as a test review. I know that it's in review because you can see, you know, the state of things using App Store Connect. And, you know, and there's an app for that, I think also called App Store Connect. There's a website, blah, blah, blah. And I see that it's been in review for like a couple hours now. I am pooping my pants because the very kind Richard had told me unequivocally, it's good to go. but I thought I was good to go before I even sent it to review.

47:01And it turns out I was wrong about that. So what's the deal. And right around the time I'm like spiraling into the depths of despair, I get a phone call from Apple and it's Richard. And he says, Hey, uh, you're probably wondering what's going on. I said, yes, yes, I am. Uh, there's something wrong on our end. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but we're working on it and we'll get it through. I promise. Okay. Are you sure? Yep, yep, yep. I'm totally sure. Would you like me to give you a call when it's through? Yes, please, because I'm really worried. He said, no worries. I will give you a call.

47:37And then it was actually, of course, it was like 10 minutes after that that it all went through. He gave me another call. All was good. So sitting in the App Store right now, pending developer release is the very first release of Call Sheet. All right. Which I'm extremely excited for and I'm extremely thankful for. And actually, before I talk release plans, I should back up a half step. I'm sorry. I should have reordered this in the show notes. We got a lot of feedback from lawyers and people with, you know, amateur lawyers saying, as John had mentioned a moment ago, oh, it's absolutely copyright.

48:10Apple cannot accept anything like that. You're absolutely 100 % going to have to use, like, Stable Diffusion to make fake poster art. I actually had somebody reach out to me. I wish I had their name in front of me. But they said, hey, I'm a producer on such and such, and I am giving you permission to use this thing that I have the rights to. which is very kind. I really appreciate that. It's hard to get, you know. Only 700 ,000 more people you need to get agreements from. Right, exactly. No, but I don't want to besmirch this fellow. It was very kind of him to say that, genuinely. But anyways, a lot of people said, you know, of course, this is never going to work.

48:39And a lot of other people said, oh, I've been through this. Here's what you need to do. And so the most concise example of this, and I think most easy to understand, was Ibrahim Thamim, who wrote, I just wanted to suggest something that might help with the App Store rejection you talked about in the last episode of ATP. I spent a lot of time with the same exact issue with my app that used the Movie Database API. What finally got them to accept the app was to include a note below in the review information section. It's weird, but this seems to be what they're looking for. Since then, I've been able to get multiple similar apps approved by providing this exact note.

49:15The note is as follows. As mentioned extensively in the app, all imagery and metadata used in this app is from the MovieDB.org API. Therefore, any information regarding permission to use the images or metadata, please refer to and then hit the movie database terms of use URL. Which basically says, I am not a lawyer. Look, everything that's been uploaded to us, as part of uploading it to us, we are asking those who are uploading it that do you have the rights to this? And they have attested yes. So if they have the rights to it, now we have the rights to it because they're granting us rights. And now we're granting you rights.

49:50so I think it's kind of like you know spider-man pointing at himself sort of situation think that's how it works but I like the fact that Ibrahim put the little fu at the beginning which is like as mentioned extensively in the app which you may or may not have actually looked at like I mean it's kind of like uploading a web browser and saying just so you know every web page this web browser loads is on the web and that content is not part of our application and yet Apple will still say i don't know i could browse porn rejected yeah yeah i mean there's lots of there's lots of sort of you know superstition about do this and they got my thing through but the problem is like it's such a random number generator like app review like is it did i get through because of something that i did or did it get through just because i was going to get through no matter what at that point like like richard said casey didn't need to change anything about his app he didn't need to get agreements with every movie studio he didn't need to do anything his app as is was just playing fine, which is what we all thought, because again, there are apps that are very similar that have been on the App Store for years and years and why wouldn't Casey's be fine?

50:51No, but it's all about, you know, it's a bunch of humans and they make mistakes or they're afraid to, you know, step over a possible line or whatever else, and so as long as this system is human-based, it's going to have human problems. It's going to be inconsistent. It's going to be, you know, they're going to mess up sometimes. You're going to get, you know, crappy reviewers sometimes. and if the system wasn't human-based if it was ai based or something we would have different problems we wouldn't have no problems so you know it's just part of being an ios developer is you got to play the system you know you have to know that yeah there's occasional landmines you're going to step on you don't really know certain how certain things are going to go and you kind of just build that into your expectations and you know we can rage and we can fight against it and we can say app review sucks we can say we shouldn't need to do this etc and that's all you know sometimes we need to we need to fight that fight but usually we just have to work within the system the way it is but see but here's the thing with the system you mentioned that being ai powered like it could be worse it could be like no humans involved but like we have the worst of both worlds like we have fallible humans but also we don't have the humanity that comes with them like the thing what we would expect maybe not in casey's case but in other cases where people get angry about things is like in actual human relationships between humans or company even just relationships between companies, a thing called reputation exists.

52:08There is a level of trust that gets built up. Like Panic, the software developer Panic, should be treated differently by Apple than I am or than Casey is because they have such a long history of such high quality applications. There is trust built up from literal decades of working with this company and these same people. When humans relate to each other, it's not all the same. So app review, everybody's the same. Everyone's supposedly treated the same. That's supposed to be fair. But what it doesn't allow to happen is to like, let's give panic the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume, you know, that they're not secretly doing like, let's not assume the worst of them.

52:47Let's give them a reviewer who actually looks at their app and knows that it doesn't contain a video player. You know what I mean? Like there should be different treatment. There is different treatment for Microsoft, Google, Adobe, you know, the big companies that are big competitors or that Apple needs or whatever. So that does exist as we've talked about. but i feel like the next level down like we want that we if it's humans to humans i want the advantages of it being human power process in addition to the disadvantages now i just feel like we just get the disadvantages and there are no advantages and whether that's an advantage like oh casey gets to talk you know casey assumed when he talked to human he'd be able to work it out because at that point he's getting higher bandwidth treatment and to casey's point earlier wouldn't it have been easier to skip all that time that we've wasted both of our time and energy before this five second phone call this five second phone call granted it's not as scalable as you know people after you can't be calling everybody on the phone or whatever but if they if apple had put the amount of effort they put into that phone call into one or two of those early reviews this whole problem could have been avoided so i still feel like i'm not saying that they have to be perfect there's always going to be mistakes but if it's going to be human powered i want some of the advantages of human review and part of those advantages is the ability to build up trust and a reputation over time for good developers which again may not apply to casey with his handful of apps that he's put out but the other developers saying he's a bad developer no i'm just saying like you know some developer he's not panic right he's not he's not adobe he's not microsoft he's not one of those giant companies and he's also not a small developer who has like decades and decades of you know he's not underscore you know what i mean like those type of relationships built up over time saying has it's underscore been sneaking bad stuff in there is he stealing people's contacts right is he making gambling apps for children no no no he's not doing any of that so he should have a higher level of trust than hey we've never heard of this developer and I have no idea what this app is.

54:31Well, but on the other hand, though, I mean, look, again, the system has a lot of flaws, but I also love the fact that everyone gets a similar level of BS. You know, that there aren't, I mean... I mean, there is, just for Adobe and Google and Microsoft and, you know. Yeah, but like, you know, Facebook... Netflix. You know, Facebook isn't able to break a certain rule much more than we can, but, you know, when they break it... Well, Facebook gets it in the other direction. They get extra scrutiny. well well but like when they break a rule they still can't release the app but they aren't kicked out of the developer program forever you know like there is some big company privilege for sure um and and there have been like you know occasional special deals made like you know there was always there was that rumor that seemed pretty well backed that like netflix was not paying the 30 for you know some time yeah and again as i've said in many years in the past that's that's appropriate apple should do that it makes sense it would be dumb not to do that anyway so like the system is not perfect but but it is overall it it does work mostly the same for most people most of the time and so that that is a little more comforting and that's probably better than the alternative of like the big companies get like much better reviewers and then the rest of us get only casey's first level reviewer right so i think the point that ibrahim and a few other people have said, who have also used the stuff from the movie database, is that they want...

55:55I'm putting a lot of words in a lot of people's mouths here, but it seems to me that the general gist of it is that Apple wants to be able to say, look, this person or this company or whatever, at least on the surface, seems to have some sort of rights to the content that they're presenting. And by using the movie database API, they have granted me those rights. And presumably on the ingestion side, like I was saying a minute ago, whoever's uploading this stuff, they're claiming to have these rights. Doesn't mean they do, but at least they're claiming to. So the movie database feels like, if I'm right or wrong, they're in the clear.

56:27I'm not saying that's factual. I'm just saying that that's what they feel like. And then Apple can say, well, look, this app developer says they got the rights from there. Don't sue me. Don't sue Apple, Disney. Sue either the movie database or this Casey List character. Sue them. Again, maybe this is just a circumstantial. I think it was John that said that earlier. Hi, this is Casey. And, um, and, and maybe that, maybe this doesn't have anything to do with it, but enough people have said similar things that it makes me think that that might be factual. I mean, that these all sound like good hacks for trying to get through those, those first reviewers that you got, who just aren't paying enough attention to your app.

57:00And you just need to find some way to find some words that their eyes are going to fall across and go, Oh, that makes me feel better about it. Because again, Richard didn't say you need to add the statement. Richard didn't say you need to get this agreement. He didn't say anything that he said you're good to go because he i think by the time he called you on the phone understood what your app was about uh you know as mentioned extensively in the app as the room said maybe you should have mentioned it more extensively in your app maybe your launch screen should be like powered by tmdb api in any case so what are the plans for launch so as we record what is it today the 26th of july you know i'm not quite ready to hit the go button but i think the plan is uh and This is just between us ATP listeners.

57:40I think the plan is on Monday, the 7th of August. That is the intention. Monday, the 7th of August, the app will go live. My intention is in the next 24 to 48 hours, I am going to cut off the previous member-only perk of the test flight. But hand to God, this app is much better because of all of the people that used it before it went to app review. And I'm really appreciative of all the people that signed up to try it. that's signed up at atp.fam slash join. I'm appreciative of all of you who have sent me feedback. Most, almost all of it was extremely useful and extremely actionable. Some of it was not, but you know, that's how it goes.

58:20It's been a very big, it's been surprisingly pleasurable for me to get all of this feedback and to work through problems that I didn't see because I'm too close to it. And if I'm completely honest, the reason I did all this originally was because I was trying to juice ATP memberships. But it actually ended up working out really nice for me in the sense that it worked out nicely for CallSheet. So I'm really thankful for it. I appreciate if you spent any time looking at the app and sending feedback and so on. But yeah, on Monday, August 7th, that is the plan. I plan to release then probably 9 in the morning Eastern, but we'll talk about it when we get closer.

58:58Or maybe I'll certainly be tooting about it on Mastodon. Maybe I'll be threading it. We'll talk about that potentially in a minute. There are no precise app release times in the App Store. Well, there's that too. That's true. But anyways, but the idea is on Monday the 7th. And genuinely, I'm really, really excited. I'm really scared, but I'm really excited. I hope the damn thing works. And I'm really looking forward to it. So on Monday the 7th, that's what's going to happen. It works and it's going to be great. You'll see. I appreciate it. All right. Continuing on the follow-up that will not end, and that's in no small part my fault.

59:29Hi, this is Casey. On Upgrade 468, an anonymous Apple engineer talked to the wrong podcast about Mac Pro stuff. What the hell is this? I know, right? I have endured hours of Mac Pro bullshit. I mean, content. I have endured hours of it. And I, the hell with you two. I don't get the benefit of getting this feedback to lord over these two jerks. I quit. Everyone's fired. You're all fired, and I quit. Anyway, Upgrade 468, which other than this moment is one of my favorite podcasts, except right now. I hate it right now. But anyway, Upgrade 468. An anonymous Apple engineer working on the GPU team said the following, I presume this was John that transcribed this.

1:00:12Thank you, John. The Apple engineer said, the quad chip has been canned with no plans to return. For context, we are actively developing what will presumably be the M5 chip. And the quad chip was only ever specced for the M1 and removed late in the project. There are no plans to create a quad chip through at least the M7 generation. My understanding is that the quad required too much effort for too small a market. Something interesting that may come in the M8 and future generations is called multi-die packaging. This allows the CPU and GPU parts of the chip to be fabricated on different dies and packaged together, much like how two Max chips make an Ultra.

1:00:47With this design, it's conceivable that we could have three, four, five, or more GPU dies with one or two CPUs for a graphics powerhouse or vice versa for a CPU workstation that doesn't need as much GPU grunt. However, as far as I know, no such plans exist yet. John, you have the floor. so some of this is old information that we knew the quad was cam we knew it was only planned for the m1 so and so forth but the new information is oh and by the way we talked in the past episode so they could do the quad in the m3 or generation or something this is like no this rumor again i want to emphasize that upgrade cannot and does not vouch for this anonymous uh thing because we get anonymous feedback they just you know this is what they say this is what they're claiming so just i don't want to if this turns out not be true don't blame upgrade and don't blame us it's you know Sometimes you get anonymous feedback, but this is what this person claims.

1:01:36They said not only is the quad not coming anytime soon, there are zero plans for it up through the M7. This, by the way, shows you how long the timelines are in hardware. Stuff has to be planned out years and years in advance for this stuff. Plans can, of course, change, but this really shows what Apple is thinking, if this rumor is true, about the directions. It's not like, oh, we couldn't do the quad, it was too expensive, and you know the m2 is not that different from the m1 but we'll revisit this later it's more like we couldn't do the quad it's too expensive and by the way forget about the quad just forget about it we're just going to plan out our chips we're going to go m3 m4 m5 m6 m7 we'll just plan out our long five year six year ten year plan don't even worry about the quad doesn't need to be anywhere on there we don't need it uh the multi-chip packaging we've talked about that back in the day when we were originally talking about the you know jade 4c and everything and chiplet architectures in the city of chips and different ways to put multiple dies in the same package this is before we knew about the ultra really but yes of course that is a conceivable approach but uh if if this rumor is true if this anonymous uh you know inside tip is true it tells you what apple thinks of the future of the mac line and what it thinks is that it does not need to have anything more powerful than the ultra obviously you know the the m3 will be when the m3 ultra will be more powerful the m2 ultra and up to the m4 m5 you know they'll get faster over time but it seems like they think that class of chip is all they're going to need what that says about the mac pro whether they keep shipping that big tower case or whether they don't or whatever is not that important unless you're one of those people who really needs those pci slots uh but what this really says to me is they think that if you're doing something with a mac right now where you have to wait for the computer.

1:03:26Uh, they're not going to do anything to help you other than give you one that is incrementally faster than you have now. like there's not they could get more performance like there is more performance to be had so in any realm gpu or cpu you could get a pc that has more gpu cores much bigger uh you know more cpu cores much bigger gpu they would do your task faster assuming it's a cross-platform app or there's some equivalent or whatever but they're like no if you get a studio or a mac pro which is basically the same whatever speed that does it at i know you could get a pc that does the task twice as fast because it has twice as many cores but we're never going to sell a machine that's like that so if you if you sort of look at the pc market and you say here is the sort of performance ceiling for cpu and gpu for personal computers within some reasonable price ceiling apple is always going to be a fairly significant step below that because they're just not going to build anything that can compete with the high end because they're saying we're not going to build something that's like a quad and which means they're going to build the biggest thing they're going to build is an ultra and we kind of know the thermal envelope of the ultra the machine they put it in this rumor is saying is basically it's like look if we can't fit it in the mac studio case we're not going to make it because you know if we needed something bigger you know like i really don't think they're going to make an ultra that's too big to fit in the mac studio case for example right the m6 ultra will fit in the mac studio case because that's what that chip is designed for but you could build something with more cores that would be faster that would fit in the mac pro case And this rumor is saying Apple does not plan to do that at all.

1:05:01And that's fine for people who don't really wait for their computers to do much of anything. But if you're currently waiting on your computer and you're like, boy, I wish this could be faster. Yeah, next year it will be faster. But if you're like, but this could be twice as fast as if I had twice as many CPU cores. Apple's like, it could be, but we're not going to make that machine for you. And that may be fine because, you know, most people don't need that. But it is disappointing on multiple levels. obviously it's disappointing to me and like i think they should make that machine because it's an exciting thing to pursue and so on and so forth but it does mean that a certain section of the market that continues to think well maybe maybe next year they'll make one and maybe this mac pro is just an interim step if this rumor turns out to be true those people who don't listen to this podcast probably are going to be like as the years pass they're like huh i guess apple's just not just not going to do that anymore and they'll be disappointed and i do wonder if we're not just going through this cycle again that we've gone through a couple of times where apple sort of loses interest in the mac pro mac pro level hardware and either stops making it or make some that's disappointing and then pro users get angry and then apple apologizes and tries to make a new one like i don't that's not a healthy cycle but i mean the two alternatives alternatives are we we're in that cycle again and we're gonna like there's gonna be some equivalent of the round table like five years from now right where there'll be some crisis and people are going to be complaining or there won't be that crisis and apple is just stepping back from that market entirely um and i think stepping back in that market entirely is again i think it's a bad idea but it's also like and not for the reasons you think like setting aside gpus because i want to set that aside for a second just cpu the you know the mac studio is small and there's only so much cpu heat generation you can put in that case again setting aside gpu pretend the gpu is like as small as you could possibly make it you can make and use more cpu cores for things that are highly parallel maybe apple doesn't care about those things like you know 3d rendering in blender or whatever whatever tests that you have that can actually spread across all the cpu cores even something simple as compiling if you have a huge application i imagine if xcode is doing its job it could use 24 48 cores if you're building some gigantic thing maybe i don't i don't know what the best examples of multi-cpu things are but those applications exist and apple is basically saying even though you can use more cpu cores we're not going to sell them to you oh you know and you can get them from intel because intel will sell you something with 56 cores right now uh and you need a big case for it and we do have a big case but we're not going to put any cpus like that in there and that's always going to be disappointing and limiting the gpu is now getting to them is actually a separate issue because Apple could at any point in the future say oh and by the way we've decided to bring back external GPU support whether it's an Apple GPU or a third party like that option is always there even if it's just for compute or whatever they can always do that but the CPU thing is actually worse because you can't add more CPU cores with a card so as long as Apple continues to make a thing with card slots that the M5 generation if people are complaining or they think there's some market they need to go after they can come back with the FPGA card like the afterburner right but they can also say hey we have a an external gpu or some machine learning thing like those slots exist apple can use them there's nothing about the lack of a quad that precludes that what the lack of the quad kills is big multi-core cpus because where are the cpu cores gonna come from now the the whole idea of like being able to rebalance them like let's make one with lots of cpus and few gpus or vice versa that's cool and all but if you have to fit it within the Mac Studio, like thermal envelope, there's only so much horse trading you can do there.

1:08:38Like, oh, I want to have, you know, five more CPU cores, but then I have to reduce my GPU. And like, you can't, you can never put it as much GPU as you want in there because there's just not enough, you know, thermal headroom. And if you start pushing out the GPU for more CPU cores, you can't push out all the GPU. You have to drive the display somehow. So I think that's interesting. And I think if they actually use that technology, they should use it to make essentially the equivalent of the quad that's not actually a quad it would be an ultra but there would be two much bigger ultras with different ratios of stuff and then like a third-party gpu or something like that so anyway we'll see how this goes like i don't know how much credence to put in this rumor uh it is pretty definitive saying that we're just not going to do this for a long long time but boy if there's not because there was pushback before like why did they have the mac round table the mac pro is a big part of that but part of what people wanted was make me a fast computer and make it expandable and quote-unquote modular remember the big discussion we have what the heck they mean by modular well i think what i thought they meant by modular i made it said it as a joke but also kind of serious was they mean the monitor is not part of the computer that's one definition of modular and apple makes a modular computer multiple modular computers where the monitor is not part of it one of them is called the mac studio that does fulfill one of the things that roundtable was about because people were kind of pissed at like i don't want an iMac pro is an amazing computer but what if i don't want the screen connected to the computer part please make me a modular computer and they did i mean they made the trash can that was modular too but that was also a problem right that was before that but the Mac studio does fulfill a lot of that promise but i do wonder if we're not just headed for another collision of people saying come on apple insert competitor name here offers me an 87 core you know cpu and nvidia is making this monster gpu that you can't compete with but you offer me nothing that can do anything like that and i have to leave your ecosystem and use pc instead because you don't compete in that category anymore maybe apple will say fine see ya i don't care we don't sell that many of those anyway but i do think that is probably a mistake like i said the uh the vision pro uses a chip from a mac granted a lower power chip from a mac but it does not use an iphone chip So I really do think Apple should reconsider these plans.

1:10:54It doesn't mean they need to make a quad because maybe that's the wrong approach to making a Mac Pro caliber system on a chip or whatever. Maybe trying to put four of them together is too much. Maybe they want to revisit and say we're going to make the Ultra. And the extreme will be basically two things that are bigger than a Mac shoved together like the Ultra. You know what I mean? There are other potential options, but that's not mentioned in these plans either. But I'm just the idea guy, Apple. You gotta run with this. My idea is don't do this because totally giving up the high end is something that Apple has pretty much never done.

1:11:28And every generation of Mac they've ever made, they've at least sort of kind of tried to be in the conversation on the day of release with their high end computers to say, whatever the biggest, baddest PC can do, we can do some selected, some handpicked set of things better. And I think it's going to be harder and harder to be able to say that if they just say we are never going to make anything that can't fit in the studio case. So this is a disappointing rumor, and Apple should see me after class. Everything you can do, I can do better. No, this was surprising even to me. And as much as I like to give you two a hard time about the Mac Pro, I mean, I do want the Mac Pro to exist.

1:12:08I think there's something to be said for Apple having a no-holds-barred, you know, just all-out incredible computer. And I will sit here and debate with you, John, whether or not you need that computer. But nevertheless, I do think it should exist. And it is a bummer that they seem to be letting it go. Yeah, and it'll be interesting to see how they market. Like, you know how they market? They're always like, oh, they have some graphs. They show it against, like, old Intel Macs and stuff like that. but they'll even the current graphs that they put against like you know pc gpus are mostly fantasy but they're just gonna have to stop doing that entirely because they're just gonna be like no we're never we're never going to compete with that but how can we like how can you compete on a on a uh you know embarrassingly parallel cpu problem you have half the number of cpu cores like no uh tsmc uh you know fab advantage is going to let you compete with twice the number of cpu cores or more on a highly parallel thing and the same thing with gpu so it's it's very disappointing yeah but i i still the more i think about this the more i think that my passing theory from last episode about like this is really just you know the mac studio is the mac pro and what we now know is the mac pro is just the mac studio in a pci case the more i think about it the more i am comfortable with that theory i mean that is what they've shipped but that but it's also saying that like they're not going to make what was previous the mac pro is a is a slot in the lineup and what you're saying is that slot doesn't exist anymore instead there's a mac studio and mac studio with a backpack sort of except that except i would characterize it differently those are the facts but i would say that's actually not not only not only unsurprising but mostly fine in the sense that when you look at where high-end computing is these days apple doesn't have much of a role in it anymore because apple doesn't get along well with nvidia and hasn't for a long time and when you look at what what kind of roles do the mac studio and the mac pro not serve very well most of that market is in the high-end gpu market that's that's the biggest area where they're really underserving i think and i don't think apple has been a major player in high-end gpu computing for some time now yeah but like it's a self-fulfilling prophecy they keep they keep making worse and worse machines and shooing the market then of course they're not going to be a player and then you use we've talked to this before then you use the fact that you're not a player to say well we don't need to be in that market because not really a player there anyway like you can get out of any market by slowly doing that to yourself that's true and that is what they've done however i don't think this mac pro losing its gpu support is as big of a change as we initially thought simply because that market has already largely left them and again through their own doing you're right but that market was already mostly gone so i i think having the mac pro exist as basically the pci express breakout box for the mac studio and having the mac studio really be the the the current mac pro for most other needs i think not only not only is that clearly the case uh but i think that's fine it's not fine for everyone but that is fine for most of the market that the mac pro still had at all well that's why i mentioned at the beginning like do you in your work ever have to wait for the computer because some people that's not true like you just don't people just don't have to wait for the and i'm not talking about like network like this web page is loading slow like are you waiting for the local computer to grind through something using disk io using cpu or using gpu and like 99 of apple customers especially in apple silicon that is not they don't wait for anything like they're waiting for the network but they're not waiting for oh the cpu is grinding over this or the gpu maybe game playing you could say i wish i had higher frame rates but like you're playing the game it's fine but there are some people who are waiting for the computer and for them to be out there knowing that this thing that takes them 15 minutes could take them seven right now not next year on computer but right now it could take them seven because they could have doubled the cpu cores and their thing is using all the cpu cores and knowing that apple like quote unquote could make that machine and intel does but they're not going to ship it to them is going to be frustrating to those people so we're going to be losing a new section of people not the gpu people already left and not the people who you know wanted the stuff that apple hasn't offered in years and years but the people who pretty much up to this point expected that apple would be in contention with you know again with cpu power mostly um and occasionally with gpu power to do whatever it is that they wait on their computer doing now a big part of that is as video stuff where i feel like apple still is in contention because they do have those dedicated units inside the socs for doing video so i think the video people will actually be should be mostly happy um because i don't think a lot of those cases adding more of those video units would be useful to them because they're usually just like trying to encode one or maybe two videos at the same time but not like 20 of them at once um but i i do think there's another class of people who wait for their computer to finished stuff who are now are going to know that they could be waiting half as long because their thing is parallelizable and that hasn't been the case before i try to think back like was there a time when apple was just opted out completely there have been dark times where they've done a poor job but never has been has there been a time where they say um we're not we're not even going to try to compete and to be clear this rumor doesn't really say that because we don't know what the m6 looks like we you're just assuming it's going to have the same ratio of cpu gpu power units and efficiency cores as they currently do we have no idea so i don't you know even if this isn't true we may you may be reading too much into it to think they're not going to compete at all but it sure seems like that they subscribe to the idea that yeah you wait a little bit but look what are you going to do switch to pc probably not so it'll be fine all right mac rid matt rigby writes this is in response to marco's passing reference to having trouble with writing or mounting external drives on usb in our somewhat extensive testing and troubleshooting at work apple silicon max seem to have trouble with externally USB-mounted SSDs that are larger than 2 terabytes.

1:18:15Specifically, we encounter these issues using docks that include the Asmodei ASM-235 USB to SATA chipset. This unfortunately includes the very popular OWC Drive dock and other iterations of the Blackmagic rack-mount SATA dock, among others. We haven't found any immediate solutions to this issue thus far, but we've had success with a variety of Nintendo-level plasticky docks from StarTech that don't utilize this chipset. So in short, Marco, you're not alone. There's definitely some chipset, driver, or Apple Silicon weirdness out there. Sorry, I don't have a solution. Yeah, my solution has just been try to rely less on USB-connected drives that are always connected.

1:18:53So that's why I moved my time machine to Synology. That was the big one. And it's just, yeah, there's something weird with Apple Silicon Macs and many USB drive enclosure type things or SSDs. and I just, I gave up. Like, I'm like, I can't keep dealing with this. So just move that rule to the network. I mean, you should check to see if you have this chipset thing. And because like a lot of those enclosures are fairly cheap, like you can get an enclosure for like 20 or 30 bucks, you might want to just try a couple of different enclosures and see if it solves the problem. The problem is it's intermittent.

1:19:24So like it might take me months of troubleshooting to slowly figure that out. And it's just, it's not worth the hassle. Indeed. Wall Street Journal writes that Threads is already losing its allure for users adding urgency for new features. This was, I think, a couple of days ago now. But anyway, for a second week in a row, the number of daily active users declined on threads, falling to 13 million, down about 70 % from a July 7 peak, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The average time users spend on the iOS and Android apps has also decreased to four minutes from 19 minutes.

1:19:58The average time spent for Android users in the U.S. dropped to five minutes from a peak of 21 minutes on launch day, according to SimilarWeb, a digital data and analytics company. Meta executives have said that they expected an eventual decline after the app gained more than 100 million signups within a week of its launching earlier this month. They have signaled that they don't see the fall off as worrisome and have said that they are working on additional features. Meta aims to increase the number of users and improve the experience before trying to monetize the platform. I like that last sentence because it's like, oh, don't worry, we're adding features.

1:20:28So come back, they're going to be really cool. And then we're going to crap it all up. Yep. before trying to monetize so come back so we can put ads in your timeline one of the most fun things i think i mentioned this one when uh threads first came out i said i was annoyed they didn't have a chronological timeline but it's obviously why they need an algorithm one because that's what most that's the right choice for most users and the developers of the application uh said oh don't worry chronological timeline is coming and i said but will i have to uh you know re-enable it every single time i launched the app like i have to in instagram and they didn't answer well guess what the answer was the answer was yes you will have to re-enable it every time you launch the app because why would we remember that setting like we want you to see the algorithmic timeline and yeah it'll stay on the chronological one but if the app gets pushed out of memory or you relaunch it or 24 hours pass or whatever we decide guess what you're back on the algorithmic timeline just manually select the chronological timeline every time i don't see what the problem is well the problem is uh that shows that you hate me uh so i don't like this app but yeah so this is this is why one of the reasons i'm very glad that we picked the title uh from marcos phrase 100 million tire kickers because they got all users uh real fast uh but you have to do something to keep those users and despite what the wall street journal says and it's typical sort of uh you know financial business person thing they need to add features i'm not sure adding features lack of features is why people are leaving threads like they came in to kick the tires and i think what makes people stay is a compelling experience as they say in business speak and that has very little to do with the feature set people you know went to twitter and continue to go to twitter building their user base up to whatever it currently is several hundred million or whatever they're down to now but anyway uh because of the experience on twitter and twitter had like no features for a really long time right uh and granted the bar has been raised but like it's not the lack of features that's making people leave they're leaving one because i feel like it's a fragmented market and two they were just hopping in to check it out and they're not entirely sure if it's a place where that they're going to make a home or whatever they're not sure how it fits into their life and they're not sure they you know are really enjoying it or there's something there that's making it sticky for them and i think that has nothing to do with lack of features lack of chronological timeline lack of editing any of that stuff like because you know lack of editing for example didn't stop twitter from being twitter at its peak had no editing uh and that you know we complained about it but it didn't stop twitter from becoming super important so i kind of agree with the meta executives are saying like we knew it would drop and it's fine like they can you know what they want to do is build it back up there's going to be a big burst of interest and then people are going to taper off but it's not like they drop to zero and the advantage facebook slash meta has is they have the money and time and maybe the will to keep doing this and build it up like it's not going to go you know the expectation that it would just say and soon it will be five billion people that's unrealistic but they have time to make a go of it so i don't think this is a doom and gloom story uh but it does show how you know what those tire kickers thought tie kickers were most of the tie kickers were not particularly convinced by the experience of using threads which mostly has to do with what was it like like what do you what's there what are you reading are your friends there is there interesting news there are you seeing celebrities like are you do you find the content compelling kind of like the same way that what made people stay on netflix it's not the quality of the application or the video player it was do you like the shows that's what would make people stay on threads or any sort of social media type service.

1:24:07And then once you all get there, then your thing will be filled with ads. Before trying to monetize the platform, before really making it just a miserable place to be. And so I would like to do a temperature check for the three of us. Hi, this is Casey. What is your Threads usage these days? Because this happened for me and for John, at least, it happened before vacation. And I was looking at it, you know, like once or twice a day before vacation and then vacation happened and I don't think I've opened it since. And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with threads. I'm not saying that it's turned bad or anything like that, but I just kind of forgot about it.

1:24:47So I'm curious and perhaps we'll start with my, uh, my concurrent vacation or John, are you using threads at all? Are you up down or about the same from a couple of weeks ago? I still try to visit all the apps pretty regularly. Obviously masked on and is my main one i have seen like so when threads came out i saw a big decline in activity among the people that i follow on blue sky those are all those qualifiers are important because my experience is not the same as other people's experience especially since i tend towards chronological timelines and not algorithmic ones threads where i previously didn't even have a choice of a chronological timeline i saw the threads activity drop off after the initial burst as well and most of the activity i see on threads has nothing to do with anybody i follow because because there's an algorithmic timeline and they're just throwing me random stuff in my face and i think their algorithmic timeline does an okay job it wasn't totally off the wall of things i might be interested in it was a it was a reasonable mix of sort of mass market media stuff plus like people that i could conceivably be interested in following or whatever um i will try the chronological timeline if i can remember to reselect it every freaking time i launched the app because they hate their users and we'll see if that changes thing but i i definitely saw less activity like less less posts from the people i follow even given the algorithm less replies less mentions less long conversations right just and i feel i feel like that's natural after the initial burst of activity but the mastodon experience like the mastodon had a big burst of activity and it kind of tapered down but the level it tapered down to mast my my timeline on mastodon is more active and more interesting and more engaging to me than my timeline and any other servers but that's just me i i feel like that is not necessarily true of other people i've heard from a lot of people that they feel like blue sky is that for them that blue sky is where the interesting conversations are happening and even though there was a traffic decline when threads came out still they feel like blue sky is like their anchor of where like the most interesting things are and i bet that's true of some people in threads too so i i don't know how this is going to shake out yet i feel like threads did get an important head start on being a mainstream thing and certainly they still have way more than Mastodon and way more than Blue Sky, which is still invite only.

1:27:01But I still feel like it's anybody's game. And obviously I'm rooting for Mastodon to be like the slow and steady wins the race. Just, you know, no one can stop us because it's open source software and anybody can run a thing or whatever. But on that front, Threads continues to claim that they're going to federate with ActivityPub. So if and when something happens in that area, I'm sure we'll talk about it. Indeed. Marco, what are you doing with Threads? Oh, this is Marco. marco colon um so far i am mostly forgetting to open the app because i've just been working a lot on my mac which is what i am usually doing most of the time in in my adult life and there is no mac story yet and when i think the most likely mac story that they add is not going to be some nice app like ivory uh it's going to be a web version of the phone app yeah they said they said that's coming right which is i mean instagram has that it's not great even the phone app is is clunky because like there's not multiple account support so you know if i want to have you know i have like my personal account and then i have an account for overcast and we have an account for atp well on the mac i i have ivory always in four column view i have my personal timeline then i have my personal mentions then i have atp mentions and then i have overcast mentions so i'm keeping track of my personal account and my two like work accounts all the time and i'm able to quickly and easily post from each one retweet from one to the other or whatever the case may be that's how i've that's how i used twitter for a decade or whatever and this is how i now use mastodon while threads has way more people and in fact many of the people on threads as i mentioned before my the the community i have found on mastodon is wonderful uh for ios developers it is not wonderful for diversity at all and there's a lot of people who i would love to follow their content and Mastodon is feeling increasingly more strongly like I'm using desktop Linux.

1:29:09It's like there's only this one subset of nerds that I'm finding here. And again, this is probably mostly on me in the sense that it's hard to find people outside of your circles on the servers because it is less algorithmic. And that's, again, I'm sure that's a lot of my fault. But it feels like this is a chat room for developers and nerds. And that's fine. But there's also other people in my life I want to hear from and read their stuff and interact with them. And way more people of way more variety that I want to follow are posting on threads. And I'm not there most of the time because I just, I'm not browsing it on my phone most of the time.

1:29:46I'm at my Mac. That's where I consume things. And I also don't find the threads that particularly, you know, a good fit for me necessarily in the way it works and how it's organized and things like that. So the way I get to threads is probably going to end up being via federation if that ever happens and i and as we discussed that's not likely to be a great experience from either direction the way it's probably going to work is threads is going to be very much like instagram for me instagram is an app that i can't use on my mac uh and well i guess i could use the web interface but it sucks so it's an app i don't use on my Mac because there's no third-party clients for it.

1:30:27It can't fit into my workflow very well. I have multiple accounts, but I barely use them and it's very hard to manage. And that's an app that has a ton of people who I'd like to follow, but I usually forget to check it. And I end up checking Instagram maybe once every week or two. And there's a whole pile waiting for me when I get there. I dip in, check a little bit, and then I switch apps at some point. And then I forget about it for the next two weeks. That's probably how Threads is going to go for me personally for the foreseeable future because threads is not where I am. It is on my phone.

1:30:59Great. I'll check it sometime, but it's not on my Mac. I totally agree with you. And I do look at Instagram probably more than I should, but I certainly don't look at it near as much as I look at Mastodon now or Twitter in the past. And in no small part, that's because most of the day I'm at my computer and I want to use a native app to look at these things. And there isn't one for instagram there is one for threads and there is one for mastodon and it's great so i hear you yeah the fragmentation is a is a problem for like the you know we're all looking for a quote-unquote you know twitter replacement or whatever like twitter had everybody twitter had the celebrities twitter had the tech nerds twitter had you know because it was it was the only thing they got critical mass and there was no real competing services now there's just there's even celebrity fragmentation like so mastodon has the nerd adjacent celebrities so like a sci-fi author like a famous sci-fi author is going to be on mastodon but like tom cruise is not going to be on mastodon julie roberts whatever who i respect random movie stars like the big stars who are not nerd adjacent in any way not not on mastodon right now threads has a bunch of celebrities but those nerd celebrities who are mastodon primarily use mastodon even if they're also on threads so if they're having an interesting conversation it's probably going to happen on mastodon but only because they're nerd adjacent but then they miss out on conversing with the rock and roll stars who are on threads or on instagram or are still on twitter and so even just even the mainstream is fragmented like obviously the nerds are fragmented like it you know it makes lots of historical sense why all the nerds are on mastodon everything like that and i am glad that i have a nerd community there but i do miss the the feeling like okay but uh but either two things either either the mainstream is at the same place where i am which is not currently the case or at least i know where to go to find the mainstream and i feel like when i go on threads i'm not even getting all the mainstream because i see the people who are still on twitter and i see the people who are primarily on mass on even though they're technically on threads and this this i think is related to why people might have checked out threads and not be that interested because they see the mainstream fragmentation too they're like oh this isn't as hopping as twitter was maybe if they find their little subset like a lot of people have found like a good like niche community on blue sky but blue sky doesn't have all the mainstream celebrity important famous people politicians companies like no one service has that anymore and i think that like oh if you go here delta airlines is here and that funny comcast account and your favorite celebrity and your favorite sports star there is no one place where all of them are and having them all in one place makes that really compelling to the common person and so now i can i can feel for someone who's like, no, I tried it, but none of these places are like Twitter used to be.

1:33:43And Twitter is also not like it used to be. So I guess I'll go look at TikTok. That's where we are right now. I don't see that being resolved anytime soon. I think we're going to be in this weird fragmented world for the foreseeable future. Yeah, I tend to agree with that as well. All right, Marco, do you want to talk to us about the Ubiquity Dream Router and why it's a piece of garbage yeah so i mentioned the last of uh the end of last show uh this is marco i mentioned that um that we we are you know we purchased a new house and that i'll be setting up you know networking gear and stuff in it uh and i was looking at ubiquity's new gear i mentioned in passing i ordered the dream router and i couldn't believe it was only 200 bucks and it seemed like the successor to the dream machine which was their previous cylinder which i'm literally talking to you through right now many people wrote in to point out that the dream router while it looks just like the previous cylindrical dream machine is actually like a cut down model that's why it's so inexpensive and in particular it is apparently very slow to process things and that its slow processor limits its throughput on an internet connection to roughly 700 megabits and i mentioned and I'm getting gigabit fiber.

1:35:00So everyone wrote in to tell me, I should not use the Dream Router. It is too slow, and my gigabit fiber will oversaturate it, and I won't be able to get my full connection speed and whatever else. First of all, thank you, everyone, for telling me that. I didn't know any of that. This is great to know, and I will try to return it, although their website is currently broken for returns tonight, so I'll figure that out some other time. I love Ubiquiti stuff, but the problem is, it goes out of stock constantly, because everyone loves ubiquity stuff so the thing i was looking at instead of the dream router is the dream machine special edition this is a 1u rack mount it includes a poe switch like the dream router doesn't have an ap but i'm i got separate ap's usually so less important has hard drive bay in case i want to use security cameras i'll get to that a little bit um but i was looking at the dream machine special edition as the um you know the alternative here when i was looking it was in stock and then when everyone wrote in to tell me i shouldn't get the dream rider i thought oh great i'll just go order the other one i was looking at sold out and it's remained sold out for the entire like week and a half since we last recorded also during that time the dream rider itself went out of stock cool i believe it came back in stock today if anybody wants them uh but this is the problem with buying ubiquity gear they are frequently out of stock uh just sold out and you don't know when they're coming back in you know you can sign up for the notices and they might come back in stock the next day or the next month or never like you don't know and there are you can go like you can go on amazon or ebay and and pay some you know scalper vendor some premium over ubiquities prices which ubiquity stuff is usually pretty affordable it's part of the reason they got so popular so you can go pay like cisco level prices for ubiquity gear from some retailer retailer somewhere who's ripping you off uh but it's just it's very frustrating when when you need ubiquity gear now now now and you go to get it and it's just sold out um but you know that is you know ultimately that the reason they have this problem is that they are very desirable and you know they you know good for them i've i've used their stuff for a while and i think they've earned their success and there's a reason why i keep buying their stuff it's really good and it isn't perfect occasionally there's a dud but you know usually their their track record is very high and it's and for what you're getting it's usually pretty pretty remarkably affordable so uh all it is to say don't buy the dream router turns out i'm going to try to return mine and try to get myself a dream machine special edition if i can get it in time but i probably can't so i'm probably going to be sticking with the dream router for a while did you see their um their like power wall thing i forget what it's actually yes the dream wall that's a thousand dollars uh otherwise really cool but it was very expensive yes the dream wall is basically like it's it's similar to the dream machine uh special edition but it's this like wall hanging thing that weighs like 25 pounds, hangs off your wall, and has a built-in, I believe, an 18-port POE switch.

1:37:58It has a massive POE switch built in, and it's$1 ,000. It's like, okay, well, I see what this is for. I don't need 18 ports even in any switch for the new house. I think I'm going to need something like six or eight ports. I'm not doing every room in the house, So I'm just doing kind of, you know, key areas that I learned are necessary. And that's about it. So anyway, the Dream Machine Special Edition will be fine if I can get a hold of one. And until then, I'll use the Dream Router and cry. All right. So, Marco, you seem to be deep into home security or maybe home automation. Or I'm not even sure what's going on.

1:38:40But you have some thoughts about Logitech, CircleView cameras, HomeKit secure video, and more. What's going on? Yes. So as mentioned, I have cameras on the outside of my house for various reasons, and I've used various ones over the years. So I have the time wise, my oldest cameras in use are an original pair of Nest outdoor cameras. These are probably something like seven years old by now. They're fine. And then I also have used the Logitech Circle View HomeKit Secure video cameras for about maybe a year on those home kit secure video was announced a few years ago or two years ago something like that still to this day there's only as far as i can tell two lines of cameras that work with home kit secure video i think it's only the logitech circle view and they have a doorbell version and the one i use it like the kind of standalone one and there's an eve there's a couple of eve cameras one indoor and one like hardwired outdoor one and that's it as far as i can find there are as far as i can tell there are no other home kit secure video capable cameras the the appeal of home kit secure video is it's it sounds amazing on paper and so i kind of wanted to give this like update one year in of having this be like my primary video system for for this house like you know how i've how i've been using it and how it's been performing so the circle view cameras they're relatively affordable i think about 150 160 each something like that they are outdoor or indoor capable they have 180 degree field of view which is a blessing and a curse it's it's hard to see detail very far away with that kind of perspective but you know you can put them pretty much anywhere and have a reasonably wide view of whatever you need to see the selling points of home kit secure video are that number one you don't need to pay like an additional cloud service like most of these cameras like nest and everything else like you usually have to pay some kind of cloud storage service fee some new subscription every month oh you got to pay 20 bucks a month for nest protect secure you know whatever that kind of stuff home kit secure video just uses your iCloud storage and the number of cameras you can have on it uh is related to whatever tier of iCloud storage you have um i have the highest tier of iCloud storage and i believe that entitles me to quote unlimited cameras i think um lower tiers i think you get like two or three or four or something like that but home kit secure video is not continuous recording it only records motion events so if you want to look back and see like oh you know what what were the leaves like you know 18 hours ago unless there was a car driving by or a person walking by you're not going to see that uh it's it only records motion events and like the few seconds around them um so that's that's kind of how they get around not having too much data being recorded uh by comparison like my old nest cams were continuous 24 7 with i think like a like a week or a month retention um the upside of that is you have a huge record of everything that happens around you downside of that is it uses a ton of data like it the the continuous streaming of that data to the cloud to some data center in google uses a ton of your isp you know local bandwidth so you need a pretty good connection you need no data cap really that's kind of the main differences between those two systems um in terms of actually using home kit secure video stuff the the other advantage is that it does most or all of its processing locally.

1:42:02So any kind of like object recognition, any kind of intelligence, it's doing all that locally on your local network. It does require you to have some device being a HomeKit hub, like an Apple TV or a HomePod, but it does it locally. The great thing about HomeKit secure video is that when things happen, they are fast. and this is one thing i absolutely love about it and we have we have like one on our like the area where we park our bikes here and every time someone comes home they usually come home on a bike when adam's coming home from school i know because i get the tap tap on my watch and i look and it says a bike camera and i know like you know 15 seconds later he's gonna walk up to the door and boom there he is and it's so fast whenever and i know too like when i go down there to get my bike or when i when i show up i pull into the bike area and i feel the vibration on my wrist like two seconds later i like it's that fast it's awesome what's also great about the home kit video is that it is integrated with ios very well so when you know when i get that tap tap on my wrist i can look at my watch and right there on my watch it'll show a little thumbnail if i look at it on my phone or and i long press notification just right there in the long press view for notification I get the video clip of the motion event right there.

1:43:21It plays right there. I don't even have to open any app or anything. So it's really nice in the Apple ecosystem to use HomeKit Secure Video when it works. Oh, here we go. Here's the downsides to this system. The accuracy of the intelligence, like does it recognize things properly? Does it have false positives? Does it have false negatives? I have found the accuracy is usually pretty good. it usually identifies people you know when there actually are people there although sometimes it thinks a moth flying around at night is a person i don't know why um but for the most part it's pretty good recognition it is way better than my old nest cams were um i don't have new nest cams to test i don't know how good the new ones are but it's way better than the old ones are again it's way faster to recognize than the old ones are too um and i love those notifications with the video clips, that is great.

1:44:14The problem is the Logitech CircleView camera is really mediocre. It drops the connection all the time. It'll have long spans where it disconnects. HomeKit helpfully alerts you when your camera disconnects and reconnects. I see this happening all day long. I should point out, I have, I think, four of these in use on the network. The one in the bike area is super reliable. All the other ones are not. and i don't know why i don't frankly i don't really care why uh they're just they're not and if you'd search the internet for like solutions on this problem you see people all reporting the same thing that their logitech circle view cameras are super unreliable and they drop off the network all the time or they disconnect or whatever else everyone has solutions that basically amount to like turn it off and turn it on again and it works for a while oh cool like if you if you can like if you reset the network in some way like if you reset your router it'll force them all to disconnect when you turn it back on they'll stay connected for a few days and then they'll start flaking on and off again uh people say oh i signed a dynamic or static ip did that no no change uh put it on 2.4 gigahertz did that no change like you know all these different things you can do to try to try to debug a glitchy wi-fi device i've done them all i've had a year to do them all the logitech circle view cameras are just super flaky super mediocre I will have spans of hours or days where a camera will just say no response.

1:45:42Something could be happening. Somebody could be stealing my bike. So I feel like it kind of defeats the purpose of cameras if a lot of the time when you go to look at them. So suppose we're away and a storm comes through. I want to know what's going on around my house. And maybe on my house or usually if a storm is coming through, I'll put a camera in the house as well. if we leave so I can check and see like is there water coming in you know that's important stuff and these cameras are just so unreliable it's really hard to depend on them for anything honestly I'm torn here because when it works it's really nice and I love all those integration features I love how incredibly fast it is when it's working but these cameras are garbage and no one except eve makes any other ones and eve only has one outdoor capable one and it requires it to be like hardwired by an electrician you can't just like plug it into an outlet it requires like direct wiring and it has to mount onto a box and i actually have one sitting here i've had it for like six months and i haven't had an electrician be able to come out and install it yet so like it's just sitting here waiting but it's like that's not going to work for most of my use of these cameras like you know i obviously i use a lot of these around and and anyway so there's basically no options except the logitech and and there's one eve cam like and this i feel like this is a problem with so much home kit stuff it's a great system but apple doesn't make the equipment and they outsource it to someone and they make the equipment and it's maybe it's okay maybe it's not maybe it's buggy who knows and that kind of defeats the purpose of the whole system because like it undermines the quality of the whole ecosystem when we don't have good options so anyway all this is to to number one kind of warn everyone i really don't recommend the logitech circle view and and therefore most of home kit secure video because it is really flaky and really unreliable and it's a shame the other thing is i'm curious if anyone has had experience with another system that's really good that actually is reliable um i'm in particular i'm curious like is the modern nest camera good they've only seemingly updated it once since i've gotten the other ones like seven years ago it seems like it's not it's not nest anymore like so i have both of them i have the old nest and i have a new post nest like whatever it's called now google home yeah the one that uses google home yeah yeah and i mean my indoor one or so both of these don't have the speed thing that you're talking about like they are they're network based and they're not speedy too.

1:48:18They're pretty speedy with the, hey, something has happened. But when you want to go look at it, it's really dependent on your network connection. I don't think it's going to be as instant as you thought it would be. My outdoor one, I think I've had for about a year now. So far, so good. I mapped out its little area to ignore like passing cars, but tell me about like, you know, things that are happening on my property with the little mappy, you know, those things that have where you just mask out areas. That's been pretty reliable. Also, its recognition, it has face recognition so it can know who people are.

1:48:51And it also does, like, on its own, it can say vehicle, animal, person. All that is pretty much dead on. Like, when a rabbit goes by, it knows it's an animal. When a person walks by or walks up the driveway, it knows it's a person. And when a vehicle pulls into the driveway, like, it's pretty good about that. But I feel like the interface to the data that it has collected is fairly impoverished. It is continuous recording, and I do have all this footage that I can go through. but the ability to navigate it isn't great. Like I do wish it was, in some respects, I wish it was local, like you were saying.

1:49:20Like, well, not that iCloud is local or whatever, but processing local would be great and storage local like on Synology or QNAP or those other ones would be great. But on the other hand, I love that everything is remote so that if someone hits the camera with a baseball bat, I'll still have footage of them. Yeah. You know, or like if the house burns down, I'll have footage before the house burns, whatever. It is nice that it's continuous recording to a cloud thing that yes, I pay for, but the annual fee for me to have my two cameras is not too onerous and it's basically 24 7 continuous recording inside and outside of my house which i found very valuable even just to see what the dog is up to you know what i mean yeah um and i can compare because the indoor ones also have face recognition and supposedly know who everybody is uh and it's pretty good it tells me dog barking alex has entered the kitchen you know like it knows people it knows where they are it knows what's going on when you know in the house when we're not home but sometimes it's like unknown in person in the living room like oh come on it's just alex again it's the same person like they're not unknown and the indoor ones do that more than the outdoor ones do so i think i think they have come a long way since and i think my indoor one is even newer than yours the outdoor one seems to do a pretty good job and i like the strategy of the outdoor one to be a tiny standalone computer on its own it makes them bulky and expensive and you got to pay for the service but i don't have a home hub to worry about it doesn't interact with icloud in any way and i'm pretty sure i don't have an apple watch but i see my wife when she gets the alerts she sees a little thumbnail of like you know we noticed the person in your kitchen and it shows them the person in the kitchen are they as timely as yours probably not but they you know i and i think she can tap on it to see a little video clip too if if you know if the if the cell data wins are right so i don't think i don't think the modern nest ones have all the advantages you just described but in terms of reliability i can pretty much always connect to the camera and there has been no point where it has not been recording occasionally if i can't connect to it it's because my network connection is flaky wherever i am but it's not like the camera didn't record that when i get back home i can use the awful interface to scroll back through to find that footage so i mean this is not a satisfying answer yes they've gotten better but i i mean it's hard for me to recommend this over what you have because it's just a different set of trade-offs yeah i just so i just checked i so it turns out i actually have six of the of the circle view is not for my mistake so i have i have six circle views currently two of them say no response um earlier today i checked and four of them said no response and they were a different set like so it's just they're they're unbearably unreliable but like i just i yeah maybe i will try the nest again but anyway i also i'm curious too if the listeners know like i know ubiquity has their own cameras and they record locally but you can access them remotely and they record onto either one of their network video recorders or the hard drive slot in the router I'm trying to buy but can't.

1:52:15So I'm curious if anybody has experience. I've never used Ubiquiti's cameras. I know Synology also has a built-in surveillance station feature where you can have stuff recorded onto that. I've never used that either. So let me briefly interject here. So I have never used surveillance station. i know almost nothing about it it's the second thing on the list of to-dos after call sheet gets released and the first thing is the fiber project that will probably never actually happen uh but nevertheless i do want to put a couple of cameras like around the house and perhaps one in the house to see what penny is doing and when we're not here um but anyways my parents have a synology a very very small two or four base synology i think it's a two bay and um and they use surveillance station and I have seen it used a handful of times.

1:53:04I know very little about it, but my dad seems pretty satisfied with it. Now, I don't think he's, I mean, he's very savvy, but I don't think he's, you know, to the level of any of the three of us. And I don't know what the notification situation's like. I do know that everything is recorded locally. I think it's processed locally as far as I'm aware. So I think it would get you pretty close to what you want. And I think the way it works is you get like one or two cameras, personality, quote unquote, for free, but then you have to buy like licenses for additional cameras or something like that. Again, I'm talking very well out of turn at this point, but I believe that is a solution that you should at least investigate.

1:53:47It may not be the rightest answer for Marco, but I would at least take a look because my parents have been using this for literally years and they seem really satisfied with it. I'm hoping that the Ubiquiti ones are good because most of them, maybe even all, but I think most of them at least are powered via power ethernet. I love PoE stuff. Yeah, that's the way my parents is as well. Yeah, like, you know, first of all, it's way more reliable because it hardwires the network connection as well. it also saves on cables like then i don't have to have all these like you know usb extension cables with sealed boxes to protect them from the weather running from these outlets that themselves have to be sealed like it just makes everything better and then it's easy to like then they have power backup because all my poe hubs are tied into like my main ups system backed up by tesla powerwall batteries so like you know i had like and solar powered you know in an emergency so like any like all my networking gear i have like on redundant power and so i can count on it even if say a hurricane comes through i'm not here and i want to see how my house is doing i can probably do that unless unless like you know the fiber goes out that's a different story but you know for the most part like i love poe stuff for lots of reasons and that also allows me to then you know part of the problem with the logitech circle views is that they as mentioned last last episode they come with this roughly 10 foot usb power cable and so you know you got you You can only have it 10 feet from either an outdoor outlet or, you know, some kind of sealed box that you can put some kind of extension or surge strip or whatever into that can protect that joint that joint from the weather.

1:55:26And that's annoying, too. Whereas I can just buy like 100 foot Ethernet cable and just run it from the insulated inside to the camera, seal it at the camera end with, you know, an enclosure or some kind of goop or whatever and be done. And that's it. And, you know, so I think that's ultimately what I will probably try next. But I kind of just want to know, like, are Ubiquiti's cameras good? Is Ubiquiti's interface for accessing them good? Are the apps good? Are they reliable? You know, does it play well with iOS? Do I have to use one of those HomeKit bridging kind of apps, like either HomeBridge or Hoobz or, you know, whatever?

1:56:05I've never used those before. But, you know, do I need to use those or can I get away without them? If I do use those, are those good? Are those reliable? You know, it's such a big topic. And so anyway, I hope to get some good tips from people. So thank you in advance for whatever you can tell me. Yeah, just very quickly with regard to Hoob's HomeBridge and Home Assistant is the other one you'll hear a lot about. I did try to use Home Assistant literally years ago. It's unquestionably more powerful than HomeBridge, without a doubt. It also was one of those things where the way it thought and operated was the antithesis of the way my brain thinks and operates.

1:56:45And I'm not saying it's bad by any means. And again, everyone who I know that can wrap their head around it, Merlin as an example, swears by it. But I just could not get my brain to click with Home Assistant. Home Bridge is what I use and it's extraordinarily reliable. I do almost nothing to it. I run it in a Docker container. I think we should probably start talking about those at some point, Mr. Marco. uh but anyways um i i really do encourage and endorse home bridge it's very very good very pretty straightforward pretty simple it didn't used to be but now it is um and i don't know barely anything about hooves other than i know that it's a thing that exists very helpful thank you indeed you're welcome and yeah and i should clarify too like the reason why i like having a bunch of cameras around my house it's not just because i'm you know i'm not like paranoid about crime you know it i have found many uses for these where it's useful to know like for instance if you're away for the weekend and someone drops a package on your porch that's really good to know so you can like ask a neighbor hey can you please bring it in or something you know like there are lots of you know checking on your house during storms checking on john's dog like there's there's lots of occasions in real life where like oh if you if you happen to have remotely accessible cameras in your house that are that are reasonably private or not in your house but like around your house, occasionally in your house.

1:58:05I don't put cameras in my house when I'm home. But, you know, if you're going to leave for the weekend, there's storm coming. You put a camera in and you can check on stuff. That kind of thing. I love having those abilities. They have proven useful many times. It isn't just to scare away people from peeing under my deck. It is also high utility. So anyway, thank you in advance for anything. You can send me listeners. And if you happen to recommend Ubiquiti's stuff, hopefully it'll be in stock. so thank you very much to our sponsor this week notion and thank you to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week that was marco by the way 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 Cause 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, Antimarko, R-M-N, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracusa.

1:59:36It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcasts so long. So over the last couple of weeks, I've had some interesting troubleshooting adventures. I wanted to quickly detail them in part so if there's anyone who ever runs into either of these situations they can learn from my mistakes and partly because I thought they were funny and or weird first of all when we were where were we we were gone for some reason it was not the beach trip that just happened it was it was a couple of weeks ago I forget where we were but we were away from home for a few days I think we might have been at my parents and a really bad storm came through Richmond and it took out, it's a long story why, which we can get into, but it's uninteresting, but suffice to say it took out the, it's not the ONT, it's like the power supply for the ONT.

2:00:32It's the thing that's in my garage, not the thing that the fiber comes into in the back of the house. It's the thing that's in my garage plugged into a regular outlet. And I believe, like I said, it's the power supply for the ONT, for the Fios. It took out that outlet, like that outlet is GFCI outlet. It tripped for whatever reason. And so the Fios connection to the house was down for several hours. And a couple of days later, you know, after I'd come home and reset all that and so on and so forth, a couple days later, I was somewhere, I forget where I was, maybe a library or something. And I was trying to use my WireGuard VPN.

2:01:06WireGuard is really, really good. And I like it a lot. It has a couple of features that keep me stuck to it. In the past, TailScale has sponsored, and TailScale, and they did pay us to say this a while ago, but legit, TailScale is really good and it's a lot less fiddly than wire guard um so i i have tail scale as like a redundant system in case wire guard fails which it was doing at this particular point in time i couldn't figure out for the life of me what was going on and I don't know if you happen to know anything about WireGuard, but do you guys know, do you know how WireGuard works either of you by chance?

2:01:39Nope. No idea. Okay. So apparently, and I am also getting outside of wireGuard. software will often tell you that you are connected when you are not, in fact, connected, because it's just sending packets out into the ether and assuming that they're getting to where they're supposed to be getting. It took a lot of troubleshooting for me to figure out what the issue was with my WireGuard, which would connect, but would do nothing. I couldn't reach the internet. Nothing was going on. It was dead in the water, except it said it was connected. Was it IPv6? No, very good guess. And you're kind of close.

2:02:22As it turns out, what had happened was I use a host name off of Casey, a host off of CaseyList.com as my house's IP address. And so I can go to mainstreet.caseylist.com, if you will, and I can get to, that will push me over to the house's IP address. Well, when the file sits down for several hours, you know what changes? Your house's IP address. but because tail scale is this weird UDP thing, or at least I think that's why, it thought it was connected. God knows where it was connected to, but when it actually tried to get any response from the WireGuard server, did I say tail scale a minute ago?

2:03:01I meant WireGuard, I'm sorry. Anyways, when it tried to get any information from the WireGuard server, it wasn't listening because it was at the wrong IP address. So it turns out fixing - You said like you got a new IP address from Verizon is what you're saying. Correct, yes. I mean, someone else probably has your own IP address. Yeah, exactly, exactly right. And so it just took me forever to figure this out, including tearing down my whole WireGuard installation on my Raspberry Pi, which is the server, and rebuilding it from scratch, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And it turns out I just never updated my MainStreet.CaseyList.com IP.

2:03:35That's what DNS is for. Why don't you have a dynamic DNS thing for that? Well, because this is all running through Hover and I don't have anything that I've automated to like report into Hover that MainStreet.Caseless.com needs to be updated. I've been using this free dynamic DNS thing for, I don't know, at this point it's like a streak, like a contest. So it's a free service that gives you a dynamic IP address. You pick the host name and they say, you know, like something on your network will ping them occasionally and it will let them know what your IP address is, right? And it's free. but they really don't want it to be free.

2:04:11They want me to pay for whatever the next upsell thing is. Yes, I was using dyn.dns.com which now is dyn.com and years ago it became clear that they wanted nothing to do with free users and so I just abandoned it at that point. That's my concern with Cloudflare by the way. Cloudflare, they give a lot for free or even their $200 a month plan gives away a lot of like unlimited this unlimited that but they are always pushing very very hard for the upsells like for the all the paid stuff that is not only not free and and definitely not unlimited it's extremely expensive and extremely you know you pay by the everything for the upsell stuff and i worry like you know cloudflare right now like a lot of things on the internet right now are only um affordable to their to their owners and hosts because of cloud flare and i feel like they're like they're one bad quarter away from ruining a lot of a lot for people i think they're doing okay but like the free service that i used back in the well first it was just free back in the good old.com days and then it was like oh they would send me an email every once in a while that said like visit this web page to let us know you're still using it so of course i just automated that and had a system that just, you know?

2:05:30And then eventually in the more modern age, they said, oh, well now there's a CAPTCHA on it, right? And at the point they added the CAPTCHA, I'm like, well, it's not worth my time to automate this anymore. So for the past, it's gotta be a decade. I should look it up. For the past at least five years, maybe possibly 10, maybe more. Once a month, I get an email that says, go to this webpage and click this, I'm not a robot box or solve this CAPTCHA and to let us know that you're still using this ip address and i've been doing it once a month for real i'm just i'm like it's like a it's like a what do you call it a game of chicken i'm like i'll do this forever like captain america i could do this all day i i have paid zero dollars to this company ever and i'm getting a free ip address that's always up to date with my ip of the thing right and they just constantly are saying you sure you don't want to upgrade sure i'm like yeah no i'm sure yep i'm human no i'm sure yeah I'm sure this month too.

2:06:24I'll be sure next month too. And I just like, this has got to end. Like, I wonder if someone inside the company is like, this person has been on our free plan for 16 years. Can we do something about this? Like, no, I'm just going to keep solving the capture. So, I mean, this is not probably a good use of my time, but like I said, I don't want to break the streak, but you could run DNS yourself, you know, run your own DNS. This is the old dream of the internet. Back in the old days, I'm going to run a Linux server. I'm going to have my own DNS. I'm going to run my own mail server. And that's so distant from us.

2:06:52But things like Fastly and Cloudflare actually do bring some of that back, and AWS do bring some of that kind of back into reach in exchange for selling a small part of our soul to the man. But, you know, it is what it is. Indeed. The other one, I can't, this story is going to have to be really quick because I don't remember the details. But I was having a different networking issue inside the house. The call was coming inside the house. The second time I made that joke this episode. And I found that I think the Wi-Fi was working fine if memory serves, but Ethernet wasn't working at all. And I could not for the life of me figure out why.

2:07:31I'm pretty sure that was a circumstance. And this started because I was downstairs trying out, I think, a dongle for my laptop before we went to the beach in case I, you know, but because I bring an Ethernet adapter everywhere because I'm a weirdo. and I just wanted to verify that this dongle that I had still worked and it wasn't working. And I was like, well, that's weird. Then I tried a known good dongle, you know, USB-C to Ethernet dongle. That didn't work. Uh-oh, this ain't right. So then I move upstairs. I was doing this downstairs and the situation downstairs is, you know, Ethernet to switch to Mocha bridge to coaxial cable that runs eventually up to the office to a different Mocha bridge to the main switch for the house.

2:08:10It's a total nightmare mess of like possibilities for issues. It's been pretty much rock solid for years. But if I'm in the troubleshooting mindset, it's a pile of what ifs that I needed to eliminate. So I come upstairs with the known good dongle. I plug it into my main switch. It's a 16 port, you know, gigabit switch in the house. I forget who makes it. I think it's D-Link. It's been, again, rock solid for years. And I plug it into the switch. Still not working. and then I plug back into my desk setup with my beloved CalDigit TS4 that has Ethernet running into that. Still not working. I think I rebooted my Eero once or twice trying to get that to work.

2:08:49That didn't work. Nothing is working. Would you care to guess either of you what the issue was and how I fixed it? Is it IPv6? Nope. Good guess, but no. Is there a USB SSD plugged into something? No, no. You know what I had to do to fix it? I had to restart my Switch which is something I don't think I have ever said before in my life. I've never had to do that with any Switch ever. I was going to say you had to replace your Switch. I don't think I know how to restart any of mine, but I have replaced it. I pulled the power from it, counted to five, put it back in. Everything's been fine since. Actually, I think if we had a power failure a couple years ago, one of my Switches...

2:09:29This was what started it, I think. Yeah, one of my Switches was freaking out. The lights were all going crazy on it, and I yanked the plug on it. That helped. I did look this up how long have I been freeloading on this dynamic IP the answer based on the oldest email that I have telling me that I need to go somewhere your free DNS is going to expire unless you go to this thing and tell us you're still using it the oldest one of those emails I have is from 17 years, 2 months and 21 days ago that's how long I've been freeloading once a month for 17 years I feel like I'm really really uh you know competing with casey on the cheapskate scale here it's free like why would i pay for the thing it does everything that i needed to do the price i pay is i and at this point because of the captures like remember your ip and everything i just have to click a link click i'm not a robot and i'm done